Gabriel Snyder — Notes

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.