7 Stories to read this weekend

I took the last weekend off, mostly because I was dead tired after hosting our Roadmap conference and didn’t have a chance to actually do much reading during the week. Of course, like it always happens, I fell sick after the conference, so I have had more than enough time to catch up on my reading. It was hard to narrow down on seven picks this week, but here they are.

• The Disconnectionists: Unplugging from the internet is the new black these days, but it says a lot more about us than about the internet. This essay by Nathan Jurgenson is a must read.
• How to lose funds and infuriate users: Couchsurfing, a cautionary tale from sharing economy: Great piece by Sam Roudman, who outlines how chasing Airbnb essentially brought one of the great experiments in sharing to the brink
• The Rise and fall of Somalia’s pirate king : Afweyne, who is one of the biggest Somali pirates, is going on trial soon. Here is his story in the Foreign Policy magazine. (Annoying sign-up pop-up alert!)
• Meet Pardis Sabeti, the rollerblading rockstar scientist of Harvard. She has some great ideas about how to treat infectious decisions with genetics. And she won the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for those ideas.
• The fall of the House of Moon: New Republic’s Mariah Blake takes a look at the scandals and drama around Revered Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church.
• The robots are here: Tyler Cowen reports on the slow rise of robots in our modern life.
• Rip the Consumer: From Clay Shirky’s archives, this turn of the century essay is worth re-reading.