This Week - Feb 14, 2014

Maybe each of these activities (listening to high end audio gear, drinking high end wine, having needles inserted into your chakras) is really about ritualizing a sensory experience. By putting on headphones you know are high quality, or drinking expensive wine, or entering the chiropractor's office, you are telling yourself, 'I am going to focus on this moment. I am going to savor this.' It's the act of savoring, rather than the savoring tool, that results in both happiness and a longer life.

— Placebo-philes (Robert McGinley Myers for Anxious Machine)

Now that he is gone, much has been said about his failure, about his fall. I don’t really see it that way. He got in the ring with his addiction and battled it for two decades successfully, creating amazing film work along the way and doing the hard stuff to keep ambitious theater alive in New York.

— The Wrestler (David Carr for Medium)

When an environment fails, over and over and over again, to provide her with a means to follow her internal compass, then she will leave.

— Why Designers Leave (Julie Zhuo for Medium)

Why not print the actual slur here? It’s an ugly, jarring word, but bigotry is ugly. “To call someone a faggot is still so commonplace.” That’s the NFL. I think it’s pretty clear that it’s the NFL culture, that accepts this status quo, that is chemically unbalanced.

— The Institutional Bigotry Michael Sam Faces in the NFL (John Gruber for Daring Fireball)

Flappy Bird was a cultural tragedy, and the tragedy has nothing to do with the game.

— Why Indie Developers Go Insane (Marco Arment for Marco.org)