📖 Read pages 100-115 of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

📖 Read pages 100-115 of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

His storytelling style is truly delicious. His sentence structure creates quite a bit of surprise, even when you know what’s coming.

📖 Read pages 51-68 of Complexity and the Economy by W. Brian Arthur

📖 Read pages 51-68 of Complexity and the Economy by W. Brian Arthur

Complexity and the Economy by W. Brian Arthur

An interesting reference to the origin of life and some related research actually pops up in the discussion!

👓 Jared Kushner’s Role Is Tested as Russia Case Grows | New York Times

Read Jared Kushner’s Role Is Tested as Russia Case Grows by Glenn Thrush (nytimes.com)
It is unclear how Jared Kushner’s high-profile woes will affect his hard-won partnership with his father-in-law, perhaps the most stable in an often unstable White House.

👓 Why Do Coptic Christians Keep Getting Attacked? | The Atlantic

Read Why Do Coptic Christians Keep Getting Attacked? by H.A. Helyer (The Atlantic)
Egypt’s preexisting climate of pro-Islamist sectarianism is an important, and sometimes overlooked, reason.
If we replace Egypt with America, ISIS with the KKK or alt-right, and Copt Christians with African Americans are the optics really that much different?

📖 Read pages 86-100 of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

📖 Read pages 86-100 of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

The trip down the river is very close in its dialogue to the version in the original 1974 movie version.

📖 Read pages 73-86 of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

📖 Read pages 73-86 of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

We get the story of the Oompa-Loompas and Augustus goes up the pipe. Parables about benign exploitation and colonialization followed by a short tale of gluttony.

👓 Examining Decentralized Social Networks | The Stream Blog

Read Examining Decentralized Social Networks by Ian Douglas (The Stream Blog)
Most companies who create a social network do so with the end goal of collecting information, interests and habits of their users in order to monetize that data (usually through advertising). They guard this data heavily and many of the largest social networks are trusted enough to be Identity Provi...

👓 Trump used to be more articulate. What could explain the change? | STAT

Read Trump used to be more articulate. What could explain the change? by Sharon Begley (STAT)

STAT asked experts to compare Trump's speech from decades ago to that in 2017. All noticed deterioration, which may signal changes in Trump's brain health.

STAT reviewed decades of Trump’s on-air interviews and compared them to Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking and unmistakable.

Research has shown that changes in speaking style can result from cognitive decline. STAT therefore asked experts in neurolinguistics and cognitive assessment, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, to compare Trump’s speech from decades ago to that in 2017; they all agreed there had been a deterioration, and some said it could reflect changes in the health of Trump’s brain.

👓 Facebook blocks Pulitzer-winning reporter over Malta government exposé | The Guardian

Read Facebook blocks Pulitzer-winning reporter over Malta government exposé by Julia Carrie Wong (The Guardian)
Temporary censorship of Matthew Caruana Galizia – who worked on the Panama Papers – raises concern over Facebook’s power to shape the news
I agree wholly with Ben Werdmuller.  Here’s yet another example why journalists should be posting their material to their own websites first before syndicating it to Facebook. Sure Facebook may help you get more eyeballs, but it doesn’t help if you’re locked out of your account or the content disappears altogether.

I’d written about some ideas related to this in the recent past: The Indieweb and Journalism.

I’m happy to help any journalist who is interested in creating their own easily maintainable website that uses Indieweb principles.

👓 Introducing Susan’s Book Club | Susan Fowler

Read Introducing Susan's Book Club by Susan Fowler (Susan Fowler)
I've been searching for the perfect monthly book club for years, one that could send me new science, math, philosophy, and technology books every month. I contacted several publishers, reached out to various existing companies, and nobody seemed to be interested. Finally, earlier this year, after he...

👓 Life Without a Destiny | Susan J. Fowler

Read Life Without a Destiny by Susan J. Fowler
I have no singular destiny, no one true passion, no goal. I flutter from one thing to the next. I want to be a physicist and a mathematician and a novelist and write a sitcom and write a symphony and design buildings and be a mother. I want to run a magazine and understand the lives of ants and be a philosopher and be a computer scientist and write an epic poem and understand every ancient language. I don't just want one thing. I want it all.

👓 Five Things Tech Companies Can Do Better | Susan J. Fowler

Read Five Things Tech Companies Can Do Better by Susan J. Fowler
I believe that tech companies should make a commitment to their employees, a commitment that they will act ethically, legally, responsibly, and transparently with regard to harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and other unlawful behavior. In my opinion, this commitment requires five things: ending forced arbitration, ending the practice of buying employees' silence, ending unnecessarily strict confidentiality agreements, instituting helpful harassment and discrimination training, and enforcing zero-tolerance policies toward unlawful and/or inappropriate behavior. Without further ado, here is a list of those five things, the reasons they're important, and how companies can implement them.
This sounds like for solid advice for all companies, not just those in the tech sector.

👓 We tracked the Trump scandals on right-wing news sites. Here’s how they covered it. | Vox

Read We tracked the Trump scandals on right-wing news sites. Here’s how they covered it. by Alvin Chang (Vox)
We’re experiencing these historical events very differently.

👓 I worked in a video store for 25 years. Here’s what I learned as my industry died. | Vox

Read I worked in a video store for 25 years. Here’s what I learned as my industry died. by Dennis Perkins (Vox)
Some interesting analysis of what we’re loosing with the death of video stores. In particular, we’re losing some of the same type of recommendations and serendipity we’re loosing with the rise of e-books and less use of libraries/librarians. In particular, loosing well-curated collections is a big issue as we replace them with streaming services which don’t seem to have the same curatorial business models.

I particularly enjoyed this quote:

A great video store’s library of films is like a little bubble outside the march of technology or economics, preserving the fringes, the forgotten, the noncommercial, or the straight-up weird. Championed by a store’s small army of film geeks, such movies get more traffic than they did in their first life in the theater, or any time since. Not everything that was on VHS made the transition to DVD, and not every movie on DVD is available to stream. The decision to leave a movie behind on the next technological leap is market-driven, which makes video stores the last safety net for things our corporate overlords discard.