Let's talk about your stuff. You have too much of it. You know that. But you don't want to get rid of it. The internet offers you many ways to sell it. Disposal services are just a phone call away. But even though it's quite likely that you'll never see much of your stuff again -- and that your offspring will one day be faced with the morbid task of milling through your stuff, ultimately putting most of it in the garbage where it always belonged -- you feel the need to keep it all (and to pay a monthly fee for the privilege). Consider these numbers shared by Curbed: "One in 11 Americans pays an average of $91.14 per month to use self-storage, finding a place for the material overflow of the American dream. According to SpareFoot, a company that tracks the self-storage industry, the United States boasts more than 50,000 facilities and roughly 2.311 billion square feet of rentable space. In other words, the volume of self-storage units in the country could fill the Hoover Dam with old clothing, skis, and keepsakes more than 26 times."

+ The one option not available to you is to bring your junk back home. There's no room. Boston Globe: 40 years into the war on clutter, and we're still overwhelmed by stuff.

"No two hurricanes are alike, and Harvey and Maria were vastly different storms that struck areas with vastly different financial, geographic and political situations. But a comparison of government statistics relating to the two recovery efforts strongly supports the views of disaster-recovery experts that FEMA and the Trump administration exerted a faster, and initially greater, effort in Texas, even though the damage in Puerto Rico exceeded that in Houston." An investigation by Politico shows a persistent double standard in the president's handling of relief efforts for Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Maria. (This sheds a little light the situation, assuming you have the power to turn on the light on in the first place...)

"For years now, Putin's calculation has been that the West is strong but lacking in unity and will, allowing a scrappy Russia willing to bend and break the rules of the international order to assert its place as a global player. But the success of this gambit hinged on his capacity to assess what the West would tolerate. By exceeding those limits, he may have delivered a triple blow to himself." The Atlantic: Putin Finally Went Too Far.

+ "It sends a muscular message from the West to President Vladimir Putin that he can't attack one Western country without generating a broad response from them all, a Western diplomat told me. But it also signals the potential for a deeper confrontation that could ripple across other global flashpoints where Western and Russian interests compete." Robin Wright: With Expulsions of Russians, the West—En Masse—Confronts Putin.

+ The unified opposition to Putin comes in response to the (attempted) killing of a former Russian spy on foreign soil. It turns out that's becoming quite a trend: "The FBI possesses a secret report asserting that Vladimir Putin's former media czar was beaten to death by hired thugs in Washington, DC — directly contradicting the US government's official finding that Mikhail Lesin died by accident." Buzzfeed: Christopher Steele's Other Report: A Murder In Washington.

Charlie Warzel with a good overview of why this Facebook scandal is different from the others. "It's a moment that forces us, collectively, to step back and think about what we sacrificed for a more convenient and connected world. And on an internet that feels increasingly toxic it's hard to look at the tradeoffs we've made and feel like we're getting a fair deal." (The biggest winners in the Facebook scandal are all the other tech companies who aren't getting lumped into the story, even though they should be.)

+ I touched upon another key reason the story is so big this time in my look at 20 Quick Thoughts About The Facebook Scandal: "Facebook is suffering from two converging trends. The building backlash against tech. And the existing rage against anything associated with the 2016 election. The CNN anchors might want to strap on their windbreakers. Storm's a comin'…"

+ "These pubs don't just open the kimonos of their readers. They bring people's bare digital necks to vampires ravenous for the blood of personal data, all for the purpose of returning 'interest-based' advertising to those same people." Doc Searls makes the point that many publications reporting on the abuse of your personal data are selling your personal data.

In an op-ed in the NYT that is certain to leave as many heads spinning as nodding, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens argues that it's time to repeal the Second Amendment.

Live sports are one of the few types of content during which people still sit through commercials. So you'd figure that the leader in sports broadcasting would be in a pretty safe position in the new media age. But that discounts the fact that nobody is in a pretty safe position in the new media age. Variety: Can a New President and Streaming Service Help ESPN Win Again? "ESPN has weathered any number of tempests in its nearly 40 years. But the perfect storm brewing in Bristol these days is bigger than any that Disney's most valuable asset has ever faced."

+ "Let's say a game starts at 7:30 and they know they're free for 15 minutes and interested in watching a portion of a live NBA game. It might not be a fair consumer proposition that a fan needs to pay $7 when they know they only have time to watch five or 10 minutes of a game." Bloomberg: Turner Sports Service to Let Fans Buy Portions of NBA Games. (This model of watching sports seems sort of terrible. It also seems entirely likely.)

+ Few sports fans will settle for just watching 10 minutes of the Final Four. And that's thanks to one team. This is how Loyola used information and skill -- not luck -- to reach the Final Four.

"Every vocation has consequences for eyesight. Ice fishermen can go snowblind. Welders suffer arc eye. Ships' lookouts hallucinate. Academics develop myopia. And texters—call it an avocation—have blurred vision." Virginia Heffernan in Wired: What are screens doing to our eyes—and our ability to see?

"Yeah, look, it's bizarre. Somebody's going to come to this godforsaken dry golf course and order a beer from a person who could be the winner of the next Nobel Prize for Literature?" NYT Mag: Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?

"What's especially clever about Dex-Net is how it learns to grasp. The software tries picking up objects in a virtual environment, training a deep neural network through trial and error. Even in simulation, this is a laborious task. Crucially, though, Dex-Net can generalize from an object it has seen before to a new one. The robot will even nudge an item to get a better look at it if it isn't sure how it should be grasped." MIT Tech Review: This is the most dexterous robot ever created. (As an added bonus, it was created by my friend, the most-excellent Ken Goldberg.)

If you live in a city that is crowded and where living spaces are wildly overpriced, perhaps you'll find some solace in the fact that the people in Hong Kong have it even worse. The government is soliciting ideas to make more housing available. From the NYT: Live in a Drainpipe? Five Extreme Ideas to Solve Hong Kong's Housing Crisis.

+ HuffPo on the importance of pasta water.

+ Bulletproof, Slow and Full of Wine: This is how Kim Jong-un rolls.