October 27, 2016

A chatbot engineer describes what it’s like to design AI to simulate a dead friend, then see it interact with the friend’s extended family. / Bloomberg

Lottie Howard and “Country” Bill White were “buried alive” practitioners in the ’60s. They were married, buried, then disinterred for the honeymoon. Two years later, Lottie served Country Bill divorce papers while he was buried in Texas, trying to break the world’s buried alive record. “The papers were dropped down the six-inch pipe he used for air and food.” / Weird Universe

See also: Halloween costume ideas for the new global economy (e.g., “Sexy Mark Zuckerberg: Unzip the hoodie.”) / Quartz

The story behind Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the “Monster Mash,” Halloween’s most popular novelty song. / neatorama.com

MoMA just acquired the original 176 emojis designed by Shigetaka Kurita. “Released in 1999, Kurita’s 176 emoji (picture characters) were instantly successful and copied by rival companies in Japan. Twelve years later, when a far larger set was released for Apple’s iPhone, emoji burst into a new form of global digital communication.” / MoMA

“We’re in the biggest period of park expansion and development since the WPA era of the 1930s. Cities are competing to see who can build the biggest, the best.” Cities are booming—the 30 largest US cities host 46 percent of the population and generate 54 percent of America’s GDP—and consequently so are parks. / Outside

Vermont man likely sets world record for using your mouth to catch a grape dropped from the greatest height. / vnews.com

Nate Silver and his 538 team give Donald Trump a 16 percent shot at winning the presidency—“about the same as the chances of losing a game of Russian roulette.” / FiveThirtyEight

“We’re talking about a character seemingly incapable of empathy, and blind to the toll his selfish behavior takes on others—whether his two wives, his colleagues, or the country at large. The kind of man whose only friend says about him, after his death: ‘He never believed in anything except Charlie Kane.’” What does a presidential candidate’s favorite movie reveal? / Lithub

Recent analysis about gun violence in the US finds that 99.85 percent of Americans will know at least one victim of gun violence during his or her lifetime. / ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, Quartz

“My last game, I was actually at the office until 4 o’clock, 4:15, editing a bunch of short stories. I lost track of time and looked at my watch and was like, ‘Oh, I better go home. I got my last game to play.’” Kobe Bryant nearly missed his last game because he was revising his fiction. He’s also working on a novel, and writes poetry. / Complex

The GOP could lose Senate races in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Missouri, which would end two brief years of Republican control of Congress. Senate aides say “the reason we don’t hold the Senate, if we don’t, is because of Donald Trump.” / Reuters

“While Republicans acknowledge they’re exiting October in worse shape than they ever imagined, they believe it’s possible Trump has hit rock bottom and can’t pull the House GOP any further down with him.” With all three debates in the rearview mirror, House Republicans are hoping Trump can’t do any more to sabotage their hopes of retaining a majority. / Politico

Don’t get too attached to the idea of Democrats retaking the Senate, because odds are it won’t last. / The Washington Post

“It is a testament to the politics of our times that Paul Ryan, the most conservative Speaker in the history of the country, won’t be conservative enough for a solid core of his own party in Congress, and is under siege from his party’s presidential nominee and acolytes.” If the Freedom Caucus makes good on its threat to oust Speaker Ryan, they’ll put forward their own hyper-conservative candidate—to which Democrats will respond by allying with mainstream Republicans to nominate a centrist. / The Atlantic

The only thing rigged about the election is gerrymandered control of the House. Republicans in state governments redrew 193 districts to their liking in 2010, whereas Democrats redrew just 44. That’s led to bizarre results. “Pennsylvania favored the Democrats by nearly 100,000 votes, but the sophisticated new lines returned a delegation that somehow broke 13 to 5 for the GOP.” / Salon

Democrats look to Jason Kander’s Missouri campaign as a model for making inroads in Southern states. Kander’s gun savvy—he’s an Army vet—made waves when he assembled an AR-15 blindfolded for a campaign spot in favor of background checks. / rollcall.com

Researchers studied 5,000 novels to determine an algorithm built to predict, with 80 percent accuracy, which books will become mega-bestsellers. / Wired

For your Thursday lunch break: Photographs of charming Paris storefronts. / Urdesign

As law enforcement agencies in the West work to combat revenge porn, an investigation finds that when it happens to women in countries like Egypt, Jordan, or Tunisia, it often has deadly consequences. / Los Angeles Times, BBC

“At the beginning of Dirty Harry, it’s unnerving to see Harry seeming to take cold pleasure in threatening a suspect with his gun…. For him, at least, the law had become an obstacle to justice rather than the mechanism facilitating it.” How Hollywood—working directly with law enforcement—invented the mythology of good police shootings. / The Washington Post