For the Win
Earlier this week I asked the great NextDraft community to vote for 826 Valencia in our effort to score an additional 250K for our new Tenderloin Center. And last night, the folks behind the Google Impact Challenge confirmed we had enough votes to get the dough. At one point on Monday, NextDraft readers hit the voting servers so hard they thought it was some kind of fraud. Thanks so much for your support. It feels great to know that NextDraft was part of this effort. But I can’t deny that after a few weeks spent promoting this cause, it will feel good to return to my more natural state of self promotion. Thanks again for the clicks, shares, and good vibes. They all paid off.
Driven Up a Decision Tree
The idea of having no choice in a situation is obviously distressing. But having too much choice can create its own form of stress. In The Guardian, Stuart Jeffries explains why too much choice is stressing us out. Almost everything requires choices these days. Want to watch a movie? Just decide if you want to view it via Netflix, AppleTV, Pay-Per-View, Amazon, Chromecast, Hulu, Roku, or YouTube, and whether you want to watch on your phone, tablet, laptop, desktop computer or your TV. I’ve seriously been trying to find the right note-taking app since 2011. They say failure is not an option. But everything else is.
Kurds and Fray
The U.S. Army’s Delta Force teamed with Kurdish forces to free about 70 prisoners — who faced “mass execution” — held captive by ISIS in Northern Iraq. During the mission, an American was killed in Iraq for the first time since the official end of combat four years ago.
Boxed Out
“In the years since Amazon became the symbol of the online retail economy, horror stories have periodically emerged about the conditions at its warehouses — workers faced with near-impossible targets, people dropping on the job from heat or extreme fatigue. This isn’t one of those stories.” Instead, this story by Dave Jamieson is a glimpse into what the future of low-wage work really looks like.
Benghazi Strip
The much anticipated House select committee grilling of Hillary Clinton on all things Benghazi took place in Washington on Thursday. And things got heated. WaPo is providing live updates and a roundup of the dust-up.
Where Standups Lie Down
“Comics were all of a sudden getting respect, so we could get away with murder. and we did.” Buzzfeed’s David Peisner on the crash pad of a comedy revolution, remembered, kinda, by the people who survived it.
A Higher Calling
In the past decade, American attitudes about the legalization of marijuana have dramatically changed. Over the same period, marijuana use among adults has doubled. So which came first, the attitude change or the behavioral change? Uh, wait a second, you lost me there.
Question Everything (And Everyone)
In the NYT Magazine, Susan Burton talks to Terry Gross about the art of opening up. And after doing about 13,000 interviews for Fresh Air, Gross is an expert on the topic.
Live and Bloodlet Live
“From what we can tell, most major cities across the world seem to have a vampire community.” The BBC reports on the thousands of people who drink human blood on a regular basis. (In California, we only do it because we ran out of water to drink.)
Bottom of the News
“You finally got what you’ve always needed: A way to express negative emotions and general dissatisfaction on the Internet.” Here’s my latest installment of Just Admit It (this will feel good, I promise): No One Escapes Letterman’s Beard.
+ AirBNB put up a series of ads in San Francisco intended to … well, I’m not quite sure what they were intended to do. But I’m reasonably sure it didn’t go well.
+ We’ve reached peak award. Robert Mugabe just won a peace prize.
+ Why settle for spin class when Cirque Du Soleil style aerial dance is an option?
