Welcome to Reading List, Gizmodo's Sunday afternoon roundup of the best writing from around the web. Today we've got great stuff from Ars Technica, the A.V. Club, Wired, and more!
- Dan Nosowitz brings us inside the tiny team of Photoshop ninjas at The Onion, whose masterful illustrations help create the hilarious, scathingly satirical parallel world that generates some of the internet's most enjoyable writing. [Co.Design]
- Andrew Cunningham tells the fascinating history of USB, the ubiquitous electronic connector that saved us from a maddening jumble of serial ports, DIN connectors, PS/2 cables, and more. There have been faster, more robust connections, but for nearly 20 years USB has been king—and it might be time for an upgrade. [Ars Technica]
- Caroline Siede reminds us of the masterworks of Don Bluth, the slightly off-beat former Disney animator whose independent works like The Secret of NIMH and The Land Before Time offered a darker, less saccharine alternative to Disney's wholesomeness. [A.V. Club]
- Nick Paumgarten chats with Christian Rudder, a founder of OKCupid. Rudder got tons of flak after blithely revealing that the online dating service sometimes misleads "bad" matches to see if they'll follow the site's advice. In a world where we're constantly offering up infinitely analyzable digital data, Rudder asks, is a little meddling really that bad? [The New Yorker]
- Ethicist Patrick Lin offers an insightful op-ed on the delicate ethics of self-driving cars, and why a driver-controlled "ethics setting" would be a terrible idea ethically, legally, and personally. [Wired]
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