The Offline Report

I'm now a Maddow convert even though we don't get MSNBC in this apartment. I'd resisted her for years, yet last week she finally penetrated my thick boundaries through the fragmented media scrum , and kept my attention long enough to hook me . Now I seek out her show's fragments via youtube. Also earning my browser's **news home** designations lately are Om Malik , The Daily Beast , and the L.A. Times . These are sites I reach for as I try to wean from twitter. I'm also really loving the podcast Gaslit Nation, whose hosts take punk rock angle at synthesizing news of worlwide corruption. My microsoft edge browser's default homepage is set to thedailybeast.com . The Beast presents today's horrifying news in a way that synthesizes it, and informs me of reality while lifting my hopes and spirits with variegated stories on life outside of, well alongside, the horror. To wit: a reporter whose name I don't recognize reviewed a random new little-known sho

It's 2019, the last year in a breakneck decade that saw advances in digital technology that disrupted everything in its path, with little time to close open loops and cauterize frayed systems, leaving many humans in a primitive state. Last December, Californians discovered when the power goes out, so do their backup analog landline communication lines , which was not the case in 2009. This October, we're discovering both a landline phone and a fully charged cell phone are useless during a power outage : When Stephanie Yamkovenko woke up in the Santa Cruz Mountains on Oct. 10, her power was out — and so was her cell phone service. It was in the midst of PG&E’s unprecedented power outages that cut electricity to millions of customers across Northern California. When her husband left for the office, she was alone at home ,where she sometimes works and couldn’t reach him. Her neighbor, who has an AT&T landline, couldn’t connect either. Neither could other neighbors with

Wednesday Oct 30, 2019 James Wolcott's beautifully written review of the Susan Sontag biography, blended with his own memory of her.    lrb.co.uk "I worked at an engineering-heavy university for the past 15 years. Year after year, the freshman class is more and more social app-savvy, and less and less tech-savvy."    reddit.com A reporter who accidentally uncovered a nationwide scam run by fake hosts on AirBnB still didn't leave said hosts a negative review, for fear of receiving downrates herself.    vice.com “Most of us have been taught to ignore that,” she says, and to favor our “saboteur” or “fear self.” The fear self manifests in several ways: “There are the toos,” Hellerer tells me. “ ‘I’m too old,’ ‘I’m too young.’ ” There are the enoughs: “ ‘I won’t make enough money.’ ” And the shoulds: “Mine was ‘No one should go to Stanford and become a career coach.’ ”    thecut.com Startups looking to suck CO2 from the air are suddenly luring big bucks.    tec

Tuesday Oct 8, 2019 The daughter of Eric Schmidt, who proclaimed there is no privacy in 2010, invoked European privacy laws to get herself scrubbed from the Guardian newspaper expose on Cambridge Analytica.    thedailybeast.com Beware of Automated Hiring: It won’t end employment discrimination. In fact, it could make it worse.     nytimes.com My op-ed was published in the NYTimes this morning. You can find the papers I cite here: Automated Employment Discrimination: https://t.co/NgFwiWXkA5 …… Paradox of Automation: https://t.co/AVO3pQHdqG …… I'm hoping to place the first paper with a law review journal soon #AHPs — Ifeoma Ajunwa JD/PhD (@iajunwa) October 8, 2019 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .