Wikipedia’s Bias, Facebook’s Monetizing Scheme, & Superaging – Link Roundup

Since I no longer post often on Twitter, I’ve decided to do a regular roundup of all of the interesting and thought provoking content that I’ve come across recently.

Articles

• Know Your Enemy: Celebrating 50 Years of the Forever War – a fictional story about a future America where we’ve always been at war [Wired]
• Is Wikipedia Woke? – how having largely white male editors impacts the types of content in Wikipedia [Businessweek]
• How to Become a ‘Superager’ – the key to living long might just be to challenge yourself physically and mentally: “Superagers are like Marines: They excel at pushing past the temporary unpleasantness of intense effort. Studies suggest that the result is a more youthful brain that helps maintain a sharper memory and a greater ability to pay attention.” [NY Times]
• The price of monetizing schemes – “Most of these monetizing schemes are all variations on the same theme: How to sell your attention, your eyeballs, to someone else. So what’s good for business is whatever can extract the most attention from your sockets. Talk about an abusive, adverserial dynamic.” [Signal v. Noise]
• Inside Sears’ death spiral: How an iconic American brand has been driven to the edge of bankruptcy – CEO Eddie Lampert has rigged Sears’ downfall so that he wins regardless of what happens. Quite unethical if you ask me. [Business Insider]
• There is nothing inevitable or natural about chronic disease – “Thus it appears that our bodies aren’t, after all, destined for chronic disease as they age – rather, it is the environment we’ve put them in that should bear the blame.” [Aeon]
• The Post-Snowden Cyber Arms Hustle – the story of a multinational cyber weapons deal and how it fell apart [Businessweek]
• Wait, other people can take your time? – Everyone controls their own calendar in our company too, it seems crazy to do it any other way [Signal v. Noise]

Podcasts

• TV Is The Oak Tree – why have different types of media responded differently to the internet? [Exponent]
• Privacy Paradox – a 5-day series of podcasts dissecting what information you’re providing tech companies, along with reasonable strategies to take control of your information [Note to Self]
• Blockchain Gang – a bitcoin entrepreneur goes to jail…then uses blockchain to create a prison currency [Planet Money]
• Four Finger Discount Simpsons Podcast – my friend introduced me to this and I can’t stop listening. Two Aussie’s do hour-long reviews of every Simpsons episode. I always learn something new about an episode I’ve seen dozens of times…plus the hosts are hilarious themselves. [Four Finger Discount]

If you’re interested in more stories like this check out the Link Roundup archive.