Read Pasadena Bookstores Pushed to Brink by Pandemic (pasadenanow.com)
Bookstores across the Southland and the nation have long been challenged by a changing marketplace increasingly dominated by online giants such as Amazon, but the increased pressure placed upon local brick-and-mortar booksellers by the ongoing pandemic is pushing some to the brink of closure.
Read Donald Trump Provokes Lesley Stahl With Context-Free '60 Minutes' Pics by Lindsey Ellefson (TheWrap)
President Donald Trump tweeted about CBS News’ Lesley Stahl for a second day in a row Wednesday, posting photos of their “60 Minutes” interview with no caption or explanation. Trump posted three photos showing the chat he had with Stahl before he cut the interview short Tuesday and began tweet...
Read Iran and Russia obtained U.S. voter registration data in effort to influence election, national security officials say by Dan Mangan,Kevin Breuninger,Spencer Kimball (CNBC)
The warnings about Iran and Russia came less than two weeks before the election between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.
Read Why we're making the age of our journalism clearer at the Guardian (the Guardian)
To improve transparency and contextualise our journalism accurately even off platform, we’ve introduced two specific changes
I’ve noticed how they highlight these changes in the past. Pretty cool that they’re working at creating this sort of additional context.

I wonder how they’re doing the portion for the images on the social media cards. Are they simply replacing them outright or doing it programatically somehow?

Read That’s Yikes…Chillian J. Yikes! by Jillian C. York (jilliancyork.com)
In possibly the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me on the Internet (and please remember that I’ve been called a fattie by the daughter of the Uzbek dictator and crowdfunded my ticket to troll a Thomas Friedman event), the New York Times, that paper of record, has today issued a correction that’s been called “the best thing on the Internet this week.”
I know this Twitter Halloween name phenomenon has been going on for several years. This is one of the earliest examples I’ve seen. Interesting that it caused a correction in the New York Times.
Read Hollywood has a talent pipeline problem. Brian Grazer and Ron Howard have an app for that (Los Angeles Times)
Impact Creative Systems, an offshoot from Imagine Entertainment, is launching a new app called the Creative Network, a LinkedIn-meets-Slack for screenwriters and studio heads.
I’ll have to take a look at this, but I’m not really sure what the direct problem is that they’re solving for. The bigger problem is usually filtering through a load of crap to find the actual talent, and I’m not sure how this app is fixing that particular problem. They may be making the net wider which is good, but there’s still the filtering problem which is the bigger problem. 
 
Naturally getting talented people to help mentor people is a good thing, but it’s also the piece that almost never happens because it takes a lot of time and effort and doesn’t always pay off. I’m not sure where their system is adding value aside from a few links.
 
This definitely disintermediates the agent in the system, so perhaps the extra value is seen in circumventing them to take advantage of the unwary writer one is mentoring?
Read “If There Is Another Tick Down, It’s a Total Bloodbath”: How Trump’s Self-Destructive Candidacy Could Blow Up the Electoral Map (Vanity Fair)
Democrats’ massive fundraising, downballot energy, and seniors turning against Trump signal a potential blue-wave election with unexpected flips. As one South Carolina strategist says, “Biden supporters in red states are hopeful.”
Perhaps I’m just reading less of it this year, but the differences between the candidates and the party seem to have resulted in less of the typical horse race political coverage like this this year.
Read Alleged China-Fighter Donald Trump Has Secret Chinese Bank Account (Intelligencer)
Another big scandal — and huge conflict of interest — has surfaced from the tax returns obtained by the New York Times.
I’m still wondering why he didn’t divest everything and put it into a blind trust. Why isn’t what’s good for the goose good for the gander. Another example of the do as I say not do as I do.
Read - Want to Read: Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America by Saidiya V. Hartman (Oxford University Press)
In this provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation during slavery and its aftermath, Saidiya Hartman illumines the forms of terror and resistance that shaped black identity. Scenes of Subjection examines the forms of domination that usually go undetected; in particular, the encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment, protection, rights, and consent. By looking at slave narratives, plantation diaries, popular theater, slave performance, freedmen's primers, and legal cases, Hartman investigates a wide variety of "scenes" ranging from the auction block and minstrel show to the staging of the self-possessed and rights-bearing individual of freedom. While attentive to the performance of power--the terrible spectacles of slaveholders' dominion and the innocent amusements designed to abase and pacify the enslaved--and the entanglements of pleasure and terror in these displays of mastery, Hartman also examines the possibilities for resistance, redress and transformation embodied in black performance and everyday practice. This important study contends that despite the legal abolition of slavery, emergent notions of individual will and responsibility revealed the tragic continuities between slavery and freedom. Bold and persuasively argued, Scenes of Subjection will engage readers in a broad range of historical, literary, and cultural studies.