Category: generally interesting

You don’t often think of slums and Luxembourg together: the tiny nation has about the same population as Milwaukee but one of the world’s highest per capita GDP (nearly twice the U.S.) and one of the lowest poverty rates. But, just a block away from the main train station in its largest city, also named Luxembourg (pop. 76,420), is a street called rue de Strasbourg which is known as an open-air market for sex and drugs. The surrounding neighborhood, Quartier Gare, is the only area in the country’s nearly 1,000 square miles called out in the U.S. State Department’s guidelines as an “area of concern” for American travelers. (Sure to offend New Yorkers, it’s been not-so-affectionally nicknamed “the Bronx.”) But Bloomberg’s Stephanie Bodie reports that a quirk of geopolitics — Luxembourg’s popularity as a relocation destination for bankers looking to leave the U.K. ahead of next year’s Brexit — is driving up housing prices throughout the Grand Duchy and spurring luxury residential development even in marginal areas like rue de Strasbourg. “These days, all neighborhoods in Luxembourg are being explored,” one real estate agent tells Bodie. In a process familiar to New Yorkers, who’ve seen countless neighborhoods go from all-but-forgotten to hubs of strollers and BMWs, the denizens of Luxembourg’s seedy streets will be pushed aside. Even the nickname is getting an upgrade: sales materials now refer to the area as “Soho.” Today, five recent stories in the news from life on the edges and what gets left behind.

(This is a revamped part of my new year’s resolution to rely less on social media for news; please sign up here if you’d like to receive these by email.)

1. Russia’s presidential election may have been a sham, but in the provincial agricultural areas, far from the major cities, the support for Putin is very real. In part, farmers are grateful for a geyser of agricultural subsidies that have bolstered the regional economy. But the desire for him to retain control of the country — even as dictator for life — also stems from a strong cultural identification with Putin and a shared sense of victimhood (in this case beset by a “Russophobic” West) that only he can fight against. As one local farmer succinctly puts it: “Putin came in and straightened everything out, and things got better.” “Meet the voters in Russia’s heartland who are about to give Vladimir Putin another six years in office” (Los Angeles Times)
2. In Israel’s own periphery, in development towns like Kiryat Malachi which are home largely to Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, Isabel Kershner looks at why support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains so solid despite his mounting legal woes over corruption allegations over accepting gifts such as cigars, jewelry and backroom deals for favorable media coverage. The reasons are by now familiar: a kinship with Netanyahu’s identity as the underdog who overcame, in this case, the liberal, urban Labor elites. “The more they attack us, the stronger we get,” says one greengrocer. “We are all Bibi,” says a hairdresser. “Let him have a cigar. He deserves an airplane.”“In Israel’s Poorer Periphery, Legal Woes Don’t Dent Netanyahu’s Appeal” (New York Times)
3. In a Q&A, Robert Wuthnow, author of The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, explains to a skeptical Sean Illing why we should pay attention to the sense of victimization in rural America when they weren’t so much left behind as decided not to keep up. “They value their local community,” Wuthnow says. “They understand its problems, but they like knowing their neighbors and they like the slow pace of life and they like living in a community that feels small and closed. Maybe they’re making the best of a bad situation, but they choose to stay.” “A Princeton sociologist spent 8 years asking rural Americans why they’re so pissed off” (Vox)
4. In the remote Bishigram Valley in northern Pakistan, Zafar Syed found what he reports are the last three speakers of the Badeshi language. “A generation ago, Badeshi was spoken in the entire village,” one says. “But then we brought women from other villages [for marriage] who spoke Torwali language. Their children spoke in their mother tongue, so our language started dying out.” Today the three elderly men do most of their business in Pashto and even they are beginning to forget their native tongue. “Badeshi: Only three people speak this ‘extinct’ language” (BBC)
5. In rapidly depopulating areas of Japan, a country where 40 percent of the population will be older than 65 by 2050, massive wild boars are moving in where people no longer want to live. “Thirty years ago, crows were the biggest problem around here,” one farmer tells Anna Fifield, “but now we have these animals and not enough people to scare them away.” “Japanese towns struggle to deal with an influx of new arrivals: wild boars” (Washington Post)

Remember when the Internet felt like it was expanding your world? I have been on Twitter a little more than usual these last few days and in addition to the annoying way it reduces conversation into competing bumper sticker slogans, it makes the world seem so much smaller than it is. That’s why I am relying less on social algorithms for my news. Here are five interesting stories I found.

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1. “Sol Flores for Congress – ‘That Door'” (YouTube) – “I’ll fight as hard for you in Congress as I did to protect myself.” That’s the closing line of a striking campaign ad by Sol Flores, a Chicago community advocate who is running for Congress, in which she tells how she fought off a man who was sexually abusing her when she was 11 years old. The Chicago Tribune has a good profile of Flores, too.

2. “U.S. Strikes Killed Scores of Russia Fighters in Syria, Sources Say” (Bloomberg) – Russian and American soldiers are fighting — and killing each other in large numbers — in Syria. To make matters more bizarre, the Russians appear to be private mercenaries working for Assad, and the “Russian assault may have been a rogue operation.”
3. “The Bittersweet Beauty of Adam Rippon” (Vanity Fair) – Richard Lawson’s essay on ice skating is heartbreaking, beautiful.
4. “The fight for the right to be a Muslim in America” (The Guardian) – Andrew Rice looks at how Islamophobia crept out from the fringes of the right-wing internet to the lives of Muslims living in tony suburban New Jersey after Trump’s victory. “It’s like his election has given permission to people.”
5. “Americans overestimate social mobility in their country” (The Economist) – Americans believe the U.S. is far more upwardly mobile than it actually is, while Europe is slightly the opposite. Interestingly, American beliefs of how probable it is for someone born into the lowest quintile to rise to the top is about even with the actual probability in the European countries.
   

Instead of relying on social algorithms for my news, I have been doing things the old-fashioned (i.e. circa 2007) way: visiting homepages, using an RSS reader, reading other people’s newsletters. Here are five interesting stories that didn’t reach me by a trending news algorithm.

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1. “Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook—and the World” (Wired) – The underlying theme in Nick Thompson and Fred Vogelstein’s deeply reported feature of Facebook’s existential crisis: there’s nothing inevitable or permanent about Facebook’s dominance over the news media.
2. “Crowdsourcing Judgments of News Source Quality” (SSRN) – A paper by Yale researchers Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand, (via Politico’s Jason Schwartz) suggests a serious methodological problem in Facebook’s plans to crowdsource its trustworthiness ratings of media outlets, but overall they point to a somewhat optimistic conclusion: partisanship doesn’t necessarily make people more likely to trust fake news sites they’ve never heard of. However, the paper also suggests that when we are talking about “fake news” problems, we’re really just saying “conservative fringes” problems.
   
3. “Videos of Syrian Militia Abusing Kurdish Fighter’s Corpse Stir Outrage” (New York Times) – If the Arab Spring showed us the best that social media had to offer as a force for good, the Syrian civil war, and the frequency of abhorrent viral memes, shows us its worst. Here, a disturbing story, of a widely circulated video of Syrian militia’s mutilating the corpse of a female Kurdish fighter: “This is the spoils of war from the female pigs of the P.K.K.”
4. “Chinese Police Add Facial-Recognition Glasses to Surveillance Arsenal” (Wall Street Journal) – Seven people have already been arrested in China after they were spotted at train stations by cops wearing glasses that can scan crowds for the faces of wanted criminals.
5. “A Famed Fishing Port Staggers as Its ‘Codfather’ Goes to Jail” (New York Times) – What happens when an entire community’s livelihood is built on corruption.

One of my realizations of not paying as close attention to trending news is that I don’t really know what’s gone viral or not as I feel more like I’m just keeping track of the news again. But whatever situational awareness I’ve lost feels a lot healthier than fruitlessly trying to keep up with every meme ever. Here are five interesting stories that I discovered without an algorithm.

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1. “Russia pushes more ‘deep state’ hashtags” (Politico) – This fascinating report by Jason Schwartz shows how Russian botnets are used to market test anti-“deep state” hashtags like #ReleaseTheMemo that later hit it big with Trump supporters. Up next: #qanon which refers to a conspiracy theory that first cropped up on 4chan.
2. “2018 election is no problem for Putin – but what about 2024?” (The Guardian) – Vladimir Putin is certain to be re-elected Russian president on March 18. But the real question for Russian politics is what happens at the end of the six-year term when he is barred by the Russian constitution from serving another term as president.
3. “#MeToo Hits Movie Deals: Studios Race to Add ‘Morality Clauses’ to Contracts” (The Hollywood Reporter) – Entertainment lawyers, some of the most fascinatingly amoral legal creatures, are trying to figure out how to handle the risk of a movie star or studio executive suddenly turning radioactive in the wake of reports of sexual misconduct.
4. “This man made over half a million dollars threatening elderly magazine subscribers” (Washington Post) – Here’s one way to make money in the magazine business.
5. “Suicides spiked 10 percent in months after death of Robin Williams” (Boston Globe) – Nothing makes trending news algorithms go wild like a celebrity suicide. A study by Columbia researchers suggests the saturation coverage could be causing others to take their own lives, too.

I made a new years resolution to rely less on social media for my news, and have been keeping track of interesting stories that weren’t delivered by trending news algorithms. But I’m shaking things up a bit: five interesting stories per day seems like maybe overload? So, instead, I’m just going to wait until I have five stories that especially stick with me and see if intermittent is an improvement.

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1. “‘It’s a Massacre’: Blast in Kabul Deepens Toll of a Long War” (New York Times) – This is an exemplary explainer: a piece that actually makes sense of bewildering news, in this case a string of brutal attacks in Kabul. In addition, Mujib Mashal and Jawad Sukhanyar make a connection that I haven’t seen elsewhere: the surge in violence by the Taliban comes after President Trump suspended security aid to Pakistan and “many Afghan officials feared an immediate escalation in violence in retaliation.”
2. “Is a Court Case in Texas the First Prosecution of a ‘Black Identity Extremist’?” (Foreign Policy) – Rakem Balogun is being held in jail on firearm charges in what Martin De Bourmont reports is the result of an FBI investigation sparked by Black Lives Matter. “This is a continuation of COINTELPRO in a modern-day form,” says Balogun.
3. “Big donors ready to reward Republicans for tax cuts” (Politico) – Here’s what political quid pro quo looks like.
4. “Bruce McArthur charged with three additional counts of first-degree murder, police say” (Toronto Star) – Toronto has a serial killer case: a landscaper who picked up gay men and then buried their bodies in planters around the city.
5. “Питерские пенсионерки в поддержку курсантов летного училища (St. Petersburg pensioners support cadets)” (YouTube) – OK, so this is technically a viral story of sorts. After a video of barely dressed, dancing air cadets went viral, there were scores of imitations. But I was especially charmed by this one: two retired ladies who in the course of their nightclub homage give a tour of their apartment.

Here are the five most interesting stories I found today instead of relying on trending news algorithms.

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1. “Nigerians return from slavery in Libya to thriving sex-trafficking industry back home” (Washington Post) – Molly O’Toole reports on the grim outcome for migrants who have managed to escape human traffickers.
2. “Conservatives and Counterrevolutionaries: Corey Robin’s ‘The Reactionary Mind’” (LA Review of Books) – “This is why conservatism, though fundamentally concerned with economics,” Lily Geismer writes in her review, “has also been inextricably linked to forms of patriarchy and white supremacy: what unites them all is the effort to protect power in both the public and private sphere.”
3. “Your Sloppy Bitcoin Drug Deals Will Haunt You for Years” (Wired) – Andy Greenberg explains why the blockchain (and law enforcement) never forgets.
4. “The Great British Empire Debate” (New York Review of Books) – No, argues Kenan Malik, colonialism wasn’t good for the world.
5. “Ghost towers: half of new-build luxury London flats fail to sell” (The Guardian) – Only 900 apartments priced above £3 million out of 1,900 units built last year have sold as Brexit is dampening the appetite of foreign buyers.

Last year it dawned on me that shift to trending news had significantly narrowed the kind of news I read. So, this year I made a media diet resolution to ween myself off of social media algorithms and, to help keep me on track, I’m trying to find five interesting stories each day from somewhere other than a viral news list.

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1. “Israel official doubted Palestinian protest icon, her family” (Associated Press) – Michael Oren, a former ambassador to the U.S. and a deputy minister for Netanyahu, admitted that he led a secret investigation that sought to discredit the Ahed Tamimi who has become a visible face of Palestinian protests against Israel. Oren told the AP he doubted the Tamimi family are actually Palestinian because of their appearance. “The children were chosen on the basis of their external look, to look Western, freckled, and blond-haired,” Oren said.
2. “At Davos, outsourcing giant Infosys prepares for closing borders” (Washington Post) – The Indian-based company, which employs 200,000 to provide things like IT and customer support, sees the tide of history shifting. “Nations across the world are going to become very nationalistic,” said Ravi Kumar S., Infosys president and deputy chief operating officer. “It’s kind of a counter narrative to globalization: the talent pools will have to be very localized.”
3. “Security, stability called top priorities in Xinjiang” (China Daily) – You know who else is building a wall? The chairman of the Chinese region of Xinjiang has said he wants to build a new “Great Wall” around its 3,800 mile border as protection from Uyghur militants.
4. “India’s switched-at-birth babies who refused to swap back” (BBC News) – A separated-at-birth yarn with a heartwarming twist.
5. “All Good Magazines Go to Heaven” (New York Times) – The world’s largest magazine collection, the Hyman Archive in London, got its start as a way for MTV Europe producers to prepare for celebrity interviews. Because of course it did.

It’s my new year’s media diet resolution to reduce how much social media algorithms determine the news I consume. So far so good, and to keep myself honest, I’m trying to select five interesting stories each day that weren’t delivered to me by some trending news widget.

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1. “The NSA’s voice-recognition system raises hard questions for Echo and Google Home” (The Verge) – How terrified should you be of your always-on Amazon Alexa? Following Ava Kofman’s in-depth report in The Intercept on just how adept the NSA and other government agencies are at snooping on voice networks, Russell Brandom argues you should be very worried indeed. Past experience suggests that whenever useful data is amassed, law enforcement and intelligence services will seek to use it no matter the intentions of whoever amassed it.
2. “Kurds Say Damascus Gave an Ultimatum Before Turkish Strikes” (Bloomberg View) – Turkey’s current operation to clear Kurdish forces from Syria — forces that were U.S. allies in fighting ISIS — shows that “Turkey, Iran, Russia and the Syrian regime are coordinating their actions more than either side is letting on,” Eli Lake reports.
3. “Why Facebook’s news feed changes are bad news for democracy” (The Guardian) – Emily Bell makes the case that whatever harm Facebook’s announced changes to its News Feed mean for publishers in the Western world, its decision to back away from journalism will hurt chances of democratic emergence in places like Cambodia and Myanmar. Worth reading alongside Ben Thompson’s (more sympathetic) take on Mark Zuckerberg’s motivations in making “time well-spent” the top priority of the social network.
4. “To Be, or Not to Be” (The New York Review of Books) – Masha Gessen on making choices.
5. “Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs” (The Guardian) – Andy Beckett makes the case that the era of employment is ending — and why that might not be a terrifying development.

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.

As part of my new year’s media diet resolution, I’m seeking out a broader range of news than the platform algorithms have been serving up to me. So each day, I’m looking for five interesting stories from somwhere other than trending story lists.

1. “DNA Helps New York Police Solve Infamous 1994 Rape Case” (New York Times) – After a woman, a black lesbian Yale graduate, reported her rape in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the New York Daily News‘s star columnist Mike McAlary wrote at the time, “Everyone who heard the woman’s story about the alleged rape was calling it a hoax,” claiming that she had staged it “to deliver a first-person speech on her own rape” at a LGBT rally. Today the Brooklyn D.A. announced new DNA testing technology matched evidence of the crime to a 67-year-old serial rapist who, though the statute of limitations on the 1994 attack has expired, is serving a 75-year sentence at Sing Sing on other convictions.
2. “Dancing to Russia’s Tune in Syria” (Foreign Policy) –
   Colum Lynch reports on how Russia is taking the diplomatic lead in Syria as regime leader Bashar al-Assad sweeps up the last pockets of resistance in the brutal civil war — largely due to American indifference.
3. “‘A beacon of hope’: Former Baltimore councilwoman becomes mentor to teens who attacked her” (Washington Post) – In December 2016, 80-year-old Baltimore City Councilwoman Rochelle “Rikki” Spector was sent to the hospital after a carjacking in her own parking garage by two young teenage boys. In the year since, she has sought to mentor the boys and joined the board of the non-profit that seeks to help at-risk youth.
4. “Muddling Through Isn’t Enough” (Jacobin) – Reviewing David Runciman’s book, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present, Chris Bickerton grapples with the argument that no leader, no matter how idealistic, can “take democracy out of the present and pin it to any particular vision of the future.”
5. “‘Fire and Fury’ from Canada: It’s Not About Trump. Or Michael Wolff.” (New York Times) – Randall Hansen, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, is enjoying a surge in sales of his book Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945 due to confused Amazon searchers. Because Trump “is threatening war constantly,” he hopes “a few people read about the horror of war.”