Ryan Holiday has a lot of experience using media tactics to stir outrage and gain coverage. And he's seen his tactics be put into action by the alt-right and various Internet trolls. He understands how they think and what their ultimate goals are. And he has a message for the rest of us: You guys are playing completely into their hands. It always surprises me when celebrities and other influencers retweet or quote the hateful messages of online trolls, many of whom have only a handful of followers (if they're even human and not just bots). The last thing you want to hand a troll is a megaphone.

+ "The goal here is not to hack computational systems but to hack free speech and to hack public opinion." Sometimes they are bots, sometimes they are human. And sometimes they are a combination of both. From WaPo: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work.

+ Backchannel: A young Wikipedia editor withstood a decade of online abuse. Now she's fighting back. 

+ Someone should create a Twitter bot that spreads upbeat news about the platform's earnings. Twitter dominates the headlines and drives policy debates. But it can't seem to have a decent quarter.

"Any attack on ... brothers or sisters of the robe is an attack on all judges." Yesterday, word spread that President Trump's Supreme Court nominee was troubled by the constant "disheartening" and "demoralizing" attacks on the judges looking at the legality of the Muslim travel ban. And surprise, someone took to Twitter to lash out.

+ Is this a real dispute among administration officials or a well-orchestrated political move or something else? You're not sure. And your head is spinning. And that could be the point.

+ In other news from the information wars, apparently no one is supposed to critique military operations anymore. Even John McCain.

FiveThirtyEight on some key immigration numbers: "More than 2 million of the nation's roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants live in just two metropolitan areas, New York and Los Angeles ... Most of the remaining 9 million undocumented immigrants are concentrated in large urban areas that likewise voted for Clinton over Trump."

+ I've been waiting for someone to cover this reality about immigration. And it's not limited to this issue. It's about regional hatreds, political blood fights, and media manipulation. And it's about the failure of the Internet's early promise. Somehow -- with more tools to connect than ever before -- we made our lives less diverse; racially, politically, and culturally; each of us left to sink in the quicksand that lines the thickening walls of our silos of homogeneity. In short: This is Why You Hate Me.

+ Lost in all the hubbub around the travel ban is the fact that the rules around deportations have also changed. Just ask Guadalupe García de Rayos.

+ "As for his promises about cracking down on illegal immigrants, many assumed Mr. Trump's pledges were mostly just talk." From the NYT: California Farmers Backed Trump, but Now Fear Losing Field Workers.

+ The new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, was one of the earliest supporters of Trump's ban.

+ The American battle over immigrations is, sadly, the rule not the exception.

From the NYT Upshot: "Almost half of people in their early 20s have a secret, one they don't usually share even with friends: Their parents help them pay the rent." (I prefer to think of it as a pension program for childhood allowance.)

+ CityLab: Americans have been driving less, but now they're just sitting at home.

"Will the net overall effect of algorithms be positive for individuals and society or negative for individuals and society?" Ask that question to the experts, and you'll find -- like with everything else -- they're split down the middle. Pew has a very interesting look at the pros and cons of the algorithm age. (Meanwhile, the algorithms are laughing because we still believe what we think about them matters...)

Every time you get prescribed antibiotics, you get the same advice from your doctor. Make sure you finish the entire prescription, even of you feel better. Well, what if that advice is actually bad advice?

+ NYT: How the Anti-Vaxxers Are Winning.

"What evolution did not prepare P-22 for is how to exist in an eight-square-mile urban park with more than 5 million human visitors a year. Most male cats have almost 20 times that space, nearly to themselves." From the LA Times: A week in the life of P‑22, the big cat who shares Griffith Park with millions of people.

+ The New Yorker: The Lions Of Los Angeles. (Interesting that the lions seem to be more welcome in LA than the Chargers.)

"The argument seemed to line up neatly. We are raising a generation of weaklings, more prone to everything from premature aging to mental disorders. Or is the opposite true? Is this just the latest step in the age-old weakening of our species as we emerged from the trees and built up civilization?" From Nautilus: There are two very different interpretations of our dwindling grip strength. (For the last decade, I haven't taken my hand off a device long enough to have my grip strength measured.)

A comment about Trump from Steph Curry went viral yesterday. That shouldn't surprise you much. Everything these days is political. And being political is gradually becoming a prerequisite for popularity. Getting more political may have saved Stephen Colbert.

+ Bob Lefsetz: If you're playing to everybody, you're playing to nobody.

+ The powerful have always seen a threat in humor.

According to Newshour, this electronic pill can send Wi-Fi updates from your tummy for days. No wonder reading so much news on the Internet is making me queasy.

+ We're running out of bees. So maybe drones can pollinate.

+ Amazing story of an Australian man who was trapped in pond with his nose just above water. (In the Bay Area, where we are currently experiencing a school and road-closing deluge, this feels like a how-to video.)

+ The MLB is considering a rule that would put a runner on second base at the start of extra innings. So then, who's on first? (Sorry, been a long week...)