Online publications know a lot about you, particularly about what you do online. In fact, they may know better than you do. The Atlantic explains it in detail.
You may not realize this, but we can see you. Yes, you. The human reading this article. We have analytics that tells us roughly where you are, what site you’ve just arrived from, how long you stay, how far you read, where you hop to next. We’ve got eyeballs on your eyeballs.
The World Cup is upon us, and now the tournament has an “instant replay” of its own!
For the first time, tournament organizers have turned to goal line technology in an attempt to end the controversial goal line calls which have tainted World Cup history. Up to now, referees and their two linesmen assistants have been forced to make split-second decisions about whether a goal has crossed the goal line or not, often without a clear view of the actual situation. The latest technology, however, should put an end to blown calls.
In other sports news, Major League Baseball may have found itself in a Cuban revolution.
Oh, how things have changed. Major League Baseball is smack in the middle of a Cuban revolution, one that’s ushered in more elite talent from the island than ever before. Aroldis Chapman is lighting up radar guns at an unprecedented rate, dominating hitters before and after his scary injury. Yoenis Cespedes is causing baseballs to burst into flames. Jose Abreu has gone from Serie Nacional terror to immediate franchise-player status for the White Sox. Jose Fernandez established himself as one of the best pitchers on the planet and a human GIF machine. As for Yasiel Puig, he’s a rocket-armed, bat-flipping, puppy-wielding wild horse who’s already one of the five best hitters in the league just one full season into his career.
The Poetry Foundation walks us through how Anne Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize.
If you happen to have a spare $159.60 you don’t know what to do with, you might want to consider purchasing Chronicle of the Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry (available on Amazon.com). It makes for some mighty interesting reading: the inside scoop on that most cherished of poetry prizes. The book covers the period between 1917, when the award began, and 2009. We learn who the jurors were each year, which titles they seriously discussed, and why they chose the winners they chose. Some years have more documentation than others, but there’s enough fascinating information here to justify the expenditure: a candid, often bewildering glimpse into the inner-workings of poetry politics. I bought the book because I was interested to know how Anne Sexton, one of my favorite poets, came to win the Pulitzer Prize. She won it for Live or Die, her third book, in 1967. Let me share with you what I found out.
John Stackhouse offers us a radical response to radical doubt.
We seem, despite all of our advances in both scholarship and technology, no closer to certainty than we have ever been. Is that a fatal problem for Christians trying to convince others of the truth of the gospel? Should it be a troubling concern even in our day-to-day lives?
The two Michigan towns of Fowler and Westphalia boast a high population density of priests.
[The identical Gary and Todd Koenigsknecht] demonstrate that priestly vocations are not evenly distributed by family or geography: they are among six priests in their extended family, and among 22 from their hometown, Fowler, Mich., population 1,224. They officially tie up the leader board with the neighboring village of Westphalia, population 938, which has also produced 22 priests, making for a robust rivalry in both football and Roman collars.
Louie C.K. takes the Internet by storm (spoiler alert!).
In the penultimate episode of Louie’s fourth season, Louie and Pamela finally went on a date. Their destination was suitably odd: It was a gallery, overflowing with abstract absurdity. There was an all-black canvas titled Jews, and a ceiling draped with glowing neon nooses. A plasticky figure clad only in tighty-whities reclined against a white wall. It appeared as if the Incredible Hulk had discarded his used Q-tips in a corner. In a side room, the pair encountered a sculpture that was literally button-pushing: When Louie pushed it, a recorded voice bellowed the N-word. When, mortified, he pushed it again, the speaker merely coughed. Was this a put-on? Or was it for real? While other attendees stared stone-faced at a perfectly executed sculpture of dog shit, Louie and Pamela couldn’t stop giggling. Eventually, they gave up trying to understand it all and went to dinner instead.
If you played the game Diplomacy, you may be a big nerd according to David Hill.
Before Risk, before Dungeons & Dragons, before Magic: The Gathering, there was Diplomacy. One writer enters international competition to play the world-conquering game that redefines what it means to be a geek (and a person).
The New York Times sheds some light on Steve Jobs’ successor: Tim Cook.
At the time, Mr. Cook was well regarded as a behind-the-scenes operations guy, but he was a relatively unknown quantity outside the company. He can be intensely private; for instance, the details of the cross-burning episode, like his reaction and the appearance of the deacon, he has shared with friends but not publicly. Even offering the outlines of that story in front of an audience, however, indicates how he is slowly beginning to reveal his own personality and style, and to define Apple leadership in his own image.
You may have found yourself wondering, what do athletes eat before the big game? BuzzFeedYellow will fill you in (Found via Digg).