Links

The Working Person’s Guide to the Industry that Might Kill Your Company – Hamilton Nolan at Splinter

In Praise of Conspiracies – Ryan Holiday at The Observer. A followup to Holiday’s article on Silicon Valley, which I linked to in last month’s Miscellanea.

What is Your Tribe? The Invention of Kenya’s Ethnic Communities – Patrick Gathara at The Elephant

The Myth of ‘Learning Styles’ – Olga Khazan at The Atlantic

The Real Origins of the Religious Right – Randall Blumer at Politico.

Are We Seeing the Start of a Liberal Tea Party? – Nathaniel Rakich at FiveThirtyEight

The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper – BJ Campbell

Facebook: The Cambridge Analytica thing wasn’t a ‘data breach,’ it’s just totally how our platform works – Laura Hazard Owen at Nieman Lab. I hate to keep pounding the Facebook drum so incessantly, but it cannot be emphasized enough that none of the incentives currently at play will allow Facebook—or just about any other social media company—to prioritize privacy, autonomy, or security. If knowledge is power, what does it mean to give out knowledge about yourself? And on that note:

China waging ‘psychological warfare’ against Australia, US Congress told – Ben Doherty at The Guardian. The genie is out of the bottle. This was never going to just be a vulnerability that got exploited once and then fixed immediately.

Why we should bulldoze the business school – Martin Parker at The Guardian

 

Videos

Basic Income Explained – Siraj Raval on YouTube

 

Books

Colonel Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris (4/5): This was the final volume of Morris’ three-part study of Theodore Roosevelt, collectively the best biography I’ve ever read. The trilogy peaked with the masterful first volume, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, but the two following volumes are well worth the reader’s time as well.

 

Music

Black Stone Cherry – Soul Machine

Chevelle – An Island

Evergrey – The Grand Collapse

Les Discrets – L’echapee

Ne Obliviscaris – And Plague Flowers the Kaleidoscope

 

Movies

A Quiet Place (5/5): Wildly suspenseful and surprisingly heartfelt. The casting of real-life couple John Krasinski and Emily Blunt was a wise choice, as was casting a deaf actress for their daughter Regan.

Truth or Dare (2/5): It’s a Blumhouse movie.