Commentary on links that caught my attention around the web.
Notable Links
[Nilay Patel at The Verge] This is, uh, the opposite of this year's trend of a bunch of newspapers refusing to endorse anyone: "Donald Trump is a dangerous maniac who can barely complete a sentence, and it is lunacy to believe he can even recognize the existentially
Notable Links
[Molly Redden and Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented] "A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that
Media
[Heather Bryant] A characteristically sharp piece on the Washington Post's spiked Presidential endorsement and ensuing fallout from Heather Bryant: "Good journalism is not unique to the Washington Post. Or the L.A. Times. Or the New York Times. Or any other specific organization. Their historical reach and
Fediverse
[Ghost] "Last week we officially started the ActivityPub private beta and sent invitations to our first 3 publishers to start testing things out. This was the first big milestone we've been working toward for months, and it felt great to get there! 🚀" The Ghost team continues
Media
[Manuel Roig-Franzia and Laura Wagner at The Washington Post] "An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two people who were briefed on the sequence of events and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they
Notable Links
[Jan Diehm and Michelle Pera-McGhee at The Pudding] "To illustrate how difficult it is to get abortion care, we built a maze for each state where the difficulty is calculated by the state’s abortion policies." What an incredible use of the web as a platform. These stories
Media
[Anne Helen Petersen] "The best indication of the health of an industry like journalism isn’t who excels there, because the answer is obvious: work robots who come from some sort of family money. To understand just how broken media is, look at who leaves the field — or who
Technology
[Bluesky Announces Series A to Grow Network of 13M+ Users] An important announcement from Bluesky: "We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15 million Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Amir Shevat of Darkmode, co-creator of Kubernetes
Culture
[Jon Hicks] I love this sort of thing: "Usborne's The Detective’s Handbook and The Guide to the Supernatural captivated my imagination in equal measure. This site is an imagined combination of those books – an engaging thematic prompt for me to overcome the quandary of 'what
Technology
[Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism] File this under "good, but I can't believe this wasn't already banned": "Sweeping changes to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines aimed at cleaning up the polluted, confusing world of online product reviews went into effect on Monday, meaning
Notable Links
[Joseph Cox at 404 Media] Without needing a warrant, police can track ordinary peoples' smartphone locations - including people who travel out of state to get abortion procedures. The implications are troubling: "“Warrantless law enforcement access to digital information related to reproductive health care, including location data, threatens
Notable Links
[Blake Ellis, Melanie Hicken, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Audrey Ash, Kyung Lah, Anna-Maja Rappard, Casey Tolan, Lou Robinson and Byron Manley at CNN] "More than 1,000 reports filed with government agencies and consumer advocacy groups reviewed by CNN, along with an analysis of campaign finance data and interviews with dozens