Must Reads: Artisanal Toast, No More Open Internet and More

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Image: Warner Bros. Warner Bros.

By Megan Hess2014-01-17 23:38:18 UTC

During the week, we consume words in snackable, tweetable bites. But on the weekends, we have the time to take a dive into the murkier, lengthier depths of the Internet and expand our attention spans beyond 140 characters. We can brew a cup of coffee and lie back with our iPads, laptops, smartphones and Kindles.

Since you're bound to miss a few things during the daily grind, we present to you, in our weekly installation of Mashable Must Reads, a curated list of can't-miss stories from around the web to read and reflect on. (You can find last week's must reads here.)

The 4 Normal Guys Who Just Happen to Be Olympic Curlers | Mashable

The U.S. men's curling team that will compete in Sochi is a motley crew: a restaurant manager, a middle-school science teacher, an engineer and a college student. "I wouldn’t say I’m athletic at all," one of them said. Yet, come February, they will represent America in one of the most complicated winter sports you'll ever encounter.

Image: Daniel Kopatsch/Getty Images

A Toast Story | Pacific Standard

Read the headline and roll your eyes — another story about the next hipster trend, artisanal toast. But this essay takes an unexpected turn: It's actually a refreshingly honest portrayal of a women with mental illness, making $4 toast something that you won't want to roll your eyes at.

Why This Is the Age of Publishers, Not Journalists | Mashable

More and more journalists are reaching a celebrity status in which they don't need a prestigious newspaper to validate their worth. While it's unrealistic to expect any journalist to outshine the publication they work for, the data here illustrates how some superstar journalists — take Nate Silver of ESPN and Ezra Klein of The Washington Post — have enough clout to take their brands elsewhere. But publishers don't sweat when superstar journos jump ship — they know who has the real clout.

Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Closing Time for the Open Internet | New Yorker

Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who coined the term "net neutrality," explains what net neutrality once was, in its purest form — and how the former FCC chairperson killed it. The legal implications of this week's court decision are far-reaching, as Wu details; not just for the big guys, like Netflix, but also for the little bloggers.

The Eye in Your Home: Google, Nest and the Rise of the Physical Graph | Mashable

Clearly, Google sees much more potential in Nest than just a sexy-looking thermostat and smoke detector. Google hasn't said anything more than a few vague statements about what it plans to do with the company, but the acquisition represents Nest's beachhead into the Internet of Things, probably more accurately described in this context as the physical graph.

Image: Mashable composite

'This Haunts Me at Night': The Man Behind ViralNova on the Viral Bubble | The Wire

"The Internet is big enough for everyone to not only exist, but thrive," says the founder of ViralNova. This deep-dive looks behind the website that all your Facebook friends keep sharing clickbait-y stories from. Despite its massive success, this story certainly won't make you want to run a viral website anytime soon.

Why 'Her' Is the Best Movie Ever Made About the Singularity | Mashable

Spike Jonze's Her is a film about a man who falls in love with his computer — not a far stretch of the imagination, really. But it's also our best look at the Singularity, a theoretical point in future history when artificial intelligences exceed the power of the human mind, become self-aware and dramatically change the balance of power on the planet while simultaneously transforming the very nature of humanity itself.

Don't have time to read them all now? In our Readlist below, export this week's must reads to your tablet to save for a time you have no distractions. Simply click the "read later" button alongside each story or or click "export" to send the entire list of articles to your preferred device.

Topics: artificial intelligence, Dev & Design, FCC, Film, Gadgets, Home, Media, Mashable Must Reads, Nest, olympics, Sports, U.S., World