Work & the Project of Living

Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working: It’s about buying free time. The vast majority of workers are happier when they spend more hours with family, friends, and partners, according to research conducted by Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. In one study, she concluded that the happiest young workers were those who said around the time of their college graduation that they preferred careers that gave them time away from the office to focus on their relationships and their hobbies.

How quaint that sounds. But it’s the same perspective that inspired the economist John Maynard Keynes to predict in 1930 that Americans would eventually have five-day weekends, rather than five-day weeks. It is the belief—the faith, even—that work is not life’s product, but its currency. What we choose to buy with it is the ultimate project of living.

Derek Thompson writing in The Atlantic 

Articles of Interest - March 4

***SOCIAL MEDIA 

Why the Life-Insurance Industry Wants to Creep on Your Instagram  New Yorker

Apps Give Private Data To Facebook Without User's Knowledge or Permission  NPR 

Facebook Slammed For Listing Users Phone Numbers  Media Post

Two years after going public, Snap’s problems are still all about growth  Recode

***TECHNOLOGY 

China’s CRISPR twins might have had their brains inadvertently enhanced  MIT Technology Review 

Silicon Valley Raises Questions On Ethics Of New Technology And Social Media  NPR

On Remote pacific island children now get life-saving vaccines from drones  Fast Company

***JOURNALISM

The New York Times is taking its opinion video coverage in a new, YouTube direction  Harvard’s Nieman Lab

Poll: How does the public think journalism happens?  Columbia Journalism Review 

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

What you need to know before starting your Journalism crowdfunding campaign  European Journalism Centre

PAC-Connected Activists Set Up ‘Local News’ Outlets  Snopes

***FAKE NEWS 

This 21-year-old tweeted lies about Robert Mueller and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now, he’s eyeing the 2020 election  USA Today

How to spot fake photos online  Fast Company

The anti-vaxxers' impact  The Week 

The Fake Sex Doctor Who Conned the Media Into Publicizing His Bizarre Research  Gizmodo 

Widower, stepdaughter who blamed panhandler for woman's stabbing death in Baltimore arrested in her killing  Baltimore Sun 

***FAKE NEWS: MOMO

The Momo Challenge Is Not Real  The Atlantic

How local TV news stations are playing a major (and enthusiastic) role in spreading the Momo hoax   Harvard’s Nieman Lab

How to Not Fall for Viral Scares Like Momo  Wired 

Schools, police and media told to stop promoting Momo hoax  The Guardian

***MOBILE  

Your smartphone screen is probably disgusting: Here's how to clean it  USA Today  

Want a Folding Phone? Hold out for Glass  Wired 

***PRIVACY & SECURITY 

Why Are Bots Unable to Check "I Am Not a Robot" Checkboxes?  Quora

‘You can track everything’: the parents who digitise their babies’ lives  The Guardian

Major Airlines Confirmed There Are Cameras On Some Seatback Entertainment Screens  Bustle

A second life for the 'do not track' setting—with teeth  Wired  

How to set up a VPN for increased security and privacy  The Verge

Social networks put your privacy at risk, even when you don’t have an account  Quartz

***PRODUCING MEDIA

What’s new in WordPress 5.0?  Creative Bloq

This app makes it easy to create shareable video content, and it's on sale  Mashable 

***INTERNET

The surprisingly complex journey a text message takes every time we hit 'send.'   Vice

FTC ruling sees Musical.ly (TikTok) fined $5.7M for violating children’s privacy law, app updated with age gate  Tech Crunch  

The Life of a Comment Moderator for a Right-Wing Website  New York Times

***BIG DATA & AI 

The qualities that make for a successful data science team  KD Nuggets 

One area where Spark and Hadoop are having an especially strong impact revolves around cancer research  Datanami  

***PERSONAL GROWTH 

The Mental Fog Begins to Lift  Becoming (my blog)

Crossing Divides: The friends who are good for your brain  BBC News

A Harvard Psychologist Shows How to Change Those Limiting Beliefs You Still Have About Yourself Inc

***GRAMMAR 

The three most useless English language “rules” you can ignore  Quartz 

When Did the Verb “To Be” Enter the English Language?  Daily Jstor 

***WRITING & READING

The Surprising Origin Of Using Symbols Like #$%@! To Represent Curse Words In Print (video)  Digg

Vatican spokesman Fr. Thomas Rosica resigns from college board after plagiarism apology; Jesuits withdraw award  Catholic News Agency 

Self-plagiarism: When is re-purposing text ethically justifiable?  London School of Economics & Political Science  

Plagiarize-Proof Your Writing Assignments  Faculty Focus

***LITERATURE

Sorry, but Jane Eyre Isn’t the Romance You Want It to Be  Daily Jstor 

***GENDER   

Cycling race in Belgium is delayed because a woman almost caught the male riders – who started first Chicago Tribune

How neuroscience is exploding the myth of male and female brains  New Scientist  

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

France: An old hatred grows stronger  The Week  

Bill Jenkins, Who Tried to Halt Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Dies at 73  New York Times 

***FREE SPEECH

Trump says he'll issue order protecting campus free speech  Associated Press 

The Tyranny Of Copyright: How A Once-Humble Legal Issue Has Tormented A Generation Of Speech  Tech Dirt  

***LEGAL ISSUES 

In Retrospect, Expert’s ‘How To Make Child Pornography’ Exhibit Might Have Been A Bad Idea  Above the Law

Supreme Court To Decide Fate Of World War I Memorial Cross On Public Land  NPR

How a flare-up at Harvard Law could undermine legal rights for everybody else  The Week 

Disability Rights Group Sues San Diego Over Scooters On Sidewalks  NPR

***LEGAL ISSUES: COPYRIGHT

Fortnite dance lawsuits are bad for copyright and bad for culture  The Verg

Community Theaters Kill 'Mockingbird' Productions After Lawsuit Threat  NPR

***CRIME 

California Keeps a Secret List of Criminal Cops But Says You Can't Have It  KQED

Supreme Court: Nebraska county owes $28M for wrongful convictions  Associated Press 

Unable to Post Bail? You Will Pay for That for Many Years  New York Times 

***RELIGION

Christian radio personality 'Uncle Charlie' dies  Christian Post  

Southern Baptist group clears 6 churches of violating sex abuse standards  Christian Post

Nazirite firefighter who promised God not to cut hair settles with Utica on religious lawsuit  Utica Observer Dispatch

***RELIGION OUTSIDE THE U.S.

South Africa funeral firm to sue pastor for 'resurrection stunt'  BBC News

Egyptian Christians Left With Nowhere To Pray But The Street  NPR

***MEGACHURCHES 

How a Radio Shock Jock Helped Bring Down a Megachurch Pastor  Slate

Megachurch pastor Bill Hybels resigns from Willow Creek after women allege misconduct  The Washington Post 

***MISSIONARIES 

Gospel for Asia Settles Lawsuit with $37 Million Refund to Donors  Christianity Today

FBI Raid of Christian Missionary’s Home Found Thousands of Bones  Indy Star

***RELIGION & LGBTQ   

Methodists reject a proposal to allow openly gay clergy and same-sex marriage  CNN

Lesbian Bishop Responds To LGBTQ Ban In United Methodist Church  NPR

3 big US churches in turmoil over sex abuse, LGBT policy  PBS 

Growing Closer After Changing Faiths  NPR 

Rift over gay rights comes as United Methodists in U.S. have become more accepting of homosexuality  Pew Research Center

***RELIGION AND POLITICS 

Arkansas church insists sign saying ‘heaven has strict immigration laws’ was not political  Fox News 

***GOOD NEWS 

The Book Catapult stayed open by the grace of its competitors  The Washington Post 

'That tank saved my life:' 95-year-old World War II veteran gets surprise of a lifetime  KETV

Montreal man walks the city streets, donating coins he finds to charity  Canadian Broadcasting Company 

Man restores, donates dozens of power wheelchairs - from a wheelchair  KARE

Oklahoma teacher, book collector makes hobby of reuniting families with meaningful bookmarks  KFOR

Teacher cuts waist-length hair to support 5-year-old girl bullied for short haircut  WLOX

Meet the street nun helping people make a living from New York's cans  The Guardian

National Geographic 2019 Adventurer of the Year  National Geographic 

***REALLY?!

Top Florida Man Stories of All Time  Miami Herald 

Woman goes to Olive Garden in Utah and announces she stabbed her mother St. Louis Tribune

***ART & DESIGN

You Are Killing Me with Your Tiny Fonts  GQ

A Brief History of LGBT+ Design  Try Design Lab 

Apple picks the winners of its shot on an iPhone photo contest  Apple

The Fascinating Legal Conundrum Facing Banksy  Fast Company

The Secrets of the World's Greatest Art Thief  GQ

The Favourite is an Oscar-nominated design masterpiece  Fast Company

Frida Kahlo’s Forgotten Politics  Jstor

When Gorgeous Architectural Landmarks Are Also Monuments to Fascism  Atlas Obscura  

***MUSIC  

A Guide to Harry Nilsson, Who You've Loved Forever Without Knowing It  Noisey

Dido Returns With Family-Focused Album 'Still On My Mind'  NPR

Scam Season Comes for the Orchestra  Vulture 

***FILM

U.S. Music Industry Posts Third Straight Year of Double-Digit Growth  Variety

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA  

Digital ads expected to crush everything else this year  Axios 

***BUSINESS & FINANCE

When the Bully Is the Boss  New York Times

Walmart Is Eliminating People Greeters. Workers With Disabilities Feel Targeted  NPR

Five big winners tell what happens when you hit the jackpot, from free milk for life to a mountain of KFC  The Guardian

For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising identity, transcendence, and community, but failing to deliver  The Atlantic 

Amazon conspicuously fails to safeguard the interests of small businesses while advancing its own at their expense  Inc 

Highly paid architects, TV producers, actors, and accountants live in a work culture that favor the already affluent  The Atlantic

Is Business School a Waste of Time?  Inc. 

***JOB SEARCH ADVICE 

Delete these eight words from your resume immediately  Yahoo News 

Want to Save Everyone's Time in a Job Interview? The Top 6 Questions Smart Companies Are Asking Now  Inc

LinkedIn Just Added a Flurry of Features for Members Looking for New Positions  Ad Week 

***FREELANCING 

Ten tips for freelance writing  Story Bench  

How Freelance Labor Became the Unsung Casualty of Media Layoffs  The Observer

Atlas Obscura is looking for freelance pitches for upcoming editions 

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT 

Thousands Of Immigrant Children Say They Have Been Sexually Abused While In US Custody  BuzzFeed News  

Sexual harassment rife in Australian science, suggests first workplace survey  Nature

***SOCIAL ISSUES 

Woman Delivers Stillborn Baby While in ICE Custody  New York Times

Marine's death from flesh-eating bacteria revealed military failures, thanks to mother refusing to let son die in vain  Newsweek 

Nearly Half of American jail inmates have a mental illness and two-thirds have a drug addition New Yorker

Colonialists are coming for blood—literally  Wired

***ENVIRONMENT 

Google and DeepMind are using AI to predict the energy output of wind farms  The Verge

Meet The White House's New Chief Climate Change Skeptic  NPR 

***VACCINES 

Arizona lawmaker calls mandatory measles vaccine 'communist' amid fight to control outbreaks  NBC News

Growing up unvaccinated: My anti-vaxx mother made me a health risk for the whole community USA Today 

Measles Outbreaks Prompt More States To Restrict Vaccine Exemptions  NPR

***HEALTH RESEARCH 

Semi-identical twins 'identified for only the second time'  BBC News 

Sleeping Late on Weekends Doesn’t Compensate for week-long exhaustion  Research Highlights    

FDA Expected To Approve Esketamine Nasal Spray For Depression  NPR  

Machine learning is far from ready for clinical practice of medicine  Health Care IT news

***TRAVEL 

Here are the Americans speaking at a hate group friendly with sanctioned Russian oligarchs  Think Progress

***FOOD

Drinkable' potato chips: the products keeping your phone grease-free  The Guardian

Why Are Pretzels Shaped Like That? And 17 Other Food Mysteries, Solved  The Daily Meal 

***CHILDREN

Being surrounded by green space in childhood may improve mental health of adults  SciTech

Give your kid a name that travels well  The Week 

How To Communicate With Children On Difficult Subjects Such As Death  NPR

Storytelling Instead Of Scolding: Inuit Say It Makes Their Children More Cool-Headed  NPR

***RELATIONSHIPS

Kentucky man mistakenly gets wife turnips instead of tulips  WKRN 

Love, Marriage, and the ‘Wife Allowance’  Topic 

***ANIMALS 

Are Dog Parks Exclusionary?  CityLab  

Former NFL player travels cross-country with his dog  USA Today 

‘Pot dogs’ a growing concern for pet owners  Cape Cod Times

***SCIENCE

The Unsolved Mystery of the Earth Blobs  Earth & Space Science News 

Lawmaker: Ky. official state mineral is a rock, state rock is a mineral  WAVE

***NEUROSCIENCE  

Doctors removed one-sixth of this child’s brain — and what was left did something incredible  One Zero

How did reading and writing evolve? Neuroscience gives a clue  Phys.org 

***PHILOSOPHY

How Friedrich Nietzsche used ideas from the Ancient Cynics to explore the death of God and the nature of morality  Aeon

***PRODUCTIVITY 

There’s an optimal way to structure your day—and it’s not the 8-hour workday  Quartz

6 Tips to Maximize Productivity When You Have ADHD  Entrepreneur 

***HISTORY 

What's the Real American Story? (video)  Robert Reich 

Almost everything you know about U.S. borders is wrong  Chicago Tribune   

Border Walls are Symbols of Failure  Jstor

***RESEARCH 

Scientific Integrity Principles and Best Practices: Recommendations from a Scientific Integrity Consortium  SpringerLink 

Correlations between submission and acceptance of papers in peer review journals  SpringerLink

Preprints as Final Publication (opinion)  BioSerendipity  

Personality and fatal diseases: Revisiting a scientific scandal  Sage 

A Darpa program aims to assign a “credibility score” to research findings in the social and behavioral sciences which have been hit hard by the reproducibility crisis  Wired

***HIGHER ED

Most Americans don’t realize state funding for Higher Ed fell by billions  PBS 

The costs of academic publishing are absurd: The University of California is fighting back  Vox  

A warning about reinventing universities around technology: How UT-Austin’s Bold Plan for Reinvention Went Belly Up  Chronicle of Higher Ed

A Purdue University pilot program that blocked access to Netflix and other streaming sites in lecture halls is being rolled out across all academic spaces on campus  Inside Higher Ed  

How Political Science Became Irrelevant: The field turned its back on the Beltway  Chronicle of Higher Ed 

***CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS  

Mike Pence to give commencement speech at Liberty  The Hill University   

Facing Title IX investigation, Christian university lets pregnant students stay in dorms  The College Fix

***HUMANITIES  

MIT President: the world needs engineers with a better grounding in the liberal arts, i.e.,there’s no such thing as a “tech person” in the age of AI  MIT Tech Review  

***TEACHING 

Almost 10,000 students went to this online school last year. 851 stayed the whole time Chalkbeat 

My Top 6 Books on Pedagogy  Inside Higher Ed 

***ACADEMIC LIFE 

College wins lawsuit to cut bad professor's pay  Washington Examiner 

Ex-Virginia Tech biotech professor found guilty of grant fraud  The Roanoke Times     

Self-esteem, self-symbolizing, and academic recognition: behavioral evidence from curricula vitae  SpringerLink

A professor is accused of stealing a student's invention to make millions  CNN

New video shows exactly what was said during a heated discussion at the annual gathering of classicists in January. Does it change anything?  Inside Higher Ed

***STUDENT MEDIA  

Am I obligated to take down an embarrassing story if the subject of it asks?  Student Press Law Center

***STUDENT LIFE

Where Graduates Move After College  Wall Street Journal  

Millennials Face $1 Trillion Debt as Student Loans Pile Up  Bloomberg

University removed a student's satire website on race relations -- and restored it only after faced with legal pressure  Inside Higher Ed 

The Mental Fog Begins to Lift

Over time, you begin to see hints and glimmers of a larger world outside the prison of your sadness. The conscious mind takes hold of some shred of beauty or love. And then more shreds, until you begin to think maybe, just maybe, there is something better on the far side of despair.

I have no doubt that I will eventually repeat the cycle of depression. But now I have some self-knowledge that can’t be taken away. I know that — when I’m in my right mind — I choose hope.

Michael Gerson, published in the Washington Post 

 

When Kids Realize Their Whole Life Is Already Online

Jaime Putnam, a mom in Georgia, said she has started to be more mindful of the fact that many of her kids’ friends don’t yet know how much information about themselves is out there. Recently she saw on social media that one of her child’s friends got a puppy. She brought it up when she next saw him, and he looked at her, horrified. He had no idea how she had learned that seemingly private information. “It made me realize these kids don’t know what’s being posted all the time,” she said. Now she’s careful about what she reveals. “It kind of feels like you’re maybe crossing a line telling them everything you know about them.”

Taylor Lorenz writing in The Atlantic

articles of interest - Feb 25

***JOURNALISM

An Arizona cop threatened to arrest a 12-year-old journalist: She wasn’t backing down  Washington Post 

Private employers: You can’t forbid your workers from talking to journalists  Poynter  

Coaching for women in journalism  Digital Women Leaders 

Five myths about journalism  The Washington Post 

RCFP receives $10 million investment from the Knight Foundation  Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press 

Chart: How the definition of “journalist” is changing  Recode

***JOURNALISM OUTSIDE THE U.S. 

Rethinking foreign reporting at the AP  Columbia Journalism Review

Economic woes hurt Chinese journalists as much as censorship does  Economist

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM 

Knight Foundation putting $300 million toward rebuilding local news  Poynter

Google May Employ More People Than the Entire U.S. Newspaper Industry  Bloomberg

23 Million Patrons of California's Public Libraries Can Now Read The New York Times for Free Online  Open Culture

National Enquirer’s biggest investors include California taxpayers and state workers Los Angeles Times

***FAKE NEWS

Liberals and Conservatives Are Both Susceptible to Fake News, but for Different Reasons   Scientific American Blog Network

Students with ADHD less likely to enroll in post-secondary education, study says  CTV News

The Imperfect Truth About Finding Facts in a World of Fakes  Wired 

Twitter Trolls And 2020  NPR 

It will take more than NewsGuard’s team of journalists to stop the spread of fake news  Recode

***TECHNOLOGY

Apple is prioritizing AR — and that’s a good thing  VentureBeat 

***BIG DATA & AI 

A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be an artist  MIT Tech Review  

Two satellites almost crashed—here’s how they dodged it  Wired 

“Machine-learning techniques used by thousands of scientists to analyse data are producing results that are misleading and often completely wrong”  BBC 

Treat Failure like a Scientist

Two profs have created a web game where you try to determine which of two images is real and which is generated by the neural net  Digg 

This algorithm dreams up convincing articles and shows how AI could power disinformation campaigns filled with fake news  Medium 

Can We Trust Scientific Discoveries Made Using Machine Learning?  Technology Networks  

 ***SOCIAL MEDIA 

Pinterest is blocking search results about vaccines to protect users from misinformation  Washington Post

Snapchat is in the middle of an identity crisis  Engadget 

How to catch a catfisher  The Guardian

America’s cops take an interest in social media  Economist  

Japanese teen's aborted bid to hitchhike across the United States divides social media  Japan Times 

Twitch is a video streaming platform where millions of people broadcast their lives in real-time. Like unedited, raw, reality TV  WNYC 

***YOUTUBE

50 Amazing Skills You Can Learn on YouTube  Mental Floss 

A pediatrician exposes suicide tips for children hidden in videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids  Washington Post 

***FACEBOOK  

Facebook decided which users are interested in Nazis — and let advertisers target them directly  LA Times

Facebook's content moderation a mess, employees outraged, contractors have PTSD: Reports  BongBong

The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America  The Verge

***PRIVACY & SECURITY 

ATM Hacking Has Gotten So Easy, the Malware's a Game  Wired 

California Data Privacy Proposal May Give Law Tough New Teeth  Bloomberg

Google 'sorry' for hiding SECRET microphone in home camera – and says it 'forgot' to tell everyone  The Sun 

Android is helping kill passwords on a billion devices  Wired 

***PRODUCING MEDIA

National Geographic hit 100 million Instagram followers: To celebrate, it wants your images for free  Vox 

***INTERNET

Millions of websites threatened by highly critical code-execution bug in Drupal  Ars Technica 

Heartbreaking: This Man Works For A Website  Clickhole

Google Updates Test My Site Speed Tool  Media Post  

***PERSONAL GROWTH 

The most important factor in a relationship  Becoming (my blog) 

The Good-Enough Life: The desire for greatness can be an obstacle to our own potential (opinion) New York Times

***TEACHING 

Students have better educational outcomes in courses taught by those who have "growth mind-sets" than those who believe intelligence is fixed  Inside Higher Ed    

How One Professor Made Her Assignments More Relevant  The Chronicle of Higher Education

***WRITING & READING 

I stopped using exclamation points and lost all my friends  Wired 

The Philosophy of Creative Writing  Los Angeles Review of Books

***LANGUAGE

The surprising revival of the Hawaiian language  Economist

More children around the world are being taught in English, often badly  Economist

***LITERATURE

The myth of Pandora’s box (YouTube)  TEDx  

23 of the most unforgettable final sentences in fiction  Washington Post 

***GENDER   

The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2019  Women’s Media Center 

Women now more educated than men, but lag in workforce  Axios

How a women-led news organization is holding the powerful to account in Brazil  International Consortium of Investigative Journalist

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

Alabama newspaper editor calls on KKK to lynch Democrats  BBC  

Man shouts Nazi slogans, flashes gun at local coffee shop  The Plainsman

Athletes and activists who modeled themselves off Colin Kaepernick have continued their campaigns  Inside Higher Ed

Should White Boys Still Be Allowed to Talk?’ Student's essay sets off intense debate  Inside Higher Ed 

Americans Remain Deeply Ambivalent About Diversity  The Atlantic 

In 'Won Over,' Judge Chronicles His Evolution on Questions of Race After Growing Up in Jim Crow Mississippi (free registration req.’ed)  Law.com 

NPR host Lulu-Garcia Navarro on racial and gender diversity in news  Vox

Doctors and Racial Bias: Still a Long Way to Go  New York Times 

***LEGAL ISSUES 

Justice Clarence Thomas calls for reconsideration of landmark libel case  CNN

Copyright Office Refuses Registration for 'Fresh Prince' Star Alfonso Ribeiro's "Carlton Dance"  Hollywood Reporter

Emoji are showing up in court cases exponentially, and courts aren’t prepared  The Verge

Justice Thomas Assails Landmark US Libel Ruling That Protects Media  Voice of America

Covington Catholic Teen Nick Sandmann Files Defamation Suit Against The Washington Post; Fail To List Any Actual Defamation  TechDirt  

US Supreme Court to interpret FOIA Exemption on Trade Secrets  Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press 

Judge decides that twin son of binational gay couple entitled to birthright U.S. citizenship  LA Times

***RELIGION

Harvest Bible Chapel founder's sons resign as pastors  Daily Herald 

United Methodists’ LGBT Vote Will Reshape the Denomination  Christianity Today   

Why a centuries-old religious dispute over Ukraine's Orthodox Church matters today  The Conversation 

Are Christian leaders more likely to commit sexual sin? (opinion)  Christianity Today  

***RELIGION & SEXUAL ABUSE 

Southern Baptist churches hired dozens of leaders previously accused of sex offenses  Houston Chronicle  

Southern Baptists Announce Plans to Address Sexual Abuse  New York Times

***RELIGION AND THE LAW 

Culture wars heat up at the Supreme Court as justices consider whether giant World War II memorial cross can stay  CNBC 

***GOOD NEWS

N.J. cop’s $100 tip, touching note for pregnant diner waitress brought her to tears  NewJersey.com 

D.C. restaurant feeds the poor and homeless every single day  WJLA-TV   

103-year-old sworn in as junior ranger at Grand Canyon National Park  Good Morning America

Who says I can’t: How could someone born without arms or legs, who's never held a football, teach high school players how to throw, tackle or block?  ESPN 

24-year-old woman becomes first openly autistic person to practice law in Florida  WFLA  

***ART & DESIGN

The Artist Behind the Famous Bathroom Selfies  The Cut

Never forget David Bowie masterminded "the biggest art hoax in history"  Salon

Graphic Novels in the Age of Trump  New York Times

***MUSIC 

Yesterday Trailer (video)  

Reporter Jim DeRogatis On R. Kelly Charges  NPR

Why Musicians Are Starting Their Own Podcasts — And Why The Podcast Industry Should Pay Attention  Bello Collective  

***FILM

What's Up, Documentary? An 'Undeniable Golden Age' For Filmmakers  NPR 

The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation Images can falsify as well as depict reality; they can mislead as well as inspire  New York Times 

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA  

Fornite’s January Revenue Dropped 48% in January but the lull likely won’t last long  TechCrunch 

***JOBS/INTERNSHIPS

This Is the Fastest Growing Job in America Right Now  Money

Resume Issues? This Organization Helps Young Adults Land Internships  NPR

Advice for student journalists applying to internships the SF Chronicle EIC  

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT 

A federal appeals court found that Iowa State officials were not indifferent to a sexual assault survivor when they declined to move the student she accused of rape  Inside Higher Ed

Sex trafficking, prostitution is anything but a 'victimless crime,' experts say  USA Today 

48% of Female Undergrads at Duke Say They Were Sexually Assaulted While Enrolled The Chronicle of Higher Education 

***SOCIAL ISSUES  

Record High # of Americans Name Government as Most Important Problem  Gallup

How to Create a Social Media Content Strategy  Social Media Today

Robert Kraft prostitution scandal exposes depth of modern slavery, sex trafficking industry  USA Today

***BUSINESS & FINANCE 

6 stats that should surprise companies when dealing with office romances  Forbes

A New Benefit: Some Companies Help Workers Pay Down Student Loans  NPR  

***HEALTH

Extreme fasting: how Silicon Valley is rebranding eating disorders  The Guardian

The Devastating Allure of Medical Miracles  Wired 

Anaesthetists say patients at risk after flawed oxygen guidelines  The Guardian  

Tens of thousands of Americans die each year from opioid overdoses The federal response remains sluggish and inadequate  Economist  

The most effective form of exercise isn’t “exercise” at all  Quartz

***VACCINES 

High risk: anti-vaxxers in the delivery ward  The Guardian   

YouTube Just Demonetized Anti-Vax Channels  BuzzFeed News  

Why women are leading the anti-vaxx movement  Medium

How One Woman Is Working To Educate Parents On Vaccinations  NPR

***TRAVEL 

Grand Canyon tourists exposed to radiation, safety manager says  AzCentral

China bars millions from travel for 'social credit' offenses  SFGate

***FOOD 

The Chicken Is Local, But Was It Happy? GPS Now Tells The Life Story Of Your Poultry  NPR

***CHILDREN 

How to Grant Your Child an Inner Life  New Yorker 

When Kids Realize Their Whole Life Is Already Online: Googling yourself has become a rite of passage  The Atlantic 

What I Gave My Kid Instead of a Smartphone  Human Parts 

***ANIMALS  

Man suffering ‘widow maker’ heart attack says dog saved his life  Fox-5

Dog's emotional reaction to 'The Lion King' movie (video)  ABC-11

Florida Church Offers Dog-Friendly Service (audio)  NPR

***PSYCHOLOGY 

Anger Can Be Contagious: Here's How To Stop The Spread  NPR 

The Psychiatrist Who Believed People Could Tell the Future  The New Yorker

***PHILOSOPHY 

How the World Thinks (podcast)  History Extra 

***HISTORY 

The Story of Storytelling What the hidden relationships of ancient folktales reveal about their evolution—and our own  Harpers 

Americans’ ignorance of history is a national scandal  New York Times 

When Nazis Took Manhattan  NPR   

***RESEARCH 

Ways to Detect p-hacking  Quora 

There’s not really a culture of strong criticism of bad science that happens through peer review  NPR 

***HIGHER ED 

How the US government created a fake university to snare immigrant students  The Guardian   

Amherst College goes 5 days without the internet  Inside Higher Ed

On Campuses, Electric Scooters Meet Speed Bumps  The Chronicle of Higher Education 

What Single Moms Need to Succeed in College  Inside Higher Ed 

New study finds “important deficiencies” in university reports of misconduct  Retraction Watch 

Revolt at USC Over Dean’s Ouster  Inside Higher Ed

Most Americans say colleges should not consider race or ethnicity in  admissions  Pew Research Center

Cuts and talk of ending multiyear contracts at evangelical Christian university raise worries some faculty members are going to be targeted based on ideology  Inside Higher Ed   

Judges side with Missouri Baptist Convention in its long-running legal battle with Missouri Baptist University  News Tribune  

***ACADEMIC LIFE  

A Vanderbilt faculty member struggles to gain tenure bec of her MeToo activism  Inside Higher Ed

UC Berkeley suspends prominent professor accused of sexual harassment  SF Chronicle

The most important factor in a relationship

Communication, no matter how open, transparent and disciplined, will always break down at some point. Conflicts are ultimately unavoidable, and feelings will always be hurt.

And the only thing that can save you and your partner, that can cushion you both to the hard landing of human fallibility, is an unerring respect for one another, the fact that you hold each other in high esteem, believe in one another — often more than you each believe in yourselves — and trust that your partner is doing his/her best with what they’ve got.

Without that bedrock of respect underneath you, you will doubt each other’s intentions. You will judge their choices and encroach on their independence. You will feel the need to hide things from one another for fear of criticism. And this is when the cracks in the edifice begin to appear.

You must also respect yourself. Because without that self-respect, you will not feel worthy of the respect afforded by your partner. You will be unwilling to accept it and you will find ways to undermine it. You will constantly feel the need to compensate and prove yourself worthy of love, which will just backfire.

Respect for your partner and respect for yourself are intertwined. As a reader named Olov put it, “Respect yourself and your wife. Never talk badly to or about her. If you don’t respect your wife, you don’t respect yourself. You chose her – live up to that choice.”

Mark Manson writing in Business Insider 

Treat Failure like a Scientist

When a scientist runs an experiment, there are all sorts of results that could happen. Some results are positive and some are negative, but all of them are data points. Each result is a piece of data that can ultimately lead to an answer.

And that’s exactly how a scientist treats failure: as another data point.

This is much different than how society often talks about failure. For most of us, failure feels like an indication of who we are as a person.

Failing a test means you’re not smart enough. Failing to get fit means you’re undesirable. Failing in business means you don’t have what it takes. Failing at art means you’re not creative. And so on.

But for the scientist, a negative result is not an indication that they are a bad scientist. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Proving a hypothesis wrong is often just as useful as proving it right because you learned something along the way.

Your failures are simply data points that can help lead you to the right answer.

James Clear 

An expert on human blind spots gives advice on how to think

A lot of the issues or problems we get into, we get into because we’re doing it all by ourselves. We’re relying on ourselves. We’re making decisions as our own island, if you will. And if we consult, chat, schmooze with other people, often we learn things or get different perspectives that can be quite helpful.

An active social life, active social bonds, in many different ways tends to be something that’s healthy for people. Social bonds can also be informationally healthy as well. So that’s more on a top, more abstract level, if you will. That is, don’t try to do it yourself. Doing it yourself is when you get into trouble.

David Dunning quoted in Vox 

Articles of Interest - week of Feb 18

***BIG DATA & AI 

IBM's AI loses debate to a human  Cnet  

Update on that study of p-hacking  Stat Modeling 

7 things we’ve learned about computer algorithms  Pew Research Center

“Someone who has malicious intent would be able to generate high-quality fake news” with this the AI text generator  Wired 

Major predictive policing algorithm is fundamentally flawed  Motherboard  

A look under the hood of an automated fake-news detection system  MIT 

Mirrorworld is all around us already—this marriage of the virtual and the physical may spark the next big tach platform  Wired

Some ideas on how to make use of Kaggle to get the data science ball rolling  Toward Data Science

***TECHNOLOGY

16% of US adults now own smartwatches  Tech Crunch 

How Should Self-Driving Cars Choose Who Not to Kill?  Medium   

***SOCIAL MEDIA 

Facebook’s Future Is Private Groups, for Better and Worse  Bloomberg  

Why Mark Zuckerberg's Writing Style Erodes Our Trust in Facebook  The Blog of Slab 

The Tinder algorithm, explained  Vox  

Teenage journalists memorialize hundreds of gun-violence victims  Columbia Journalism Review     

***MOBILE 

US iPhone users spent, on average, $79 on apps last year, up 36% from 2017  Tech Crunch  

***PRIVACY & SECURITY 

Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism  The Guardian

Electric scooter reportedly vulnerable to hijacking hack  Cnet 

***PRODUCING MEDIA

The best WordPress hosting 2019  Tech Radar

***INTERNET 

Ads 'slows down' browsing speeds  BBC 

How badly is Google Books search broken, and why?  Sapping Attention

***EMAIL  

No, You Can’t Ignore Email: It’s Rude  New York Times  

Think I’ve Identified Email’s Fundamental Flaw  The Cut  

“Are you available for a quick task?” – Keep an eye out for the latest phishing scam hitting inboxes  TechRadar

***JOURNALISM 

A Crackdown On Journalism In The Philippines  NPR 

Journalists Can't Now Use A Database Of People's Phone Numbers And Addresses  Buzzfeed News 

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM 

The New York Times quietly paused its Snapchat channel  Digiday

Media Layoffs Hit Peak Since 2009 Great Recession  The Wrap  

Findings from our national study on reinventing local TV News  Storybench

Newsrooms are finally focusing on loyalty over pageviews: Here’s how to actually measure it  Poynter  

***FAKE NEWS

An Apocalyptic Preacher And QAnon Followers Made A Fake Pope Francis Quote Go Viral Buzzfeed News 

Most Canadians trust media, but a similar share worry about fake news being weaponized: survey  Global News 

Russian Trolls Promoted Anti-Vaccination Propaganda That May Have Caused Measles Outbreak Researcher Claims  Newsweek  

Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think  Nautil.us

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was seen in public Monday: Conspiracy theorists still insist she’s dead Washington Post

***PERSONAL GROWTH 

Surviving the brain-dissolving internet  Becoming (my blog)

Treat Failure Like a Scientist  James Clear Blog 

I’d like to tell you about the life-changing magic of not getting rid of things  Washington Post   

What’s all this fuss about “digital detox” — and does it really work?  Recode 

There's A Gap Between Perception And Reality When It Comes To Learning  NPR

***WRITING & READING

The Newest Way To Check Out Library Books In Houston? Vending Machines  Houston Public Media  Houston Public Media  

The Hardest Part of Writing Is Restarting  Chronicle of Higher Education  Chronicle of Higher Ed

5-Year-Old Logan Brinson Couldn't Find a Library Near Him—So He Opened One Himself  Mental Floss 

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction The Paris Review

***LANGUAGE

Slang by state: Words only locals know  USA Today 

American parents say their children are speaking in British accent after watching too much Peppa Pig  iTV 

***LITERATURE

Tolkien’s World: An Exhibition Transports Us to Middle-earth  New York Times  

How an Italian Writer’s Imaginary Garden Became a Place of Literary Pilgrimage  Atlas Obscura 

***GENDER   

 The Women Who Contributed to Science but Were Buried in Footnotes  The Atlantic  

Three female students file class-action lawsuit against Yale University to allow women to join all-male fraternities  USA Today 

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

Ted Danson once wore blackface to roast Whoopi Goldberg, and it’s striking to read the coverage of that now Slate 

11-year-old arrested after refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance  Bay News 9

After Black Student Is Kept Out of Class Discussion, NYU School Acknowledges ‘Institutional Racism’ Chronicle of Higher Ed 

US border agency sued for detaining two Spanish speakers  BBC 

When Fred Rogers and Francois Clemmons Broke Down Race Barriers on a Historic Episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1969)  Open Culture 

***FREE SPEECH

10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech: 2019 (including Liberty University)  The FIRE 

What is ‘auditing,’ and why did a YouTuber get shot for doing it?  Washington Post

Another Politician Probably Violated the First Amendment By Blocking a Constituent on Twitter Technology & Marketing Law Blog 

Federal Judge Thinks The Best Fix For An Accidentally Unsealed Court Doc Is Prior Restraint  TechDirt 

***LEGAL ISSUES 

Fortnite's Appropriation Issue Isn't About Copyright Law, It's About Ethics  Waypoint

CNN, Dish Fight This Question in Court: Is The Weather Channel a News Network?  Hollywood Reporter 

Copyrighting a dance step? Between a Hard (Milly) Rock and a Copyright Office  The 1709 Blog

***RELIGION

I was hospitalized for depression. Faith helped me remember how to live  Washington Post 

Producer of ‘Silent Scream’ anti-abortion film dies  Miami Herald 

Founder Of Harvest Bible Chapel Fired For Misconduct And ‘Highly Inappropriate Comments’  Chicago CBS 

***RELIGION OUTSIDE THE U.S.

Missionaries and nurses trapped in Haiti as protests sweep country  CNN

Once a majority, Protestants now account for fewer than a third of Germans  Pew Research Center

***RELIGION & SEXUAL ABUSE  

Southern Baptist seminary chief regrets embrace of religious leader accused of hiding sex abuse  Courier-Journal

More than 100 Southern Baptist youth pastors convicted or charged in sex crimes  Houston Chronicle  

***RELIGION & CELEBRITIES 

Evangelicals claim Justin Bieber, but he won’t claim them  Washington Examiner  

Hillsong: Is this celeb-filled, Instagram-friendly church the new face of evangelicalism?  NBC News 

***RELIGION AND POLITICS

A law beloved by evangelicals could stand in the way of Trump’s wall  Yahoo News  

Wyoming Senate rejects death penalty repeal, one senator citing Jesus' crucifixion as her rationale  The Week 

***GOOD NEWS

UPS driver’s instincts lead to rescue of elderly man  Fox 8   

CNY Taco Bell worker writes a feel-good message in each take-out order; customers love it   Syracuse.com

Inmates help police rescue Florida baby accidentally locked in car  USA Today

Doctors Said His Daughter Might Never Walk (video)  Digg 

***MUSIC 

"Rest in Vinyl” - A Company Will Press Your Ashes into a Working Vinyl Album  The Vintage News 

***FILM

A Peerless ‘War and Peace’ Film Is Restored to Its Former Glory  New York Times

Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Crackpot Theories’ on How Moviegoing Has Changed The Atlantic

‘Office Space’ Turns 20  Variety 

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA  

How the growth and evolution of the over-the-air tv home fits into today’s viewing landscape  Nielsen

eSports Joins the Big Leagues  Goldman Sachs  

***JOBS: FREELANCING 

Where to pitch, based on data from the website, Who Pays Writers?  Columbia Journalism Review 

What do freelance writers make?  Storybench 

Why Freelancing Creates Anxiety About Money  The Cut 

***SOCIAL ISSUES 

Climate Change Still Seen as the Top Global Threat, but Cyberattacks a Rising Concern  Pew Research Center  

America’s gun problem, explained in 5 facts  Vox 

Facebook's security team tracks posts and keeps a possible threat list  CNBC 

***BUSINESS & FINANCE

What Happens To A Small Town After Walmart Leaves It (video)  PBS  

The GDP Of Each State, Matched To An Equivalent Country  Digg  

The Biggest Economic Divides Aren’t Regional—They’re Local  New York Times 

A record 7 million Americans are three months late on their car payments, revealing what could be cracks in the U.S. economy  CityLab

***ENVIRONMENT

Bold Plan? Replace the Border Wall with an Energy–Water Corridor  Scientific American

From marine biology to gallery walls: At Lux, artist Courtney Mattison draws attention to the fragility of our oceans  Union-Tribune 

Key West bans sunscreens that harm coral reefs  CNN

Why polar bears invaded a Russian village  The Verge

Massive starfish die-off tied to warming seas  Axios 

This Scary Map Shows How Climate Change Will Transform Your City  Wired

Scientist who resisted censorship of climate report lost her job  Reveal News

***HEALTH: PREVENTION 

Sneezed-In Tissues For Sale (video)  Stephen Colbert 

Children are using an unhealthy amount of toothpaste, CDC warns  USA Today 

Poor sleep could clog your arteries. A mouse study shows how that might happen  Science Magazine

***HEALTH: VACCINES 

Facebook under pressure to halt rise of anti-vaccination groups  The Guardian

Anti-vaxxers are spreading conspiracy theories on Facebook, and the company is struggling to stop them  Washington Post 

In anti-vaccine rant, wife of top Trump aide says it's time to 'bring back our childhood diseases' The Week 

***TRAVEL 

Where Not to Travel in 2019, or Ever: Another take on the Christian Missionary who tried to Sentinelese (opinion) The Walrus 

***FOOD

The official fast food French fry power rankings  LA Times 

***RELATIONSHIPS

About 40% of American couples now meet each other online  Quartz  

Sharing Netflix, Spotify Accounts After Couples Break Up  NPR 

Dating App Scams  Vox

The Cities With the Most Singles  Citylab

8 facts about love and marriage in America  Pew Research Center 

***SCIENCE 

How Many Creationists Are There in America? Scientific American Blog Network 

Ph.D. Student Breaks Down Electron Physics Into A Swinging Musical  NPR 

Does scientist immigration harm US science? An examination of the knowledge spillover channel ScienceDirect

Essential elements for high-impact scientific writing  Nature 

New NASA Mission Will Create Maps of the Sky Like Never Before  Popular Mechanics 

***NEUROSCIENCE   

Depression speeds aging in the brain, a new study shows  Quartz

How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past  Quanta Magazine

***PHILOSOPHY

Why so many men online love to use “logic” to win an argument, and then disappear before they can find out they're wrong (opinion) The Outline

Google Translate is a manifestation of Wittgenstein’s theory of language  Quartz

A global history of philosophy (podcast)  BBC 

***PRODUCTIVITY 

Emotional burnout is fueled by envy  The Outline

***HISTORY 

How the US has hidden its empire  The Guardian 

A majority of Americans in every state except Vermont would fail a test based on the questions in the U.S. citizenship test  Axios 

***RESEARCH 

Editorial Independence and Journal Ownership in the Age of Open Science  The Scholarly Kitchen

Be cautious, skeptical with comprehensive reviews of evidence   Association of Health Care Journalists  Health Journalism  

Study suggests that making reviewers’ reports freely readable doesn’t compromise peer-review process Nature  

Replication is on the Rise  Arnold Ventures

Major medical journals don’t follow their own rules for reporting results from clinical trials  Science Magazine  

The Fraud Finder: A conversation with Elisabeth Bik  The Last Word On Nothing

***STUDENT MEDIA  

As student journalists, how do you report on rape allegations? Pretty much the same way you report on anything else  Dynamics of Writing 

 Student journalists hold power to account, with fewer protections  Columbia Journalism Review 

Loyola’s Media Policy is designed to hinder student reporting (opinion)  Loyola Phoenix 

Loyola Student Newspaper Accuses University of 'Trump' Tactics, Dodging Reporters  NBC Chicago 

***STUDENT LIFE

Historic black church pays off loans of Howard University students  The Hill  

Tobacco use is soaring among U.S. kids, driven by e-cigarettes  Axios

College grads expect to earn $60,000 in their first job—here's how much they actually make  CNBC

***ACADEMIC LIFE 

College fires longtime professor of English when he asked too many questions about accreditation  Inside Higher Ed

Is Email Making  Professors Stupid? It used to simplify crucial tasks. Now it’s strangling  scholars’ ability to think  Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Lessons learned from the Wright State strike: professors  Inside Higher Ed  

***ACADEMICS & PLAGIARISM 

Current Policy, Past Investigations Offer Window Into Harvard’s Next Steps In Abramson Plagiarism Case  The Harvard Crimson

Correcting the scholarly record for research integrity: In the aftermath of plagiarism: Accountability in Research  Tandfonline  

***HIGHER ED

The booming popularity of esports has started a vociferous debate over whether the NCAA or another entity will regulate the industry for colleges and universities  Inside Higher Ed

A Guide to the Changing Number of U.S. Universities  US News 

Judge says University of Texas at Austin can't revoke a former student's Ph.D. on its own, outside a court of law  Inside Higher Ed

Mega-Universities Are On the Rise: They Could Reshape Higher Ed as We Know It  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***HUMANITIES

Study documents economic gains from liberal arts education  Inside Higher Ed

7 Things You Can Do With Your Humanities Degree Thrive Global

***CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS 

Louisiana College quits CCCU over LGBT policy  Baptist Message 

Why Bob Jones University hosted a gender and sexuality conference  Greenville Online

Azusa Pacific University: Is a Faculty Purge Imminent? (opinion)  Rewire

  

Surviving the brain-dissolving internet

I’ve been a technology journalist for nearly 20 years and a tech devotee even longer. Over that time, I’ve been obsessed with how the digital experience scrambles how we make sense of the real world.  

Technology may have liberated us from the old gatekeepers, but it also created a culture of choose-your-own-fact niches, elevated conspiracy thinking to the center of public consciousness and brought the incessant nightmare of high-school-clique drama to every human endeavor. It also skewed our experience of daily reality. 

Objectively, the world today is better than ever, but the digital world inevitably makes everyone feel worse. It isn’t just the substance of daily news that unmoors you, but also the speed and volume and oversaturated fakery of it all. 

And so, to survive the brain-dissolving internet, I turned to meditation.

The fad is backed by reams of scientific research showing the benefits of mindfulness for your physical and mental health — how even short-term stints improve your attention span and your ability to focus, your memory, and other cognitive functions.

Farhad Manjoo writing in the New York Times

Daily Rituals

Here’s the true secret of life: We mostly do everything over and over. In the morning, we let the dogs out, make coffee, read the paper, help whoever is around get ready for the day. We do our work. In the afternoon, if we have left, we come home, put down our keys and satchels, let the dogs out, take off constrictive clothing, make a drink or put water on for tea, toast the leftover bit of scone. I love ritual and repetition. Without them, I would be a balloon with a slow leak.      

Daily rituals, especially walks, even forced marches around the neighborhood, and schedules, whether work or meals with non-awful people, can be the knots you hold on to when you’ve run out of rope.    

Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

A one-way ticket to a toxic relationship

Many people are addicted to the ups and downs of romantic love. They are in it for the feels, so to speak. And when the feels run out, so do they. Many people get into a relationship as a way to compensate for something they lack or hate within themselves. This is a one-way ticket to a toxic relationship because it makes your love conditional — you will love your partner as long as they help you feel better about yourself. You will give to them as long as they give to you. You will make them happy as long as they make you happy.  This conditionality prevents any true, deep-level intimacy from emerging and chains the relationship to the bucking throes of each person’s internal dramas.

Mark Manson