Articles & Podcasts of Note (Week of 11/18/2019)
- Ask HN: What’s the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in an Hour? (news.ycombinator.com): Hacker News is one of the best news aggregators around. The community gets really enthusiastic about posts like this which results in an a bounty of insightful comments.
- Finding Drago (abc.net.au): Podcast mini-series in which two Aussies track down mysterious author Todd Noy who wrote “Drago: On Mountains We Stand” and account of the Rocky franchise character’s aftermath. Bizarre and hilarious.
- Her Amazon Purchases are Real. The Reviews are Fake (buzzfeednews.com): Paid shills are gaming the system for product reviews for verified purchases.
- The Home Ownership Obsession (curbed.com): Millennials anguish over the American dream. Can we be rational about an idea that elicits such strong emotions and hopes?
- How NBA Executive Jeff David Stole $13 Million from the Sacramento Kings (espn.com): A decade-long con is unraveled by an errant computer file which uncovers a digital trail of financial fraud.
- The Most Remote Emergency Room: Life and Death in Rural America (washingtonpost.com): Telemedicine attempts to fill the void in parts of America with a dearth of physicians and hospitals.
- TikTok Hits 1.5 Billion Downloads, and is Still Outperforming Instagram (businessinsider.com): My teenager loves it, I still don’t get it and Mark Zuckerberg might want to start sweating. Regardless of my opinions on the vapidity of 15-second videos, it’s a global phenomenon to be reckoned with and cannot be ignored.
- Uncensored: What Free Speech Debates Teach Us About Empathy (apple.com): This week’s podcast episode from Wondery’s “Next Big Idea” podcast features Zachary Wood a liberal-democrat, Africa-American who challenged and outraged his peers by inviting controversial speakers to his college campus in the interest of rational debate.
- What America Lost When it Lost the Bison (theatlantic.com): “The bison engineer and intensify the spring…they had a stronger influence on the timing of plant growth than weather and other environmental variables. They’re equivalent to a force of nature.”