The final ball, which will pro­duced by repli­cat­ing the same tech­niques used to cre­ate arti­fi­cial human organs, encour­ages us to con­sid­er the role life sci­ences will have in our dai­ly lives today and in the future. It is also a ref­er­ence to the col­lid­ing worlds of human enhance­ment, the bio-tech­nol­o­gy indus­try and the glob­al cap­i­tal­iza­tion of sport, which have become high­ly con­test­ed areas.

(via About Pigs Blad­der Foot­ball)

A ser­vice aimed at teas­ing out “mean­ing­ful sto­ries” from its users. The main tool for this seems to be an ever-grow­ing list of cat­e­go­rized ques­tions, such as this, from the cat­e­go­ry Life: “What life lessons would you tell your 13 year old self if you had the opportunity?”

When it was tak­en, the pho­to would have been a fun­ny and unusu­al pic­ture of three ter­ri­fied girls and a doofy-look­ing stingray. Today, the pho­to can be labelled a pho­to­bomb, which implies a nar­ra­tive of sur­rep­ti­tious sab­o­tage, con­nects the stingray to a whole tribe of obnox­ious pranksters, and makes the ray look like his smile might con­tain a hint of frat-boy­ish dis­so­lu­tion. We’ve come so far.

(via The Stingray Pho­to­bomb Explained : The New York­er)