This story about how a man sabotaged a FAA facility is terrifying and inspiring in how people worked together to overcome it, and also includes this unintentionally funny line, “He had worked at the Chicago Center for eight years, according to an FBI affidavit. The company has fired him.”

The Internet’s Most Fascinating Newsletter Writer, Dave Pell. Still one of my favorite reads, though I don’t look at it every day because it’d make me lazy about blogging and you all would get tired of seeing “Hat tip: Dave Pell” on every post.

Sarah Gooding of the WordPress inside baseball blog WP Tavern has an interview with me she titled Matt Mullenweg on Ensuring the Future of WordPress.

Ben Gillbanks, the co-author of TimThumb, says I No Longer Use TimThumb — Here’s What I do Instead.

David Sedaris in the New Yorker on how his Fitbit took over his life.. Hat tip: Jeremey Duvall.

Circa is how I get news on my phone every day, and they’ve just redesigned with some slick new features. They’re an Audrey company, too.

The Invasion of Corporate News.

Checky tells you how many times a day you check your phone, which Mary Meeker said in 2013 that we do 150 times a day. In a brilliant act of marketing, Checky is brought to you by the same people as Calm.com.

Tim Cook’s letter on Apple privacy is pretty amazing and a shot across the bow of Google.

Merchbar is an iPhone app that makes it easy to buy merchandise from your favorite artists. It also was the first investment I made through my Angellist Syndicate, and I’m excited for the team on its launch. (Although it’s good to remember that launching is a halfway point — you should expect to spend at least as much time as you did leading up to launch to get to something you’re happy with. Something I’m thinking about a lot in Automattic these days.)

We’ve had some really good press the past week, the first I’d like to share with you comes from Aimee Groth writing for Quartz: The makers of WordPress.com learned years ago that the ultimate office perk is not having an office. The funny thing is I’m writing this from the once-a-year Automattic Grand Meetup, which is in Utah this year, there are over 250 of my colleagues here and it’s great fun meeting and hanging out with everybody.

We’ve talked about the Fermi Paradox here and here before, my long-time friend David Galbraith, ever the architect, tackles the Fermi Paradox from the point of view of the natural limits of communication in Minimum & Maximum Viable Civilizations.

Brentin Mock from Grist looks for evidence that Hip Hop is not down with Monsanto.

Automattic Rejects Series Of Bogus Janet Jackson Takedown Attempts By Using Janet Jackson Song Titles.

I bet you didn’t know today that you wanted to play a game with Jay Z’s head eating cupcakes while his Pound Cake verse plays in the background, but you do. Use the keyboard instead of mouse and it’s way more challenging. (Also worth mentioning Childish Gambino had the best freestyle on Pound Cake.)

WordPress 4.0, code-named Benny, is now available. The response so far has been great, over 200k downloads in just a few hours. Today we celebrate, watch the counter, and tomorrow go back to work on 4.1. 🙂 For those following along at home, the 3.x series of WordPress was downloaded 300 million times.

Luca Sartoni writes The Rules of A/B Testing by Tyler Durden. “1st Rule: You don’t talk about A/B Testing.”

Matthew Ingram writes for Gigaom: Journalism is doing just fine, thanks — it’s mass-media business models that are ailing. Hat tip: Ben Thompson.

Tom McFarlin writes Everything Is Bloated, Nothing Is Good.

Introducing plugin icons in the plugin installer, the defaults are cool (and that library would be nice to support for Gravatar) but go ahead and start making icons for your WordPress plugins. It adds a nice punch and panache to the plugin experience.