Tuesday, March 15th, 2016

1

Read Between the Lines

People often ask, "Dave, why do you feel the need to be so interesting and hilarious throughout each edition of NextDraft?" Well, here's the answer: Because I know how hard it is to keep your attention. Increasingly, book publishers are discovering the same thing about their readers. And the more they know about how we read, the more tempted they'll be to tweak the content to match our habits. Welcome to the era when we measure everything -- and don't necessarily like what we find out. From the NYT: Moneyball for Book Publishers: A Detailed Look at How We Read. (P.S. I consider it a personal victory if you're still with me at this point.)

2

Tuesdays With More E

It's Tuesday in America, which means we're set for another big day in the presidential primaries. Here's The New Yorker's Jeffrey Frank on the unusual story of the primaries so far. And John Cassidy has a look at today's biggest races (Florida and Ohio are huge).

+ Sick of the election already? Well, then this will come as bad news. NPR: Why both the Democratic and Republican races are probably going to June.

+ Plenty of "C-SPAN nerds and political junkies" hope the GOP race goes on a bit longer than that. They are pumped to watch the madness of a contested convention.

+ And, this has got to be the saddest photo of the election.

3

You Cannot Be Syrious?

ISIS has been the the target of only "10 to 20 percent" of Russian airstrikes in Syria. And yet, Putin is pulling out his troops and ceasing much of the air campaign. Hmm, maybe it wasn't actually about fighting ISIS... From The Daily Beast: What Putin Really Won in Syria.

+ 55 years. That was the average life expectancy for Syrians back in 2014. Here are some more numbers from Syria's long war.

4

Pillage

Pharma Bro is being investigated and now Quartz explains that Karmic justice has been inflicted on pharma company (Valiant) that buys drugs and jacks-up prices. But it's critical to note that jacking up drug prices is a symptom that goes well beyond a handful of companies in the headlines. Consider that name-brand prescription drug prices in the US have doubled in the last five years.

+ "In a bid to blunt a nationwide opioid drug addiction epidemic, federal health officials on Tuesday called for doctors to stop prescribing chronic pain patients so many of the drugs." The feds are going after drugs that actually harm people. Now that's what I call a pivot.

5

Fake It Til You Make It

"Sometimes what we post on social media is less about bragging and more about learning to see ourselves in a more positive light." Interesting take from Holly Elmore: Faking happiness on social media helped me cope with depression. (Making fun of fake Facebook happiness helps me cope with mine.)

+ "It is a constant stream of brutally frank chatter about relationships, work, sex, race, gender and, yes, cats, along with a bizarrely large quantity of nude selfies." Fusion takes you inside the elite, super-secret world of L.A.'s coolest girls on Facebook.

6

Who You Gonna Call?

"On any given day, the police could be 45 minutes away. And a gun situation could happen in between two and five minutes. So how are we going to deal with that? We want our kids to stay safe. So if I can't take care of them by saying I'm going to call the police, then I've got to figure out a different way." From Buzzfeed's Anne Helen Petersen: An Idaho town makes the case for guns in school.

+ The Guardian: In the U.S., toddlers kill more people than terrorists do.

7

Circle Work

One of the Internet's biggest startups is a real estate rental company. WeWork is big and it was recently valued at $16 billion. Is this the world's most overpriced exposed brick office space, or is Adam Neumann really on track to turn WeWork into WeWorld -- a supposed utopia where we all sort of live and work together?

8

Dead Can Dance

"Torajans believe that people aren't really dead when they die and that a profound human connection lasts well past death. Death for many Torajans is not a brick wall but a gauze veil. It is not a severing but just another kind of connection." So that explains why, even after a person dies, they keep them around for awhile.

9

Lookie Loo

According to a recent survey, about a third of people who watch Netflix don't pay for Netflix. That actually makes sense since about a third of the content on Netflix is so bad it's unwatchable.

10

Bottom of the News

Here's a Super-duper Tuesday related twist: It turns out that Ohio Man might be even more popular that Florida Man.

+ Because there's nothing you can believe in, closing apps doesn't save your phone's battery.

+ Disney is making a fifth Indiana Jones movie, starring Harrison Ford. Indiana Jones and The Last Packet of Metamucil?

+ Vox: The Kiss Cam, behind the scenes.