Keystone — Esquire article by author John H. Richardson on the Alberta tar sands, the Keystone Pipeline, and the socioeconomic and environmental controversies swirling around this new, deadly, yet highly profitable oil field and delivery route.

The Story of Nokia MeeGo — a recent history of what would have become Nokia’s next-generation mobile OS before Microsoft came into the picture. (MeeGo development has shifted to Sailfish OS by indie dev offshoot Jolla.)

Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS — Verge story on Palm’s downfall, from leading creator of personal digital assistants, to has-been maker of smartphones and tablets that could have been competitive with iOS and Android — if HP hadn’t killed them.

Skeuomorphic design (or, one reason we can be thankful Scott Forstall is gone) — on the “sewn leather” look plaguing iOS organizer apps and the departure of the Apple designer responsible.

An Alternate Universe — Marco Arment tries a Surface at a Microsoft Store.

A Brief History of the Teleprompter — Smithsonian Magazine on what began as a suitcase-based scrolling cue card system and became a technological phenomenon that defined politics and entertainment with its own strange cadence of speech.

The whale that talked — On NOC, a beluga whale at the National Marine Mammal Foundation, who learned to mimic human-like patterns of speech.