I know I link to Kottke a lot, but you MFers don't seem to be reading him any more (near as I can tell), so I'm just gonna throw down with a week's worth of the best Kottke-links. Each of these leads to the Kottke page where he links to a story. The descriptions... they're so good. Sometimes I've read the linked-to thing, sometimes I've not. Sometimes the description is all I need, so I'm gonna give you that respect too.

Tarantino on the studios vs. the artist.

Aging in bursts through family-event photographs.

Why do we feel suspense re-watching a movie?

Richard Gerrig, the psychologist who gave anomalous suspense its name, offers a different solution. He posits that in general, when we reread a novel or rewatch a film, our cognitive system doesn't apply its prior knowledge of what will happen. Why? Because our minds evolved to deal with the real world, and there you never know exactly what will happen next. Every situation is unique, and no course of events is literally identical to an earlier one. "Our moment-by-moment processes evolved in response to the brute fact of nonrepetition" (Experiencing Narrative Worlds, 171). Somehow, this assumption that every act is unique became our default for understanding events, even fictional ones we've encountered before.

Apple Store prototyping.

Maps of world-civ at 2000BC, 1000BC, 500BC, etc.
(Most interesting to me is the collapse of the Indus River Valley state-societies between 2000 and 1000 BCE. What gives? And why does nobody talk about it?)

Out of the suburbs into a life.
(I, like many, have long suspected this to be the case about cars. It's nice to see that intuition verified.)