The digital publishing revolution is so old that a great many reading consumers might not be able to envision a time when they couldn’t simply pop online to order a book, download a new title from their favorite author, or use an app or PDF for supplemental book material. eBooks and digital publishing have simply become a part of everyday life for many people.
Reads, Listens
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
👓 Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith Wins Miss. Senate Runoff After Racially Charged Campaign | NPR
Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith won the Senate runoff in Mississippi by a margin of 54-to-46 percent, according to the Associated Press, overcoming a series of missteps that brought the state's dark history of racism and violence to the forefront. Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to the Senate earlier this year after Republican Thad Cochran stepped down because of health reasons, defeated former congressman and agriculture secretary Mike Espy. Neither candidate had won the requisite 50 percent in the first round of the special election on Election Day. She is the first woman elected to the Senate from Mississippi.
Too often I’m just saddened at what America is producing.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: The Plan to Discredit the Florida Recount | New York Times
The partisan battle over several close races risks damaging public confidence in the state’s election systems.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: A Conversation With a Freshman Democrat | New York Times
We spoke with Abigail Spanberger, a recently elected congresswoman from Virginia, about her first days in the Capitol and what it means to be a Democrat today.
Last week on “The Daily,” we looked at the campaign of a candidate who embodied the Democratic strategy for winning the House. This week, she arrived in Washington.
Abigail Spanberger a former C.I.A. officer, was elected as a Democrat in Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. Listen to last week’s episode of “The Daily” about how the Democrats flipped the House, with a spotlight on Ms. Spanberger’s victory in a reliably conservative district.
The incoming group of House Democrats is the most diverse, most female freshman class in history. Members of the group also have major differences in ideology, which may present a challenge for Democratic leaders trying to unify their new House majority.
👓 Why suicide is falling around the world, and how to bring it down more | The Economist
Urbanisation, fewer forced marriages and more curbs on the means of self-destruction
👓 Special measures: well-being | Economist Espresso
How should society’s progress be measured? GDP tends to be used as a proxy. But its imperfections are widely known: it focuses on market-oriented production, for instance, and ignores how the gains from that output are distributed. Today experts gather in Seoul to discuss work on alternative measures led by Joseph Stiglitz and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, two eminent economists, and commissioned by the OECD, a group of mostly rich countries. Their report recommends adding a number of indicators to policymakers’ dashboards, including measures of inequality, environmental sustainability, happiness and trust. Economic insecurity—such as income buffers available to people when trouble strikes—also matters. If governments had considered insecurity during the 2007-08 financial crisis, they would have provided their economies with more support, and continued to do so even after GDP started to recover. But, as the report says, “what you measure affects what you do.”
👓 MSNBC declines to allow Sarah Sanders to dictate its programming | Washington Post
It had been nearly a month since Sarah Sanders had held what was once known as a “daily” briefing. So when the White House press secretary — along with White House officials Larry Kudlow and John Bolton — took the podium on Tuesday afternoon, cable-news channels jumped right on the proceedings. Well, most of them, anyway. While CNN and Fox News carried the tripartite briefing from the very beginning, MSNBC stayed away — until it had blown off the entire session.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: The California Wildfires | New York Times
What was once a seasonal concern has become a persistent, year-round threat across the state.
🎧 Episode 56: The Juggernaut (MEN, Part 10) | Scene on Radio
Writer Ben James and his wife Oona are raising their sons in a progressive and “queer-friendly” New England town. They actively encourage the boys to be themselves, never mind those traditional gender norms around “masculinity” and “femininity.” All was well. Until the elder son, Huck, went to sixth grade. Story by Ben James, with hosts Celeste Headlee and John Biewen, and psychologist Terrence Real.
👓 Opinion | Maybe They’re Just Bad People | New York Times
Not all Trump support is ideological.
🎧 Episode 55: Be Like You (MEN, Part 9) | Scene on Radio
Lewis Wallace, female-assigned at birth, wanted to transition in the direction of maleness—in some ways. He shifted his pronouns, had surgery, starting taking testosterone. None of that meant he wanted to embrace everything that our culture associates with “masculinity.” Story written and reported by Lewis Wallace, with co-hosts John Biewen and Celeste Headlee.
🎧 Episode 54: American Made (MEN, Part 8) | Scene on Radio
American history—law, economics, culture—has built different notions of masculinity (and femininity) for people of varying races and ethnicities. A trip through a century of pop culture and the stereotyped images that white supremacy has manufactured and attached to Asian and African American men. With scholars Tim Yu and Mark Anthony Neal and co-hosts John Biewen and Celeste Headlee.
🎧 Lecture 12: "Resist Japan!" 1937–1945 | The Fall and Rise of China by Richard Baum
In the fireball of World War II, witness the brutal Japanese offensives in China and their grim consequences for the Nationalists, while paradoxically sparing the Communists from annihilation. Learn also about growing U.S. ambivalence toward Chiang K'ai-shek and how Japanese brutality actually aided the Communists' seizure of power.
👓 Twitter and Tear Gas: part two of our book club’s reading | Bryan Alexander
With this post we discuss Chapters 2: “Censorship and Attention” and 3: “Leading the Leaderless”.
👓 Twitter and Tear Gas: part one of our book club’s reading | Bryan Alexander
With this post we discuss the Preface, Introduction, and chapter 1, “A Networked Public.”
In this post I’ll briefly summarize the text, then add some reflections and questions. You can participate by writing comments here, or through whichever other means you like (Twitter comments, Hypothes.is annotations, etc.).
