Our reluctance to have an honest and open conversation about the flaws of celebrities we love stems from a simple fact: we see ourselves in them. If your favorite smart, talented, successful celebrity can be classist, sexist or racist then what does that say about you? Well, it says that you can be classist, sexist, racist, homophobic, or transphobic.

But you can and you are at least some of these things sometimes. So am I. Own it. Learn from it. It’s not an attack, it’s the truth. Nobody is a perfect example of civil rights virtue. If you aren’t screwing up, you aren’t trying.

— Admit It: Your Fave Is Problematic — Matter — Medium

Nobody likes to learn uncomfortable truths about themselves, let alone the people they admire, but it’s the only way we can learn. How can you expect to do better by others, and even by yourself, when you don’t know when you’re causing harm? Try to drop the defensiveness, and cross the empathy gap.

Today we are writing to announce that we have published the last issue of The Synopsis. It was a fun experiment, which unfortunately no longer makes financial sense to continue onwards with.

— Thank You, It Was Fun – The Synopsis

Terribly disappointed to read this. I looked forward to seeing The Synopsis update popping up in my daily RSS feed, and it was a great replacement for the dearly departed Tab Dump. I’m no news junkie, and that’s why The Synopsis was so great: just a quick way to find out what happened in the last 24 hours.

I hope someone fills the void, and quick. I’d do it myself if I had the time.

It’s tiring to lug around your armor of spurious competence. And it’s equally exhausting to weather a swarm of weigh-ins from everyone and his brother (you guys don’t need me to tell you this is an especial behavior of men, right?), or stare down another slog through the hot-take-backlash-counterintuitive-take-counterintuitive-take-backlash-wet-blanket-hoax-accusation opinion cycle. Everyone is burned out by thinking something about everything. Everyone is even more burned out by everyone else thinking something about everything.

— Everyone’s opinions are fatiguing after a while – even your own | Jess Zimmerman | Comment is free | The Guardian

No opinion is a valid opinion. We don’t need to constantly spout out thoughts on the issues of the day, or issues of the minute. Admit your ignorance, shut up, and listen to the people who know what they’re talking about. There’s no shame in doing so.

As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the release of the iPhone, the category it blew up is starting to feel familiar. By now, an American who purchased a smartphone on contract in 2009 has not just bought but discarded at least three devices, and as smartphones mature, that is the reality of their use: to improve is to disappear just a little more. Aren’t we all just emailing and Instagramming and Facebooking and Snapchatting and WhatsApping and Angry-Birdsing anyway?

— Shitphone: A Love Story — Matter — Medium

Cheap, and good enough.

Not everyone needs an iPhone, but everyone needs a smartphone. The future of computing for most people is going to be inexpensive, commodity hardware, and we’re getting close to having commodity hardware that’s almost as good as the top-of-the-line in terms of experience. If I wasn’t so tied to iOS, I might give a shitphone a try.

“The iPhone is an object that we buy. It’s made by Apple, which is a company that wants to make money. But that’s not how I look at this. Call me naive and romantic, but I dropped cynicism a long time ago. Think about it this way: there are people who found a way to make a tiny computer that’s always with us. Then, there are other people – indie developers and big companies – who make software that can help us work and live better. We get the chance to experience all this and tweak our lifestyles with the aid of apps. And even if some of these people are driven by greed or questionable motives, the end result is that today we can use a phone to be healthier.

I can track and optimize my lifestyle with an iPhone. An entire ecosystem of apps, services, and devices capable of monitoring my nutrition, weight, fitness activity, and even sleep uses my iPhone as the central, private hub that I control. On the iPhone, everything is collected and visualized by a single Health app, which can be connected to more apps. As a cancer survivor who wants to improve his lifestyle because of a newfound appreciation of life, all this is incredible”

— Life After Cancer: How the iPhone Helped Me Achieve a Healthier Lifestyle – MacStories

Federico’s story is exactly the sort of thing that interests me when we talk about technology. It’s not about the specs, or the branding, or the price tag for the most expensive model. The ways technology can change our lives, to improve them, to utterly transform them—that’s simply incredible.