What I Read or Listened to This Week


Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:

  • My semester with the snowflakes - “To me there is no dishonor in being wrong and learning. There is dishonor in willful ignorance and there is dishonor in disrespect.”

  • The two big flaws of the media’s impeachment coverage — and what went right - “In an unceasing effort to be seen as neutral, journalists time after time fell into the trap of presenting facts and lies as roughly equivalent and then blaming political tribalism for not seeming to know the difference.” “Author Jennifer Weiner warned in a Times opinion piece: “If we keep insisting that impeachment has to entertain us, we’re going to channel-surf our way right out of our democracy.” When that excitement level isn’t met, the media often steps in to provide it. That takes the form of dramatizing the nation’s polarization, compete with laments about “divided America.””

  • How Your Phone Betrays Democracy - “Imagine the following nightmare scenarios: Governments using location data to identify political enemies at major protests. Prosecutors or the police using location information to intimidate criminal defendants into taking plea deals. A rogue employee at an ad-tech location company sharing raw data with a politically motivated group. A megadonor purchasing a location company to help bolster political targeting abilities for his party and using the information to dox protesters. A white supremacist group breaching the insecure servers of a small location startup and learning the home addresses of potential targets.”

  • Total Surveillance Is Not What America Signed Up For - “The price of participating in modern society cannot be turning our lives into open books, diaries of all travels and relationships and wants and desires to be read and passed along by corporations — corporations that are themselves not monitored or tracked in any meaningful way. Americans need to know how their information is being gathered, and whether it is being used to manipulate them. They deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance.”

  • I created my own deepfake—it took two weeks and cost $552

  • Punished by Rewards - Lots of research shows that offering rewards in exchange for doing a task is not effective. Rewards discourage risk taking, make people less interested in the task and ignore the reasons why a person is not doing the task without a reward and rupture relationships by putting people against each other. They discourage learning because the person cares more about convincing the person giving the reward that they have done the task instead of actually learning what they are supposed to learn which makes them less likely to ask questions about what they don’t understand. If you offer kids a reward each book they read they will just start reading short, easy to read books.

  • Why an internet that never forgets is especially bad for young people - “Simply put, in the future, geeky kids remain geeky, dumb jocks remain dumb, and bigots remain bigots. Identities and political perspectives will be hardened in place, not because people are resistant to change but because they won’t be allowed to shed their past. In a world where partisan politics and extremism continue to gain ground, this may be the most dangerous consequence of coming of age in an era when one has nothing left to hide.”

See also