1. Periscope (or something like it) is going to make a huge impact all over the place.

   “I was browsing on Twitter when someone posted an image of a smoking building, fire trucks, and a message about a crazy explosion. Then I got a push notification on Periscope, the new live-streaming app from Twitter, about a broadcast from the scene of the accident. Suddenly I was watching a video of the fire and smoke from a block away. No news media had yet arrived on the scene.”

2. Photographer Rob Stephenson chronicles Florida's Space Coast, a community grappling with its past.

   “Kennedy Space Center was for two generations the public face of a space program that ended when the shuttle Atlantis touched down for the last time on July 21, 2011. Thousands of NASA employees lost their jobs, Kennedy was essentially mothballed and Space Coast became a shadow of itself Yet everywhere you look, there are reminders of its once glorious past. A life-size replica of a shuttle cockpit moulders on Merritt Island. The faded silhouette of a space shuttle remains on the marquee of a bowling alley. A space shuttle-themed room in a hotel goes largely unused.”

3. Nick Hornby reflects on twenty years of High Fidelity and the importance of tangible culture.

   “One of the great benefits of digital consumption is that it is democratic: In cyberspace, there's nobody to judge you. If this 57-year-old wants to hear what Joey Badass sounds like, I don't have to run the gauntlet of incredulous stares in cool record stores: There! I'm listening to Paper Trails as we speak! And yet part of the point of culture is that it allows us to demonstrate our tastes publicly -- it helps us find our tribe. The arts are the most elaborate and most precise social network ever invented, but if it's going to work properly, you have to get out of the house sometimes and show who you are and what you love. You have to go to shows and galleries and bookstores, you have to ask for what you want out loud. And this expression of taste must involve an impulse that, at its heart, is anti-democratic: Somewhere you have to believe that what you like is better than what all those other losers like. … So maybe we need those record-store guys; maybe the reason so many of them are still around is that, without them, the whole system grinds to a halt. If you own all the music ever recorded in the entire history of the world, then who are you?”

4. How we made Jenga.

   “I took the game to a London toy show in 1983. I’d grown up speaking Swahili and gave it the name Jenga, which means ‘build’. I was convinced people would only need to see the game, and it would sell out. But computer games were just taking off, and everyone thought the board game was dead. And there I was trying to sell a pile of wooden blocks. I didn’t make a single sale, but a man from Harrods gave me a break. He said they’d take some if I agreed to do a demonstration in the store. It was Christmas, and the shop was frenetic. People would stop, play the game, the blocks would fall over, and they’d walk off, leaving me on my hands and knees, being trodden on by shoppers as I picked the pieces up.”

5. James Greig spent a month off twitter and on the phone. Miraculously, he survived to tell the tale.

   “There was a power outage at work, and I found myself wishing I could search Twitter for updates on the situation. Support requests to services I used, usually fired off in a quick tweet, became infuriatingly slow emails. And I remember spending one lunch time in particular really craving an aggregated news source that wasn’t a newspaper. … After one particularly tough day, I found myself manically tapping through Twitter, the same way you might binge on ice-cream or cookies. Yikes! The ‘Ship Your Enemies Glitter’ website had been sold a week ago for $85k, and I had no idea! But when I shared the story at work, no one had heard about it yet. I realised that much of the ‘information’ I was consuming on Twitter was pretty low in nutritional value.”

That is all.