Really long, I mean. But the organization is beyond criticism because there isn’t any.
Category: Other · Item: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot's prison letters to Slavoj Žižek (and she plays hard-ass music too).
Item: David Weinberger’s Pronouns were a mistake that we can fix.
David Malki: Mortality record from 1665.
Category: Wrong · The egregious Evgeny Morozov got a slimepiece about the Maker movement published in The New Yorker. Remarkably, he apparently did not actually visit a Maker Faire or talk to an actual practitioner. What was The New Yorker thinking? I’m not linking to it.
Category: Fun · Ars gives us The 20 best (and three most disappointing) video games of 2013; I only played one of them, because Ingress, and it is the most utter bullshit that that’s not on Ars’ list.
Politics · The developed world’s monotonically-increasing Gini coefficient and consequent aspirational rigidity is drifting into focus as maybe the only really meaningful political story, assuming you think “meaning” centers around things that affect the lives of, to steal a phrase, the 99%. There are a lot of links here, for which no apology.
Dangerous ideas from David Simon of The Wire: There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show. From the Economist: Labour’s share lost and Why poor Americans aren’t up in arms. What I found most devastating: John Cassidy’s New Yorker piece: American Inequality in Six Charts. And, if we’re following the data: Brad DeLong’s This Is Yet Another in the 56-Month Straight Series of Disappointing and Awful Bureau of Labor Statistics Household Employment Surveys.
Inequality isn’t the only issue. Here’s a refreshing blast of pure rage: Matt Taibbi’s Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke.
And then there’s the Middle East. It’s hard to find anything new being said about that issue, but here’s a piece whose existence in 2014 first made my jaw drop and head shake, then increased my understanding of just how incredibly, malignantly, tangled-up this whole scene is: Why non-Orthodox Judaism is a disaster for Israel.
Politech · As in, where politics and technology cross; specifically, Matt Yglesias’ The Economic Case for Net Neutrality. What he said.
Oh, right, technology...
Browser tech · From Mozilla, there’s Lightbeam, and I hope lots of people are running it because the world needs that dataset. From Google, uProxy, which has to be a good thing if it works.
Oh, and if you care about making the Web better you should be reading Steve Souders’ High Performance Web Sites blog; for example, Prebrowsing.
Search tech · Also from my employer, Deep App Indexing for Web Search, which I don’t think people have fully figured out yet but it’s a great big hairy deal if we can drag the world of mobile apps into the universe of mainstream searchability.
Thoughtful tech · Alex Russell’s Long Term Web Semantics is too long but I’m not giving you the tl;dr because you should hunker down and read it already. I don’t 100% agree with it all but there sure is a whole lot of good, deep stuff along the (long, long) way.
Also thoughtful: Matt Mullenweg’s The Four Freedoms.
Surprising tech · I’m not sure whether Urbit is the future or whether it’s evidence of someone being irretrievably whacked-out. But I’m going to have to go back and take a few more looks.
Node tech · Brent Simmons, one of my favorite coderbloggers, wrote a quickie introduction to JavaScript and Node for people like him (and me) coming at this stuff from outside: In Another Country.
Ruby tech · Sam Ruby, I mean, but the language too; Sam’s been having fun while I wasn’t watching with something called Wunderbar; I haven’t figured out what it’s for yet, but I will. He’s also fooling around with Angular and other good stuff; things that are particularly worth reading include HTML5 Mode Links and Ruby2js += underscore.js; yes, they both mention me, but that’s not why they’re here.
Educational tech · Wise things that ought to be read: Principles for making things for the web and Security Engineering.
