This is actually a pretty compelling read! I have to confess I haven’t read the entirety of the Mueller report.

It feels as if nobody read the Mueller report. That’s a shame, because it’s an important document, depicting possible crimes by a sitting US president.

But not reading it makes sense. As a narrative, the document is a disaster. And at 448 pages, it’s too long to grind through. For long stretches, it reads less like a story and more like a terms-of-service agreement. The instinct to click “next” is strong.

And yet, buried within the Mueller report, there is a narrative that reads in parts like a thriller, like a comedy, like a tragedy — and, most important — like an indictment. The facts are compelling, all the more so because they come not from President Donald Trump’s critics or “fake news” reports, but from Trump’s own handpicked colleagues and associates. The story just needed to be rearranged in a better form.

So we hired Mark Bowden, a journalist and author known for his brilliant works of narrative nonfiction like “Black Hawk Down,” “Killing Pablo,” and “Hue 1968.”

Our assignment for him was simple. Use the interviews and facts laid out in the Mueller report (plus those from reliable, fact-checked sources and published firsthand accounts) to do what he does best: Tell a story recounting Mueller’s report that’s so gripping it will hold your attention (and maybe your congressional representative’s).

https://www.insider.com/mueller-report-rewritten-trump-russia-mark-bowden-archer-2019-7

Fascinating stuff. I got embarrassingly many of the questions wrong.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/world/gapminder-us-ignorance-survey/

I thought this was nicely put:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start
explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without
discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this
(the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.

In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so
common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”.
Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor,
Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he
heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two
sides of a triangle were together greater than a third — “Oh you say
that because you are a man.” “At that moment”, E. Bulver assures us,
“there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is
no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and
explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove
that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or
right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the
wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth
Century.

[…]

Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance
at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of
mine is “wishful thinking.” You can never come to any conclusion by
examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is
to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my
figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance
or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring
about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If
you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain
psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the
doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant — but only after you
have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely
arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems
of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating
about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of
yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of
them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go
on and discover the psychological causes of the error.

From the comments on:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/

This came as a pleasant surprise!

The world is literally a greener place than it was 20 years ago, and
data from NASA satellites has revealed a counterintuitive source for
much of this new foliage: China and India. A new study shows that the
two emerging countries with the world’s biggest populations are leading
the increase in greening on land. The effect stems mainly from ambitious
tree planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both
countries.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china-and-india-dominates-the-greening-of-earth-nasa-study-shows

The expected effects of climate change, according to organizations like the IPCC and the World Bank, are fairly terrifying.

They suggest the planet’s climate will change fast enough to cause widespread droughts and famines, the spread of insect-borne diseases, the displacement of populations, and a worsening of severe poverty.

But here’s one thing they don’t predict: mass civilizational collapse.

Most models warn that as a result of climate change, the incredibly rapid progress
humanity has been making in life expectancies and in ending extreme
poverty will stall; we could even lose decades of the progress we’ve
made. If extreme poverty gets as bad as it was in 1980 due to climate
change, that will be an immeasurable humanitarian failure, and hundreds
of millions of people will die. But the 1980s definitely did have human
civilization, and the future in this version would too.

Another way of looking at it is that the predicted
effects of climate change are very bad, but not in a cinematic way. Sea
levels will rise, but not up to the Statue of Liberty’s neck (if all the
ice in the world melted, sea levels would rise to approximately the statue’s waist).
Lots of people will die, most of them low-income. It’s not surprising
that this gets less viral attention than extreme, extinction-focused
scenarios.

But that isn’t to say extreme scenarios are made up from
nothing. Where do some people conclude that climate change might swallow
up civilization itself?

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/13/18660548/climate-change-human-civilization-existential-risk

Also excellent: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qmHh-cshTCMT8LX0Y5wSQm8FMBhaxhQ8OlOeRLkXIF0

This is fairly clear to programmers and similarly tech-savvy folks, but unclear to many others.

Our data has a secret life in many of the devices we use every day, from talking Alexa speakers to smart TVs. But we’ve got a giant blind spot when it comes to the data companies probing our phones.

You might assume you can count on Apple to sweat all the privacy details. After all, it touted in a recent ad, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” My investigation suggests otherwise.

IPhone apps I discovered tracking me by passing information to third parties — just while I was asleep — include Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit’s Mint, Nike, Spotify, The Washington Post and IBM’s the Weather Channel. One app, the crime-alert service Citizen, shared personally identifiable information in violation of its published privacy policy.

And your iPhone doesn’t only feed data trackers while you sleep. In a single week, I encountered over 5,400 trackers, mostly in apps, not including the incessant Yelp traffic. According to privacy firm Disconnect, which helped test my iPhone, those unwanted trackers would have spewed out 1.5 gigabytes of data over the span of a month. That’s half of an entire basic wireless service plan from AT&T.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/28/its-middle-night-do-you-know-who-your-iphone-is-talking/

Excellent short essay on rethinking the meaning and nature of privacy in the Facebook age.

All of this leads me to see a parallel between privacy law and environmental law, another area where a technological shift forced us to protect a dwindling resource that earlier generations could take for granted.

The idea of passing laws to protect the natural world was not one that came naturally to early Americans. In their experience, the wilderness was something that hungry bears came out of, not an endangered resource that required lawyers to defend. Our mastery over nature was the very measure of our civilization.

But as the balance of power between humans and nature shifted, it became clear that wild spaces could not survive without some kind of protection. […]

In the span of a little more than a century, we went from treating nature as an inexhaustible resource, to defending it piecemeal, to our current recognition that human activity poses an ecological threat to the planet.

https://idlewords.com/2019/06/the_new_wilderness.htm

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote. In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice—a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/1984-george-orwell/590638/

Here’s a good high-level summary of Elizabeth Warren’s policy proposals, with links to each of her plans.

“It’s rare, at this stage of a presidential campaign, somebody distinguishes themselves by the boldness and detail of their policies,” said Robert B. Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. “She is asking the biggest questions that exist, and that is: How do you make a free market work? How do you make capitalism actually work for the many rather than the few?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-2020-policies-platform.html