Wild Times, 29
March 9, 2017
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1 – Michael Flynn, General Chaos – Nicholas Schmidle @ The New Yorker
"Marks’s thirty-five-year-old daughter, who was watching with him, turned to her father and said, 'Dad, General Flynn is scaring me.'"
2 – Our Miserable 21st Century – Nicholas N. Eberstadt @ Commentary Magazine
"From work to income to health to social mobility, the year 2000 marked the beginning of what has become a distressing era for the United States."
3 – The Future of Not Working – Annie Lowrey @ The New York Times
"As automation reduces the need for human labor, some Silicon Valley executives think a universal income will be the answer — and the beta test is happening in Kenya."
4 – The National Death Wish – David Brooks @ The New York Times
"The problem is that American society is actually more like a river. Sometimes the river is running high, with a lot of volume and flow, with lots of good stuff for everybody, and sometimes it’s running low."
5 – Manifestos and Monopolies – Stratechery
"Today the fundamental impact of the Internet is to make distribution itself a cheap commodity — or in the case of digital content, completely free. And that, by extension, is why I have long argued that the Internet Revolution is as momentous as the Industrial Revolution: it is transforming how and where economic value is generated, and thus where power resides."
6 – Facebook Plans to Rewire Your Life. – Leonid Bershidsky @ Bloomberg
"Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto, penned clearly in response to accusations leveled at the social network in the wake of the bitter U.S. election campaign, is a scary, dystopian document. It shows that Facebook -- launched, in Zuckerberg's own words five years ago, to "extend people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships" -- is turning into something of an extraterritorial state run by a small, unelected government that relies extensively on privately held algorithms for social engineering."
7 – The New Yorker’s Big Cover Story Reveals Five Uncomfortable Truths About U.S. and Russia – Glen Greenwald @ The Intercept
"...featured within the article are several interesting, uncomfortable, and often-overlooked facts about Putin, Trump and Democrats. Given that these points are made here by a liberal media organ that is vehemently anti-Trump, within an article dispensing what has become the conventional Democratic wisdom on Russia, it is well worth highlighting them."
8 – The Gravity is Strong – Josh Marshall @ Talking Points Memo
"I don't have a clear sense of how big a deal last night's Jeff Sessions news will turn out to be. And I mean that both substantively - how much does it really matter? - and more generally - how will it be perceived, what effect will it have on the course of the broader story? As I wrote last night, this is much more about Sessions' need to conceal the meeting than the meeting itself."
9 – Inspired Media – Stratechery
"The broader takeaway is that the Internet is the Rubicon: products, politicians, and strategies that were optimal on one side are suboptimal on the other."
10 – You May Want to Marry My Husband – Amy Krouse Rosenthal for The New York Times
"I have been trying to write this for a while, but the morphine and lack of juicy cheeseburgers (what has it been now, five weeks without real food?) have drained my energy and interfered with whatever prose prowess remains."
Video
1 – 4.1 Miles – Daphne Matziraki @ The New York Times
"A coast guard captain on a small Greek island is suddenly charged with saving thousands of refugees from drowning at sea."