45 murders in 31 days

July saw 45 homicides across Baltimore, a toll that matched the deadliest month in the city’s modern history and came amid a violent crime surge that has stretched the entire summer. The killings occurred across the city, overwhelmingly in historically impoverished neighborhoods. The victims included a 5-month-old boy and a 53-year-old grandmother, a teen stabbed to death in a dispute over a cell phone and a carryout deliveryman killed in a robbery.

The victims of July violence, Baltimore Sun

Dublin is a bit less than twice the size of Baltimore. That would work out at approaching 90 murders in a month.

✩ Want You To Know: The Most Exciting Of All Greens

Best pithy URL slug in ages, and the article ain’t half bad either. Lots about the widespread, unavoidable try-so-hard uniqueness of startup culture.

Branding. Chartreuse “screams lively or quirky,” Michelle Richter, senior designer at O+A, an interior design studio that has decorated for the likes of Uber, Yelp and Cisco, told me. Tech workers use zany hues because “uniqueness is valued” in the industry, Leatrice Eiseman, director of the Pantone Color Institute, says. “It’s a real attention-getter, and that’s what you need when you’re starting out. It truly is an unignorable color. There are other colors that you hardly see, but not in your chartreuse range.”

This live action FPS video is just as good as everyone on Twitter said it was, and I’m really disposed to disliking these sort of things. Sometimes, just sometimes people on the Internet can be amazing and inspiring. Particularly funny to see which of the ‘players’ are familiar with FPS tropes, and which of them are mostly confused by the whole thing, but still happy to go along with it. The ‘making of’ video is great as well.

I admit to entirely forgetting that there was free municipal wifi in Dublin. It is now no more, departing with the slightest of whimpers. At least it’s contributed some more idiosyncratic signage to the cityscape.

Worth Pondering

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Eye Candy

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I’ve been using a couple of new free streaming music services which are built on top of (mostly) tracks hosted on YouTube and Soundcloud for the last few weeks. Given Google’s commercial interest in streaming music I’m extremely sceptical as to how long these will last – they seem to have killed off or crippled several small similar services recently.

If you’re a little miffed that Spotify are interested in finding out what colour underwear you’re wearing and telling you what your neighbours are listening to, one or both of onetune.fm or bop.fm could be worth looking at though.

Totally Confused

Notifications! NOTIFICATIONS! NOTIFICATIONS!, favourites, base jumping spiders, TV from the future, and New York not popular with New York Times readers.

Finally, here’s an adventure game for you: The Writer Will Do Something. Particularly relevant to anybody who writes a lot, or wants to work in the games industry. If you value your sanity, don’t do that last one.

Yours etc., @loughlin


(Follow @WantYouToKnowHQ on Twitter for more bits and bobs.)

✩ Want You To Know: My Darwinism Is Purposeful Or It Is …

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Finally, some good quality Trump. This piece is yuge.

Comments are completely fixable. The problem is that most site owners have neither the inclination or the budget to do so, so we’re left with either no comments or a free-for-all.

Turns out Amazon is still 99% horrible.

Is this something distinct to Amazon, or is this commonplace across US companies? Just ask Jonah Peretti if you’re stumped on the answer to that.

Staying with journalism, we may still need the humans to write the stories, but bots are now selecting which ones you get to see. The stories you see are all wrapped up in and overgrown with ads. Many people don’t like these ads because hell, they’re very very annoying. In many cases they now distract utterly from the content itself. They also slow down page load times considerably. So people use ad blockers, and publishers feel this is a betrayal of some implicit contract. Not really.

Ads have always been a hopeful gamble, not required consumption. … The burden is on the advertisers and publishers to create ads that you’ll care about and present them in a way that you’ll tolerate.

‘The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

Worth Pondering

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Eye Candy

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Peregrines – and a Photographer – Bunk Out at Chicago Man’s Apartment

Currently listening to the Witchrock EP by Magneta Lane. Latest mix is up on Mixcloud, featuring a picture of my first dog (awww). One of the first Rhodesian Ridgebacks in Ireland, according to my parents. Still not sure if I believe them about that.

Totally Confused

Drones stress bears, Oath Keepers, no Facebook internship for you, monolith and how to spot a hoax

Finally, The New Devil’s Dictionary is as good as everyone says it is. Bierce would be bitter.

Yours etc., @loughlin


 

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✩ Want You To Know: No Dentist, No Lion

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Rare weekend edition ahoy. Does exactly what it says in the subject line.

“You don’t want to be a Steve Buscemi GIF”

Drop whatever you’re doing and run, don’t walk over to Soundcloud and listen to the Awl podcast with Laura Olin. She talks about running Obama’s online campaign in 2012 and what the 2016 campaign will probably be like online (hint: awful).

As an aside, the UI of the Soundcloud app is nice, isn’t it? It’s my current favourite, more intuitive than most audio apps I’ve seen.

Facebook is now used by half the world’s Internet population, or at least they look at it once a month, experience deep despair and close it again. Hopefully not before stalking Mark Zuckerberg’s dog / mop-head hybrid for a bit though.

It’s a Bank Holiday weekend, the weather forecast is very bad. Here are some good things to read.

‘What It Feels Like To Go Viral’

This is the other standard scenario for content that goes viral: something completely unexpected and random. This isn’t always a good thing. “For the ones that you didn’t do on purpose, it’s frustrating,” Daulerio says. “It’s kind of demoralizing. You realize, OK, great, I basically somehow hit the slot machine and won against the robot that is the Internet.”

‘An Interview with Sarah Jeong, Author of The Internet of Garbage

The most important thing to address is how people of color — particularly black women — are either erased or villainized when we talk about online harassment. I would love to see a book about online harassment that centers on people of color. I wish my book could have done that, but unfortunately, there just aren’t a lot of studies on, for example, how race exacerbates harassment. There aren’t a lot of media accounts, either.

(The Toast wins today’s trackers prize. 67 trackers on this page.)

‘That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket’

TL;DR Hiring people who can write may be beneficial to your start-up.

How A Powerful Criminal Network Infiltrated The Bank Of England’

A source with knowledge of the operation said: “Organised crime’s infiltration of the City of London and financial services industry has long been a concern. Intelligence such as this was a real risk to the economic well-being of the UK and shouldn’t have been suppressed.”

Worth Pondering

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Eye Candy

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Artist Creates Moving Tribute by Hand-Drawing Every Single Item in His Late Grandfather’s Tool Shed

Totally Confused

Three super-earths, what data looks like, buy Jesse Pinkman’s house, keep Twitter weird and Trump’s goons.

Finally, if you’re reading this on a tablet or a phone you might want to chuck it out the window right now if you’re in any way concerned about your privacy. Your apps are eavesdropping on you.

Yours etc., @loughlin


 

Think you know someone who might like to receive more emails like this? Then forward this one on to them so they can read the words below.

Hey! Want to be part of something hip and retro like a mailing list? Of course you do? Then head on over here to subscribe. I promise not to spam you or sell your email address to Facebook. Or Google. Or Twitter. Or anyone else at all.

Follow @WantYouToKnowHQ on Twitter for more bits and bobs.