Facebook’s news feed changes sound like McDonald’s transforming itself into a health food brand: They make their product slightly healthier but it’s still junk food.
5 generally interesting stories
I am trying to keep a new year’s media diet resolution of weaning myself off of trending news after realizing I have been reading more but learning less. As part of this attempt to widen my news horizons, I am finding five interesting stories each day that didn’t come from viral news algorithms.
- “Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens” (Gizmodo) – Kashmir Hill continues her impressive obsession with the ways that Facebook populates its “People You May Know” feature. While not exactly the scariest thing the social media megalith does, her reporting does show how much a technology firm can learn about its users given enough coders and the financial incentive of billions upon billions of advertising dollars. Also, there’s a fun-ish tool you can download and play with.
- “‘I replied to a Facebook post and was married six days later'” (BBC) – In other Facebook news, a charming story about how a Nigerian man’s quest to find a wife online went from “Am interested, just DM me…lols” to wedded bliss in less than a week.
- “Exposed: London’s eugenics conference and its neo-Nazi links” (London Student) – A student news publication at the University College London detail the London Conference on Intelligence, held on their campus four times since 2014, and the band of white supremacists and far-right figures attracted to this brand of racist genetic theory. One attendee: Toby Young, who has somehow gone from milking a book, movie and play from failing at a short-lived stint working for Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair to Tory pundit to, now, inexplicably, the head of a state-funded education charity.
- “Ice cliffs spotted on Mars” (Science) – A paper published today describes 100-meter tall cliffs at relative low latitudes: “Each cliff seems to be the naked face of a glacier, tantalizing scientists with the promise of a layer-cake record of past martian climates and space enthusiasts with a potential resource for future human bases.”
- “Man Ray’s Los Angeles: An outsider’s view of Hollywood” (Los Angeles Times) – A selection of photographs taken by the Surrealist and Dadaist master during his time spent with movie stars and celebrities in Los Angeles after he fled France in 1940.
Trump on AIDS in 2006: “We think that AIDS can only happen to Africans… By holding onto this myth, we are setting ourselves up for an unncesscary and perhaps disastrous consequence.” Why did medical anthropologist Susan Hunter ask Donald Trump to write the foreword to her book AIDS in America? It’s as baffling as seeing Donald Trump credited alongside Alan Cumming, who wrote the preface. Even though there is no chance Trump the two-page foreword himself, the words are still jarring to see in contrast to the vile stuff he says on the subject now, 12 years later in the Oval Office. Given its content — Kirkus called it, “A disturbing picture of the status of AIDS in the United States and an angry claim that the country has failed utterly to confront the problem” — it’s clear Trump didn’t read it.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?†sounds a lot like the other racist garbage that’s reportedly informing Trump’s immigration policy.
5 generally interesting stories
It’s time to keep up with my new year’s media resolution and come up with five interesting stories that neither algorithms or virality brought to my attention.
- “Myanmar military says soldiers murdered 10 captured Rohingya” (Reuters) – The admission is notable because the official position of Myanmar is that the Rohingya do not exist. The story is also notable because two Reuters journalists are facing criminal charges that carry sentences of up to 14 years in prison for their reporting on the massacre.
- “Libya may not be ready for democracy, says military strongman” (The Guardian) – The U.N. plans to hold elections in Libya this year, but Khalifa Haftar, who controls much of Libya and enjoys Russia’s backing, tells Patrick Wintour he might not respect their outcome if he doesn’t like the results.
- “Czech election: The politically incorrect president dividing a nation” (BBC) – Czechs will vote this weekend on whether to re-elect their populist, pro-Moscow, anti-immigrant president, Milos Zeman, who has divided the 25-year-old nation between urbanites and the rural working class. Sound familiar?
- “The $100 Million Game Turkish Officials Worry Is Pyramid Scheme” (Bloomberg News) – Farm Bank, a Turkish FarmVille, is trying to convince new
dupesplayers that it is not a Ponzi scheme by investing in actual dairy farms, part of an appeal to nationalist and religious supporters of Erdogan. - “Robomart autonomous bodegas will deliver produce to your door” (Engadget) – Did you look at the unmanned pantries a Silicon Valley startup hoped would put neighborhood bodegas out of business and think, “nah, too much walking”? This other startup has you covered.
This would not be the first time a fact checker was deployed to confirm something a writer was having trouble nailing down herself.
This (slightly bizarre) chart shows how the GOP’s current era of good feeling is headed for a blow up in Arizona. The three main candidates in the Republican primary for Jeff Flake’s Senate seat have already been tacitly or directly endorsed by the three poles of the Republican party: Kelli Ward secured Steve Bannon’s endorsement back when that meant something, Donald Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio and Mitch McConnell has dropped not-so-subtle hints that he’d like to see Martha McSally be the Republican nominee. Assuming that Ward is as dead in the water as Bannon’s political career appears to be, it leaves Trump and McConnell on  opposite sides of a primary, and there are national implications to either of them switching sides in order: Trump turning his back on Arpaio  would mean abandoning someone who he’s already invested quite a bit of political capital (looks weak!) while McConnell would be saddling the national GOP brand with one of the most virulent anti-immigrant figures around at a time when all the happy talk in D.C. is about comprehensive immigration reform. The primary is not until August 28, so enjoy the next seven months!
5 generally interesting stories
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.
- “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.
- “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. - “‘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.
- “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.”
- “‘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.”
“Digital advertising contributed a far greater share of overall revenue than ever” is often a way of saying that other revenue segments (say, print advertising) are shrinking dramatically.
As a New York City celebrity, Trump would attend the opening of an envelope. News he’s attending Davos should surprise no one.
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