The story behind a portrait that brought a widely overlooked human catastrophe into devastating focus.
Reads, Listens
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
👓 AT&T wireless CEO on fake 5G complaints: ‘that makes me smile’ | The Verge
"Every company is guilty of building a narrative of how you want the world to work."
👓 I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone | Motherboard
T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.
👓 High demand from retirees to live on campus at Arizona State University I InsideHigherEd
A sold-out housing complex for senior citizens on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus sparks a conversation about whether universities are doing enough to engage with older people.
👓 Used Clothing Floods Beacon’s Closet, Courtesy of Netflix’s “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” | The New Yorker
👓 I Was Pregnant and in Crisis. All the Doctors and Nurses Saw Was an Incompetent Black Woman | Time
At every step of a fairly typical pregnancy for a black woman in the U.S., I was rendered an incompetent subject with exceptional needs.
I just don’t have words.
If you’re feeling depressed and angry though, I invite you to continue on with some stories I can’t help but collect:
👓 2018: a year in gratitude | Mark A. Matienzo
Mark A. Matienzo (Mark A. Matienzo)This year was largely complicated and often felt like a massive garbage fire to myself and my crew. I didn’t accomplish a number of my goals and was inconsistent about others, so recapping awesome things I did doesn’t feel appropriate and also happens to be a soft reminder of either failure or things not going as planned. I also tend to hate “best of the year” lists but I find them helpful to remember about where I found joy or the ability to connect to something outside of myself. I suppose this is an attempt to reconcile those things, or perhaps more in line with the end of year spirit, a way to articulate gratitude to the people and things around me that impacted me.
Interesting, but I’m not sure how this rates for cross-posting to IndieWeb News…
👓 Consuming Instagram differently | Jonas Voss
Jonas Voss (Left handed typing since 2017)I've been looking for a different way of consuming Instagram. Facebook has introduced more and more features in their neverending quest to wrestle users from Snapchat and onto Instagram, and I don't care for those. I like Instagram, the photo sharing part, not so much the TV and Stories part. The ot...
🎧 Before the Flood:The Mesopotamian Enuma Elish and Atrahasis | The Literature and History Podcast
BCE 1700-1500
The Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis, in circulation 3,800 years ago, were Mesopotamia's creation and flood epics, making them 1,000 years older than Genesis.
There are a few sections of these ancient texts which indicate that thousands (or more) were wiped out due to illness and disease that sound like a flu, a virus, or some other local pandemic. Gives pause to think about what the state of public health was at the time.
Enuma Elish and Atrahasis are indeed not well known, but I’ve actually seen quite a bit about them as the result of reading within the area of Big History.
I’ll have to do some digging but I’m curious if any researcher(s) have done synoptic analyses of these books and the Book of Genesis from the Old Testament. I’m sure there aren’t as many as there are of the synoptic gospels from the New Testament, but it might be interesting to take a look at them.
The obvious quote of the day:
The gods became distraught at the destruction they had unleashed. The midwife goddess, Mami, who helped raise the first generations of mankind, was particularly saddened, and “The gods joined her in weeping for the vanished country / She was overcome with heartache, but could find no beer”. Yes, it really says that.
As a side note, fermented beverages like beer were more popular throughout history than they are in modern America, because unlike now, prior generations of humans didn’t have the public health ideals or levels of clean drinking water that we do today. Thus beer and other alcoholic drinks were more par for the course because they were less likely to make you sick or kill you to drink them. Naturally the Mesopotamian gods must have been healthier for drinking them as a result too!
👓 There’s One Encouraging Thought Buried In Zuckerberg’s 2019 Challenge | Techdirt
Every year Mark Zuckerberg sets a "challenge" for himself for that year, which as many people have noted, Facebook has turned into a big PR vehicle for the company. We usually don't even bother to write about it, because why bother?...
Do we want technology to keep giving more people a voice, or will traditional gatekeepers control what ideas can be expressed? ❧
Part of the unstated problem here is that Facebook has supplanted the “traditional gatekeepers” and their black box feed algorithm is now the gatekeeper which decides what people in the network either see or don’t see. Things that crazy people used to decry to a non-listening crowd in the town commons are now blasted from the rooftops, spread far and wide by Facebook’s algorithm, and can potentially sway major elections.
I hope they talk about this.
👓 Publishers build a common tech platform together | Nieman Journalism Lab
Jonathan Gill (Nieman Lab)"From a business standpoint, publishers aren't competing with each other so much as they are with the big technology platforms — Google, Facebook, Apple, and so on. Yet publishers expend huge amounts of energy optimizing competitively against one another."
👓 The platform tide is turning | Nieman Journalism Lab
Ben Werdmüller (Nieman Lab)“Instead of becoming more like technology companies or remaining beholden to platforms, publishers could help to build the internet they need.”
There are an impressive number of IndieWeb-related articles in this year’s list of Nieman Journalism Lab 2019 Predictions. Somehow I had missed the one written by our own Ben Werdmüller, or perhaps they continued publishing them after I’d seen the first batch?
👓 Why You Should Start A Blog In 2019 | Tedium
Ernie Smith (Tedium)The independent blog has been in decline for years. It doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s why you should start a blog in 2019—and host it yourself.
A great argument here for the IndieWeb, and his second in probably as many weeks. Even better, it sounds like he doesn’t yet know some of the cool new things that blogs are capable of doing now that they couldn’t do in 2006.
👓 Dear Journalists, Stop Being Loudspeakers for Liars | Dan Gillmor
An open letter to newsrooms everywhere
👓 Rod Rosenstein Expected to Leave Justice Dept. Once Attorney General Is Confirmed | The New York Times
The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, has been a central figure in the Russia investigation by appointing the special counsel and overseeing the inquiry.
As long as he’s leaving of his own accord…