Reads, Listens

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Read Hello, I’m Andy and I’m addicted to Twitter by Andy Bell (Andy Bell)
A big part of getting better and overcoming addiction is accepting that you are addicted, and with that in mind, I’m telling you here today that I’m addicted to Twitter. Enough is enough, though. I have to get better.
Some great ideas from Andy for mitigating a variety of issues with Twitter.

I’ve personally found that not having/using Twitter on my phone gets rid of a large portion of the problem. The other thing I can recommend is only reading subsets of Twitter via feed reader. Finally, I’ve long been making all my interactions with Twitter (Tweets, replies, etc.) through my own website. This creates just enough of an extra hurdle that I don’t make the snap decision to reply to tweets right away. Often they sit for a day or two and if I still care enough, then I’ll reply or comment. Not that my UI is necessarily worse than Twitter’s, just a little less addictive and immediate. I also have the benefit of owning my content for the eventual Twitterpocalypse–you know that thing that follows the fire and brimstone we’re currently experiencing.

Read Check out my year in Pocket! (Pocket App)

See how much I read in Pocket in 2019, including the most popular articles I saved and more.

Chris, you read a ton this year and made it into our top 5% of readers. That’s an impressive amount of knowledge gained.

You read 676K words in Pocket. Equal to 9 books.

Pocket badge that reads "Top Reader - Five Percent - 2019"

I bookmark a lot of things with Pocket, but I don’t feel like I use it a lot for reading. I’m surprised that I archived this many pieces.
Listened to The Hidden Truths of Hanukkah from On the Media | WNYC Studios

A special history lesson in time for the holidays.

Today is Christmas, but it's also Hanukkah — the Jewish festival of lights. With its emphasis on present-giving, dreidel games and sweet treats, the holiday seems to be oriented towards kids. Even the story of Hanukkah has had its edges shaved down over time. Ostensibly, the holiday is a celebration of a victory against an oppressive Greek regime in Palestine over two thousand years ago, the miracle of oil that lit Jerusalem's holy temple for 8 days and nights, and the perseverance of the Jewish faith against all odds.

According to Rabbi James Ponet, Emeritus Howard M. Holtzmann Jewish Chaplain at Yale University, the kid-friendly Hanukkah mythology has obscured the thorny historical details that offer deeper truths about what it means to be a Jew. In his 2005 Slate piece, "Hanukkah as Jewish Civil War," Ponet looked at the often-overlooked Jew-on-Jew violence that under-girds the Hanukkah story. In 2018, he and Brooke discussed how this civil war lives on in Jewish views on Israel, and how the tension between assimilation and tradition came to define the Jewish people. We're re-releasing it today in time for the holidays.

Read The Internet's Dark Ages (The Atlantic)
If a Pulitzer-nominated 34-part series of investigative journalism can vanish from the web, anything can.

[The Web] is a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness. ❧

Highlighted on January 07, 2020 at 11:58AM

Listened to Can Restorative Justice Save The Internet? from On the Media | WNYC Studios

How theories of criminal justice reform can help us detoxify the web.

As prison populations soar, advocates on both side of the spectrum agree that the law-and-order approach to criminal justice is not making us safer. On this week's On the Media, we look at restorative justice, an alternative to prison that can provide meaningful resolution and rehabilitation. Meanwhile, harassment and bullying are plaguing our online lives, but social media companies seem fresh out of solutions. OTM brings you the story of a reporter and a researcher who teamed up to test whether restorative justice can be used to help detoxify the web.

1. Danielle Sered [@daniellesered], author of Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, on her promising foray into restorative justice. Listen.

2. Lindsay Blackwell [@linguangst], UX researcher at Facebook, and OTM reporter Micah Loewinger [@micahloewinger] share the story of their online restorative justice experiment. Plus, Jack Dorsey [@jack], CEO of Twitter, and Ashley Feinberg [@ashleyfeinberg], a senior writer at Slate, on the toxic state of Twitter. Listen.

Read How to do PESOS from Pocket to Micropub by Jan-Lukas ElseJan-Lukas Else (jlelse.blog)
After thinking about it, I finally figured out how to PESOS from Pocket to my own site using IFTTT. The first step was to retrieve an IndieAuth access token using the tool Gimme a token. Then I created a IFTTT applet with the a new favorite item on Pocket as the trigger and a Webhook to execute. I f...
Following in Charlotte’s footsteps?