“As soon as you hit Google’s territorial waters, you came under our jurisdiction, our terms of service. Our laws–or lack thereof–apply here. By boarding our self-driving boat you granted us the right to all feedback you provide during your journey. This includes the chemical composition of your sweat. Remember when I said at I/O that maybe we should set aside some small part of the world where people could experiment freely and examine the effects? I wasn’t speaking theoretically. This place exists. We built it.”

I was thirsty, so I drank the electrolyte solution down. “This is delicious,” I replied.

“I know,” he replied. “It also has thousands of micro sensors which are now swarming through your blood stream.”

“What… ” I stammered.

This, by Mat Honan, is kind of incredible.

The major Bluth Cos. ventures are the Hussein homes, the series of “Boyfights” videos (with wacky side character Buster and his “Too Old to Breastfeed” and “I Don’t Want to Be on This Video” subplots), and the terrifying and dangerous Cornballer. George’s most successful side business, the Bluth’s Original Frozen Banana Stand, was stolen from Korean immigrants. It’s amazing that the Bluths compiled a fortune at all. Losing it is inevitable. Isn’t that the way it always goes? George stood in for the whole scam, and the rest of the clowns lined up behind him.

At Businessweek, Will Leitch examines the Bluth family business and gets us excited about seeing what kind of scheming the Bluths will be up to when Arrested Development returns on Netflix later this month.

Loving every word of A.O. Scott’s take on this year’s crop of materialistic films featuring “commodity fetishism:”

Fitzgerald’s Gatsby may be subject to analogous confusion, but Mr. Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” is something else altogether. The movie’s view (literally, its visual presentation) of American materialism is not moralistic, but pornographic. It traffics in the sheer libidinal pleasure of money and what it can buy. So does “Spring Breakers,” though this may be less obvious because of the proximity of its images to pornography of a more familiar kind.

Are Spring Breakers, The Great Gatsby, and the Bling Ring simply hedonistic? Or are they SUBVERSIVE? (“Like Daniel Lugo and his band of thugs, who kidnap a businessman and steal everything he owns, Ms. Coppola’s adolescent burglars are taking physical possession of what they feel already belongs to them.”)

In what must be the nerdiest nerdgasm posted to the Internet in the last 24 hours, Slate economics blogger Matt Yglesias has watched every episode of every series of Star Trek and shared his thoughts about what makes the series great.

Naturally, he has some insights about the “post-scarcity socialism” of the future economy they portray:

Consider the miraculous technology of the replicator—a machine that can seemingly create anything out of thin air, based on rudimentary raw materials plus energy. When computers and energy can substitute for productive human labor, either the energy supply will be controlled democratically for Federation-style liberal socialism, or else it will fall into the hands of some narrow clique and give us the fascistic authoritarianism of the Klingons, the Romulans, or the Cardassians. Under the circumstances, nothing resembling capitalism as we know it could survive.

Also, everything he has to say about the shows themselves is 100 percent objectively correct.

What can be learned from Fitzgerald’s tax returns? To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger—as if he were a grocer—a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money—at least until his wife Zelda’s illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue.

Fitzgerald, as we learn from this terrific American Scholar piece, was also paid no less than $1,000 per week during his Hollywood years and had an annual income of roughly $500,000 a year when adjusted for inflation. [Thanks to Michael McGrath for the pointer.]

Previously: Jane Austen

I’m Justin Bieber, and I think it’d be sweet if y’all paid for me to record my next album.

I know a lot of haters out there are gonna hate on this. “But Biebs, you recently spent upwards of $450,000 on a single birthday party,” they’ll say. Or “Your shoe collection alone costs more than I will earn in my entire lifetime, times three.”

To them I say: You have no idea how many shoes I truly own, it’s actually a crippling addiction. But that’s not the point. I’m doing this for my fans. I love my #Beliebers and my #Beliebers love me. And the perfect way to give back to my #Beliebers is to make my #Beliebers pay for my next album.

This isn’t your grandpa’s music industry anymore, y’all. This is the future of music. We’re living in a world where Soundgarden is spun on oldies stations. Now, I’ve never heard of Soundgarden, but my manager told me that shit was significant. Times are changing. Twitter is the new record label, Instagram is the new marketing, and #ShirtlessSelfies are the new everything.

I’m not mailing you any “incentives” cause y’all know I don’t have the time or patience for any of that shazz. But if you give me $10, I’ll nod my head. Give me $25, I’ll pump my fist. $100, double fist pump (that’s two hands, y’all). $500, I’ll say your name once, softly, under my breath. $10,000, I will write your name down on a piece of paper, dotting the i’s with hearts, and then I’ll fold it and put it in a drawer somewhere. $100,000, I write your name on some of the fancy paper my mom got me to send thank you notes.

I know many of my fans are pretty young and probably don’t have that much money to give me for this, so if y’all need to ask your parents for help, that’s totally cool. Just say it’s for your #education or some shazz. Or food or whatever. I don’t know. Whatever you guys normally ask your parents for, just ask for that, and then give it to my album.

The thing is: Yeah, I could technically record my album with my major label, and I’ve had a lot of success with that model in the past. But if I do it this way, I get to have final say on the final cut. Y’all don’t know how hard I fought to have my unreleased jam, “I Want More Shoez And Hatz” featured on my last album, but the record label turned it down.

My next album will definitely have that song on it and a whole bunch of others, also. Like the one I wrote with Jaden Smith called, “Sh*es/H*ts (The Hats and Shoes Song)” and another one I co-wrote with that kid from Jerry Maguire called “#Sex.”

This is the world now and I’m so #blessed to be making music for y’all #Beliebers. And just remember, if you don’t have the time or #money to contribute to this crowdfund, you can basically forget about ever getting a chance to talk to me.

Lucas is a writer and performer based in New York. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Washington Post, Flavorwire, and as a staff reporter for the Huffington Post. Co-creator of The Days of Yore. Twitter: @Lucaskavner

Photo: lwpkommunikacio

It’s Demo Day for participants from The Last Mile, a program designed to train a select group of inmates for eventual employment in Silicon Valley.

WYNC has a fascinating interview with a guy named “Chuck”, a marijuana dealer from San Francisco, Calif.—where marijuana has been decriminalized and is legal for medicinal purposes—who came to New York—where marijuana is 100 percent illegal—to sell weed and quadruple his income. They also talk to a special agent who is trying to stop the illegal flow of marijuana.

The pile of unread publications on my coffee table attests to my knowledge of the names of publications that keep people informed on many and divergent areas of the cultural spectrum.

n+1: I saw the name of this publication on a blog, in the same paragraph as the name “Slavoj Žižek.” It’s based in Brooklyn. ($35/year)

Lucky Peach: The pork buns at Momofuku are without a doubt the best I’ve ever had. ($28/year)

American Caving Accidents: Cave diving is dangerous business. (included with $40/year National Speleological Society membership)

The Believer: Isn’t it brilliant and convenient that they put the table of contents on the back cover? ($45/year)

The Wire: British. (£56/year)

American Reader: This is a new one. Issues 2 through 4 have thick, pretty, beige covers, but issue 1 clearly had a much lower budget. ($39.99/year)

The Baffler: Really smart bunch of people behind this one. ($30/year)

Vice: There’s boobs in there sometimes. (free)

William Foster lives in Portland, Ore.

Paul Miller had a quarter life crisis and decided to quit his job and unplug himself from the internet for a year. Better for him—The Verge paid him to leave the internet and then write about it. His conclusion is what you might expect it to be.