onfocus

Dreary edition.

Feeling heartbroken about the devastation in Sonoma County where I used to live. I'm sure you've seen pictures and heard stories by now. They're going to need help.

• The Atlantic: What Facebook Did to American Democracy - Alexis Madrigal: "The information systems that people use to process news have been rerouted through Facebook, and in the process, mostly broken and hidden from view."
• BuzzFeed: Climbing Out Of Facebook's Reality Hole
• BuzzFeed: Facebook Says Its Fake News Label Helps Reduce The Spread Of A Fake Story By 80% - The lag time to identify is about three days though.

• Recode: Dear @Jack: It’s time to suspend Donald Trump from Twitter
• GQ: Twitter Should Shut Down Donald Trump’s Account Before He Starts a Nuclear War
• Politico: Twitter deleted data potentially crucial to Russia probes
• Vanity Fair: Why Twitter Silenced One Of Harvey Weinstein's Accusers

• Washington Post: Google uncovers Russian-bought ads on YouTube, Gmail and other platforms
• Washington Post: Pierre Omidyar: 6 ways social media has become a direct threat to democracy
• Rambling Space: Apple created the attention sinkhole. Here are some ways to fix it.

• Thrive Global: The Secret of Happiness and Living a Good Life - by Tim O'Reilly. I really like "Will what is necessary..."
• Hackernoon: Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds your new music - Discovery Weekly is absolutely my favorite Spotify feature. Its picks are uncanny. Here's why.
• A Dictionary of American Slang (1926) - Some capital slang in this old chestnut from the 20s. Part of the new Sonny Bono Memorial Collection of copyright-questionable works at the Internet Archive.
• The Rock Test: A Hack for Men Who Don’t Want To Be Accused of Sexual Harassment - Not only is this hilarious on its own, it was tweeted out by The Rock.

I took a day off from Twitter yesterday and it was fantastic. I highly recommend social media fasting. I have already uninstalled Twitter and Facebook apps from my phone but I'm such a creature of habit I had to block twitter.com from myself in various hosts files and with parental controls on my iPhone. Of course I can easliy undo these, but that little speedbump from my mammal brain reminds my lizard brain that I'm trying to stay away. I need to find a way to make breaking that addiction a regular habit. har har.

Bad times edition.

• The Atlantic: Google and Facebook Failed Us - Current algorithms can't handle breaking news.
• @zchamu: Twitter shittery, and how we are all doomed: a thread. - Twitter leadership refuses to accept the paradox of tolerance.
• @yonatanzunger: I worked on policy issues at G+ and YT for years... - Context for Twitter leadership's intransigence.
• Infowarzel: The Milo Emails: Don't Make The Gamergate Mistake Again - Some context for the important article about Breitbart by Joseph Bernstein at BuzzFeed.

• The Atlantic: Death at a Penn State Fraternity - Excellent reporting on a painful and infuriating story.
• Wall Street Journal: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3 Billion - The price of centralization.
• Engadget: Former Equifax CEO blames breach on one IT employee - No, you "can't fix stupid" as one Senator suggests but you can make massive data aggregation illegal. Maybe the bigger stupid is the fact that Equifax exists at all.
• The Guardian: 'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

• The World of Tomorrow - Fantastic first issue of a new online comic set in the early Internet days. Subscribe!
• Calling Bullshit - An open course by two professors at the University of Washington about identifying and countering bullshit in our media diets. We should all take this.
• Japanese Vending Machines at Night Juxtaposed with a Wintry Hokkaido Landscape - Escape into wintery convenient stillness through these photographs.
• Optical Effects in User Interfaces (for True Nerds) - *raises hand*.

Bleak edition.

• CNN: San Juan mayor: 'Dammit, this is not a good news story'
• James Fallows: From Donald Trump, a New Low
• Time: How to Help Puerto Rico: 12 Effective Ways to Donate Money

• The Guardian: Facebook's war on free will
• New York Times: Zuckerberg’s Preposterous Defense of Facebook
• Washington Post: Russian operatives used Facebook ads to exploit America’s racial and religious divisions
• BuzzFeed: Mark Zuckerberg Can’t Stop You From Reading This Because The Algorithms Have Already Won

• Bloomberg: What Is Trump Worth to Twitter? One Analyst Estimates $2 Billion
• John Warren Hanawalt: If Twitter won’t #BanTrump, it’s time to #DeleteTwitter.
• New York Times: Senator Berates Twitter Over ‘Inadequate’ Inquiry Into Russian Meddling
• Be Nice To Bears: Twitter Adds 280 Characters

• Eric Reid: Why Colin Kaepernick and I Decided to Take a Knee
• CNN: Bob Costas: 'Preposterous' to say criticism of NFL kneeling protests not tied to race
• Business Insider: Gregg Popovich says the US has become 'an embarrassment to the world' in speech slamming Trump and white privilege
• MTV: Black Flag: On the History of the American Flag in Black Protest Art

• Logo Crunch - helps lower the resolution of images for favicons, app icons, etc.
• Data Viz Project - a collection of data visualization types.
• AtF Spark - sparklines font.
• Before and After: Why Animal Shelters Need Good Photographers
• Accessibility for Everyone by Laura Kalbag - new from A Book Apart

• The Atlantic: My 150 Writing Mentors and Me
• Erin Kissane: Writing Well about Terrible People
• Why Is 10 Past 10 the Default Setting for Clocks and Watches in Advertisements? A Psychological Experiment
• Button it. - a gallery of Soviet control rooms.
• Leadership

Links: everything is terrible, no commentary edition.

• Wikipedia: Imminent lawless action
• New York Times: A Pardon for Arpaio Would Put Trump in Uncharted Territory - Narrator: and here we are.
• NPR: A Reformed White Nationalist Speaks Out On Charlottesville
• Reuters: U.S. state election officials still in the dark on Russian hacking
• 4 Thoughts About Trump’s Phoenix Speech And The Media
• The Baffler: The President of Blank Sucking Nullity
• ProPublica: Despite Disavowals, Leading Tech Companies Help Extremist Sites Monetize Hate
• Wired: The Alt-Right Can't Disown Charlottesville
• Globe and Mail: There aren’t ‘many sides.’ There is only one right side, and Trump is not on it

And in more tech-related news...

• The Verge: Medium will now pay writers based on how many claps they get
• Track Changes: Decentralize It! - I clapped several times for this.
• Did This Book Buy Its Way Onto The New York Times Bestseller List?
• A Designer Life: Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 App Analogy
• MIT Technology Review: Eliminating the Human
• Wired: The Great Tech Panic: The Internet Is the Uncanniest Valley
• Data & Society: Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online
• EPJ Data Science: Instagram photos reveal predictive markers of depression
• Google will offer help when searching for 'clinical depression'

Games are fun?

• Longreads: Here at the End of All Things
• The Believer: Destroy All Monsters

And because we're all trading nuclear fallout tips now I guess?

• Ready.gov: Nuclear Blast
• Racked: How Washing Your Hair Could Help You Survive a Nuclear Blast
• Business Insider: Nuclear fallout safety: Getting in a car is the worst thing you can do

Maybe some music will help: