“From 2016 to 2019—mostly during Trump’s administration—those rural left-behind counties, which make up about 18% of the U.S. population, added 10,000 jobs. In 2023 alone, they added 104,000. Tankersley notes that Trump overwhelmingly won the support of voters in these counties, but their circumstances did not improve during his administration. Under Biden, they added jobs…
“Seeing with an Artist’s Eye” – Counter Craft
“The fan brain thinks about what is. It worries about “canon” and wants to preserve the work like a sacred object from critics, vandals, and barbarians. The artist brain thinks in what could be. It looks at the object not to vandalize it, but to come up with a new object. Actually, let me shift…
“I can’t binge games like I used to – but here’s how I finally got stuck into Elden Ring” – Keza MacDonald (Pushing Buttons, Guardian)
“Elden Ring is a horrible game if you’re trying to complete it as fast as possible with extremely limited time – most games are. It’s a wonderful game if you’re focused on the adventure you’re having in the moment. I spent about 40 minutes in a small smouldering church, trying to beat a red phantom…
“Jeff Zucker’s Fleet Street Misadventure” – Michael Wolff (Intelligencer)
“As media becomes more of a constrained business — a troubled asset class — it becomes more of a technical one. You are managing decline. You’re fighting at the bottom rather than living at the top — but that can be a business opportunity as well as any other. Zucker is a good operator. Possibly…
“The Shareholder Supremacy” – Ed Zitron
“The Michigan Supreme Court found that “a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders [and that] the powers of the directors are to be employed for that end,” and intimated that cash surpluses should not be saved to invest in upcoming projects, but distributed to shareholders, because Ford…
“Being legible to oneself” – Dan Davies
“One of the key edicts of management cybernetics is that “it is not necessary to look inside the black box in order to understand its behaviour”. But this is only true a) if you’ve made the right decisions about how to divide things up into black boxes and b) if you’re prepared to accept that…
“Bits of the mind’s string” – Julian Simpson
“A notebook crackles with potential energy. Between the covers, myriad scribbles hold ideas, observations, quotes, anxieties… This is pure thought, suspended in time. Only when an idea is extracted from the book and exposed to daylight does it start to decay. Nothing lives up to the original idea, or at least nothing lives up to…
“The New Alt Media and the Future of Publishing” – Anil Dash
“Look, I could talk your ear off about how the tech aspect of this alone improves the odds for these new publications. (Content management is business strategy! Open distribution platforms are fundamentally politically radical!) But the more important thing is that regular people, people who aren’t nerds who’ve spent two straight decades worrying about how…
“Economic termites are everywhere” – Big
“Economic termites describes where these same forces get into the mostly unseen business foundations of our society and profiteer. These termites are in the infrastructure or guts of business, like recruiting services, construction equipment or software, the industrial gasses that go into chemicals and electronics, and so forth. It’s the stuff you don’t see that…
“Congestion Pricing, A Good Idea, Died Because Our Government Doesn’t Deserve the Money” – Very Serious
“But then, who’s counting? New York mega-projects always take way too long and cost way too much. At least, now that it’s open, commuters from Long Island must be really happy with their shorter commutes? Right? Unfortunately not. Here’s the thing: the MTA, the parent agency of the LIRR, built this very expensive new terminal….