Strands of Genius: June 17th

Curated by @rosiesiman + @faris.

• First things first: When you are getting married in less than a month, ingratiating your soon-to-be in laws should be top of your list. So when Rosie mis-linked to Faris' brother's piece on GapJumpers, things didn't go over well. We kid. Ramzi was very forgiving, but it was our most e-mailed about mis-link. If you were disappointed you missed his interview last week, read up today! And follow him on Twitter already. We love you, Ramzi!
   
• The wrong way to treat child geniuses. Or, why genius is a thing that happens, not a kind of person. 
   
• It's very hard to appreciate how weird things are, because, by virtue of things being, well, everything, they seem normal.  McLuhan: "The present is always invisible because it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly". Warren Ellis has a lovely 15min speech on the same, reminding us to appreciate how awesome things actually are living in the future, which you can watch or read. [Compare to Louis CK's classic Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy.] 
   
• Rosie's go-to karaoke song is quite often Sir Mix-A-Lot's 90s hit, Baby Got Back. (Or if it's early in the night and she's not ready to embarrass herself, a country song.) Which is possibly why this article so appealed to her - Baby Got Backspace: How early tech helped make Sir Mix-a-Lot a star.  
   
• The Ouroboros of media swallows its linkbait tail, as satirical news organ The Onion launches 'viral content' Buzzfeed pastiche Clickhole. 
   
• This week we have another literary recommendation:  the peculiar, poignant polyphonic prospections of paradise called Forty Tales of the Afterlives by neuroscientist David Eagleman. Each tale is a completely different imagining of what happens after. 
   
• You may have noticed the Internet likes cats. This piece tracks the origin of kitty litter and how it has contributed to that. Compare to the amazing 5min talk by Kevin Slavin on toxoplasmosis that explains same.
   
• The Cannes advertising festival is upon us, which reminded Faris of a thought experiment he wrote for the Wharton Future of Advertising project, about creative awards in 2020. If you're not there, watch these case studies and enjoy a few bottles of rose in your garden and dream big.