Turn off your phone at this restaurant and pay only half the bill. http://t.co/LXF3h3chsi pic.twitter.com/vWejvRc8PK

— Co.Exist (@FastCoExist) December 10, 2013

Drop that phone, #unplug and get happy. Read about the new Kent State study. http://t.co/f4wBcVjPS6

— Sabbath Manifesto (@SabbathManifest) December 9, 2013

I saw this Karl Middlebrooks piece on durian at Medium yesterday, The Cake That Should Not Be. His discussion of the fruit was not exactly tempting.

Everything I’ve heard about this fruit is that it smells awful. So awful, in fact, that in some places in Southeast Asia, you can’t bring them on public transportation or into restaurants and bars.

Still, people eat it. I was surprised to see a confirming piece in The New York Times today, A Love Letter to a Smelly Fruit. The accompanying video is too good to miss.

I Iove that Thomas Fuller compares the breeding of durian fruit to the breeding of flavorless hothouse tomatoes, and that he convincingly manages to work a William Blake quotation into an appreciation of a fruit that still seems unattractive to me: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

James Buckhouse at Medium

Something marvelous happens when you treat your phone as punctuation, rather than a metronome. Hugs burst forth from across the bar instead of smirks from friends to whom before you might have merely shown a funny gif. Laughs and forgotten screenplays emerge as intricate theories or urgent product visions. Musical re-mappings and rhyming games mix with foreign languages, fun, trust, hope and debate. In other words—conversation. Crass, elegant, classy, funny, dirty, dire yet brilliant conversation.

Gizmodo writes of an exercise machine that lets you know how well you're doing.