Journalists need to stop covering elections like horse races. Don’t obsess over who’s winning—help us decide who to vote for.
Horse-race journalism perpetuates the image of journalists as detached observers.
The horse race fills the insatiable news hole. Every day, a new poll or gaffe. Candidates’ stands on the issues, their experience and competence don’t change much over the course of a campaign—they don’t make news—but they are more important.
Daily Tar Heel staffer Georgia Roda-Moorhead: “We are the Sandy Hook generation. We grew up crouching behind desks in pitch-black darkness, as our teachers barred the doors shut in case a ‘scary person’ stepped on campus."
What time do Americans have dinner? Which state eats dinner earliest? Latest?
Using data from the American Time Use Survey, between 2018 to 2022, we can see the percentage of households in the country who were eating during a given time.
“The Corduroy Appreciation Society was a club where people gathered secretly to celebrate their love of corduroy." On the delightful Articles of Interest podcast with Avery Trufelman.
Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina discusses school closures, mask mandates and the pandemic response, on the Ezra Klein show, with guest host David Wallace-Wells, a New York Times science and public policy journalist
Political discussions today focus on school, shut-downs, lockdowns, masking, and whether the economic stimulus was too big. We’re not discussing the big question of whether we could have prevented 1.1 million deaths in the US alone.
Katelyn Jetelina is an epidemiologist and the author of the popular newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist. She argues that we’ve entered a new phase of the Covid-19 pandemic: “pandemic revisionism.” In her telling, the revisionist impulse seduces us into swapping cheap talking points for the thorny, difficult decisions we actually faced – and may face again with the next novel virus.
No maybe about it. We will face those questions again.
In the 2020 election, Biden rightly said that Trump was unfit for office because Trump’s handling of the Covid crisis resulted in 200,000 dead Americans. During the Biden administration, far more Americans have died than while Trump was in office, and many of those deaths were preventable
Biden’s Covid policy has been to pretend that the vaccine solved the problem. 900,000 dead Americans disagree.
My 20-year-old self-inking return-address stamp still works. That is some seriously well-made self-inking technology.
Continuing with decluttering my home office. Can all the drawers in all the furniture be junk drawers?
Hi, @mtt! Thank you for the nice work on the Tiny theme and plugins. Regarding the Summary Posts add-in: Would it be possible to configure the add-in so that titled posts are not truncated by default–only truncated when manually adding the relevant code to a post? Thanks!
How can we learn to speak alien? On Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman.
If we meet extraterrestrials someday, how will we figure out what they’re saying? We currently face this problem right here at home: we have 2 million species of animals on our planet… and we have no Google Translate for any of them. We’re not having conversations with (or listening to podcasts by) anyone but ourselves. Join Eagleman and his guest Aza Raskin to see the glimmer of a pathway that might get us to animal translation, and relatively soon.
How To Practice “Productive Procrastination”. By Clive Thompson.
My latest article: Is cloud networking convergence just around the corner? Dell’Oro says yes.. New enterprise cloud architecture requires simplified networking services that unify the network edge, middle mile and public clouds, says the analyst firm.
Clive Thompson: How I Use RSS To “Rewild” My Attention
I use RSS for an hour or so every day to follow specific sites, most of them very popular. Here, Thompson advocates using RSS to find great, weird content. I’m going to try that.
The relationship between ByteDance and Oracle has become deeply untrusting and adversarial, according to five sources. One source with knowledge of the companies’ actions characterized Oracle’s stance toward ByteDance as a “counterintelligence operation,” rather than a normal customer relationship. Meanwhile, some ByteDance employees wonder if Oracle just wants to run up their bill. The TikTok contract, known internally at Oracle as Project Telesis, has made ByteDance one of Oracle’s most lucrative customers.
When was the first time a waiter asked someone whether they saved room for dessert? Is that guy getting royalties?
Want to read—nonfiction: Empires of the Steppes by Kenneth W. Harl 📚
From landlines to Zoom, a brief 30+ year history of business phone technology and etiquette. By Clive Thompson.
In the 90s, background noise was unprofessional. Today, if somebody’s cat zoombombs the meeting, business stops while everybody meets the cat.
Wanted: A combined RSS/Mastodon client. Yes, Masto generates RSS feeds but that doesn’t give you everything a Mastodon client does.
Cory Doctorow: How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth:
It’s a great time to be an oligarch! If you have accumulated a great fortune and wish to put whatever great crime lies behind it behind you, there is an army of fixers, lickspittles, thugs, reputation-launderers, procurers, henchmen, and other enablers who have turnkey solutions for laundering your reputation and keeping the unwashed from building a guillotine outside the gates of your compound.
One Weird Trick for Writing a First Draft. By Clive Thompson
Clive Thompson: How I Take Notes When I’m Doing Research
On the You Are Good podcast with hosts Sarah Marshall and Alex Steed and guest Rain DeGrey.
The only movie I’ve ever watched more than once in a single day. I watched it three times.
Though it is a great movie, I don’t know if I would call it one of my favorites. But something about it hit me hard on that particular day.