Every Friday the Suss collective body points to some number of things currently interesting us (be it a book, a building, an awesome peony bush, a particularly interesting idea...) and briefly explains to us why we should all also spend some time with this thing of theirs.

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Nerds
We're not talking about the candy or Anthony Edwards in his pre-Dr. Green days. We're taking about  real life nerds, actual people who are so deeply passionate about a single topic that they know it sideways. Anyone with a truly deep store of knowledge and an abiding passion for their subject of choice—be it fonts, pop music, sketch comedy, football, general-purpose Unix scripting languages—this person is someone in whose company we revel.

Photos of Edward Gorey's house from the week he died
(Photoset on Flickr)
Compiled by Christopher Seufert, a documentary filmmaker who'd been working with Gorey at the time of his death in April of 2000, this photoset is at once beautiful, disturbing, and heartbreaking. It also makes difficult looking through the stuff of a great artist so close to his death without trying to imbue it all with some meaning. The coffee syrup on his refrigerator door—how did that inform The Gashlycrumb Tinies?

CSS-Tricks.com
We are in the midst of a massive DIY overhaul of the entire Lintel, Sash, & Sill internet world. Chris Coyier's tutorials, screencasts, downloads, and code snippets are proving invaluable in this endeavor. He is a first-class nerd whose skill and deep back-catalogue of knowledge is so great it could be mistaken as magic by the unaware.

from K.A. Keener

Brown paper packages tied up with string
Buying an éclair at a bakery and watching them wrap it in an éclair-shaped box with red string is certain to make me smile.

Body Art
Seeing images of almost any brain scan touches something inside me that also means smile.

The Stanford Marshmallow Study
Researchers gave kids a choice between one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later (provided they could resist eating the first when left unattended). Marshmallow success, they say, is a predictor of success later in life.

from R.B. Moreno

Excerpts from "Made in China," a forthcoming essay on human hair:
DOUGH CONDITIONERS reads the fine print on a bright blue box of Texas Garlic Toast.  It’s made by Great Value, or GV (“When Quality Counts”).  Wal-Mart, the product’s distributor, describes GV as the country’s largest food brand.  Peering closer at the ingredients listed under dough conditioners, which fall just before sugar but after yeast, I spot a familiar term: L-CYSTEINE.

Some time later, deep in the bowels of the European Union’s legal archive, in correspondence with an alarmed German legislator, I find that one means of dough conditioning hinges on a process called hydrolysis.  This entails boiling hair, usually human hair, in vats of hydrochloric acid for several hours on end, which makes the follicles decompose into a white, odorless powder: L-CYSTEINE.

from Michelle Filippini:

Temporal Relativism
I have been amused of late by the abundance of twentysomethings prefacing what they’re about to say with, “Back in the day..." As I recently asked some friends (none of them twentysomethings), What day are they referring to—when they were in utero? So we started to make up our own (as them): "Back in the day when we couldn’t wait to talk about who’d been voted off the island..." "Back in the day when Yahoo! was the only search engine we used..." "Back in the day when the Twin Towers still dotted the skyline..."