Outside the Beltway

Out of a sense of fairness, I gave a listen.

The longtime aggregator is now serving mostly non-news content.

You pay for this but they give you that.

The Internets are terrible.

A depressing magazine piece argues it is.

Doing nothing is still a choice, and the legitimacy crisis is here, like it or not.

Our brains are wired to seek approval but may not be equipped to handle our modern existence.

A series of mismatches mean would-be workers can’t find employment despite an abundance of openings.

A new story archetype is all too common.

Making sense of a weird story.

Making it difficult for refuseniks works better than prizes.

The tech giant is even more powerful than you think.

The President announced a whopping 72 initiatives to rein in corporate power and lower prices.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You know, some light weekend thoughts.

Vague reporting makes it hard to know whether the latest scandal is scandalous.

The singer now wishes to be referred to as “they.”

A powerful symbol has been robbed of its significance.

More voice, more votes, more representation.

The latest variant of the “No Justice, No Peace” threat is unhelpful.

The law is out of sync with modern realities.

An internal review is calling for America’s business paper to diversify its appeal.

The Internet killed the newspaper without really replacing it.

Is he bogarting all the good documentaries?

Multiple indicators point to a decline in the representativeness of the American system.

Also some ironic positions on capitalism.

The quasi-monopoly power of the world’s largest bookstore is problematic. Maybe.

Debunking urban legends and Internet rumors is harder than it used to be.

Not.

Outliers are bad places to look for solid support of your argument.

Biden nominees Janet Yellen, Tony Blinken, and Avril Haines are under scrutiny for their financial disclosures.

Thinking about unsupported narratives and a little bit about data usage.

The days of one-stop media shopping are long gone.

Barr finds no fraud.

Some guy you never heard of is the guy.

Up is down. Down is up.

It’s much easier to fund bad information than good.

Having failed to prevent or contain it, aggressive stupidity is now washing over us.

A new company has reinvented the communication tool that people love to hate.

Utterly classic.

The President has been Twitter on their own platform. Now, he’s following through.

The pandemic is highlighting an international shame.

Vastly more people died than needed to and the economy still crashed.

A fiasco wrapped in a clusterfuck.

Cable news “experts” frequently aren’t.

Conferences, sporting events, and even school has been canceled to avoid spreading the pandemic.

How Iowa works.

Ted Cruz is the latest Republican Senator to repeat discredited Kremlin-backed conspiracy theories about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.

The Butterball Turkey Hotline still thrives even in the era of the Internet.

Twitter is banning all political advertising from its site. It is a largely meaningless decision, but it’s still a bad idea.