Here are ten items worth your time this week:
📈 1) How Microsoft Quietly Became the World’s Most Valuable Company [WSJ]
“Microsoft Corp. tried through the years to compete in a range of buzzy consumer businesses, but it was Chief Executive Satya Nadella’s focus on selling humdrum yet fast-growing computing services to companies that allowed it to reclaim the title of world’s most valuable company.”
📧 2) Facebook’s Zuckerberg at Center of Emails Released by U.K. Parliament [WSJ]
“The U.K. Parliament released on Wednesday a trove of internal Facebook Inc. emails that show Mark Zuckerberg and other executives pursuing hard-nosed tactics to stifle competitors, as well as considering a range of possibilities for monetizing the massive amounts of data the company collected on its users.”
🤝 3) The Friendship That Made Google Huge [The New Yorker]
“Coding together at the same computer, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat changed the course of the company – and the Internet.”
🎉 4) Instagram Is the New Evite [The Atlantic]
“Here’s how it works: When teenagers are planning a big party, they’ll sometimes create a new Instagram account, often with a handle that includes the date of the party, like @Nov17partyy or @SarahsBdayOctober27. The account will be set to private, and its bio will list the date of the party and sometimes the handles of the organizers.”
🎧 5) An appreciation of the long-lost MP3 player skins of yesteryear [BoingBoing]
Winamp was infinitely customizable, and there was an exuberant practice of coming up with MP3 player skins (some of Winamp’s competitors adopted its skin format, making the skins interoperable among different players), and sites devoted to featuring
🎥 6) The Best Movies of 2018 [The New Yorker]
“The gap between what’s good and what’s widely available in theatres – between the cinema of resistance and the cinema of consensus – is wider than ever.”
Related: Five good SF/F films from 2018 (that you probably missed) [Factor Daily]
🔭 7) The Best Science Books of 2018 [Five Books]
“As life on Earth is rocked by conflict and environmental crisis, these serene little scientific emissaries remind us of how different it can be when we collaborate selflessly in the getting of knowledge.”
Related: Here are the Biggest Fiction Bestsellers of the Last 100 Years [Literary Hub]
🔨 8) The Trade Journal Cooperative [TradeJournalCooperative.com]
“Our editors painstakingly comb through the back alleys of capitalism to bring you fascinating publications like Pasta Professional, American Funeral Director, and Plumber Magazine.”
🦆 9) Quackarazzi: Mandarin duck holds NYC in its spell [AP]
“A horde of photographers has been gathering daily in the park off Fifth Avenue for well over a month, hoping to catch a glimpse of the exotic bird with pink, purple, orange and emerald green plumage and markings that admirer Joe Amato compares to ‘a living box of crayons.’”
🎩 10) Dog-related link of the week: Who Let the Dogs Out (at the Wedding)? Readers Respond [NY Times]
“We asked our readers to submit photos of their dogs, cats and even birds dressed in fancy wedding fashion. Here’s what they shared.”