Newsletters: The $24.95 that made me feel secure

Valentine's Day is this week, and everywhere you look there seems to be an increased emphasis on romantic love, a hard-to-define and relatively new concept that for a blip every February we shorthand with dark shades of red in the form of cut roses and candy boxes in the anatomically inaccurate but societally agreed-upon shape of hearts. It's a celebration!

For a little reminder about what the search for romantic love looks like the other 51 weeks of the year, Kaitlyn Tiffany dug into the modern baby Cupid: Tinder's algorithm. In a smart, funny piece that gave me full-blown contact anxiety, Kaitlyn parses Tinder's secret internal rating system, the dangers of overswiping, the blunt capitalist force of the Super Like, what competitors (or are they?) are doing in the same space, and if your conspiracy theories about being hidden from your true love are for real (as always: maybe!).

And hey, speaking of getting to know someone you care about better, we'd like to know more about you! Specifically what you like and don't like about this newsletter, which you can tell us via this survey link.

—Meredith Haggerty, deputy editor of The Goods

The Tinder algorithm, explained

Sarah Lawrence for Vox

If there's one thing I know about love, it's that people who don't find it have shorter life spans on average. Which means learning how the Tinder algorithm works is a matter of life and death, extrapolating slightly.

According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans now consider dating apps a good way to meet someone; the previous stigma is gone. But in February 2016, at the time of Pew's survey, only 15 percent of American adults had actually used a dating app, which means acceptance of the tech and willingness to use the tech are disparate issues. On top of that, only 5 percent of people in marriages or committed relationships said their relationships began in an app. Which raises the question: Globally, more than 57 million people use Tinder — the biggest dating app — but do they know what they're doing?

They do not have to answer, as we're all doing our best. But if some information about how the Tinder algorithm works and what anyone of us can do to find love within its confines is helpful to them, then so be it.

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The best $24.95 I ever spent: an ugly organizer for cables and cords

Dana Rodriguez for Vox

In November 2008, Circuit City closed 155 stores and declared bankruptcy. The following year, it was liquidated. The retail company is now better known for the carapaces it left across the American landscape, concrete boxes like the megaliths of a forgotten ancient civilization. Sometimes I catch a glimpse from the highway of the old sign with its italicized, all-capital letters that zoom toward some future now vanished. It was an anachronistic future of chunky plastic mp3 players, voluminous CD binders, and thick high-definition televisions in suburban living rooms.

Circuit City was the tech utopia of my childhood. The store was right next to the only Borders within hours of my hometown in Connecticut (RIP all retail), so after perusing the books, I'd go wander among the televisions in the cavernous space, like a goth Home Depot. All the devices at Circuit City looked like they were designed to be installed in your basement where no one else could see them, as with any other source of shame. Ah, the days when "computers" hadn't become immaterial meshes of data and content pervading the very air we breathe! You could log off by pulling a plug.

I've been thinking of Circuit City lately because of a storage pouch I bought a few years ago that has become totally indispensable to my travel routine, precisely because it returns to that older, rougher era of technological aesthetics. As devices become increasingly Apple-fied, all slick and smooth, this pouch revives the comfort of functional awkwardness. The STM Cable Wrap is a foot-long fold-up bag designed to hold all your technological accessories: charging cords, batteries, earbuds, whatever. It is very useful because even as our devices promise to be less material and more wireless than ever, we're actually awash in wires, adapters, and dongles, and it's very easy to lose them. At $24.95, it also costs less than walking into an Apple store.

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