My recommended read for this weekend is an interview with Natasha Dow Schüll, an MIT cultural antropologist, about slot machines (and casinos more generally). The interview was conducted by Brad Plummer of Vox.

As is often Vox‘s style, both the interview and a written-up story based on it are on the same page. I’ve linked directly to the interview itself, as I found that more interesting – but, of course, your mileage may vary.

As an aside: the article says that manufactures often ‘smooth’ the gameplay by making payouts less volatile, while maintaining the payout rate. Apparently, this is legal, as it doesn’t count as changing the ‘odds’. This seems to imply that, in the States at least, odds are regulated in terms of pay-out rate. This seems an intriguingly dumb interpretation of statistics, which has no regard to the player’s own experience. Can it possibly be true?

I don't often go for medical publications for my weekend recommended read, but this is worth it – Tania Glyde's piece on being normal, published this week in The Lancet Psychiatry.

If you were expecting something Scottish… There's been a lot of good stuff written, but I've read so much about it this week (and will no doubt read more in the week to come following the "no" vote) that I wanted to pick something different. I'm not at all bitter at having lost a long-standing bet…! 

Yesterday was the 13th anniversary of the ‘9/11’ terrorist attacks on the United States. It is a day which I remember well. I recently found myself re-watching Jon Stewart’s extraordinary monologue on the first Daily Show after 9/11, and felt those same chills as I did thirteen years ago.

Earlier this year, the 9/11 Memorial Museum opened in New York. Steve Kandell, whose sister was killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center, had pre-opening admission to the Museum. His thoughtful BuzzFeed article reflecting on the content of the museum, and his reaction to it, seems a fitting article to post for this weekend.

My recommend read for this weekend is – horror of horrors – a Gawker article. Caity Weaver's article documenting her "feat" of eating 32 mozzarella sticks in the course of a little more than 12 hours is a great bit of funny writing. The level of tension and disgust may be out of all proportion to the action being described, but that only serves to heighten the humour.

My recommended read for this weekend is really more of a recommended 'gawp' than something to read… but I like to do that sometimes.

It's a photo article from Slate, written by Jordan G Tiecher and feautring the photography of Seph Lawless. It features a number of arresting photographs of abandoned US shopping malls, taken from Seph's latest book. The photos that wonderful artistic haunting post-apocalyptic quality of urban exploration.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

The people in this stock photo, like most people in stock photos, look happy. How many times in your life have you sat through a PowerPoint presentation – particularly one on an inadequately size TV – and been that happy? Not terribly often, I suspect.

And so my recommended read for this weekend is a wonderfully sweary post on Medium, written by Robin Hardwick. It’s a guide to writing a PowerPoint presentation that won’t cause people to want to commit suicide. Here’s a sample:

I don’t need a slide that says HOUSEKEEPING to tell me that I can get up and go to the bathroom whenever I need to. It’s not like I was going to stay in my seat at all costs and soil my drawers so I won’t miss a precious moment of your Screen Beans describing what teamwork means.

Well, quite. Writing as somebody whose heart sinks when PowerPoint is fired up, I’d say that this article shouldn’t just be a recommended read, it should be compulsory for everyone who might ever have to give a presentation. It’s excellent.

At the end of last year, Walter Mossberg retired from his technology review column in the Wall Street Journal. He closed the book on his column with this great article in which he picks the best the dozen products which he thinks changed the industry. There are, of course, hundreds of similar columns online which debate the most important products in consumer technology history, but Mossberg’s well-informed perspective is well worth considering.

I’m linking to the AllThingsD version of the article, as the WSJ’s main site requires registration.

Kathryn Schultz has put together a wonderfully absurd listicle for Vulture in which she argues with passion for the five best punctuation marks in literature. This is a great article in itself, but is made all the better for being one of the few punctuation-related articles on the internet that doesn’t tediously rehearse the merits of either the semicolon or the interrobang.

Back in May, Jeff Jarvis wrote a brilliant reflective piece for Medium about the changing journalism workflows associated with changing technology. His compulsion to Ctrl-S is something that I share, and that I still do even though it is not longer necessary now that I use a Chromebook as my main machine.

Interestingly, one of the biggest changes that Chromebooks have had on my personal working patterns has come from the inclusion of a “search” button in place of the Caps Lock key. I cannot count the number of times I’ve hit Caps Lock on a work PC and typed search terms directly into whatever document I’m working on instead of finding the answers I’m seeking!

I have enjoyed both series of Netflix‘s remake of House of Cards. I’d argue that the second series was better than the first, but both are better than almost anything else I’ve seen on TV in recent years.

If you, too, enjoyed the series, you’ll likely also enjoy Adam Sternbergh’s discussion of the show, its philosophy, and how it came to be. It was published in the New York Times Magazine. And if you are not already a fan, I’d probably advise watching the first series before reading, as it’s laden with spoilers.