The FADER Weekend Reading List

Ingrid Burrington, The Atlantic

There's something crazy about the fact that most of the actual, physical stuff that makes up the internet lives in what is basically a modern ghost town. Burrington's piece on a visit—one of many—to where these centers hide in plain sight is pretty beautiful, especially for a story about Amazon Web Services. Here's a taste:

"If driving across America in search of the Internet has taught me anything, it’s that the suburban sprawl of northern Virginia...looks exactly like the Internet as we live with it today: it looks like a landscape in equal measure blandly sinister and weirdly poetic, a place whose significance is not really born of grand ambitions but of conniving and coincidence, of political machinations hitting against material reality, of easily discarded histories that only achieve coherence after sifting through sediment."

Amos Barshad, The FADER

Gaspar Noé's very NSFW film Love was released on DVD this week, and to honor that occasion, The FADER's own Amos Barshad chatted with the French director about 3D cumshots, why men are threatened by images of other men's phalluses, and why the truth of sex is often seen as mere provocation.

Ben Lerner, The New Yorker

The new Whitney Museum of American Art opened summer of 2015, and it's awesome. What's also cool is a space we typically don't get to see: their new conservation department, which now has six times more room than it did in its former home on the Upper East Side. In this piece, Ben Lerner hangs out with the Whitney's head conservationist Carol Mancusi-Ungaro to talk about the problems of restoration, de-restoration, and re-restoration. There's a lot to cover in regards to conservation, but Lerner notes, "These debates are fundamentally about temporality: should we celebrate the patina of time or what’s beneath it?"

Will Oremus, Slate

The mysterious ways of your Facebook newsfeed, explained! Slate's Will Oremus went deep in his investigation of the algorithms, past and present, that Facebook uses to show us what we want to see, and how the media attempts to capture attention via the newsfeed.

Jack Lowery, The FADER

Kyle Hall's Detroit techno draws heavily from the jazz lineage of his family and of the Motor City. In this interview with The FADER, the producer sheds light on the influences behind his newly released album, From Joy, and how he's looking to the past in order to move forward.

Nathaniel Rich, New York Times

The very true story of how a corporate lawyer became an advocate for the environment, because it was "the right thing to do." Because sometimes people do the right thing, and it's wildly refreshing to read about.