Our reality is changing, thanks to media
Nov 8, 2016Facebook needs to embrace its status as a major media company and find ways to improve the average quality of the news stories it recommends to its users.
↩︎ Vox
Check yourself, Facebook
Even though a Washington Post investigation showed that Facebook allowed several false news stories to go viral, it hasn't followed Google's lead in adding fact-checking icons into posts.
Oct 24, 2016The best way to attract and grow an audience for political content on the world’s biggest social network is to eschew factual reporting and instead play to partisan biases using false or misleading information that simply tells people what they want to hear.
↩︎ BuzzFeed
More and more people are deluded into believing themselves experts
538's podcast lays out the problem inherent when, if you ask someone if they feel well-informed, they say “yes.”
Oct 20, 2016The old influence hierarchy has been shattered, replaced by a new mosaic of influence in which social media play a growing role.
↩︎ MIT Media Lab
America’s partisan divide comes down to city v. country
Cracked can usually be counted on for liberal viewpoints and hearty laughs, but their executive editor soberly recasts America’s partisan divide as one between the city and the country. “The cities are less than 4 percent of the land mass, but 62 percent of the population and easily 99 percent of the popular culture. Our movies, shows, songs, and news all radiate out from those blue islands. And if you live in the red, that fucking sucks.”
A central part of his argument is that the media have failed, and not just in their characterization of Trump supporters. There’s a fundamental mismatch between the lifestyles depicted onscreen and what is possible for many Americans, a disjuncture that has borne heavily on rural minds while city folk have gone blithely on. That vacuum was, inevitably, filled.
Oct 20, 2016Twitter has colonized my mind. Almost every day for just under a decade, I have checked the site, have tweeted, retweeted, been subtweeted. My mental map is the frontier surrendered, and Twitter is the empire. To become occupied by a social network is to internalize its gaze. It is to forever carry a doubled view of both your own mind and the platform’s.
↩︎ Real Life
The Editors' Longreads Picks
- An excellent essay on poverty and writing by Starr Davis. Updated May 31, 2022
- Novelist Héctor Tobar tries to understand the 1992 Los Angeles riots through the experiences of a single high school.
- Steven Johnson with a long assessment of the current state of A.I. and language. (The illusion has gotten very good.)
Welcome to The Morning News Tournament of Books, 2017 edition.
- Our championship match is decided in the Tournament of Books, with news of a Rooster surprise debuting this summer. Updated Mar 31, 2017
- In Thursday's action, Reyhan Harmanci sets up a colossal final.
- The Zombie round opens with Buzzfeed's Isaac Fitzgerald reading The Nix and The Underground Railroad.
Все ваши Белый дом принадлежит нам.
- "Will Putin expose the failings of American democracy or will he inadvertently expose the strength of American democracy?" Updated Mar 3, 2017
- Wilbur Ross just wanted to make some money in ethically gray areas (that should've prevented him from taking office).
- Jeff Sessions's spokeswoman can't help but continue to lie.
The oceans are under assault, and not just from the White House and friends.
- Trump's assault on the environment begins with American headwaters. Updated Mar 1, 2017
- Don't just blame the oil companies for destroying the oceans—blame sushi restaurants.
- Nothing escapes the deepest trenches of the ocean floor. Not light, not nutrients, not pollutants.