Who decides what goes on the Internet?

In a small number of Silicon Valley conference rooms, decisions are being made about what people should and shouldn’t see online—without the accountability or culture that has long accompanied that responsibility.

How awful is the Internet?

I began my media career about seven years ago as an unabashed internet enthusiast. As I’ve said before, I never worked in print journalism and had little nostalgia for the world that was entering free fall as I did my first internship at an online publication. By then, the internet had already provided me an outlet for various creative pursuits for years, and I saw nothing but the opportunity to escape some of traditional journalism’s worst constraints, which were related both to the print medium and to the sorts of gatekeepers and ideologies that controlled it. I never read print newspapers or magazines devotedly, so I never experienced unsettling changes in habits the way many people have as they transitioned primarily to digital reading in the past decade. Blogs and startup web publications were always much more to my taste than “old media”; their immediacy, their freedom, and their ability to evolve and adapt quickly always seemed promising and exciting.

Did the series finale of The Soprano leave you with a lot of questions? Well, David Chase answers a big one:

The main topic of conversation about The Sopranos, seven years after the series finale, is still whether Tony Soprano, mob boss of North Jersey, is dead or not. And series creator David Chase couldn’t care less about that.

David Lynch says he let Kanye West down because he couldn’t come up with a good music video idea. Read more about it at The Verge:

It’s easy to see how Lynch’s grotesque style might be a perfect match for West’s dark song. “Kanye came up to the house one day,” Lynch tells The Daily Beast. “Kanye’s a good guy, and a great musician. I loved the song, and that’s what brought us together, but I couldn’t come up with ideas that thrilled either one of us.”

Vox explains how Beyoncé became such a big deal:

Beyoncé (Bee-Yon-Say) Giselle Knowles-Carter is one of the biggest celebrities on the planet. The 32-year-old singer has a net worth of $460 million and rising, and is responsible for a trove of hits, such as “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” “Irreplaceable,” “Baby Boy,” “Check on It,” and “Crazy in Love.” She got her start in the late 1990s as the lead singer of Destiny’s Child.

Some instructions for intoxication, article by Tim Crane:

Wine is not a solution, Clark Smith tells us; in fact, it’s not even a liquid. Allowing a pinch of salt for exaggeration, Smith’s point is that if we assume a wine is essentially a solution, then filtering, which removes inessential undissolved solids, should reveal its essence. On Smith’s view, this assumption epitomizes everything that is wrong with modern winemaking. The solids suspended but not dissolved in the wine – the tannins and other large molecules or colloids – are what give character to wines, what make them develop complex flavours that change and (one hopes) improve over time. This is why wine is more like an emulsion, a sauce or a soup, that can take time to achieve perfection. Wine is, in one of Smith’s favourite phrases, the “ultimate slow food”.

Children say the darndest things:

Children are notoriously unreliable witnesses. Conventional wisdom holds that they frequently “remember” things that never happened. Yet a large body of research indicates that adults actually generate more false memories than children. Now a new study finds that children are just as susceptible to false memories as adults, if not more so. Scientists may simply have been using the wrong test.

Paul J. Griffiths tells us how to handle theological disagreement:

Theology, in its broadest and most fundamental sense, denotes a particular human practice: that of engaging in reasoned thought and discourse about god. The practice is, in Latin, sermo de deo, and in Greek logia about theos. This is the meaning suggested by the word’s etymology; it is also the meaning standardly given the word in the Latin-using West.

Exactly what comes after a good cup of coffee? Slate explains:

You’re almost done drinking that cup of coffee. Now what? Kevin Roose at Matter follows his cup of joe with a morning run; the coffee, he writes, allows him to “run longer and feel more energized.” He’s not the only one. Health magazine reported on research showing that coffee before a workout improves circulation, lessens pain, improves memory for exercises and routines, and preserves and fuels muscles. And Shape proclaimed that drinking coffee before a workout gives a mental edge and helps burn more fat.

It seems a pastor’s salary won’t cut it anymore. More at The Atlantic:

As full-time pastors become a thing of the past, more and more seminary grads are taking on secular jobs to supplement their incomes. For someone seeking a full-time job as a church pastor, Justin Barringer would seem to have the perfect résumé. He’s a seminary grad, an author and book editor, and a former missionary to China and Greece. But despite applying to nearly a hundred jobs over the course of two years, Barringer, who lives in Lexington, Kentucky, could not secure a full-time, salaried church position.

John Oliver on the wage gap:

Russell Brand v. Sean Hannity:

Honorable Mention