The Good Browser Is Firefox Now, And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: Chrome is still bad, the best way to win a game of horse and the people who only feel fear and anger.
If You Value Privacy, Firefox Is The Best Browser
In days past, the browser wars were defined by simple performance metrics: how fast a browser can load pages, manage resources and render everything correctly. Now, since the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the ad tracking legislation GDPR going into effect, the speed of which you can load into your email inbox isn't exactly the primary concern anymore.
This week, Fast Company's Katharine Schwab makes a compelling argument for why one might switch to Firefox: privacy. While Firefox developers can't undo the years and years of web developers optimizing their websites for Chrome, they can tout their robust privacy features — stopping advertsiers and websites from tracking your browsing or shopping behavior. In an age where ad tech has made tracking everyone and anyone a frightening norm, seeing a company take steps to reverse a decade of predatory behavior is welcome sight.
Ideally, no one should be tracked without their permission online. For now, the best solution is to use services that either refuse to collect information of their users, or outright block others from doing so.
The Best Way To Win A Game Of Horse Is To Master The Bank Shot
Slate's Nick Greene is absolutely right to point out that a a game of Horse, that fun basketball game where two players attempt to make shots the other cannot up until one accrues five misses, has little to do with being good at basketball.
Sure, if two basketball players are playing each other, they're both going to try shots of increasing difficulty, but they'll all probably fall within the realm of what your average basketball fan would consider a "tough shot" — three pointers, fade-aways, maybe a hook shot if there's a rec center dad involved.
Green suggests, however, that you do not need to be good at basketball to be good at Horse. Horse is a mental game. You both want to confuse and intimidate your opponent. You must bust out the unorthodox. An underhand free throw. A set bank shot from the elbow. Escalate until you're both heaving no-look half-court bombs. Remember: You're not actually playing basketball here.
[Slate]
Some Folks Can Only Feel Anger And Fear
Have you ever felt something and came to the conclusion that it was beyond words? For most, it's mostly a figure of speech, a singular emotion so intense that words cannot accurately describe what you're feeling. But what if you felt something, and you know you're feeling something but just couldn't describe what that feeling is. You know the words, and what emotions represent, but for some reason, you just can't identify what this feeling is.
Normally, most would chalk this up to two popular emotional disorders, autism and psychopathy. But there is, potentially, a third. This week in Mosaic, Emma Young dives into a condition known as alexithymia. The main subject Young profiles who has alexithymia, a man named Stephen, discusses how the only emotions he knows he feels are anger and fear. Everything else he cannot place. Sure, he's learned how to emulate emotions, but he still struggles with the notion that he is pretending to be happy, or to love or to be sad.
Of course, reading Young's excellent feature on the condition, like reading about any sort of mental condition, will make you slightly feel like you also have it. That said, this alexithymia spectrum — ranging from people who find it harder to identify their emotions to those who just cannot — is thought to affect 1 in 10 people. Now, how does that make you feel?
[Mosaic]
