All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Editor's note: We're proud to bring NextDraft---the most righteous, most essential newsletter on the web---to WIRED.com. Every Friday you'll get a roundup of the week's most popular must-read stories from around the internet, courtesy of mastermind Dave Pell. So dig in and geek out.
You've probably heard the question many times: "On a scale of one to ten, what is your level of pain?" A desire for more swift care has often led me to answer "around 10." But, in reality, it's difficult for someone to rate their pain on some kind of universal scale. "How does a patient imagine the worst pain ever and give their own pain a number? Middle-class British men who have never been in a war zone may find it hard to imagine anything more agonizing than a toothache or a tennis injury. Women who have experienced childbirth may, after that experience, rate everything else as a mild 3 or 4." And when we move beyond numeric levels, the descriptions of pain become even more elusive. Is it sharp or dull? Cold or hot? Nagging or intense? Nerve or muscle? Stabbing or tingling? The questions are often hard to answer, and your answers are often even harder to treat. Aside from throwing buckets of often ineffective drugs at the problem, how can the medical community solve pain when it's so hard to even understand it? From John Walsh in Mosaic: How much does it hurt?
Today we're as divided online as we are regionally. And our regional segregation is epic. These divisions leave us vulnerable to being defined by those who---for money or for power---gain from us remaining divided. That's why you in your rural town and me in my metropolitan city only know each other as the caricatures we see beamed through our completely separate sources of news, entertainment, and political messaging. It's a big problem. And the tools we thought would make it better have made it worse. My latest post: This Is Why You Hate Me.
We can see how the Trump transition is playing in the media capitals. But, as we learned in 2016, we need to pay attention to how it's playing in other parts of the country. The NYT's Trip Gabriel spent more than a year living in Iowa. He went back this week and found that Trump voters are unfazed by controversies: "Washington may be veering from one Trump pre-inaugural controversy to another: unproved reports of Russia's holding embarrassing information against him, possible ethical conflicts, the donors and billionaires of his cabinet, his pushback against intelligence findings on Russian hacking in the election. But there does not seem to be much angst in Iowa among those who voted for Mr. Trump, including some Democrats and independents."
Mars has long dominated candy shelves with products like Snickers, Skittles and M&Ms. But candy and gum aren't even the company's biggest businesses. After a $7.7 billion purchase of VCA, the company's main business is pet care. Why? "Americans spent an estimated $62.75 billion in 2016 on their animals, according to the American Pet Products Association. That is up from $51 billion only five years ago." (Let's hope Mars is healthier for our pets than it is for humans.)
+ "A wave of corporatization is hitting the veterinary industry, but does a one-size-fits-all approach work?" Bloomberg with an in-depth look at the high-cost, high-risk world of modern pet care. (I have 3 cats and 2 dogs. I'm pretty sure that makes me a potential acquisition target.)
We know there are a lot of recent graduates who are saddled with loads of student debt. But it turns out grandma and grandpa are caught up in this trend as well. From Quartz: To put their grandkids through college, Americans over 60 now have $67 billion in student debt. And they don't even get to share in the adderall and keg stands.
"At the same time, and even with spotty and irregular electricity, it also has one of the higher levels of education and internet access in the Arab world. More than two-thirds of Gazans are under 24, and nearly all have high written and computing literacy. If the definition of a great entrepreneur is one who thrives in working through and around challenges and creating innovative solutions, it's no surprise that Gaza is chock-full of them. Half of them, by the way, are women." Politics hasn't made much progress in the name of Middle East peace. But maybe tech and entrepreneurship are a better place to start. Christopher M. Schroeder (who knows as much about this topic as anyone) in ReCode: Gaza is attracting the attention of Silicon Valley.
+ For more on this topic, you can check out Schroeder's book: Startup Rising.
President Obama gave his farewell address in Chicago on Tuesday, and brought himself (and others) to tears with tributes to his veep and first lady. The most interesting part of the address was the amount of time he dedicated to detailing what he sees as potential threats to our democracy (most of which come from within): "Without some common baseline of facts, without a willingness to admit new information and concede that your opponent might be making a fair point, and that science and reason matter, then we're going to keep talking past each other. And we'll make common ground and compromise impossible."
Let's lighten things up a bit with Bloomberg's look at The Preposterous Success Story of America's Pillow King which begins with this lede: "As so many great entrepreneurial success stories do, the tale of Mike Lindell begins in a crack house." (Kids, let that be a lesson to you!)
"One of the bitterest fights being waged in Congress right now is over an acrylic painting by a teenager in Missouri that almost nobody had heard of until this Friday." Vox on why several members of Congress are feuding over a teen's controversial painting that dramatizes events in Ferguson. (This is about as far away as you get from Bob Ross and the Joy of Painting.)
According to the Department of Agriculture, the cost of raising a child in America went up 3 percent last year. "The cost for a middle-income family to raise a child born in 2015 to age 18 is $233,610." (That's how much I have set aside just for in-app purchases.)
"In an age when most music exists on the boundless, only somewhat navigable reservoir of sound called the internet, splintered across streaming services, YouTube embeds, torrents, and message board threads, there's something to be said for the tangibility and simplicity of physical media." OK, so you think we're talking about the vinyl revolution being led by snooty audiophiles, bearded hipsters, and suburban dads suffering from peak mid-life crisis. Well, forget vinyl. Cassettes are making a comeback.
+ Why some Peso traders want Mexico to buy Twitter and shut it down.
+ On the similarities between Indianapolis and Kim Kardashian.
+ "There's a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring." From the NYT: The very unusual, but pretty interesting, musings of Peter Thiel.
+ From Consumerist: A man wants police to apologize for confusing sock full of kitty litter with meth. (I have three cats. So in my case, I'd probably be safer with the meth.)
+ Quartz: A new study linking profanity to honesty shows people who curse are more authentic. Studies like this are complete bullshit. (See what I did there?)
+ From NPR: Fitness Trackers Aim To Improve The Health And Happiness Of Zoo Elephants. (They started working out after being accused of having too much junk in the trunk.)
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.)
