Kathryn Schulz describes these horrifying species:

Of the five-thousand-odd species of stinkbug in the world, the brown marmorated kind is the most destructive, the most annoying, and possibly the ugliest. It is roughly the size of a dime, although thicker, but its head is unusually small, even for an insect, which gives it an appropriately thuggish look. Its six legs prop its shield-shaped body up in the air, as if they were pallbearers at the funeral of a Knight Templar. Its antennae are striped with bands of dark and light, while its eyes, should you get close enough to gaze into them, are the vivid red of an alarm clock at night. The “marmorated” in its name means “marbled,” but “mottled” is closer to the truth. Entomologists, who have a color palette as elaborate as Benjamin Moore’s, describe the underside of its body as “distinctly pale luteous” and the topside as “generally brownish cinereous, but also greyish ochraceous, ochraceous, testaceous, or castaneous.” To everyone else, it looks as dull brown as its own frass, the technical term for insect excrement.

They could be anywhere in your house. Schulz writes:

One poor soul spooned up a stinkbug that had blended into her granola, putting her off fruit-and-nut cereals for life. Another discovered too late that a stinkbug had percolated in her coffeemaker, along with her morning brew. A third removed a turkey from the oven on Thanksgiving Day and discovered a cooked stinkbug at the bottom of the roasting pan. Other people have reported accidentally ingesting stinkbugs in, among other things, salads, berries, raisin bran, applesauce, and chili. By all accounts, the bugs release their stink upon being crunched, and taste pretty much the way they smell. (They are also occasionally eaten by household pets, though seldom twice. One of my cats recently ate two at once, and promptly vomited them up.)

Finally finished reading Rachel Aviv’s provoking, chilling piece on “What Does It Mean to Die?.” Aviv writes:

African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to ask that their lives be prolonged as much as possible, even in cases of irreversible coma—a preference that likely stems from fears of neglect. A large body of research has shown that black patients are less likely to get appropriate medications and surgeries than white ones are, regardless of their insurance or education level, and more likely to receive undesirable medical interventions, like amputations.

Tom Critchlow:

Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”.

Critchlow makes a challenge:

So I challenge you to think clearly about the many disparate networks you’re part of and think about the ideas you might want to offer those networks that you don’t want to get lost in the feed. Ideas you might want to return to. Think about how writing with and for the network might enable you to start blogging. Forget the big B blogging model. Forget Medium’s promise of page views and claps. Forget the guest post on Inc, Forbes and Entrepreneur. Forget Fast Company. Forget fast content.

This blog is written mostly for myself these days. I don’t care about page views and popularity. I am thinking of pulling the plug on Google Analytics since I have not checked it for almost a year or so. I write like no one is reading and that could get me in trouble.

Farhad Manjoo:

Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news — I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.

It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.

Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.

These days I turned off all of the notifications on my phone. I prefer to read printed books over digital devices. I still carry a book with me everywhere I go. I look more like a dork reading a book while most people around me stare at their screen, even in my own home. I deactivate Facebook until I need to use Messenger to communicate with my family in Vietnam. I still need some work with Twitter since I use it mainly related to web design and development. The online publications I read the most are The New Yorker and The New York Times and I usually go for the long essays rather than quick news.

The launching of Future Fonts is creating some buzz in the type community. The gist of it is that type designers offer their work in progress at a low price. Lizy Gershenzon explains its pricing model:

Future Fonts also makes financial sense for both type designers and buyers. Without devaluing the work, you can get typefaces at a cheaper price. This is because they are still in progress and don’t cost as much as their final releases. As more work is completed and new versions are added, the price goes up. Early buyers lock in at the cheapest rate and get free updates along the way. It’s a win, win, with extra incentive to buy typefaces early.

It’s a fascinating concept, but Future Fonts doesn’t work for me personally because the fonts do not have Vietnamese support. In a way, Future Fonts is similar to David Jonathan Ross’s Font of the Month Club, which I am a member, but David makes his fonts available in as many languages as possible and I really appreciate that.

Charles Duhigg reports:

Google has succeeded where Genghis Khan, communism and Esperanto all failed: It dominates the globe. Though estimates vary by region, the company now accounts for an estimated 87 percent of online searches worldwide. It processes trillions of queries each year, which works out to at least 5.5 billion a day, 63,000 a second. So odds are good that sometime in the last week, or last hour, or last 10 minutes, you’ve used Google to answer a nagging question or to look up a minor fact, and barely paused to consider how near-magical it is that almost any bit of knowledge can be delivered to you faster than you can type the request.

Duhigg points on ways Google uses its dominant power to kill its competitors. I wonder how long this article will stay in Google search.

@RWD:

Well. @visualgui’s redesign is stately, stunning, and—and!—responsive.

@robinrendle:

Mr. @visualgui’s redesign for his blog is so dang lovely – just look at that L O G O

I have tremendous respect for these guys; therefore, I appreciate their shoutout.

John Herrman:

If my old iPad could talk, it might ask me what has changed. If it could feel indignant, it might suggest that it isn’t the problem, and that everyone and everything else is. While it would be wrong according to the logic of its creation, it wouldn’t be incorrect. It is a piece of consumer technology, so you would expect that everything around it — its own software, Apple’s new products, the internet on which it depends — would have improved in the last five years, and that it would suffer in comparison. What seems unfair is that my old iPad, because it does nothing but provide access to these ever-evolving services, necessarily has to get worse and that it may, before long, have nowhere to go. Above all, my old iPad has revealed itself as a cursed object of a modern sort. It wears out without wearing. It breaks down without breaking. And it will be left for dead before it dies.

An enjoyable read.

iA:

The answer to the passive consumption of trash is the active formulation of questions, the active search for answers and the active work of putting complex knowledge and diffuse feelings into clear words. Unlike swallowing stuff pushed down your throat, research, reflection, and concise writing clears the mind. We need to write on our own domains. Don’t post thoughts on Facebook. Use it to get traffic. Drop Medium for blogging. Own your writing. Use Twitter carefully. And on your domain, send people to other domains you like, outside the usual black holes, if possible.

The entire blog post is worth reading.

Maggie Jones’s “What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn” examines how kids use porn as their source for sex. A fascinating read.