Tag: Reading
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Inside the spectacular startup failure of Oomba – The Verge
Inside the spectacular startup failure of Oomba Strip clubs, board games, sugar babies, an office coup — and a whole lot of money via The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/21571690/oomba-startup-work-environment-sex-lies-video-games-gameworks-exworks I reviewed thousands of pages of documents and spoke with over 30 sources about Williams and Oomba, including investors, employees, and business partners. Most described him as narcissistic,…
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How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism | The New Yorker
How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism Even the worst-run startup can beat competitors if investors prop it up. The V.C. firm Benchmark helped enable WeWork to make one wild mistake after another—hoping that its gamble would pay off before disaster struck. via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/30/how-venture-capitalists-are-deforming-capitalism However, as reports of WeWork’s oddities began appearing in…
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Along Russia’s ‘Road of Bones,’ Relics of Suffering and Despair – The New York Times
Along Russia’s ‘Road of Bones,’ Relics of Suffering and Despair (Published 2020) The Kolyma Highway in the Russian Far East once delivered tens of thousands of prisoners to the work camps of Stalin’s gulag. The ruins of that cruel era are still visible today. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/22/world/europe/russia-stalin-gulag-kolyma-magadan.html More than a million prisoners traveled the road, both…
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How a Deadly Police Force Ruled a City | The New Yorker
How a Deadly Police Force Ruled a City After years of impunity, the police in Vallejo, California, took over the city’s politics and threatened its people. via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/23/how-a-deadly-police-force-ruled-a-city Vallejo, a postindustrial city of a hundred and twenty-two thousand people, is best known for its Six Flags amusement park and for its musicians: E-40,…
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» Ethics in Strategy Gaming, Part 1: Panzer General The Digital Antiquarian
Link: https://www.filfre.net/2020/11/ethics-in-strategy-gaming-part-1-panzer-general/ The gallant panzer general gets his orders. (How can you argue with cool uniforms like these?) The game studiously avoids swastikas. In popular culture, the swastika has come to stand for the Gestapo, SS, and other “bad” Nazis, while the older iconography of the Iron Cross or eagle wings stands in for the…
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100 Notable Books of 2020: Full Reviews List – The New York Times
100 Notable Books of 2020 (Published 2020) The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review Link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/books/notable-books.html The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review
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Burkina Faso’s Invisible War – Columbia Journalism Review
Burkina Faso’s Invisible War Amidst conflict, the country’s historically robust press is being muzzled. via Columbia Journalism Review: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/burkina-faso-war-press-coverage.php n the early hours one morning last January, Yacouba Ladji Bama, a forty-two-year-old investigative reporter, woke up at his home, in Ouagadougou, to the sound of shattering glass. He ran outside and found the rear windscreen…
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How a ‘Distorted Culture’ Led Elite Australian Troops to Kill 39 Helpless Afghans – The New York Times
Blood Lust and Demigods: Behind an Australian Force’s Slaughter of Helpless Afghans (Published 2020) The findings of a four-year military inquiry paint a brutal picture of a special forces culture of rewarding the killing of innocents and prisoners and methodically covering it up. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/world/australia/afghanistan-war-crimes.html Commanders ordered junior soldiers to execute prisoners so they could…
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Opinion | Trump’s Mean Policies – The New York Times
Opinion | Four Years of the Trump Administration in Court. One Word Stuck in My Head. (Published 2020) A succession of Trump policies reflected the administration’s spite and heartlessness. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/opinion/trump-policy-mean.html The judge’s 31-page opinion offers an intricate account of the bureaucratic turmoil that has left the mammoth agency and its quarter-million employees without Senate-confirmed…
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The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done | The New Yorker
The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to. via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise-and-fall-of-getting-things-done The ability to better visualize work would also enable smarter processes. If you notice that the influx of administrative demands from other parts of your company is overwhelming you and your co-workers, you’re now motivated…
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The Price of Freedom – Guernica
The Price of Freedom Christina Kim risked everything to escape North Korea’s entrenched gender violence. She almost didn’t make it. via Guernica: https://www.guernicamag.com/the-price-of-freedom/ Each morning, when the adults went to work for the regime, the children stayed home, warmed by coal. One day, a house nearby caught fire, with a boy inside. Kim watched the…
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The Underground Movement Trying to Topple the North Korean Regime | The New Yorker
The Underground Movement Trying to Topple the North Korean Regime Adrian Hong says he leads a group of “freedom fighters” conducting a revolution. Has the U.S. already betrayed them? via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/23/the-underground-movement-trying-to-topple-the-north-korean-regime On the afternoon of February 22, 2019, a tall Asian man rang the doorbell of the North Korean Embassy in Madrid. His…
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Why Trump Carried Out His Pentagon Purge | The New Yorker
Why Trump Carried Out His Pentagon Purge With his Administration coming to a close, the President is still reshaping the government around himself. via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-trump-carried-out-his-pentagon-purge The situation in Afghanistan is tenuous. In February, American and Taliban diplomats signed an agreement, by which the United States would withdraw all of its forces once…
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Death at The U: Who killed Bryan Pata?
Death at The U: Who killed Bryan Pata? Bryan Pata was 22 when someone killed him in the parking lot of his apartment complex after football practice in 2006. Fourteen years later, a police investigation had gone dormant. Then an ESPN investigation revealed some theories — and a suspect. via ESPN.com: https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/30204203/killed-miami-hurricanes-football-player-bryan-pata “I was nowhere…
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A Public Defender’s Lonely Fight Against Family Separation
A Public Defender’s Lonely Fight Against Family Separation Before “zero tolerance” was rolled out nationwide, Sergio Garcia found himself up against a secret pilot project to test family separation in El Paso. via The Intercept: https://theintercept.com/2020/11/01/el-paso-family-separation-border-patrol/ But the Trump administration had no such objections. Even before Trump took office, his chief immigration adviser Stephen Miller,…
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Inside the New York Times’ Heated Reckoning With Itself
Inside the New York Times’ Heated Reckoning With Itself The paper has evolved during the Trump years: less dispassionate, more crusading. This has sparked a raw internal debate over its mission and future. via Intelligencer: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-times-heated-reckoning-with-itself.html What the paper did have — in increasing numbers in fact — was a growing cohort of people who…
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Opinion | We Hereby Dump Trump – The New York Times
Opinion | We Hereby Dump Trump (Published 2020) When it came to planning his postelection fight, Trump was an Apprentice. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/opinion/sunday/trump-biden-election.html It was the same old tired Trump routine we’ve watched for four years, right through the pandemic failure: Beat your chest and bleat that you’re king of the world. Then do nothing except…
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Trump’s Brief Speech from the White House Made America’s Troubles Worse | The New Yorker
Trump’s Brief Speech from the White House Made America’s Troubles Worse What Trump wants is for election officials to stop counting votes that do not favor him, and to make sure to count the ones that do. via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trumps-brief-remarks-from-the-white-house-made-americas-troubles-worse When Donald Trump came out to speak just before 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday,…
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In the Presidential Election, the Worst-Case Scenario Is Happening | The New Yorker
Biden May Win, But Trump Remains the President of Red America His attacks on “the rigged election” are a worst-case scenario for the country. via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-worst-case-election-scenario-is-happening There have been many times, over the past four years, that covering Trump’s Washington felt like a foreign assignment to me, never more so than while…
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Dr. Opioid | HuffPost Latest News
Dr. Opioid William O’Brien was a well-heeled doctor with a thriving Philadelphia medical practice. He was also at the center of a massive painkiller supply chain run by an outlaw biker gang. via HuffPost: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opioid-doctors-philadelphia-william-obrien_n_5f99c7f5c5b6c7fe582b5e31 Anna Marie thought the police should have paid more attention to a strange incident that occurred the day before. She…