Engineering Serendipity: On how creativity is sparked by your networks, and face-to-face communication.

Distributed Systems and the End of the API: Chas Emerick discusses issues with distributed systems and how to solve them.

The Story of the Hearing Glove: When Norbert Wiener presented a device that could translate sound to touch, people couldn’t wait to try it out. Testing didn’t go as planned.

How Complex Systems Fail: A great, but short paper by Dr. Richard Cook, about how complex systems fail, drawn from his experience in health care. Bonus: Dr. Cook’s presentation at Velocity Conf.

The Trouble With Harvard: The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it

I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not: An excerpt from Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

Dear Novak, Love Roger: Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer exchange emails during the US Open Final – another masterpiece by Brian Phillips.

Why You Should Refrigerate Tomatoes and Ignore Anyone Who Says Otherwise: Serious Eats at it again, challenging conventional culinary wisdom with experimentation and data.