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You've got the tweets. The Facebook updates. The breaking news notifications vibrating in your pocket. The overstuffed inbox. The text messages. The conversations with Siri and Alexa. Real news. Fake news. All of it coming at you day and night in a never-ending stream that moves so fast that it becomes a screaming blur that makes you want to bang your head against a brick wall until the lost consciousness finally silences the machine and provides you with some degree of sanctuary from the madness. With this in mind, it seems clear that Americans are suffering from information overload, right? Well, according to the latest Pew numbers, only 20 percent of us feel overloaded by the glut of information we encounter on a continual basis. And that surprisingly low number is actually down pretty dramatically from a decade ago. (Maybe people are so overloaded with information that they didn't understand the survey questions...)
The rise of Trump and the nonstop election coverage made it feel like 2016 was a year with only one story. InFocus takes a look back at a pretty remarkable year in photos. It's broken up into three sections: January to April, May to August, and September to December. (For the last three weeks of December, you can just imagine photos of Trump tweeting.)
You know the feeling. You go to the ticket site a few minutes before those Beyonce tickets are set to be released at 10 am. You refresh and refresh, over and over, until finally, the moment has arrived and you've got the ticket page up at the exact right moment. You select your seat preferences and check for tickets. But you're foiled, because the event is sold out. It's 10:01. What happened? The bots happened. But thankfully, some new bot-blocking legislation could make it easier to score tickets to popular events. (If I'm ever seated next to one of these bots at a concert, I'm gonna totally let them have it.)
"The full veil is not appropriate here. It should be banned wherever it's legally possible." So said Germany's Angela Merkel as she called for a widespread ban on "full veil" Islamic coverings. Such a ban would probably only impact a few hundred of Germany's 4.7 million Muslims. But this announcement is less about an actual policy shift and more about the way the political winds are blowing. And they are blowing hard.
Brexit. Trump. Populism. Nationalism. Is there one story that can provide a single unified explanation for the trends taking hold across the globe? Maybe not. But if you had to choose one, it would be the economic divide. And it's not just about the 1 percent and everyone else. It's about a split that's as evenly divided as most American elections. Here's the NYT on America's haves and half nots. "This group -- the approximately 117 million adults stuck on the lower half of the income ladder -- 'has been completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s ... Even after taxes and transfers, there has been close to zero growth for working-age adults in the bottom 50 percent.'" (It's worth noting that, contrary to popular opinion, this story has been anything but ignored by the media.)
+ "Their jobs were routine and the easiest to replace with automation. The first thing to do is accept the 21st century reality that no matter what you do, these jobs aren't coming back." A Quartz Q&A: Brace yourself: the most disruptive phase of globalization is just beginning.
+ Larry Summers: "If foreign companies are allowed to run production chains that include Mexico and American companies are not, won't American employment ultimately suffer?"
+ Brookings: Technology, not international trade, is the primary force behind lost manufacturing jobs. (The misunderstanding of this fact has created a lot of misplaced rage against workers in other countries -- and "others" in general. But I guess it's pretty hard to get pissed at a robot.)
There's no doubt that a lot of illegal drugs cross the US/Mexican border. "But increasingly the most powerful opioids destroying lives and devastating communities from Maine to Texas are arriving through a different route: from China. Via the US Postal Service." Stat on the Amazon of drug trafficking. It all starts in a double-wide on a dead-end street on the high plains of Texas.
"What was real was Welch -- a father, former firefighter and sometime movie actor who was drawn to dark mysteries he found on the Internet -- terrifying customers and workers with his assault-style rifle as he searched Comet Ping Pong." What was false was pretty much everything else. WaPo on Pizzagate, from rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in D.C.
+ Buzzfeed: 75% of American adults who were familiar with a fake news headline viewed the story as accurate.
+ Sunil Paul helped stop spam. Now he has some ideas for stopping lies on the Internet: We Can Fix It: Saving the Truth from the Internet.
If you visited just about any news site on Tuesday, you encountered a top news story about another presidential tweet. This time its target was Boeing: "Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!" Is this news? Yes, for a variety of reasons, it really is. But is it the day's top story? Hell no. But that's the kind of coverage it got. Donald Trump will soon be America's new Commander in Chief. But apparently his role as America's Editor in Chief has already started. Here's my message to the folks who run big media outlets: You're Editors. So Edit.
"That's a feat that I would put money on to probably never be touched again in the history of basketball. It's unbelievable." That's how Steph Curry described Klay Thompson's scoring performance during last Monday night's Warrior win over the Pacers. Thompson scored 60 points in 29 minutes. And get this: "Thompson only needed 11 dribbles to make his 21 field goals. In all, he only had the ball for a grand total of 88.4 seconds." (In other news, my son and I definitely picked the right game to attend...)
It's currently legal to have sex with animals in 9 states. Ohio is looking to remove itself from that list. (At this point, I'm even against playful flirting.)
+ There are now eight humans who will call Mick Jagger Dad. That guy's got some stones.
+ The 2016 Hater's Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog.
+ Fidel Castro's other gig: Copy editing for Gabriel García Márquez.
+ Starbucks is planning to add another 12,000 cafes in the next few years. At this point, where are they going to open them, inside other Starbucks?
This is a weekly best-of version of the NextDraft newsletter. For daily updates and to get the NextDraft app, go here. (Original story reprinted with permission from NextDraft.)
