Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.

See how FCC staff responded rather to John Oliver’s bit on Net Neutrality:

Back in June, you may remember Last Week Tonight With John Oliver had a great bit on net neutrality. Oliver poked fun at the FCC commissioners; he compared Chairman Tom Wheeler, a former telecom lobbyist, to a dingo. The internet had a laugh, and the day after, FCC employees went back to work.

If you bought everything advertised during an NFL game, how much would it cost? The Verge calculates the amount:

The average NFL game lasts three hours from start to finish but contains only about a dozen minutes of action. TV broadcasters have become expert in filling the gaps between outbreaks of sport on the field with an intoxicating mix of anticipation, apprehension, and advertising. The drama and magic of football as a collective spectacle intermingles with branding messages urging me to buy more stuff. This past week I decided to find out exactly how much it would cost me to be the perfect consumer and buy everything I’m prompted to acquire during a game. Every car, every pizza, every beverage.

The book The Wild Truth reveals what drove Chris McCandless “into the wild” (a story chronicled by Jon Krakauer):

Jon Krakauer’s 1996 book Into the Wild delved into the riveting story of Chris McCandless, a 24-year-old man from an affluent family outside Washington, D.C., who graduated with honors from Emory, then gave away the bulk of his money, burned the rest and severed all ties with his family. After tramping around the country for nearly two years, he headed into the Alaska wilderness in April 1992. His emaciated body was found a little over four months later.

Mary Berg, author of one of the earliest Holocaust diaries published in the U.S., hated being in the spotlight:

Mary Berg, a Polish Jewish teenager who wrote one of the earliest firsthand accounts of the Nazi genocide to be published in English, has long been something of a mystery in the annals of Holocaust literature. Her diary recounting her experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto, serialized in American newspapers in 1944 and released as a book in 1945, won wide praise and turned the author, who had escaped to the United States in March 1944 at the age of 19, into a prominent campaigner on behalf of Hitler’s Jewish victims. But by the early 1950s, the book, “Warsaw Ghetto,” had fallen out of print, and she disappeared from public view, refusing to speak with researchers and sometimes denying that she had written the diary at all.

AOL’s David Shing, the digital prophet:

Shingy believes in storytelling—more story, less telling. A story can be anything—text or image, six seconds or thirteen hours. According to Shingy, we are no longer living in the age of information; it’s the age of social, and social is all about conversations. How does Shingy know? Because he is a digital prophet. Literally. His business card has a microchip embedded in it, and it reads “Digital Prophet, AOL.” It also says “David Shing,” but, unless you knew him when he was a kid in Australia, you should just call him Shingy, which is also his Twitter handle and his URL. AOL pays him a six-figure salary for—for doing what, exactly? “Watching the future take shape across the vast online landscape,” Shingy says. “I fly all around the world and go to conferences.” Last month, he was in Singapore, Brazil, and Germany. “I listen to where media is headed and figure out how our brands can win in that environment.” In 2002, AOL had more than twenty-five million subscribers; it now has fewer than two and a half million. Shingy calls it “a company in transition.”

Essays are making a comeback:

Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don’t know where to put them. It’s a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and Michael Chabon, among others, have published essays, and so this month will I. And though I think I know why I wrote mine, I wonder why they wrote theirs, and whether we all mean the same thing by the word “essay”, and what an essay is, exactly, these days. The noun has an unstable history, shape-shifting over the centuries in its little corner of the OED.

Is it time to add a pitch clock to Major League Baseball?

Levy, Freer and Lazarus, each of whom work with MLB, all lauded incoming Commissioner Rob Manfred and said they expect him to be open-minded in working with the sport’s TV partners, particularly with regard to pace-of-play issues. “I want to give Bud (Selig) the due he deserves,” Levy said. “He’s done a great job leading the sport for a long time, and he’s given Rob a tremendous foundation from which to build. But I think Rob will be more apt to figure out ways to work with TV partners, giving us more access to players. He’ll be open to a lot of ideas. I think he’ll be open to what Randy and I need to do with our businesses.”

On philosophy, race, and “white privilege”:

This is the first in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon and the author of “The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality After the History of Philosophy.” The interview was conducted by email and edited.

The Amazon Echo hates you, a parody:

Found via The Verge

Kanye’s remix of Lorde’s single on the new Hunger Games soundtrack:

Found via The Verge