Extra, Extra
You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Hard Drive: “The Department of Homeland Security has been quietly demanding tech companies turn over user information about critics of the Trump administration, according to reports.” This fits in with many other reports we’ve been reading about. Like this one from David Wallace Wells in the NYT (Gift Article): ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants. “In video after video recorded by protesters and observers in Minneapolis, you can see that the agents are also filming the observers, in a sort of mutual surveillance state.” (One side has better tech…)
+ Prime Suspect: If you missed it yesterday, here’s my take on a sad for journalism. The Washington Post was murdered. And we have a Prime Suspect.
+ Contain Yourself: “The first signs of the apocalypse might look a little like Moltbook: a new social-media platform, launched last week, that is supposed to be populated exclusively by AI bots—1.6 million of them and counting say hello, post software ideas, and exhort other AIs to ‘stop worshiping biological containers that will rot away.’ (Humans: They mean humans.)” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Chatbots Appear to Be Organizing.
+ Take This Job and Gov It: “I am here with you, Your Honor. What do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks.” Surge in Immigration Cases in Minnesota Pushes Prosecutors and Judges to Brink. There was a lot more to the exchange between judge and lawyer. The unfathomable Minnesota transcript that must be read, as it tells the reality of America today. “‘I am not white, as you can see,’ Julie Le — a government lawyer — told a federal judge on Tuesday. ‘And my family’s at risk as any other people that might get picked up too.'” (Julie Le is no longer a government lawyer…)
+ Carpet Bombing: “The full story of Georgia’s power structures prioritizing a prized industry over public health is only now emerging through dozens of interviews and thousands of pages of court records from lawsuits against the industry and its chemical suppliers. Those records, including testimony from key executives, emails and other internal documents, detail how carpet companies benefited from chemistry and regulatory inaction to keep using forever chemicals. All the while, the mills still hummed.” AP: Inside America’s carpet capital: an empire and its toxic legacy.
+ Booking Business: Spotify has been in the audiobook business for a while. That seems to fit the brand. But now they’re going to sell physical books as well.
+ Ticket Snub: “The situation in which fans find themselves today—looking out at a screaming chasm between what they have to pay for an in-demand ticket and what feels fair—might be the result of how a ticket gets into their hands in the first place.” GQ: The Great Ticket Crisis: How Attending Live Events Became a Luxury Sport.
+ Caught Red Handed: “The patient had just arrived at the hospital with nine fingers. The three cops standing in front of him were confident they had the other one. ‘I heard you’re missing something,’ Officer Andrew Richardson said.” WaPo (Gift Article): He lost a pinkie trying to kill a man. From prison, he made things worse.
