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https://longreads.com/2020/01/15/whatever-happened-to-______/

Then, “If you’re good at it, work hard. If you’re original…cream rises.”

That’s possibly true, too, I concede. I’ve heard about cream rising before, in workshops and rejection slips. Very likely, it happens.

The implied corollary is that if you can’t make it, you’re not good enough. It’s a bootstraps philosophy.

Then I think about a particular pack of white men in Hollywood, how wealthy they are and have been for so long, and the famously wealthy neighborhood where at least one of them lives, and the single lunch I was fortunate to enjoy with a cluster of actors and one showrunner, before my idea — a successful indie novel — was lifted almost whole cloth, lightly disguised, and the main character’s gender switched to suit their needs. A show’s concept instantly emerged among these men, and their show had more than strong parallels to the work of mine we’d been discussing; I was turned into an unacknowledged muse, crushing a movie deal my publisher and I spent years establishing.

In interviews, the famous men said they’d been in a bind, running out of ideas, with the clock ticking on a deal already in place that they were struggling to fulfill. The idea came to them out of virtually nowhere.

They looked after themselves. It had nothing to do with who was or wasn’t, creatively, “cream.” Honestly, s**t floats, too.

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/epbt6y/this_scene_in_peter_jacksons_they_shall_not_grow/fek8aar/
But, its only the modern era veterans that get shit on for it. That get called racist. By people that have no idea what we did, or who we are. I'm not going to lie and say no innocent civilians were killed, its war, it happens, but I can say the men I served with, we took casualties because we tried so hard to not hurt innocent people. We took casualties when we brought supplies and food and books and toys to the civilians. We could have been thr monsters we are labelled as now, but we werent, we thought we were doing a good thing, we didn't know ISIS would pop up 10 years later. We didnt know how our govt was going to handle the war. We just did our job, and tried not to lose our humanity while doing it. We tried not to hate the entire population, because we couldn't understand why they would blow us up or set traps for us, when we werent trying to hurt them. Some guys do hate them all, they could have warned us, thet could have turned on the insurgents, they should have fought for their country so we didnt have to.. but I at least realize its deeper and harder than that. I still dont hold any grudge.

I dont wish war upon anyone really, but I do wish people would understand how devastating war is for everyone involved.

https://meaningfulmama.com/unless-you-are-raising-a-special-needs-child-you-dont-understand.html

Unless you are raising a child with special needs, you don’t know what it is like to take everything you thought you knew about parenting and throw it out the window.

Standard parenting strategies work with my other children. Consistency and loving discipline are the key. Not with this child.

This child doesn’t respond to time outs.

He doesn’t respond to typical consequences.

Spankings only exasperate the situation.

Rewards do little to help improvement.

New strategies are needed, and they are hard to discover and hard to implement as a united front. There is a lot of trial and error. Failed attempts at discipline are the norm. Defeat is a reality. Yet determination and love persist.

Unless you are raising a child with special needs, you don’t know what it is like to yearn for normal.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/04/25/605092520/high-paying-trade-jobs-sit-empty-while-high-school-grads-line-up-for-university
In a new report, the Washington State Auditor found that good jobs in the skilled trades are going begging because students are being almost universally steered to bachelor's degrees.

Among other things, the Washington auditor recommended that career guidance — including choices that require less than four years in college — start as early as the seventh grade.

"There is an emphasis on the four-year university track" in high schools, said Chris Cortines, who co-authored the report. Yet, nationwide, three out of 10 high school grads who go to four-year public universities haven't earned degrees within six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. At four-year private colleges, that number is more than 1 in 5.

"Being more aware of other types of options may be exactly what they need," Cortines said. In spite of a perception "that college is the sole path for everybody," he said, "when you look at the types of wages that apprenticeships and other career areas pay and the fact that you do not pay four years of tuition and you're paid while you learn, these other paths really need some additional consideration."

And it's not just in Washington state.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/book-review-leadership-in-war-lessons-from-nine-figures-who-made-history/
A reassuring conclusion of Leadership in War is that we don’t — and that, in fact, morally repugnant individuals are inherently less successful war leaders. Roberts’s chapter on Hitler is a tour de force of historical portraiture. Forget the clichés about his bewitching charisma, Hitler was an absurd, boorish, banal, vainglorious, misogynistic “little weirdo,” incapable of normal human interactions, uncomfortable in anything approaching debate or discussion, hooked on juvenile conspiracy theories of all kinds, and whose ideas would not have stood up to 30 minutes of serious television interview. Both his and Stalin’s chronic insecurity, personal cruelty, and cynicism born of their guiding concepts of race and class wars, caused them to make errors and miscalculations at critical decision points in the war. They were all but incapable of taking on others’ ideas; or of operating within an alliance, habitually inclined, as they were to view their partners’ behavior not as goodwill to be reciprocated but as weakness to be exploited.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html
While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.

Facial recognition technology has always been controversial. It makes people nervous about Big Brother. It has a tendency to deliver false matches for certain groups, like people of color. And some facial recognition products used by the police — including Clearview’s — haven’t been vetted by independent experts.

Clearview’s app carries extra risks because law enforcement agencies are uploading sensitive photos to the servers of a company whose ability to protect its data is untested.[...]

“I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” Mr. Scalzo said. “Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/magazine/united-arab-emirates-mohammed-bin-zayed.html

Even as he cracked down on the Brotherhood, M.B.Z. was working on a far more ambitious project: building a state that would show up the entire Islamist movement by succeeding where it had failed. Instead of an illiberal democracy — like Turkey’s — he would build its opposite, a socially liberal autocracy, much as Lee Kuan Yew did in Singapore in the 1960s and ’70s. He began with Abu Dhabi’s Civil Service, which was afflicted with many of the same ills as those of other Arab countries: bloat and inefficiency, with connections and family reputation playing a bigger role in hiring than merit. These features were partly a legacy of the Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser, who built a dysfunctional prototype in the 1950s that was copied everywhere.

M.B.Z. deployed a group of young, talented people and authorized them to smash up the bureaucracy. Over the next few years, they fired tens of thousands of employees and reassigned many others, streamlining the state. Between 2005 and 2008, the Abu Dhabi government went from 64,000 people to just 7,000. At the same time, he began harnessing Abu Dhabi’s vast capital reserves to build up a non-oil economy. Using a new sovereign wealth fund called Mubadala, he attracted new industries, creating job opportunities that would help train the local population. He honed his progressive image by including women in his cabinet. Mubadala created an aerospace-and-aviation hub in Al Ain where 86 percent of the workers are women.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/justin-amash-iran-impeachment-congress-937760/

Why has Congress gradually abdicated this role in terms of war powers?It’s consistent with rank-and-file members abdicating almost their entire role. On ordinary legislative matters, most members of Congress don’t think anymore. They just follow whatever they’re told by their leadership. This is just a more extreme version of that. There is not a strong incentive — at least not a strong political incentive — to take a position. They prefer to have the president decide these matters and then they can later say, “Yeah, I supported it,” or, “No, I opposed it,” without actually having to take a vote and go on the record. It prevents them from ever having to take responsibility for whatever happens.

I think a lot of members of Congress are used to that lifestyle and they like it. They don’t want responsibility. They want the job, not the responsibility.

https://www.shatnerchatner.com/p/the-cilantro-eater
It’s just that it’s already in some of the foods I like the most, the most fragrant and vivid foods, it’s in everything Thai and Mexican and half the world’s best dishes besides, and to have to scrunch up your face and ask, “Does this come with —? Do you mind if I ask —?” is degrading to the palate and dispiriting to every dining companion, who know it’s not your fault because of your soap-genes, but can’t help but hold it against you regardless. I must have done something to deserve it. Something unadventurous and unwelcoming, something foreboding and oafish is knit into my DNA, and my tongue bears the truth. The tongue is the mirror of the soul, and I can taste Hell.

I’ve already given up so much. Please, just don’t let there be any this time. If there’s not any this time, I’ll be so careful from now on, I promise. Every time, I’ll ask. Every time, I’ll find a way just to quickly and casually ask, or not even ask, just let them know, “I can’t eat cilantro,” and I’ll only apologize once, not compulsively, and the rest of the dinner will roll on into the evening like a lovely, broad stream, with everyone wading into it together.

https://medium.com/@sarah.sullivan25/why-are-we-so-sick-29c6f39e3d11

The CDC has said that only 9% of Americans eat enough vegetables, that 3% of us eat enough fiber. I’ve read studies that show that ~50% of kids arrive to school dehydrated, which shrinks the brain, diminishes test scores, and inhibits a whole host of metabolic processes (1). We know that we are spending too much time on screens, which is disrupting our circadian rhythms, which undoubtedly is contributing to our collective sleep problems.

This is deserving of a whole post, but just to be clear: I do not believe that consumer choice is the most compelling explanation of this situation. In a world where 91% of us do not eat enough vegetables, “choice” — as my doctor says — “is a fiction.” Much more interesting is this question: How on earth did we create a society where vegetables are Rich People Food?

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/northkorea-china-border/
In our week-long drive, security was tight - we often couldn't stay to chat for long. But people told us they have interacted for years with North Koreans across the river.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/comments/el2zm3/why_is_trump_killing_soleimani_so_bad/fdg9aae/

There's a famous quote from a French diplomat Tallyrand that I can't get out of my head. Napolean arrested and executed Louis Antoine de Bourbon on flimsy pretenses, a man who stood in his way, a tyrannical act and a crime. Tallyrand noted in the moment. "This is worse than a crime... This is a mistake." It was tyrannical, but worse, it betrayed his intent to the world, and the blunder showed weakness - and others immediately began plotting against him.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/false-romance-russia/603433/

In his landmark 1981 book, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, Paul Hollander wrote of the hospitality showered on sympathetic Western visitors to the Communist world: the banquets in Moscow thrown for George Bernard Shaw, the feasts laid out for Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag in North Vietnam. But his conclusion was that these performances were not the key to explaining why some Western intellectuals became enamored of communism. Far more important was their estrangement and alienation from their own cultures: “Intellectuals critical of their own society proved highly susceptible to the claims put forward by the leaders and spokesmen of the societies they inspected in the course of these travels.”

Hollander was writing about left-wing intellectuals in the 20th century, and many such people are still around, paying court to left-wing dictators in Venezuela or Bolivia who dislike America. There are also, in our society as in most others, quite a few people who are paid to help America’s enemies, or to spread their propaganda. There always have been.

https://www.newamerica.org/work-workers-technology/reports/worker-voices/

For many workers, the future is already here. Food, retail, and grocery workers have witnessed rapid change in recent years, especially in the front end of their stores. Most feel they lack a voice in these changes and feel pessimistic about the future for humans in their stores. Advancing technological change is not occurring in a vacuum, but rather in a time of increasing economic precarity and inequality; unequal care and domestic burdens; and the rootedness, responsibilities, and stories of workers’ lives. Low pay and economic insecurity sharply limit workers’ ability to prepare for—and access—a better future of work, and women face many barriers. Workers are thinking about, and responding to the possibilities of a technologically enabled and dehumanized future in the context of their current situations. The current educational and workforce systems make career transitions extremely difficult, and workers often have trouble acquiring the skills and credentials they desire. Policymakers will improve the odds of building effective programs by paying attention to the wider human context and by addressing the needs of a greater diversity of workers who will shoulder the greatest burden of the change.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/nyregion/auschwitz-love-story.html

The first time he spoke to her, in 1943, by the Auschwitz crematory, David Wisnia realized that Helen Spitzer was no regular inmate. Zippi, as she was known, was clean, always neat. She wore a jacket and smelled good. They were introduced by a fellow inmate, at her request.

Her presence was unusual in itself: a woman outside the women’s quarters, speaking with a male prisoner. Before Mr. Wisnia knew it, they were alone, all the prisoners around them gone. This wasn’t a coincidence, he later realized. They made a plan to meet again in a week.

On their set date, Mr. Wisnia went as planned to meet at the barracks between crematories 4 and 5. He climbed on top of a makeshift ladder made up of packages of prisoners’ clothing. Ms. Spitzer had arranged it, a space amid hundreds of piles, just large enough to fit the two of them. Mr. Wisnia was 17 years old; she was 25.

“I had no knowledge of what, when, where,” Mr. Wisnia recently reminisced at age 93. “She taught me everything.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/egtsgd/former_lcs_player_remilia_passes_away_during_her/fcaqipp/
When you have depression it’s like it snows every day.

Some days it’s only a couple of inches. It’s a pain in the ass, but you still make it to work, the grocery store. Sure, maybe you skip the gym or your friend’s birthday party, but it IS still snowing and who knows how bad it might get tonight. Probably better to just head home. Your friend notices, but probably just thinks you are flaky now, or kind of an asshole.

Some days it snows a foot. You spend an hour shoveling out your driveway and are late to work. Your back and hands hurt from shoveling. You leave early because it’s really coming down out there. Your boss notices.

Some days it snows four feet. You shovel all morning but your street never gets plowed. You are not making it to work, or anywhere else for that matter. You are so sore and tired you just get back in bed. By the time you wake up, all your shoveling has filled back in with snow. Looks like your phone rang; people are wondering where you are. You don’t feel like calling them back, too tired from all the shoveling. Plus they don’t get this much snow at their house so they don’t understand why you’re still stuck at home. They just think you’re lazy or weak, although they rarely come out and say it.

Some weeks it’s a full-blown blizzard. When you open your door, it’s to a wall of snow. The power flickers, then goes out. It’s too cold to sit in the living room anymore, so you get back into bed with all your clothes on. The stove and microwave won’t work so you eat a cold Pop Tart and call that dinner. You haven’t taken a shower in three days, but how could you at this point? You’re too cold to do anything except sleep.

https://www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961
To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one's underwear. There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/books/review/once-more-we-saw-stars-jayson-greene.html

Eventually, they return home: “Nothing in here knows about Greta’s death — not her red horsey with its empty smile, the toy bin beneath the living room chair. … We bring the news with us into each room, like smallpox.”

At Greta’s funeral, Stacy decides unexpectedly to speak. Greene writes: “Her face is pale, but her eyes are blazing. Everything and everyone she has ever been in her life — daughter, sister, colleague, wife, mother — is visible to me. She is overwhelmingly beautiful in this moment.” Stacy talks about her daughter’s loving relationship with her mother: “‘She wanted nothing more than to spend time with her Grandma Suz. She had the best day,’ she finishes, her eyes filling and her voice breaking. She sits down, spent from effort.”

Greene too finds himself spent, also enraged, at having to repeatedly explain his family’s plight. “Greta was the victim of an accident. … I have to learn to state this grievously unacceptable information over and over again. … I am the reminder of the most unwelcome message in human history: Children — yours, mine — they don’t necessarily live.”

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/17/657824190/heavy-brilliantly-renders-the-struggle-to-become-fully-realized
I have dog-eared too many pages to close my copy of Kiese Laymon's Heavy: An American Memoir. I found something noteworthy on almost every page.

Heavy recounts growing up in a ferociously intellectual household — the only child of a single mother — as a black boy who struggles with weight. It is about the jagged, uneven road to becoming a writer and a man; it is a chronicle of daily confrontations with the twin assaults of American racism and America's weight-obsessed culture. Heavy is a compelling record of American violence and family violence, and the wide, rutted embrace of family love.

In clear, animated prose, Laymon writes in the second person, addressing himself to his mother. This fierce woman is a prominent political scientist who completed her Ph.D. and postgraduate work as Laymon was coming up in Jackson, Mississippi, and in Maryland. To raise him to excellence, she beats him regularly. She has a violent relationship with a man whom Kiese loathes and goes out of his way to avoid. She keeps a running critique of her son's weight.

Goldberg: Do people in Idaho and people in New York City have more in common than they think? Or are we really becoming two countries?

Westover: We have a shared history and shared interests as Americans, that’s true, but it’s also true that Democrats and Republicans increasingly live and work in different places. We have different experiences. As a general rule, I think we focus far too much on Donald Trump. We act like he’s the problem, but he’s not. He’s just a symptom—a sign of poor political hygiene.

Goldberg: Poor political hygiene?

Westover: Social media has flooded our consciousness with caricatures of each other. Human beings are reduced to data, and data nearly always underrepresent reality. The result is this great flattening of human life and human complexity. We think that because we know someone is pro-choice or pro-life, or that they drive a truck or a Prius, we know everything we need to know about them. Human detail gets lost in the algorithm. Thus humanity gives way to ideology.

Goldberg: So good political hygiene includes a respect for human complexity?

Westover: Our political system requires us to have a basic level of respect for each other, of empathy for each other. That loss of empathy is what I call a breaking of charity.

Goldberg: What does that mean?

Westover: It’s a term that’s associated with the Salem witch trials, and it refers to the moment when two members of a tribe disfellowship each other, and become two tribes. That, I think, is the biggest threat to our country, more than any single issue or politician. It’s the fact that the left and the right, the elite and the non-elite, the urban and the rural—however you want to slice it up—they no longer see themselves reflected in the other person. They no longer interpret each other as having charitable intent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/magazine/jailhouse-informant.html

With the help of his public defender, Skalnik filed a motion with the trial court in which he claimed a history of extensive prosecutorial misconduct. In the motion, he asserted that prosecutors had coached him on how to testify in numerous cases so as to give jurors the false impression that he “had actually heard all these ‘confessions,’ and had no agreement with the state for a reward for his testimony.” Prosecutors “knew of the potential questionability of said confessions,” the motion charged. Skalnik provided the names of 11 prosecutors whom he accused of misconduct but provided few specifics. He claimed to have given information or testimony in more than 50 cases and suggested that much of that evidence was tainted.

Just as the men whom Skalnik leveled outrageous claims against over the years had faced accusations that were maddeningly difficult to disprove, prosecutors found themselves on the defensive, scrambling to discredit what Skalnik claimed was the honest truth. In formal responses submitted to the court, the state attorney’s office categorically denied his assertions, dismissing them as “falsehoods, ranging in degree from gross exaggeration to preposterous fabrication” — a richly paradoxical about-face for an office that had asked scores of jurors to take him at his word. Trying to preserve the integrity of the cases Skalnik had participated in, prosecutors simultaneously argued that his earlier testimony as a state witness “was credible, was often independently substantiated and withstood extensive cross-examination.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/28/opinion/mister-rogers-neighborhood.html

Playing the piano as a child, Rogers wrote, taught him to express the whole range of his feelings. He recounts banging on the low keys when he got mad, and I imagine him exploring the minor keys when he felt sad. In multiple episodes, Rogers showed viewers how to tell their feelings through the piano. When he had famous musicians like Yo-Yo Ma or Wynton Marsalis on the program, Rogers would ask whether they played differently when they were sad or angry. They always reported that yes, they did, and that playing their darker emotions helped.

“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” was purportedly a show for children. But I think Rogers also meant it for adults. We’d be better off if we’d stop negating children’s dark emotions with stifling commands like “Don’t cry,” “Calm down,” “Be quiet.” If we are convinced by Rogers’ and Aristotle’s claim that feelings are not wrong and that “what’s mentionable is manageable,” we should begin mentioning our own sad, lonely and disappointed feelings. In doing so, we would show children — and our grown-up selves — how to appropriately manage them.

https://www.prayerandpolitiks.org/blog/2019/12/03/peace-like-war-is-waged.3879870

Walker’s 1969 book, The Struggle for Integrity, is the reason my wife and I moved to Atlanta after finishing seminary in New York City. We had no jobs waiting; we just wanted to be part of Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, whose pastoral leadership (clergy and lay) refused to move to the suburbs when the neighborhood de-gentrified. It was a risk-your-assets moment, resulting in substantial membership loss. The refusal to comply with Jim Crow almost killed the church. But then came Epiphany’s visionary renewal. Clarity is often reserved for those with their backs against the wall.

Over the ensuing years, Walker’s insightful voice helped lead the congregation through a longer series of dramatic decisions about its ever-deepening grasp of its mission as a countersign to larger cultural values. But not without renewed conflicts.

Walker knew that faith is often clarified not in the absence of conflict but within and through it. In a long prose poem printed in the December 1972 issue of Home Missions Magazine, which he edited, Walker dwelled at length on the risk of Advent and the fact that peacemaking entailed an active, even provocative engagement—whose practice is not for the faint of heart.

“Peace plans its strategy and encircles the enemy. / Peace marshals its forces and storms the gates. / Peace gathers its weapons and pierces the defense. / Peace, like war, is waged. / But Christ has turned it all around: / the weapons of peace are love, joy, goodness, longsuffering; / the arms of peace are justice, truth, patience, prayer; / the strategy of peace brings safety, welfare, happiness; / the forces of peace are the sons and daughters of God.”

Seven years later, then-US President Jimmy Carter quoted some of those lines in his speech marking the signing of the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, which he worked so hard to accomplish.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/01/omada-health-is-seeking-solutions-for-clash-of-doctors-and-techies.html

One San Francisco-based physician recalled the excitement he felt when he first showed up to work in 2018 at a diagnostic testing start-up. The company seemed to be growing quickly and was backed by tens of millions of dollars in venture capital.

But during his first month on the job, he saw behavior that would surely raise questions if regulators were aware of it. The company used doctors from a staffing agency to prescribe tests to patients. Those doctors appeared to be liberally issuing prescriptions, without doing thorough reviews, out of concern that the agency would lose its contract with the company if it was perceived to be limiting business.

After bringing up the issue with management, the “CEO flipped out,” the physician said, and accused him of not being a team player. He was subsequently put on a performance improvement plan.

“I stayed away from the regulatory issues after that,” and then left the company a year later, the physician said.

https://www.nurturingfaith.net/john-pierce-blog/remembering-walker-knight/

He coined the phrase, “Peace, like war, is waged.”

He challenged Baptists and others to live out the gospel of justice and inclusion — when it challenged their cultural norms.

He founded an independent publication (at great personal cost) in which such truth could be written, even if not celebrated — which I’m now privileged to serve as editor.

He shared his inspiring life story in Zion to Atlanta: Memoirs, published by Nurturing Faith.

He was small in size, but huge in integrity and influence.

Devoted husband to his late wife, Nell, and a caring father.

Mentor to many.

Longtime, rock-solid member of Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, Ga., the community of faith that helped launch his publishing venture.

Walker Leigh Knight, publisher emeritus of Nurturing Faith Journal, died this morning at age 95.

He was beloved. He will be well remembered and deeply honored — today and in the days ahead.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w26480

Estimates of teacher “value-added” suggest teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student learning. Prompted by this finding, many states and school districts have adopted value-added measures as indicators of teacher job performance. In this paper, we conduct a new test of the validity of value-added models. Using administrative student data from New York City, we apply commonly estimated value-added models to an outcome teachers cannot plausibly affect: student height. We find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and reading achievement, raising obvious questions about validity. Subsequent analysis finds these “effects” are largely spurious variation (noise), rather than bias resulting from sorting on unobserved factors related to achievement. Given the difficulty of differentiating signal from noise in real-world teacher effect estimates, this paper serves as a cautionary tale for their use in practice.

https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jobs-and-the-yoke-of-managerial-feudalism
The Economist: What is a “bullshit job” and can you give a few examples?

David Graeber: A bullshit job is one that even the person doing it secretly believes need not, or should not, exist. That if the job, or even the whole industry, were to vanish, either it would make no difference to anyone, or the world might even be a slightly better place.

Something like 37-40% of workers according to surveys say their jobs make no difference. Insofar as there’s anything really radical about the book, it’s not to observe that many people feel that way, but simply to say we should proceed on the assumption that for the most part, people’s self-assessments are largely correct. Their jobs really are just as pointless as they think they are.

If anything, just taking people’s word for it might understate the problem, since if you think that what you’re doing is pointless, but there’s some non-obvious larger big-picture way that you’re really contributing to the greater good, at least the greater good of the organisation, then what’s the chance no one is going to tell you that?

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole

People love me. Why? Because I’m fun. I’m the life of the party. I bring levity to any situation. Need to soften the blow of a harsh message about restroom etiquette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the directions to your graduation party? WHAM. There again. Need to convey your fun-loving, approachable nature on your business’ website? SMACK. Like daffodils in motherf**king spring.

https://www.adl.org/news/article/sacha-baron-cohens-keynote-address-at-adls-2019-never-is-now-summit-on-anti-semitism

What do all these dangerous trends have in common? I’m just a comedian and an actor, not a scholar. But one thing is pretty clear to me. All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.
The greatest propaganda machine in history.

Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others—they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged—stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It’s why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It’s why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it’s no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history—the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, “Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook.”

On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC. The fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion look as valid as an ADL report. And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3833/1

Several weeks ago, I was contacted by Robert Andrews, who informed me that he had worked for General Electric on Satellite Recovery Vehicles (SRVs) for several early American satellite reconnaissance programs, notably the first reconnaissance satellite CORONA, which first launched in 1959, and the high-resolution GAMBIT-1 satellite, that first launched in 1963. I encouraged Robert to write about his experiences, noting that although both programs are discussed in numerous declassified documents and official histories, the stories of the individuals who made these programs successful have rarely been told. Who were they? Where did they live and go to school? How did they end up working on these programs and what was that like? In the course of our discussions, I learned that Robert also worked on an obscure part of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program: a small reentry vehicle that would enable MOL astronauts to return film to Earth before they ended their mission and returned in their Gemini spacecraft. I encouraged him to discuss that project as well, including what happened when MOL was canceled in summer 1969. What follows is Mr. Andrews’ recollections of his work during these early years of satellite reconnaissance. — Dwayne A. Day

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/opinion/google-quantum-computer-sycamore.html

Google officially announced last week in the journal Nature that it achieved the milestone of “quantum supremacy.” This phrase, coined by the physicist John Preskill in 2012, refers to the first use of a quantum computer to make a calculation much faster than we know how to do it with even the fastest supercomputers available. The calculation doesn’t need to be useful: much like the Wright Flyer in 1903, or Enrico Fermi’s nuclear chain reaction in 1942, it only needs to prove a point.

Over the last decade, together with students and colleagues, I helped develop much of the theoretical underpinning for quantum supremacy experiments like Google’s. I reviewed Google’s paper before it was published. So the least I can do is to try to explain what it means.

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/11/16/interview-ex-head-legislature-jasper-tsang-says-govt-weakest-player-four-hong-kongs-struggle/

It is dangerous for Hong Kong. I don’t know what the people in Beijing want. Up to now, they have no intention to interfere. Now, I see four players:

The protesters: they don’t have any intention to stop.
The people: a large part of our population is supporting them.
The SAR government: it is incapable of doing anything, Carrie Lam has admitted it. The government is made up of very competent administrators but there are no politicians.
Beijing: they have no intention to interfere.

If all this doesn’t change, we cannot expect it to end.

The Central and the SAR governments want to appeal to the public to denounce the radicals. But is not working.

My hope lies in the protesters; it seems that, recently, some of them have called to stop the violence. And there is a very good reason for that. Elections are coming and it is very probable, as public sentiment is very much against the government, that if they take place in November, the pro-government camp will lose.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/tampa/2019/08/30/more-than-120-coffins-found-buried-at-forgotten-zion-cemetery-now-an-apartment-complex/

TAMPA — Zion Cemetery has been found.

Ground-penetrating radar has detected what appear to be more than 120 coffins under an apartment complex in Tampa, the remains of the lost cemetery revealed by the Tampa Bay Times.

The 2½-acre, segregation-era burial ground, believed to be the city’s first for African-Americans, was established in 1901 along the 3700 block of Florida Ave. and extended back around 400 feet.

It disappeared nearly a century ago when the land was parceled off for white developments.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/technology/softbank-startups.html

For five years, Sunil Solankey, a retired captain in the Indian Army, had run the 20-room Four Sight Hotel in a New Delhi suburb. Business was steady, but he longed to make the establishment a destination for lucrative business travelers.

Last year, a hospitality start-up called Oyo told Mr. Solankey that it would turn the Four Sight into a flagship hotel for corporate customers. It guaranteed him monthly payments whether the rooms were booked or not, as long as he rebranded the property with Oyo’s name and sold the rooms exclusively through its site.

At Oyo’s request, Mr. Solankey sank 600,000 rupees, or $8,400, into reupholstering the hotel’s furniture and adding new linens. But corporate guests did not materialize, and Oyo stopped making the payments. Now he is on the verge of eviction.

https://dhh.dk/2019/about-the-apple-card.html

My name is Jamie Heinemeier Hansson. Since my husband, David, tweeted about an unfortunate and ridiculous situation with AppleCard that involves me, I have been (or my credit-worthiness has been) the subject of lots of speculation. Unlike David, I am an extremely private person who does not post on social media. I am slightly mortified to have my name in the news. However, lest I be cast as a meek housewife who cannot speak for herself, I would like to make the following statement:

I care about digital privacy. It’s why I wanted an AppleCard in the first place.

I care about transparency and fairness. It’s why I was deeply annoyed to be told by AppleCard representatives, “It’s just the algorithm,” and “It’s just your credit score.” I have had credit in the US far longer than David. I have never had a single late payment. I do not have any debts. David and I share all financial accounts, and my very good credit score is higher than David’s. I had a career and was successful prior to meeting David, and while I am now a mother of three children — a “homemaker” is what I am forced to call myself on tax returns — I am still a millionaire who contributes greatly to my household and pays off credit in full each month. But AppleCard representatives did not want to hear any of this. I was given no explanation. No way to make my case.

Loewen said sundown towns sprang up all around the country from 1890 to 1940, a period he calls the “nadir” of race relations in America. “For the small, independent towns all around the state that are still all white or almost all white, it’s like the civil rights movement never happened,” he told me.

https://features.propublica.org/illinois-sundown-towns/legend-of-anna/

Anna’s historical resistance to black people is, and has long been, well known in the region. Even though it may never have been codified, I found references to the fact that black people weren’t allowed to live in Anna in newspaper articles from as early as 1903. In that particular reference, a woman from Anna who worked as a hotel maid in Indianapolis was quoted as saying, “I never saw more than 10 negroes in all my life until I was 18 … as a negro is not allowed to stop in our little village of Anna.”

Over the past two years, I visited the town several times to try to understand where Anna’s history had left the town today. I talked with people going about their lives — in the library, the Farm Fresh milk store, the Blue Boar restaurant, the city’s park, the Walmart parking lot and other pockets of Anna. I talked with public officials, historians and longtime residents. I visited a grave in the Anna cemetery that belongs to the man deemed by a local newspaper in 1916 to be “the only colored man who has ever lived in this city” and I spent some time with one of the few black families (if not the only one) living in Anna today.

Still, I’m not going to claim I know Anna’s full story — I’m an outsider. But after hearing A-N-N-A said aloud that night, I realized my race made me a sort of insider, too. Would the man who first recited A-N-N-A have done so if I weren’t white? Nearly everyone I met knew what Anna stands for — whether they heard it first as a “joke” at school or from their grandparents or just from living here long enough. Most people said they wished the A-N-N-A reputation would just go away and were quick to say Anna wasn’t “like that” anymore.

Like what? I’d ask. If Anna has changed, how?

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/story/2019-11-07/cbp-fraud

Asylum seekers who have finished their court cases are being sent back to Mexico with documents that contain fraudulent future court dates, keeping some migrants south of the border indefinitely, records show.

Under the Migrant Protection Protocols policy, asylum seekers with cases in the United States have to wait in Mexico until those cases are resolved. The Mexican government agreed to only accept migrants with future court dates scheduled.

Normally, when migrants conclude their immigration court cases, they are either paroled into the United States or kept in federal custody depending on the outcome of the case.

However, records obtained by The San Diego Union-Tribune show that on at least 14 occasions, Customs and Border Protection agents in California and Texas gave migrants who had already concluded their court cases documents with fraudulent future court dates written on them and sent the migrants back to Mexico anyway.

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