November 17, 2016
The 20 top hoax news stories on Facebook garnered 1.4 million more engagements than the top 20 pieces of journalism. / BuzzFeed
In the 1800s, people believed newspaper stories about trips to the moon and monkeys picking cotton. Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken printed stories made from whole cloth. More recently, Joseph Mitchell and David Foster Wallace embellished wholeheartedly. Our best hope is that it’s in Facebook’s interest not to let this get out of hand. / Politico
“You can love Dylan or hate Dylan, just as you can love Elvis or hate Elvis. But even if you love Elvis, it’s hard to argue that he was the King because he was somehow an exponentially more talented performer than Ike Turner, or LaVern Baker. Rather, he was the King because critics, and the public, see a white person reshaping black sources as a quintessence of creativity and cool.” Is Dylan calling BS on himself? Yesterday he said he’ll decline to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony. Does he realize he doesn’t quite deserve it? / LitHub
Trump’s election is likely a sign that racism is getting worse in America. However, there’s also a more optimistic scenario possibly at play: “The broader historical data suggest that discrimination can persist across many generations, and of course the US has a long history of prejudice toward many groups. The real lesson might be, We’ve been worse all along, rather than, Things are getting worse again.” / Bloomberg
Colson Whitehead wins for The Underground Railroad at last night’s National Book Awards gala—or, as Larry Whitmore called it, “BET Presents the National Book Awards, with special guest Robert Caro,” considering wins by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, Rep. John Lewis, and the Cave Canem writer’s center. / The New York Times, cavecanempoets.org
Silhouettes of the International Space Station pass across the Supermoon. / apod.nasa.gov
1. San Francisco residents fight affordable housing, but say their argument is more aesthetic than NIMBY. / San Francisco Chronicle
2. Three Dutch warships that sank during World War II have gone missing from the Java Sea. / Quartz
3. Finnish school children will no longer study subjects. “Instead of individual subjects, students will study events and phenomena in an interdisciplinary format.” / brightside.me
4. “On average in 1965 an American CEO earned 20 times what a worker did. By 2013, on average, the number was 296 times.” Some numbers to explain what was going to be a Republican-leaning election no matter what. / London Review of Books
5. A TV producer once got permission to adapt a Salinger story into a film, but Salinger refused his adaptations and insisted on casting rights. / The New Yorker
“Demand for information is shattering traditional intellectual property barriers. Chess moves are just data, no different from who just threw a pick-6 on Monday Night Football or who just got killed on The Walking Dead.” Who owns the masterpiece that two chess grandmasters are creating on a board? / Bloomberg
“Sure, those Macedonian news stories aren’t great, but their effect such as it is comes from confirming what people already believe. Contrast that to Miller’s stories in the New York Times: because the New York Times was a trusted gatekeeper, many people fundamentally changed their opinions, resulting in a disaster.” Top-down solutions to Facebook’s fake news problem only work if the person wielding that power agrees with you. / Stratechery
Twenty years ago, conservatives were irate at the idea that language was subjective. Then we hung a “Mission Accomplished” banner on an aircraft carrier in the middle of a war, kowtowed to false equivalence, and let Mark Zuckerberg wash his hands of the whole “editorial responsibility” thing. Now we find “the insights of subversion repurposed for the needs of authority.” / mtv.com
“I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything—they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.” Horner is an “OG” of hoaxing—he’s twice convinced media he is Banksy—but he always expected fact-checkers to pull the rug out from Trump. Now AdSense might pull the rug out on him. / Washington Post
In order to get suspects stuck in jail to admit to crimes they might not have committed, Chicago police officers have developed a novel technique: not showing up for court hearings. / Chicago Reader
The pro-privatization and anti-regulation Trump presidency will be good news for not only private prisons but also the major banks—including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase—that finance the industry and profit off its reliance on debt financing. / In These Times, inthepublicinterest.org
High art, or high-end real estate porn? In “The Politics of the Office,” Andreia Alves de Oliveira does a study of London corporate interiors. / Andreia Alves de Oliveira
“If you earnestly put forward this idea that fighting for policy is somehow irrelevant and that laws are ‘simply letters on a page’ you have very little to offer modern society.” Edward Snowden’s insistence on using his platform to advocate technology’s power over policy—to the point of shunning actual policy change—is simply wrong. / Gizmodo