Recommended Reading on Navigating Politics on Social Media Feeds and Review Culture
More Recommended Readings from the past few months
We interrupt this (ir)regularly scheduled programming to bring you an important message from artist and activist (and badass friend) Alexandra Jamieson. Fascism Tarot deck by Alexandra Jamieson funds pro-democracy and voting rights organizations leading up to the 2024 Presidential election in the USA.
20-piece art card deck, showing the early warning signs of fascism. Buy a deck. Pull a card. Fight for democracy.
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Revisit Recommended Reading on Art as Resistance, Publishing, and Writing, too to learn more about Alex’s Abortion Trading Cards: Because Abortion Access Is Not a Game.
As I was composing this post to share the backlog of Recommended Reading links with you, I had to spend time reviewing what links were even included here, that I had read over the past few months. Published in June, but obviously very pertinent to the current election cycle is the published research from the Pew Research Center, How Americans Navigate Politics on TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram. This also makes me think about how you can gaze over the shoulder at another commuter’s IG feed and see a wildly different world than the one you enter on your own phone.
Similarly, I think everyone should read this piece by Jaya Saxena, Everybody Gets a Star, about Yelp:
What Yelp has really augured is an entire review culture. Twenty years later, it is now nearly impossible to get through a day without being asked to rate something: your Uber driver’s friendliness, the waiting time at your doctor’s office, the cleanliness of the airport bathroom. It is a culture that professes to value populist truth, the democracy of everyone’s voice getting equal weight. But even within Yelp’s pages, that’s never actually been true. What it values is what all social media values: engagement. A sheer quantity of opinions. It doesn’t matter what you think, as long as you’re rating.
Do you use Yelp anymore? I don’t think I’ve used it in years, and stopped trusting the reviews on it years before that. This article is well-written, albeit unsurprising to me!
Keeping this brief - this is another catch-up Recommended Reading. Scan the sections, pick your poison. I hope you find something interesting.
LISTEN: Freakonomics Radio Podcast - Your Brand’s Spokesperson Just Got Arrested — Now What? It’s hard to know whether the benefits of hiring a celebrity are worth the risk. We dig into one gruesome story of an endorsement gone wrong, and find a surprising result. Interview by Stephen J. Dubner (June 2024)
RECOMMENDED READING - Top of Mind
How Lonely Planet Founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler Revolutionized the Way We Travel Paige McClanahan on the Origins, Development and Popularization of the Travel Guide (June 2024)
Everybody Gets a Star Twenty years after its debut, Yelp has changed how we think about reviewing everything and anything Jaya Saxena (July 2024)
Maybe She’s Born With It. Maybe It’s Neurocosmetics. Skin care is coming for your brain. Hannah Seo (July 2024)
The Coddling of the American Undergraduate: The infantilizing social control of the university. Rita Koganzon (Spring 2024)
How Americans Navigate Politics on TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram The experiences and views of each site’s users – from how much political content they see to the platforms’ impact on democracy Colleen Mcclain, Monica Anderson, Risa Gelles-Watnick (June 2024)
I’m a Trans Man, but I’ve Become My Mother As cooks and homemakers, we both play the role of our family’s pioneer woman Krys Malcolm Belc (July 2024)
The Forgotten Hero of D-Day Waverly Woodson treated men for 30 hours on Omaha Beach. But his heroic record that day became a casualty of entrenched racism, wartime bureaucracy and Pentagon record-keeping. Garrett M Graff (June 2024)
Are you a workaholic? Here’s how to spot the signs In a major shift, psychologists now view an out-of-control compulsion to work as an addiction with its own set of risk factors and consequences Chris Woolston (July 2024)
NEWS / LONG-FORM JOURNALISM
The Meme-ification of Anthony Bourdain The beloved chef’s admirers have given him a distinctly modern kind of digital afterlife — at the center of fondly parodic jokes. Becca Shuh (June 2024)
Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children) Hannah Neeleman, known to her nine million followers as Ballerina Farm, milks cows, gives birth without pain relief and breastfeeds at beauty pageants. Is this an empowering new model of womanhood — or a hammer blow for feminism? Megan Agnew (July 2024)
You Might Be a Late Bloomer The life secrets of those who flailed early but succeeded by old age David Brooks (June 2024)
White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now The meeting-industrial complex has grown to the point that communications has eclipsed creativity as the central skill of modern work. Derek Thompson (July 2024)
The New Age of Endless Parenting More grown kids are in near-constant contact with their family. Some call this a failure to launch—but there’s another way to look at it. Faith Hill (July 2024)
The search for the random numbers that run our lives Our world runs on randomly generated numbers and without them a surprising proportion of modern life would break down. So, why are they so hard to find? Chris Baraniuk (July 2024)
The adoption paradox Even happy families cannot avoid the reality – my reality – that adoption is predicated on transacting the life of a child Fiona Sampson (July 2024)
Emma Carey: The skydiver who survived a 14,000-foot fall Ryan Hockensmith (June 2024)
King of Quarters: The ‘Pay Phone Bandit’ Who Baffled the FBI in the ’80s A rogue genius figured out how to breach coin boxes on the phones, with his haul adding up to as much as $1 million. Jake Rossen (June 2024)
The Queen of Cups When the Spanish Civil War broke out, everyone from Spanish revolutionaries to M.I.6 agents wanted to steal the Holy Grail. Little did they know that a Valencian postwoman had hidden it in her sofa Adam Hay-Nicholls (June 2024)
BUSINESS / STARTUPS / INVESTING
Venture capitalists wanted Sober Sidekick’s founder to take his addiction recovery app in a different direction. Now he’s proving them wrong Jessica Matthews (June 2024)
The spectacular rise and surprising staying power of the George Foreman Grill Mark Dent (July 2024)
Benchmark’s Victor Lazarte on what changes (and what doesn’t) when transitioning from operator to VC Allie Garfinkle (June 2024)
How to Connect With Buyers and Get Your Products on Store Shelves, According to the Founder of Daring and Cadence Ross MacKay, founder and original CEO of the plant-based food company Daring Foods and co-founder of performance beverage brand Cadence, shares the strategies that have landed his products in over 40,000 stores nationwide. Dan Bova (July 2024)
Millenials are losing their cool How marketers are exploiting an entire generation’s fear of adulting Emily Stewart (June 2024)
The Problem With SAFEs In Venture Capital Aram Attar (June 2024)
How to Break into VC in 2024 David Zhou (May 2024)
5 Most Common Mistakes Made By Startup CEOs (And What To Do About Them) Startup advisor Brett Fox shares his expertise on how founding CEOs can approach a number of fundraising hurdles. Nathan Beckord (June 2024)
AI / WEB 3 / CRYPTO
Steven Bartlett’s AI plan will ruin publishing Fred Skulthorp (June 2024)
A ChatGPT for Music Is Here. Inside Suno, the Startup Changing Everything Suno wants everyone to be able to produce their own pro-level songs — but what does that mean for artists? Brian Hiatt (March 2024)
LLMs are not inventions, they are Discoveries. How That Fact Changes Adoption and Outlook. Reframing how you think about generative AI Brett Kinsella (December 2024)
BRAIN / MIND / HEALTH
Ozempic and Wegovy are marketed as a short-term holy grail for weight loss by some startups. Doctors disagree. Jessica Matthews and Alena Botros (July 2024)
Schadenfreude: why do we find joy in the pain felt by others? David P Barash (July 2024)
Culture Creep, and the Impact of Mental Health Awareness on Youths Amy Biancolli, Family Editor (July 2024)
Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Explain Value of Shock Therapy Electroconvulsive therapy is highly effective in treating major depressive disorder, but no one knows why it works. New research suggests it may restore balance between excitation and inhibition in the brain. Elizabeth Landau (March 2024)
Brain-imaging study reveals curiosity as it emerges Columbia University (July 2024)
The Three Loops of Human Consciousness Gregg Henriques (July 2024)
From Toad Toxin to Medicine: The Promise of 5-MeO-DMT The compound stands out for its quick and potent psychedelic effects. Can lab formulations help improve mental health? Lourdes Medrano (June 2024)
The early days of a psychedelic resurgence? Research with illicit drugs to treat anxiety, depression and PTSD inches forward Mark Conley (April 2024)
ART / LITERATURE
Envy, Obsession, and Instagram: On My Mental Breakdown at an Esteemed Writing Conference Brittany Ackerman (July 2024)
The Writer and the Brute One short story offers a key to the question: How could Alice Munro respond to her daughter’s revelations of sexual abuse so callously? Laura Miller (July 2024)
How did what happened to Alice Munro’s daughter stay quiet so long? Start with our uniquely Canadian devotion to silence Andrea Skinner’s memoir amounts to a national horror story, a specifically Canadian conspiracy of silence, and evidence of a national pathology: It reveals so much of our desire not to tell stories. Stephen Marche (July 2024)
No publisher, no problem: the authors earning a fortune by going it alone Self-publishing, once as reputable as pornography, is now the preferred – and most profitable – option for aspiring authors. Why? Ian Winwood (June 2024)
Crooked Parallels: On Alice Munro, Andrea Skinner, and My Mother’s Failure to Protect Me For Jonny Diamond the Separation of the Art From the Artist Isn’t the Question Jonny Diamond (July 2024)
Reading Jill Ciment’s Consent As a Former Teenage Bride Rafia Zakaria Considers Context, Choices and Consequences Across Eras and Cultures (June 2024)
How Schrödinger’s Cat Got Famous Fifty years ago, science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin popularized physics’ most enigmatic feline. Robert P Crease (June 2024)
FICTION / POETRY
THE THEORY THAT GOT US CANCELLED MIGHT WIN US THE NOBEL PRIZE “The Idols” by Thomas Dunn, recommended by Halimah Marcus for Electric Literature (July 2024)
FLORIDA IS A STRANGE WILDERNESS GROWING INSIDE ME An excerpt from STATE OF PARADISE by Laura van den Berg, recommended by Paul Yoon (July 2024)
WHEN FIRE OWNS THE AIR Flash Fiction Tochukwu Okafor (July 2024)
IMPROBABLE MIDNIGHT ERRANDS IN A STARLESS CITY An excerpt from GOODNIGHT TOKYO by Atsuhiro Yoshida, translated and recommended by Haydn Trowell (July 2024)
GRANDMA’S FIANCÉ REQUIRES OUR FULL ADVERSARIAL RESPONSE “No Picnic” by Caroline Beimford, recommended by Wynter K Miller for Electric Literature (June 2024)
A Children’s Story Weike Wang (July 2024)
My Addiction Possessed Me Like a Demon Alexandra Dos Santos (June 2024)
SURVIVOR’S GUILT OF THE SUICIDAL “Last Night,” by the author of THE THIRD HOTEL recommended by Electric Literature (August 2018)
FILM / SCIENCE / OTHER / PERSONAL INTEREST / RANDOM
I Said He Could, So He Did If you give your partner permission to sleep with someone else, he might take that as permission to leave. Kay Bloomberg (July 2024)
“Going To The Movies Used To Be Simple And Spontaneous”: Older Adults Share Little But Meaningful Things That Modern Technology Has Made Obsolete, And It’s Pretty Poignant "Nowadays, everything moves so fast, people have short attention spans, and it's all about how productive you can be and how much money you can make. It's a fast-paced world now, and sometimes it sucks." Dannica Ramirez (June 2024)
Goodbye, Work Friends After four years, as she prepares to hand off to her successor, our workplace advice columnist reflects on the rewards and the frustrations of office life. Roxane Gay (June 2024)
We’re So Back : The “get-your-ex-back” industry is booming. It really shouldn’t be. Luke Winkie (June 2024)
The Difference Between Episodic and Committed Intimacy Paul J Dunion (July 2024)
Human brains found at archaeological sites are surprisingly well-preserved Nora Bradford (March 2024)
Unraveling the Physics of Knitting Georgia Tech (June 2024)
Stop setting your thermostat at 72 Let’s settle the heated debate over your AC, once and for all. Adam Clark Estes (July 2024)
The City’s Quiet Crackdown on Kava Bars The businesses selling kava and kratom have found themselves in a legal no-man’s-land. Chris Crowly (July 2024)
New York Basic Income for Artists Helped One Woman Pay for Healthcare Allie Kelly (July 2024)
Photos From 1911 Show New York Struggling in Deadly Heatwave Matt Growcoot (July 2024)