December 7, 2016

“We do not understand how GSA or its inspector general failed to anticipate the possibility of this eventuality or devise an exit strategy.… None of this happened quickly.” The General Services Administration needs to end its lease agreement with the Trump Organization, which controls Trump’s fancy new hotel down the street from the White House. / Government Executive

1. Breaking news: Acting as a paid foreign agent for Taiwan, former senator and current lobbyist Bob Dole got Trump to take the infamous call. / The New York Times

2. Analysis: Why so many South Koreans are fed up by their president: voters of all ages feel betrayed. / The Economist

3. Opinion: If Facebook breaks into China by censoring news, the real winner is Beijing. / Quartz

4. Deeper thoughts: How the Circle Line rogue train was caught with data. / blog.data.gov.sg

See also: “Picking up the Piedmont Blues” in the Oxford American, “The Soccer-Star Refugees of Eritrea” in the New Yorker, or “The Oasis of Palmyra” in Lapham’s Quarterly. / oxfordamerican.org, The New Yorker, Lapham’s Quarterly

5. Something to tell your boyfriend at lunch: After being evacuated from the South Pole, Buzz Aldrin is being treated by Dr. David Bowie in New Zealand. / Reuters

“A black transgender woman living in rural poverty needs equal pay legislation far more urgently than a multi-millionaire movie star, but if words from Jennifer Lawrence help that happen, so be it.” Prominent women—whether they became famous on purpose or through tragedy—are embracing the open letter to often brilliant effect this year. / The Guardian

Masha Gessen lost her job as editor-in-chief of a Russian science magazine because she refused to assign reporters to cover Putin’s Siberian crane hang-gliding adventure. / The New York Review of Books

And you thought you built complicated Lego systems back in the day? A “great ball contraption (GBC) module” that uses strain wave gearing. / Wikipedia

Important to remember: Some news is fake by virtue of deception on the part of companies, like Theranos. / Wired

“As with many other false stories about Clinton that have widely spread online—like the baseless rumor promoted by Infowars and then Trump that millions of non-citizens illegally voted for her, and were encouraged to do so by President Obama—this should be described as what it is: disinformation, or the sort of ‘black propaganda’ intelligence agencies have fabricated in decades past to smear politicians they see as enemies.” Disinformation is political. Fake news is just for profit. Discriminating between the two is necessary for discerning the way forward. / The Intercept

“Perhaps what I’ve actually done is scraped the topsoil off the surface of 2016 and found one of the underground springs that has been quietly nurturing it,” says journalist Carol Cadwalladr, who describes the way that the right has proven much more effective, and zealous, in “colonizing” the online real estate adjacent to innocuous queries to create their own reality. / The Guardian

The filter bubble is a key step in the proliferation of fake news. A new Chrome plug-in allows you to see what news pages your friends like and post from. Here’s what mine looks like. / New York

After a year in which journalists became a straw man for Trumpian tirades and tweets, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the outrage among media over fake news has rebounded back as conservatives claim mainstream media is the source of most of it. / t.co, BuzzFeed

This Times review of Richard Fortey’s book The Wood for the Trees: One Man’s Long View of Nature—which sounds pretty great—reminds us of Myoung Ho Lee’s beguiling “photography acts” of backgrounded trees. / The New York Times, Amazon

Rio de Janeiro is flat broke, just three months after the Olympics, with lawmakers considering even more austerity measures. / PRI, The Washington Post

“Inmates interviewed at prisons around the state said that if they had to do time in a maximum-security facility, Sing Sing would be the best place. ‘Everyone wants to get to Sing Sing.’” Racial bias is so entrenched in the workforces at most New York state prisons that inmates do anything they can to get to Sing Sing, the only facility with a majority-black staff and no racial disparities in discipline. / The New York Times