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Ryan Holiday has a lot of experience using media tactics to stir outrage and gain coverage. And he's seen his tactics be put into action by the alt-right and various Internet trolls. He understands how they think and what their ultimate goals are. And he has a message for the rest of us: You guys are playing completely into their hands.
+ "The goal here is not to hack computational systems but to hack free speech and to hack public opinion." Sometimes they are bots, sometimes they are human. And sometimes they are a combination of both. From WaPo: As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work.
+ Backchannel: A young Wikipedia editor withstood a decade of online abuse. Now she's fighting back.
FiveThirtyEight on some key immigration numbers: "More than 2 million of the nation's roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants live in just two metropolitan areas, New York and Los Angeles ... Most of the remaining 9 million undocumented immigrants are concentrated in large urban areas that likewise voted for Clinton over Trump."
From the NYT Upshot: "Almost half of people in their early 20s have a secret, one they don't usually share even with friends: Their parents help them pay the rent." (I prefer to think of it as a pension program for childhood allowance.)
+ CityLab: Americans have been driving less, but now they're just sitting at home.
"His innovation was to teach a computer to spot trends in unsolved murders, using publicly available information that no one, including anyone in law enforcement, had used before. This makes him, in a manner of speaking, the Billy Beane of murder." There are a lot of murders in America. And, over the past few decades, a lot more of those murders have gone unsolved. You'd like to think there's some trove of data being crunched by law enforcement agencies across the country to find any clue that can and will be used against the perpetrators of what could be multiple homicides. Thomas Hargrove found out there wasn't. So he starting building one. From Bloomberg: Serial Killers Should Fear This Algorithm.
"So that's where I went. I wanted to feel what it was like in the dark. The human population is somewhere north of 7 billion, and light tends to follow our species wherever it goes. I wanted, in a way, to go back in time." FiveThirtyEight's Oliver Roeder pays a visit to the darkest town in America. (Oh man would my retina display pop in that environment.)
"Not so long ago, Fillerup Clark was a broke student in Provo, Utah. Today, at age 26, she is the equivalent of internet royalty: a 'relatable influencer,' someone whom hundreds of thousands of women trust as a friend and whom companies pay handsomely to name-drop their products." Maybe you too should be turning your life experiences into a business. In the meantime, meet Instamom. (I'm waiting for the person who shares photos of their screaming kids and disappointed friends. Now that would be a relatable influencer.)
+ Remember when fitness instructors were only famous among the people in their classes? Now, they are part of an online entertainment industry, and they're pedaling their way to stardom.
"What evolution did not prepare P-22 for is how to exist in an eight-square-mile urban park with more than 5 million human visitors a year. Most male cats have almost 20 times that space, nearly to themselves." From the LA Times: A week in the life of P‑22, the big cat who shares Griffith Park with millions of people.
+ The New Yorker: The Lions Of Los Angeles. (Interesting that the lions seem to be more welcome in LA than the Chargers.)
"The argument seemed to line up neatly. We are raising a generation of weaklings, more prone to everything from premature aging to mental disorders. Or is the opposite true? Is this just the latest step in the age-old weakening of our species as we emerged from the trees and built up civilization?" From Nautilus: There are two very different interpretations of our dwindling grip strength. (For the last decade, I haven't taken my hand off a device long enough to have my grip strength measured.)
"Anthropologists like to say that to observe a culture is usually, in some small way, to change it. A similar dictum holds true for Bourdain's show. Whenever Bourdain discovers a hole-in-the-wall culinary gem, he places it on the tourist map, thereby leaching it of the authenticity that drew him to it in the first place. 'It's a gloriously doomed enterprise,' he acknowledged. 'I'm in the business of finding great places, and then we f*ck them up.'" (My kids have the same goal on family vacations.) The New Yorker's Patrick Radden Keefe on Anthony Bourdain's Moveable Feast.
"If there are people who can't stand cats -- and it seems there are many -- one reason may be envy." What cats can teach us about how to live.
+ Vice on dating: I Asked a Psychopath How to Stop Caring About Rejection.
+ Details about each of the ingredients in Doritos. (How could inventing a photo sharing app make one richer than inventing this?)
+ One strawberry, 22 bucks.
+ According to Newshour, this electronic pill can send Wi-Fi updates from your tummy for days. No wonder reading so much news on the Internet is making me queasy.
+ We're running out of bees. So maybe drones can pollinate.
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.)
