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Let's kick off the new year by introducing what promises to be the most-watched reality show of all time. It's called 2017. It features all your favorite stars, a cast of millions, and it will be broadcast nonstop on television and social media, and covered in-depth by news outlets (both real and fake). And best of all, you get to be part of the show too -- whether that means just sharing a tweet or a Facebook status update, or by somehow becoming a key character in the story and earning your eleven minutes of fame (no one gets fifteen minutes anymore). And as you've probably already guessed, 2017 will be produced by Mark Burnett. He brought you Survivor, he brought you The Apprentice, and now, by extension, he's bringing you 2017. Here's The Ringer's Kelsey McKinney on The Mythmaker: How Mark Burnett Created Reality TV -- and Donald Trump.
+ Who is dominating real reality TV these days? The answer might surprise you. "The escapist appeal of looking at other people's beautiful homes turned Home & Garden Television into the third most-watched cable network in 2016, ahead of CNN and behind only Fox News and ESPN."
"The technology it uses derives partly from systems designed to grow crops on the moon. The interior space is its own sealed-off world ... Countless algorithm-driven computer commands combine to induce the greens to grow, night and day, so that a crop can go from seed to shoot to harvest in eighteen days. Every known influence on the plant's wellbeing is measured, adjusted, remeasured. Tens of thousands of sensing devices monitor what's going on." Welcome to what could be the future of the world's produce supply. And unlike today's messy farms, it won't require soil, sunlight, or nearly as much water. (Add in a couple quarts of coffee, and that's basically the environment in which NextDraft grows.) The New Yorker's Ian Frazier with a very interesting look at the folks who are growing crops in the city: The Vertical Farm.
+ If you can raise crops indoors in the city, then you can go fishing in a barn in Iowa. From MoJo: A Fish Out of Water. Can farmers in Iowa help save the world's seafood supply?
While there have been some signs of improvement, America's incarceration rate has grown pretty steadily over the past half century. "The number of people held in local jails on any day in the United States has increased four-fold since 1970." And in recent years, there's been a surge of incarcerations in small towns. "The jail incarceration rate of Lackawanna County, a small county with a population of 213,000, increased by more than 15 times between 1970 and 2014, with racial disparities in incarceration that are both egregious and indicative of uneven incarceration rates in small counties across the country." From Vera: Why Are There So Many People in Jail in Scranton, PA?
+ The need for data-driven criminal justice reform is (at least as of now), one of America's few areas of bipartisan agreement. President Obama makes the case in the Harvard Law Review that it should remain a focus: The President's Role in Advancing Criminal Justice Reform. Obama also seemed to leave a message for his replacement. "Presidents are not private citizens. We need to be careful about speaking about legal matters before all the facts are in -- even if it appears that everyone else in the United States is commenting on them."
"Back in the day, the worst thing people did was hide in a ditch and hurl field corn kernels at passing cars. 'It used to be so Mayberry.'" But then came the opioid crisis, other drugs, an increase in crime, and ultimately, a precipitous decline in life expectancy. WaPo's Joel Achenbach on the perfect storm of bad trends that have left many small towns facing what sociologists call diseases of despair.
"A good long-term limit for most adults is no more than 50 grams (or about 12 teaspoons) of added sugars per day, and closer to 25 is healthier. A single 16-ounce bottle of Coke has 52 grams." In the NYT, David Leonhardt suggests you get your year started off right by trying to go a month without sugar. (This conflicts with my personal 2017 plan which includes a lot of comfort food and a determination to never change out of the sweatshirt I have on right now.)
+ Trying to keep sugar intake below recommended levels can be tough since so many of our products have a ton of added sugar. The NYT has an interactive menu planner. See how far you can make it into the day without exceeding recommended limits.
+ "At the heart of it all, biohacking is being driven by one of Silicon Valley's prevailing sentiments: that anything can be optimized to run better, so why should the human body be any different?" GQ's Josh Dean hits the tech scene (which is also a new drug scene) where hackers have a new target: Their own minds. LSD Micro-dosing: The Drug Habit Your Boss Is Gonna Love.
+ "The drugs we take at a given time can largely be ascribed to an era's culture. We use -- and invent -- the drugs that suit our culture's needs." (In that case, today's citizens should be taking truth serum.) From Aeon: Drugs du jour.
"There's no need to dwell on the particular character of Trump, who will be sworn in on January 20th. But it is worth examining what remedies exist if any President is too careless, inattentive, or impulsive to deal sensibly with questions affecting the nation's survival. What could be done if a President behaves in a way that directly threatens to turn the planet into radioactive dust?" The New Yorker's Jeffrey Frank asks a question we should probably all have an answer for, regardless of who's in the Oval Office: What if a President Loses Control?
+ During a recent appearance on Charlie Rose, Ian Bremmer provided an interesting overview of Obama's foreign policy legacy (he's not a big fan), and of the challenges facing the Trump administration. This is not necessarily uplifting, but definitely recommended.
"One morning in July 2015, Miller took his seat at a regular meeting of palliative-care doctors at the University of California San Francisco's cancer center. The head of the team, Dr. Michael Rabow, started with a poem. It was a tradition, he later told me, meant to remind everyone that this was a different sort of hour in their schedule, and that, as palliative-care physicians, they were seeking different outcomes for their patients: things like comfort, beauty and meaning." The NYT Magazine looks at one man's quest to change the way we die. It all started when an "electrical current arced out of a piece of equipment into the watch on his wrist. Eleven-thousand volts shot through his left arm and down his legs. When his friends reached him on the roof of the train, smoke was rising from his feet."
"This is going to be a really short post because most people don't read really long ones, and a lot of people don't read past the headline. And that's the point: Now, more than ever, headlines need to be clear." Stick with me for a few more lines and one image that illustrates why headlines matter.
"The story was gruesome: American forces had discovered bags containing more than 700 'SCALPS from our unhappy Country-folks.' There were bags of boys', girls', soldiers and even infants' scalps, all allegedly taken by Indians in league with King George. There was also a note written to the tyrant king hoping he would receive these presents and 'be refreshed.'" That, it turns out, was fake news. The author: Benjamin Franklin. From Robert G. Parkinson in WaPo: Fake news? That's a very old story.
+ Quartz: "In a bid to restore some semblance of work-life balance, French companies with more than 50 employees are now required to guarantee workers the 'right to disconnect' from technology when they leave the office at night."
+ "Off Twitter, these are all things by which I make my living -- in fact, they comprise the totality of my income. But on Twitter, I do them pro bono and, in return, I am micromanaged in real time by strangers; neo-Nazis mine my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit; and men enjoy unfettered, direct access to my brain so they can inform me, for the thousandth time, that they would gladly rape me if I weren't so fat." From Lindy West: I've left Twitter. It is unusable for anyone but trolls, robots and dictators.
+ The 10 most unusual things TSA confiscated in 2016. (This seems like advice one shouldn't need from the TSA: "Don't pack your homemade replica suicide vest.")
+ In South Korea, "the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has tasked an officer with the job of monitoring Trump's Twitter feed, with an eye to any signs of policy that might affect the country." (Half of America does that job for free...)
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.)
