"Call [it] a 'blacktag'—a trending topic initiated by a young African-American woman in Hollywood, pushed to a wider audience by a black woman in South Africa, and then pushed over the top by thousands of contributions from who appear to be black teenagers all over the United States."— — Read the rest

Slate's Farhad Manjoo says his hope for the big Apple announcement this week (which I'll be live-blogging from San Francisco) is "a tablet that's as easy to use as an appliance."

Farhad Manjoo (previously) writes in the New York Times about his cautious optimism that the big platforms are finally taking some steps to prevent harassment, but he also worries that this is setting the stage for a new era in tech, one in which the rules guarantee that Big Tech never has to worry about being challenged by upstarts.

If you had a gun pointed at your head and had to choose one, which of the following five companies would you eradicate from your life: Facebook, Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, or Amazon?

Which would come second?

Here's a fun "quiz" by Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times today. — Read the rest

The delightful Stewart Butterfield: "Q So do you think Slack is worth $3 billion? A It is, because people say it is."

"Don't plan on camping outside an Apple store," writes The Verge's Jacob Kastrenakes. "Steep learning curve," warns the NYT's Farhad Manjoo, "But once I fell, I fell hard."

Update: It will be available in select stores. [via]

Farhad Manjoo reports on the recent demise of GigaOm, the tech news website founded by Om Malik. Though it roasted $30m before creditors shut it down, "digital media darlings" are unfazed.

Gigaom's downfall does not offer easy lessons for media start-ups.

Yesterday, Amazon announced the Fire Phone, its $200 answer to high-end Android models and the iPhone. The New York Times' Farhad Manjoo interviews Amazon chief Jeff Bezos.

The Onion cooked up a brutal item today: a fake op-ed from CNN.com's managing editor, Meredith Artley, explaining why the above was CNN's homepage this morning.

There was nothing, and I mean nothing, about that story that related to the important news of the day, the chronicling of significant human events, or the idea that journalism itself can be a force for positive change in the world.

Farhad Manjoo: "Google has a single towering obsession: It wants to build the Star Trek computer." [Slate]

Farhad Manjoo writes that Zynga, no longer shielded by its early success, is now in a death spiral fueled by universal contempt: "If you're looking for this generation's Pets.com, Zynga is pretty much it."

Baby cry decoders! Advanced bouncing chairs! Surveillance systems! A Voice Activated Crib Light with Womb Sounds! In the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo has an interesting roundup of apps and gadgets for babies.

Reporters who attended the "Antennagate" presser today in Cupertino were invited to tour the company's "$100 million antenna designing and test facilities." They're blinding us with science! Bonus: When I right-clicked to save this jpeg from the Apple website, I noticed that the original file name included the words "Stargate Chamber." — Read the rest

"The iPhone turns 'heard about garys internship at the whitehouse?' to 'Heard about farts internship at the whorehouse?" At Slate, Farhad Manjoo explores the technical underpinnings of cellphone autocorrect.

An interesting Slate piece points out a correlation between rates of infection by "cat poop protozoa"—that's Toxoplasma gondii— and success rates in soccer:

If we set aside the qualifying rounds (in which teams can play to a draw) and focus on matches with a clear winner, the results are very compelling.

Farhad Manjoo writes in to tell us about his Slate series looking back on Y2K, ten years later, "In the first part, which is up now, I look into how Y2K changed the tech industry, and whether it was all a waste. — Read the rest

Farhad Manjoo sez, "I just wrote a piece about why office IT restrictions hurt productivity. There's a great deal of research showing that people are more creative and driven when they feel some sense of autonomy at work; locking down their computers works against that goal." — Read the rest

Here's part five of the Boing Boing Holiday Gift Guide, a roundup of the bestselling items from this year's Boing Boing reviews. Today's installment is nonfiction books.

Don't miss the rest of the posts: kids' stuff, fiction, gadgets and comics. — Read the rest

Farhad Manjoo's True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society is a breezy-but-engrossing look at the increased polarization of news in the 21st Century. Manjoo convincingly argues that our own capacity for selective perception (show two groups of partisans footage of a political debate and both will swear it was biased for the other side; show the same footage to someone who doesn't care and they won't see bias for either side) combined with the Internet's capacity to network affinity groups and spread fragmented, selective media are a perfect storm, with the truth right in its path. — Read the rest

Slate's Farhad Manjoo has some great tips for outsmarting the greedy, lying sensor in your printer that wants you to change the super-expensive cartridge before the ink runs out:

This guy had also suspected that his Brother was lying to him, and he'd discovered a way to force it to fess up.