My family has a sort of love/hate relationship with tennis, insofar as that my mom loves it, and the rest of us hate it.

This 2006 David Foster Wallace piece in the New York Times, however, may have convinced me to give it another chance.

And besides, any chance to mention Federer gives me a great opportunity to post this ridiculous video:

With social media being a big part of my job (and a big part of maintaining clients as a freelancer), I know I can't totally get rid of Facebook and Twitter, and I certainly can't shed myself off of YouTube. But since the latest "Google Privacy Scandal of the Week," I've really been trying to ween myself off of as many free services as I can. It's really pretty stupid: why are we willing to give so much information to these companies who are more than willing to sell it to the highest bidder?

This is a great article in the New York Times about the various organizations who mine and utilize the information we give to companies like Facebook every day. This part, in particular, really worried me:

Stereotyping is alive and well in data aggregation. Your application for credit could be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of aggregate data — what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done. If guitar players or divorcing couples are more likely to renege on their credit-card bills, then the fact that you’ve looked at guitar ads or sent an e-mail to a divorce lawyer might cause a data aggregator to classify you as less credit-worthy.

Even more scary:

The term Weblining describes the practice of denying people opportunities based on their digital selves. You might be refused health insurance based on a Google search you did about a medical condition. You might be shown a credit card with a lower credit limit, not because of your credit history, but because of your race, sex or ZIP code or the types of Web sites you visit.

Just searching for something like "diabetes symptoms" could disqualify you for health insurance, even if you were just doing research for an article on the disease.

I bet the first person who makes a social network that values its users' privacy and operates on a model that can make money without selling out their users will become very, very wealthy.

An older story but still a good lesson for 21st-century journalists.

I really like this quote:

The bigger issue that may or may not apply in this specific case (I can't decide): Over the past 25 years, being a sports fan somehow flipped from "I believe you" to "I don't believe you until you prove to me why I should believe you." We don't trust anyone any more.

I think you could substitute "sports fan" for many different groups of people these days, most obviously "constituents".

Being the massive Simpsons snob that I am¹, I thoroughly enjoyed this article by Bill Oakley, a writer for the Simpsons during the greatest seasons of the show's existence.

Additional required reading: How We Wrote Classic Simpsons Episodes and The Making Of "Homer At The Bat".

A really great video about a woman who wants to get rid of an old accordion she has been holding onto for a long time. Instead of simply selling it on craigslist, however, she puts an ad up with an interesting proposal: you come to a dinner party that she's hosting and perform in front of her guests (and judges a la "America Idol"). The winner receives the accordion for free.

I think my favorite part about this video, however, is the guy you see in the bottom corner at 3:24. Keep looking for him throughout the video, because his reactions are simply amazing (I just about spit my water all over my iPad when I first saw his annoyed/apathetic reaction).

I missed this during the last holiday season, but Barack's got a pretty good voice.

Great video piece by the BBC on the saving, and subsequent attempts at renovation, of the house where John Coltrane wrote "A Love Supreme."

Seeking relief from bullying, Brittany transferred to Jackson Middle School. Her very first day of eighth grade, eight boys crowded around her on the bus home. "Hey, Brittany, I heard your friend Sam shot herself," one began.

"Did you see her blow her brains out?"

"Did you pull the trigger for her?"

"What did it look like?"

"Was there brain all over the wall?"

"You should do it too. You should go blow your head off."

A long but necessary read about the multiple student suicides that happened in the Anoka-Hennepin school district in around 2010. It doesn't really matter what your views are on gay rights. It really doesn't even matter if you think these kids were lying, making up these wild stories about being harassed and tormented by their peers. Any person with a soul should have seen that these kids needed help, politics be damned. Shame on anyone who thinks otherwise.

Torrenting is probably too hassle-y for the average viewer: Installing Transmission, VLC, perhaps re-encoding to watch on my TV—but I'm pretty techy (ok, a geek) and have been doing this for years. However, if a show is available on iTunes—as South Park is to me now I've set up a US iTunes account (yet another tech hassle I had to overcome…)—I'll click and buy. It's simple, quick, better quality, not to mention legal. It's also cheap.

Preach it, Peter Serafinowicz.

Record label Sony has apologised for increasing the price of two Whitney Houston albums in the UK, hours after her death on Saturday.

The wholesale cost of the two LPs - Houston's Ultimate Collection and Greatest Hits - went up by about £3 each, causing an automatic price increase on iTunes.

Is there anyone who is even remotely surprised that the record labels tried doing this?