5 generally interesting stories

I got a little behind on posting these this week but I have been keeping my new year’s media diet resolution and largely have been staying away from social media. It’s been a good change. Here are some of the interesting stories I found in ways other than virality.

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  1. “China Sets New Records for Gobbling Up the World’s Commodities” (Bloomberg) – China’s voracious economic appetite passed one major milestone last year: it is now the world’s largest customer for oil imports.
  2. “American Democracy Is an Easy Target” (Foreign Policy) – Henry Farrell argues that the best way to understand Russian intereference in America’s elections is as “a loose collective of Russians, with incredibly meager resources, have been working together in a disorganized way to probe American democracy for weaknesses,” and it is those weaknessses, not some master strategy, that has made the efforts so successful.
  3. “Facebook Crushed Everyone’s “Pivot to Video”—Except Its Own” (Slate) – Facebook’s changes to its Mews Feed is “a death knell for publishers that made the infamous ‘pivot to video’” — a strategy that many outlets made under the specific advice of Facebook.
  4. “An Emissary to Tyranny” (Foreign Policy) – “Go and hang on a banana tree”: African-American diplomats serving in Zimbabwe face unceasing racial abuse from the government there.
  5. “I have cancer. Don’t tell me you’re sorry.” (The Guardian) – Elizabeth Wurtzel on living with cancer is a powerful read.