read | Chris Aldrich

🎧 ‘The Daily’: Taking Over Local News | The New York Times

Listened to ‘The Daily’: Taking Over Local News by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com

On local TV stations across the United States, news anchors have been delivering the exact same message to their viewers. “Our greatest responsibility,” they begin by saying, “is to serve our communities.”

But what they are being forced to say next has left many questioning whom those stations are really being asked to serve.

On today’s episode:

• Sydney Ember, a New York Times business reporter who covers print and digital media.

• Aaron Weiss, who worked several years ago as a news director for Sinclair in Sioux City, Iowa.

Background reading:

• Anchors at local news stations across the country made identical comments about media bias. The script came from their owner, Sinclair Broadcast Group.

• David D. Smith, the chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, said his stations were no different from network news outlets.

• The largest owner of local TV stations, Sinclair has a history of supporting Republican causes.

🎧 ‘The Daily’: From Fox to Twitter to the National Guard | The New York Times

Listened to Listen to ‘The Daily’: From Fox to Twitter to the National Guard by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com

It started with a report on Fox News, and ended with calls for troops at the border with Mexico. We look at how President Trump’s approach to immigration transformed over 72 hours.

We look at how President Trump’s approach to immigration transformed over just 72 hours.

On today’s episode:

• Julie Hirschfeld Davis, who covers the White House for The New York Times.

Background reading:

• President Trump said on Tuesday that he planned to deploy the National Guard to the border with Mexico to confront what the White House calls the growing threat posed by illegal immigrants and crime.

• Three days of presidential tweets contained many false and misleading accusations. Here’s a fact-check.

Another data point in the story that we have a System 1 only President who completely lacks any System 2 capabilities.

👓 All my Instagrams are MINE | Spitot Design

Read All my Instagrams are MINE by Bryan Hoffman (Spigot Design)

There was a time in the early days of social media that I signed up for every service that came out. The username @spigot is mine across most services you can find. By the time Instagram started, I’d started to grow weary and standoffish to new services. I’m sure you know what I mean. So I held ...

🎧 This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • March 31st – April 6th, 2018 | Marty McGuire

Listened to This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • March 31st - April 6th, 2018 by Marty McGuire from martymcgui.re

IndieWeb for Drupal, IndieWeb for Businesses, and Foodspotting going under. It’s the audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for March 31st - April 6th, 2018.

👓 Six ‘X-Rated’ Math Terms That Only Sound Dirty | Huffington Post

Read Six 'X-Rated' Math Terms That Only Sound Dirty by Macrina Cooper-White and David Freeman (HuffPost)

Cox-Zucker machine. What sounds like a high-tech device for oral sex is actually an algorithm used in the study of certain curves, including those that arise in cryptography. The story goes that David A. Cox co-authored a paper with fellow mathematician Steven Zucker, just so that the dirty-sounding term would enter the lexicon.

I always thought he was cool before (many of his students didn’t “get” him), but I’m now even more proud to have had Steven Zucker as my first math professor in college.

Steven Zucker explaining the concept of tangent to a surface.

👓 Congrats, Jeff Goldberg. You Just Martyred Kevin Williamson | POLITICO

Read Congrats, Jeff Goldberg. You Just Martyred Kevin Williamson. by Jack Shafer (POLITICO Magazine)

The <i>Atlantic</i> climbed out on a limb by adding Williamson to its staff. Then they proceeded to saw off the branch.

I noted the hire of Williamson with curiosity when it happened, but I expected it might last a tad longer than this. At least he managed longer than Quinn Norton did at the New York Times, but both seemingly gone for relatively similar reasons.

👓 Apps of a Feather

Read Apps of a Feather …Stick Together (Apps of a Feather)

Third-party Twitter apps are going to break on June 19th, 2018.

After June 19th, 2018, “streaming services” at Twitter will be removed. This means two things for third-party apps:

Push notifications will no longer arrive

Timelines won’t refresh automatically

If you use an app like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings, or Twitterrific, there is no way for its developer to fix these issues.

We are incredibly eager to update our apps. However, despite many requests for clarification and guidance, Twitter has not provided a way for us to recreate the lost functionality. We've been waiting for more than a year.

Twitter seems to finally be closing off the remainder of their open API that allowed full-fledged Twitter clients to still exist. This certainly creates a chilling effect in the future on developers spending any time or resources on projects like it that aren’t completely open. This also makes it much harder to build competing services to Twitter which have a similar financial model. I remember the heady days when there were dozens of awesome Twitter clients to chose from and interesting new things were happening in the social space.

If I was sitting on a huge pile of Twitter related code with a full set of Twitter related reading/posting functionality, I think I’d head toward some of the new open protocols coming out of the IndieWeb to build a new user base. By supporting feeds like RSS, ATOM, JSON feed, and even h-feed (possibly via Microsub) for the feed reader portion and building in the open Micropub spec, one could rejuvenate old Twitter apps to work with a myriad of microblog-like (and even traditional blog) functionality on platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, WithKnown, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, micro.blog, and a myriad of others in the future. Suddenly all those old Twitter apps could rise from the ashes and invigorate a new, more open community. Given the open “architecture” of the community, it would give developers much more direct control of both their software and futures than Twitter has ever given them as well as a deeper sense of impact while simultaneously eating a nice portion of Twitter’s lunch. With less than a week’s worth of work, I suspect that many of these old apps could have new and more fruitful lives than the scraps they were getting before.

If the bird site doesn’t heed their cries, I hope they’ll all re-purpose their code and support the open web so that their hard work and efforts aren’t completely lost.

🎧 Mitch Landrieu | The Atlantic Interview

Listened to Mitch Landrieu by Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic Interview

A white southern mayor confronts the history in his city.

"There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it," said New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu in his now-famous speech in May of 2017. As Landrieu said those words, city workers a few blocks away uprooted an enormous statue of Robert E. Lee – the last of four Confederate monuments the mayor removed from the city after a years-long process. In a conversation with The Atlantic's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Landrieu discusses the politics of race in the south, his grappling with history as a white southerner, and his own family’s connection to the story of civil rights in America.

I miss the days when I had a seemingly unending backlog of episodes to listen to. Now I just wait with bated breath for them to be released.

I love extended interviews on small topics like this one. This does a really good job of taking a look at some of the broader details behind removing Confederate statues in New Orleans.