#I RAN OUT OF MY FREE NYT articles

[imhereonthekitchenfloor]

you can post this or not but i figured i'd tell you: not posting because i'm israeli and don't feel safe engaging with pro-palestinian content. the vast majority of it is made in good faith but you can't tell the difference between what is and what isn't, which makes me deeply uncomfortable. a lot of the fundraisers are scams, or go into hamas's pockets. a lot of the awareness spreading posts are made or motivated by people with anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli sentiments, including both posts that claim to provide historical context and updates kn the current situation. there's a lot of misleading info out there. my personal stance is that you can and should be pro-palestine AND pro-israel. you can and should be anti-hamas and anti-bibi. there's no space for that here. (there's a great NYT oped from a couple days ago that breaks down the nuance of the situation and aligns almost 100% with my own view called "How to Think Through the Moral Tangle in Gaza" if you're interested)

I think tumblr is a wonderful website for people to get a summary on major world news that might not be traditionally catered to them in the media. And tumblr is also nice because we dont need to fight backwards thinking and can thus actually talk about lesser known intricacies of the issue. I also think tumblr is a very bad website for any sort of nuance against the majority opinion in these situations as we are all anonymous users without context to anyone who doesn't follow us.

I understand where you are coming from!! I have a Jewish friend whose sister was in Israel at the start of this and her stance has always been she wants a better life for all the people and how heartbreaking this war is on all sides. We all know why Palestine is getting the attention it is, but that doesn't take away from the conflict in the area and how this too will need to be resolved. I understand you keeping out of this and I don't think that's a bad thing. (I haven't been posting a ton for the very reason you mentioned of not knowing what sources are good.) I am not going to blindly post and have been trying to support legitimate groups. This all being said, I'm sure this is all really stressful for you. I hope you are mentally doing okay right now and hope you can find a good balance online💕

[copperbadge]

Current Events Reading Reccs

I had a couple of people asking me about my “current events” reading in general (news aggregators, podcasts, etc) so I figured I’d just list them off here. 

I don’t read any tumblrs that are specifically focused on current events, I just kinda get news from various people I’ve followed, but I’ve found in general it helps to find people for whom the news is a hobby, not a consuming habit. I have communists and anarchists and prison abolitionists on my dash, but they aren’t people who have made that their identity, which removes the “You are insufferable” factor. So I guess find fandom weirdos with strong political views and follow ‘em. 

Also I want to state at the top that part of why I’m on top of shit that I get through Tumblr is that I have a policy of never reblogging or reacting to anything until I have 1. read the article being linked and 2. done my own research. This has saved me a vast deal of embarrassment, because sometimes I’ll save something outrageous to research and before I can even research it, it’s been rebutted. I cannot stress how important the process of reading and research is -- you can’t get your news from headlines and particularly not clickbait you see on Tumblr. 

As far as I know there’s no single tumblr clearinghouse for good high-level current events reporting and analysis (the analysis I think is a vital part) but if folks have resources they use, drop ‘em in the comments or reblogs.  

Anyway, some mailing lists I belong to are:

Quartz Daily Brief: finance and tech, mainly. Back when they were for-pay I paid for them, this newsletter was that entertaining. I believe they’ve now gone fee-free but they sometimes link to paywalls. I get it as an email newsletter, that’s just a link to the web version. 

Breakfast with ARTNews: Obviously a bit niche but I really like keeping up with the art world and they cover art crime too. The link is to the all-newsletters signup page, I only belong to Breakfast. 

The Futurist: This is the most insufferable nonsense masquerading as news ever. The ads are indistinguishable from the content. But it does help me keep a finger hard on the pulse of what irritating tech bros are into. Watch scams unfold in real time! 

I also follow a number of local interests -- community centers and neighborhood organizations primarily -- in Chicago, so those are always good to hunt up. Most major cities have a “citycast” podcast (just search “citycast [your city]” in your podcatcher) that is also good for local news.  

Some websites:

Longreads: Since longform.org went under, the best place to find the current longform pieces that everyone’s talking about.  

Brand Eating: Extremely niche, but I really love reading about “brand” food trends. It covers new food releases and sales and such in the areas of packaged food (potato chips, candy, etc), fast food, and casual dining. It’s also great as a resource for cheap eats. 

I stopped reading Bon Appetit recently (they ran this appallingly sympathetic story about a dickhead hiring manager) but like, honestly, if you want to track food trends, the BA email newsletter is kinda the way to go. If you’d like good food news in podcast form, I recommend The Sporkful (it’s in the podcast list). 

I used to read the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and Fortune Magazine (which mostly scraped the not-awful stuff from Forbes) but I’ve cut it down to just the Trib; I don’t really need Fortune to keep me current and the NYT has morphed into a creepy proto-fash nightmare. The Trib has pretty good national/international coverage so if you don’t have a decent local paper it’s not bad, but I don’t know how much access you get as a nonpaying reader (I subscribe). 

Podcasts:

Quartz has a podcast, Quartz Obsession, which is off-and-on in terms of when episodes come out but very interesting when they do. 

Planet Money is a once-weekly podcast about economics, and has a daily show called “The Indicator” which is daily “small bites” current events coverage. 

The Late Show and the Daily Show both have an “ears edition” podcast that’s just the show audio; I’ve stopped listening for the most part but if you want good cultural commentary, that’s the place to go. 

The Journal by the Wall Street Journal is a weekly podcast focusing on one or two news stories, generally pretty relevant. 

Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me is a panel show but it’s a fun way to get bite-sized news you can look up later in more detail if you want. And it’s taped in Chicago! If you listen you can hear me in the audience laughing. :D (I’m going to another taping in a few weeks!) 

Behind The Bastards is actually a history podcast but if you’re listening current he does a bit of current-events commentary, and also I just really like it as a podcast.

Stuff You Should Know is a trivia podcast but they occasionally do current-events stuff.

The Sporkful is pretty good about current food news, although I run hot and cold on it.

I used to listen to a really good “professional” medical podcast, but it went full paywall when it started to offer certain forms of professional credit, so I found The House Of Pod as a very good free replacement. It’s not really for non-doctors, but as a non-doctor I still find it accessible and informative. (For medical history and curiosity, I do highly recommend Bedside Rounds, but I wouldn’t call it a current events cast.) 

So that’s how I get my news -- it’s not what I would call fully comprehensive but it’s reasonably informative! 

[remodelling]

i cant give feedback to the nyt (i want the beta games on the games app i paid a subscription for) bc their page for submitting feedback counts as an ‘article’ and i’ve ran out of my ‘free articles’ …. get fucked i just want digits in the app

[ladysophiebeckett]

i hate myself for laughing so hard at this

[tiikerikani]

Last week Yle ran an article about one normal (i.e. not risk-group or healthcare worker) person’s experiences in this never-ending panini, and at the bottom they invited readers to write in about their own.

They received some 400 responses and published some representative ones this week. To nobody’s surprise, most comments dealt with depression and stress and anxiety, but some people also got positive things out of it, like changes in lifestyle or outlook. 

Anyway, I just wanted to quote this one because it basically speaks for me:

Pandemia-aika on romuttanut mielenterveyteni. Minulla on masennustaustaa, ja pandemian alusta saakka olen pelännyt masennuksen uusimista huomattavasti enemmän kuin koronatartuntaa. Nyt pahin skenaario on realisoitunut. Käsky pysyä kotona on käytännössä käsky vahingoittaa mielenterveyttään, kirjoittaa nelikymppinen helsinkiläisnainen ja lisää, että asiat, jotka ovat hoivanneet hänen mielenterveyttään, ovat nyt kiellettyjä. Ystävien vapautunut tapaaminen ja salitreenaaminen ovat haave vain.

[”The pandemic has ruined my mental health. I have a history of depression, and since the beginning of the pandemic I have feared relapse considerably more than getting infected. Now the worst-case scenario has been realized: an order to stay home is in effect an order to harm my mental health,” writes a 40-year old woman from Helsinki. She adds that the things which have sustained her mental health are now banned; being free to meet friends and going to the gym are but dreams.]

(I’ll write my personal commentary in a reblog so it doesn’t have to tag along with every reblog.)

[adenovir]

It’s not just Trump-Russia...

(THREAD) Pre-election Russia collusion may take down Trump. It's equally possible the Trumps' pre- and post-election collusion with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel will do it—a course of collusion also connected to the Kremlin. I explain here. I hope you'll read on and share.

1/ I must stress how unbelievably complex the "Grand Bargain" theory of the Trump-Russia case is—a different thing from saying it's not substantiated. It's substantiated in *almost every single particular*—it just *also* happens to be very confusing. Not byzantine—just confusing.

2/ The basics: Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the UAE all view Iran as their chief regional enemy. Iran is propped up by Russia. Therefore the Saudis, Israelis, and Emiratis all need a US government willing to find a way to get the Kremlin to *stop* supporting Iran in the Middle East.

3/ The best way to get Russia to stop supporting Iran—or reduce support—was/is to drop all sanctions on Russia over its 2014 annexation of Crimea, as that'd be worth *trillions* to the Kremlin over the next decade. Everyone knew that Clinton wouldn't do this—and that Trump would.

4/ Per the NYT, on August 3, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. met secretly at Trump Tower with a Saudi and Emirati emissary, George Nader, as well as an Israeli intelligence expert, Joel Zamel, with *significant* ties to both Israeli intelligence *and* Russian oligarchs allied with Putin.

5/ Per the NYT, Nader and Zamel both—effectively on behalf of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and Russia—offered the Trumps clandestine collusive assistance to win the 2016 election. Jr. reacted favorably to this offer—which got into the specifics of how the collusion would work.

6/ Zamel specifically offered a domestic disinformation campaign in the United States that would use fake social media accounts to sway "micro-targeted" U.S. voters toward Trump—basically *exactly* what ended up happening. Zamel has been connected to Bannon's Cambridge Analytica.

7/ Nader was an emissary from the Saudi Crown Prince ("MBS") and the Emirati Crown Prince ("MBZ"), while Zamel was connected to a Trump-linked Russian oligarch (Rybolovlev), Israeli intel, and Cambridge Analytica. Together they had money, microtargeting, and "dark" intel methods.

8/ Jesus... this is where it gets insane. I'm going to post five articles now that are absolutely necessary to what I'm about to say. This is... serious stuff, and it needs to be right. Please take a look at the following five articles:

9/ KEY ARTICLE 1:

Trump Jr. and Other Aides Met With Gulf Emissary Offering Help to Win Election

https://www.nytimes.com/…/trump-jr-saudi-uae-nader-prince-z…

10/ KEY ARTICLE 2:

Saudis Close to Crown Prince Discussed Killing Other Enemies a Year Before Khashoggi’s Death

https://www.nytimes.com/…/saudi-iran-assassinations-mohamme…

11/ KEY ARTICLE 3:

Top Cheney Aide in Muellers Sights as Probe Expands

https://www.thedailybeast.com/top-cheney-aide-in-muellers-s…

12/ KEY ARTICLE 4:

Abbas rival hired American mercenaries to kill in Yemen for UAE: report

https://www.i24news.tv/…/186610-181018-abbas-rival-hired-is…

13/ KEY ARTICLE 5:

Dahlan ‘cover-up team’ from Lebanon helps hide traces of Khashoggi murder

https://www.yenisafak.com/…/dahlan-cover-up-team-from-leban…

14/ Upshot: the Saudis and Emiratis formed a plot in 2015 to systematically assassinate Iranians and Iranian allies they considered a threat. To do this they needed the help of US mercenaries and quality intel—two things it now appears the Trumps and their allies helped provide.

15/ In other words, the Saudis, Emiratis, Israelis, and Russians didn't offer the Trumps pre-election collusive assistance for free—indeed they asked for a lot. The Russians would get trillions once the 2014 sanctions were dropped, and the other nations would get... other things.

16/ Trump adviser Erik Prince—who was *also* at the secret meeting with Nader, Zamel, and Don Jr. at Trump Tower in August '16—ran a mercenary army. Elliott Broidy, who had enormous access to Trump as a lobbyist and RNC finance co-chair, also was connected to a mercenary company.

17/ Jared Kushner—who wasn't at the August '16 meeting but *would* attend a followup in December with MBZ (who secretly entered the US for the meeting), Bannon, and the Zamel-connected Mike Flynn—struck up a very close "friendship" with MBS (the other Crown Prince) post-election.

18/ Numerous reports say Kushner got intel from his father-in-law's Presidential Daily Briefing—which only Trump could permit him to take—and gave it to MBS. The intel—a list of MBS' enemies—allowed MBS to target his domestic enemies and kill some of them.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/…/Saudi-crown-prince-brags-Jare…

19/ MBS subsequently told friends that Kushner was "in his pocket." And why would he think otherwise? Trump had (apparently) declassified intel for MBS' use as part of his program of domestic and international assassination. It was that very program that targeted Jamal Khashoggi.

20/ So *no one* was surprised when—despite the CIA concluding that MBS ordered Khashoggi killed—Trump gave his "I'm colluding with this guy" response, saying (as he had of Putin) that he believed MBS wasn't involved in the killing because... wait for it... MBS told him he wasn't.

21/ This five-party collusion explains why Trump went to Saudi Arabia first on his first trip abroad and immediately sold them weapons; why Kushner uses WhatsApp for all his MBS communications (it frustrates oversight); why Prince was Trump's envoy to Russia in the Seychelles...

22/ ...why Broidy was given $1 billion in business by Nader; why Nader met with White House officials repeatedly in the first 60 days of Trump's administration; why Mueller originally suspected Papadopoulos as an Israeli spy; why Flynn, Barrack, Gates, and other Trump allies...

23/ ...began lobbying Trump as soon as he was elected to send nuclear tech to Saudi Arabia (partly to build new nuclear reactors, but with a longer-term goal of letting Saudi Arabia and the UAE develop nuclear weapons as a deterrence of Iran); why Trump ripped up the Iran deal...

24/ ...even though Iran was in compliance; and more. Look: we know Trump's top aides were willing to assist foreign nations in assassinating people living in the U.S., because that's *exactly* what Mike Flynn was caught trying to do—extradite a Turkish cleric to be killed abroad.

25/ The reason this is all so confusing is that *some* of the motives in play may have been reasonable. Iran *is* a state sponsor of terrorism—so it's not so far out of bounds to think that a U.S. government might want to assist Iran's many enemies in the Middle East if possible.

26/ But many of the motives involved were *illegal*, too. Namely—as was the case with Russia—the Trumps (plus Kushner) are *easily* bribed, and willing to set U.S. policy on the basis of bribes. With Putin, it was billions in real estate deals in Moscow that easily bribed Trump.

27/ With Saudi Arabia, Trump and Jared being the *only* people in the White House who supported the Saudi blockade of Qatar suggests that—when Qatar shortly thereafter turned around and "loaned" Jared $1 billion—they were being strong-armed by secret Trump-Saudi Arabia collusion.

28/ Just so, the Trumps are trying to expand (and *have* expanded) their real estate empire into the UAE, which makes pleasing the Emiratis important as a business proposition. And since Trump doesn't care how many people the Saudis or Emiratis assassinate, why not help them out?

29/ This sort of Bribery—a federal crime—is of course impeachable under the Constitution. But if a story that just came out in the Middle East Eye—which has been *very* accurate on the Khashoggi case—is correct, the Trumps may have just crossed the line into something far darker.

30/ If this BREAKING NEWS is accurate, the Trumps *actively* participated in the Saudi-Emirati-Israeli assassination scheme—which, remember, per the links in this thread, both Nader and Zamel were part of—in order to get financial benefits on the back end.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/…/saudis-using-pompeos-plan-s…

31/ Simply put, under circumstances in which you know MBS is criminally responsible for the murder of a Washington Post journalist, you *can't* assist him in escaping detection by delivering to him a plan to do just that. That'd be Accessory After the Fact to First-Degree Murder.

32/ *Obviously* I want to see the Middle East Eye story reported elsewhere also, but again, the Middle East Eye has repeatedly broken news in the Khashoggi case. Plus, their scoop fits with *all the other evidence* we have of this plot dating back (at least) to early August 2016.

33/ I can't help but recall, now, how Pompeo was the CIA director, and then Tillerson was pushed out at State so Pompeo could replace him, and then Trump started singing his praises in terms of his *loyalty*. Well, it'd take that sort of "loyal" person to do something like this.

34/ There are too many angles here to count: for instance, one wouldn't normally think Bannon would be at all the planning meetings for Trump-Russia-Saudi-Emirati-Israeli collusion—but it makes sense when you understand that Zamel and Cambridge Analytica were crucial to the plan.

35/ Flynn's involvement might also be a mystery, until you learn that Zamel had previously tried to recruit him for *his* intel outfit (Flynn had one too), and Flynn thereafter became an *energy lobbyist* trying to bring nuclear energy (thus, eventually, weapons) to Saudi Arabia.

36/ A list of the people relevant to this plot:

Trump Sr. Trump Jr. Kushner Bannon Flynn Nader Broidy Prince Zamel MBS MBZ Rybolovlev* Barrack Gates McFarlane Dmitriev + others

*There's credible evidence Rybolovlev had two secret meetings with Trump in the 10 days pre-election.

37/ My point in writing this thread *isn't* thinking I can explain every aspect of this to all of you on Twitter—the 5- (really 6-) nation "Grand Bargain" requires, literally, an entire book to explain properly. And—as importantly—to document with reliable, major-media reporting.

38/ The important thing to understand is that all the major-media reporting you've read saying that Mueller is looking at *multi-state collusion*—not just a "bipolar" collusion between the Trumps and Russia—is not just correct but *richly* supported by reams of *public* evidence.

39/ This also means that when you see continued reporting on the Khashoggi case, you shouldn't see it as merely the tail-end of a story from weeks ago that is losing steam... but quite possibly the *beginning* of a story that will ultimately lead to the end of Trump's presidency.

40/ I've been saying forever that "Trump-Russia"—which is now the catch-all term for all pre- and post-election collusive activities orchestrated by the Trumps and their allies—is about *greed*. These are really *really* bad people, folks—and we'll soon learn just *how* bad. /end

UPDATE/ This thread continues, with additional *significant* evidence of the "Grand Bargain," here:

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1064904175761403906

(THE GRAND BARGAIN) If the "grand bargain" theory of the Russia case is accurate—and it is—we'd expect to see MBS pay Rybolovlev hundreds of millions in laundered money to pay Russia for the social media campaign the Saudis promised Jr. And hey—guess what?

https://www.nytimes.com/…/salvator-mundi-da-vinci-saudi-pri…

2/ That's right:

1. Rybolovlev agent offers Trump Jr. (on 8/3/16) a Russia disinformation campaign in the presence of an MBS agent. MBS apparently offers to bankroll it. 2. Trump Jr. says yes. 3. A year later, an MBS agent overpays Rybolovlev by $300 MILLION PLUS for a painting.

3/ The only plausible reason Nader—the MBS agent—offers collusive assistance to the Trumps at *the same secret Trump Tower meeting* at which Zamel (a Rybolovlev agent) pitches a disinformation campaign mirroring Russia's is if the Saudis can bankroll it. So MBS *owed* Rybolovlev.

4/ Below is info on Zamel as Rybolovlev agent. Note: Rybolovlev a) apparently held two secret tarmac meetings with Trump himself in the 10 days before the 2016 election (Charlotte/Las Vegas), b) previously overpaid Trump by tens of millions for a property.

https://www.haaretz.com/…/.premium-who-is-joel-zamel-austra…

5/ But wait! you say. Did Zamel have the sort of micro-targeting data needed to coordinate a Russian pre-election propaganda campaign in the U.S.? Well, almost the very day after the election Zamel *publicly* announced a partnership with... Trump's data-firm, Cambridge Analytica.

6/ And once Trump won, Kushner and Bannon (Trump's data guys) started showing up at secret transition meetings with... MBZ (the other Crown Prince behind the August '16 collusion offer) and Flynn (a former Zamel associate and fellow intel guy) and George Nader (representing MBS).

7/ But why make Don Jr. the first point man in receiving offers of a digital campaign to hurt Clinton? I don't know, was Don Jr. in contact with WikiLeaks to try to find out how to help his dad during the *same 2-week period* he accepted a digital collusion offer from Zamel? Yep.

8/ Can I just repeat that a Saudi prince who's a top ally of MBS overpaid a Trump-linked Russian oligarch for a *painting* by... OVER 300 MILLION? (Re-read multiple times.) Per the NYT, Christie's—the auction house—and everyone else was like, uh, where did this guy get the money?

9/ The key point: this *isn't* a theory of the case that exists only on Twitter. This appears to be *Mueller's theory of the case* with respect to Trump-Russia: that it's a Bribery, Money Laundering, Fraud, and Conspiracy case involving *multiple* nations.

https://newrepublic.com/…/mueller-probe-going-beyond-russia…

10/ Another point about that painting: as NYT notes, many think it's a) not good work, and b) even worse, *fake*. So that transaction is *suspicious as hell*—and it's effectively between the two people in the *world* you'd most suspect of needing to launder money over collusion.

— Seth Abramson, the author of "Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America"

[theweekendbriefs]

Weekend Briefs - 12 September 2020

Hello everyone!

After a brief hiatus, we are back with a new edition of the Weekend Briefs. To be very honest, the hiatus was self imposed due to pressing schedules, never ending meetings, being a good ‘ol listener to many and  scrambling through many content to find the best for weekend briefs. Anyways with Unlock (some number) under progress and world resuming to business as usual, the English Premier League ( EPL ) kickoff this weekend and the IPL next week, we can find some joy, relief and unity the sporting world offers.

Alright moving on to our regulars, first off...

Tell us something to read

Artificial intelligence has been touted as the next big game changer in our world.  While I am a big fan of the limitless possibilities of AI and also transcribing this briefs  with the aid of a AI powered text processor* I also share the same skepticism Stephen Hawking shared about AI. 

Image Source : Apple

Last week, a certain article had re-kindled some of my interest in AI and  in the past 24 hours I have been looking around for articles that present a simple, yet curious read for a general audience. This certain article interestingly was written by a robot, specifically, the GPT-3 ( a deep network natural language learning processor ). The article published in the Guardian was a response to the  editorial team’s questions on, “ Why humans need not fear the emergence of AI?” The AI brought out many iterations/response to the question, which was further edited by human editors. You can read this article here and the guardian editors note on editing articles written by robots.

However, on the contrary there is also a rising sentiment to whether Robots or AI powered beings ( whatever shape and form they take ) will replace human jobs, will they do much of our jobs with speed and efficiency and maybe over time gain so much insights into our behaviors to make them work for us or They could soon start writing articles with or without human input. An interesting Op-Ed in the New York Times looks at this intriguing premise. Farhad Manjoo, an opinion columnist at NYT offers compelling arguments on the global society marred with rising technological pusuits and issues of broader nature. The article titled, “ How Do You Know a Human wrote this?” can be found here. 

Lastly on the topic of AI. I have found an interesting blog that offers a very critical insight into the world of technology, the whims and fancies of surveillance governments, horrors of facisism and many more. “Real Life” as the blog is titled has put up an interesting article contesting the neutrality of AI powered text and speech and underpinnings of liberalist coherence in these text. You can read this article titled, “Lawful Neutral ”  challenging read here.

Iran’s Housing Crisis : A Photo Essay

Photo essays are a joy to read and powerful tool of journalistic endeavor. It brings life to the banality of text and allows the reader to develop a visual angle to the context. Iran is a country in the news for all the many right and wrong reasons. I choose carefully not to delve into the geopolitics at hand, but its a country whose beautiful landscapes and complicated history as always baffled me. The New Yorker last year ran an interesting photo essay titled “ The Ghost Towers : On Iran’s Housing Crisis.  ”  chronicling the many equations, constants and variables present in the housing equation. Urban housing is not merely a demand-supply problem, it goes beyond the economic curves and rational theories of consumer good. Its extremely contextual and intersectional. Read this beautifully composed article here. 

Alright, enough with the reading...tell us something to watch..

The self imposed brief hiatus meant I could catch up on some watching on OTT platforms. The advent and rise of OTT platforms especially in this post pandemic era is a welcoming  change in the Big-ticket-Big Screen Landscape. With a few regional industries and even the mammoth Bollywood taking leaps of faith in making exclusive releases on Prime or Netflix, it is an indicator OTT is here and will be a competitive force in demanding our attention. 

First up, my recommendation ( for those who have not caught it yet ) is C U Soon. 

C U Soon |  Image Courtesy : Prime Video 

Malayalam industry is hailed for its remarkable eye to content, detail and pushing the envelope of exciting cinema in India. With a large dish of extremely talented actors, producers, technicians, every new Malayalam movie round the corner is not just pleasant to watch but offers a breath of superior cinematic experience. C U Soon, shot entirely virtually and on an iPhone and portrayed on the virtual landscapes of Zoom, Google Chat and FaceTime was conceived and developed during the pandemic lockdown. Inspired by 2018 flick, “Searching”, C U Soon, offers a string of brilliant performances from Fahad Fasil ( ♥️ ), Darshana Rajendran and Roshan Mathew, is an emotional thriller keeping you at the edge of the seat. While the actors dazzle with their performances, Mahesh Narayanan’s fine cut editing, direction and virtual cinematography gives a distraction/disturbance free and focused environment. You can catch C U Soon on Amazon Prime and Mahesh Narayanan, FaFa’s interview with Anupama Chopra on Film Companion here.

While Netflix has had a few nice releases, I am looking forward to watching “Social Dilemma ” and Charlie Kaufman’s “ I am Thinking of Ending Things ”. You can read reviews of both these films here and here. 

and...Tell us something to listen to...

If there is one thing that has been constant and increasing in number over time in a working life is meetings. The running joke in our WFH life is, ‘this meeting could have been an email.” And over time, we lose patience, the sanity and feel increasingly rattled with more meetings. The Freakonomics podcast features an interesting episode on “ Making Meetings Miserable ”. The episode sheds light on the behavioral insights of what makings meetings terrible and what could be the workarounds to make it better. You can catch it here. 

Also, interesting podcast to binge listen to is “ Planet of Money” hosted by Jacob Goldstein on NPR. The podcast is relatively simple in explaining the haranguing concepts of money, finance and economics. You can catch it here.

Image Courtesy : NPR

and for our readers who really wish to relax this weekend, here is a Spotify Playlist titled “ Easy Mornings ”

___

Alright, that's all we have for this weekend. We have been less frequent over time, but when schedules and monotony buries us, the Weekend Briefs is a space to go back to. 

Thanks to Navnit for his timely suggestions for the podcasts and listening recommendations. If you all have suggestions for text, movies, video, audio etc please write to us. 

Hope everyone has an exciting and relaxing weekend.  

Signing off,

The Weekend Briefs.

* PS: The AI Powered Text Processor is the new Microsoft Word inbuilt with some empowered AI Techniques to help us write by speaking to it. Word of Caution, it listens to everything.

[adventuresindakar]

Leaning into the village.

On the first day of 2017 two of the people I love most in the world had a baby boy.  He was a “surprise” an unplanned arrival, years after they had finished having kids.  2016 is was a rough year for the world, but it was a particularly difficult one for their extended family so the arrival of this beautiful, healthy, baby boy was a joyful and auspicious start to 2017.  I did what people do when they are thousands of miles away, i cooed over his sweet, slightly stunned, red faced newborn photo his proud parents posted to facebook and then I wrote a message on his mama’s wall:  Welcome to the world! 

Welcome to the world. 

Its a phrase we bandy about so cavalierly when babies are born, but this time it caught in my throat a bit. Its a big deal, the biggest deal there is, to welcome someone to life as a human being on this planet, and all that entails.  All the joy and pain and disappointment and challenge and delight and frustration and complexity and simple pleasure of life as a human on this planet.  And only slightly less of a big deal is to be a parent of one of those newly formed humans who is responsible for guiding them through the first 20 or so odd years of life on that planet, hoping somehow that you will keep them in basically one piece and teach them to be polite and to tie their shoes and pee in the toilet and also respect their fellow human beings and love unconditionally and eat a balanced diet and meet their potential and not write on the furniture. 

Parenting is impossible. 

I know that people who are not parents get really sick of people who are parents being all dramatic and precious about their job of raising sticky little people and how hard it is and how exhausting and yet so Worth. It.  Non-parents, I assume, want to take all of us parents by the shoulders and say “first of all, you are NOT the first people to ever be parents, humans all over the planet have been doing this literally since the dawn of human existence and, secondly, you CHOSE this path so stop whining about it and let me get back to my kid-free brunch and quiet reading time.”

I really don’t blame them for feeling that way.  Even I get sick of the constant blather about parenting - but what non-parents have to understand is that, for most of us, parenting is overwhelming and bewildering in ways that were totally unexpected, but due to the exhaustion and extreme distraction we don’t get much time to reflect on this notion and thus fall back on comparing eating habits and fretting about potty training and debating endlessly about the best way to get our kid to sleep better at night.  (parents are obsessed with sleep.  All of us are certain that most of our problems would be solved if we could just get a friggin night’s sleep)

To make things even worse, parenting has become something of a competitive sport in America, especially among east-coast educated progressives who are all nauseating know-it-alls and hell bent do-gooders.  Armed with statistics and advice from parenting blogs, moms and dads volley healthy snacks and perfectly timed naps at each other with lightening speed, one upping with references to "restorative justice” or NYT articles about the pros and cons of co-sleeping   DC is an especially competitive parenting league, as it is chock full of (mostly) women who are professionals and would prefer to be working, but are being dragged to DC with their spouses for a relatively temporary assignment, and decide to be a SAHP for a while until their kids are in school.  These (mostly, but not entirely) moms pour the same level of professionalism and expertise into their children as they did into their high-powered careers, and the result is dizzying.  

In the months before we moved to Dakar I didn’t work and got to play quite a bit of rec league “parentball”, and like most sports, discovered out I wasn’t very good at it.  I was at once awed and shamed and morbidly fascinated by these perfectly turned out moms with their snacks and sunscreen.  Whereas my diaper bag was mostly a repository for used kleenex, melted crayons and mysterious food bits, the professional moms at the parks in my neighborhood had  handbags that seemed to be made from the same material as Harry Potter’s tent - no matter what the situation called for - a fresh pair of pants, a parka, a towel, a thermos of soup -  it was pulled at once from the depths of the bag.  While Enzo roamed around the splash pad in just a swimming suit (and maybe a swim diaper if I was having a good, day)  the other kids had sunproof swim shirts and zinc on their noses and sturdy water shoes.  I would inwardly sigh and put a mental check in the “crappy mom” column in my brain.  

I have to admit, I rarely felt overtly judged by the moms around me.  Occasionally i would catch a side eye, some shade thrown from across the swing set,  but it began to dawn on me that most moms were just desperately trying to prove that THEY were good moms, not that I was a bad one.  I wanted to say “you’re doing great! This is hard! If I pick your kid up after she falls off the slide, its not a referendum on you as a person, I was just handy and I am a teacher and it is second nature to me.”  I had the urge to start conversations with “Hey, my kid sleeps on his stomach and started drinking chocolate milk when he was 18 months old” just to clear the air.  But I was too insecure, there were too many check marks accumulating in my crappy mom column, and a particularly nasty inner voice was beginning to wonder aloud if perhaps I wasn’t cut out for this mommy business.

And then we moved overseas. 

 When we arrived in Dakar we had one adorably precocious two year old and vague plans to have another one in a year or two.  We didn’t know that I was already pregnant with what would eventually become our sweet little rascal, Mateo.  When I found out I was pregnant I was not immediately overjoyed, i was in despair - we were still living out of suitcases, I was tired and grieving the loss of the life I knew and bewildered about how to help Enzo manage the transition to this strange new world.   I was mentally exhausted from spending all day trying to speak French, and physically exhausted from the heat and mosquitoes cutting into our sleep, and emotionally exhausted from the impossible task of making a home in this dusty place, and I was in no shape to bring another person into our family.  After a couple days I unpacked my big girl panties and pulled myself together and got busy finding a home and working at the school and slowly began to embrace the idea of another tiny person in our lives.  But I couldn’t shake those check marks, the tally that added up to me being insufficient, and I wondered how I was going to parent another child when I was so far behind the learning curve.

Allow me to take a little detour from my story here.

I have always been aware that I am not a great driver.  I have never gotten into a catastrophic accident, but still, my wandering mind, poor hand eye coordination and slow reflexes mean that I am a mediocre driver at best.  Or at least that is what I used to think.  The truth is, I am not a bad driver, I was just born to drive in Africa.  Your mind can’t wander when there are horse drawn carts, goats, aggressive taxis, giant busses, potholes, reckless pedestrians and the occasional industrial dump truck to contend with.  And because the lanes are narrow and packed no one is going very fast, so my reflexes have ample time to fire up before I am going to go skidding into the car in front of me.  Traffic rules are optional, you can park your car anywhere you feel like stopping, lanes are just suggestions, and when backing out of a parking spot into oncoming traffic there is always a parking attendant ready to stand in your blind spot and wave you out into the street.  I love it.  (I am pretty sure my passengers aren’t nearly as enamored with my driving as I am) 

This is basically how I feel about parenting too.  I am not a bad parent at all, in fact I am a totally kick-ass mom.  As long as I am parenting in Dakar where the rules are flexible, you can take your kids anywhere, and there are always people ready to help you out of a jam. Maybe its because living overseas you learn to take things in stride and reorganize your priorities, or perhaps its the fact that people who choose to live their lives abroad are generally a bunch of freewheeling bohemians, but whatever the reason, parents here are an incredibly relaxed, supportive and non-judgemental group of people.  I love it.  

For example: I regularly leave my boys in the car when I run into the bakery or to the ATM or hop out at the vegetable stand.  I leave the doors locked and the windows open and I can always see them from the store and its never for more than a 5 minutes, but dragging two kids out of the car and through the sidewalk traffic just so I can buy a loaf of bread is insane.  The first time I did it because both kids were asleep, and I HAD to get water.  But now I do it as a matter of routine.

In the US this could get me arrested. 

Which is dumb, because it is objectively safer to leave your kids IN the car than drag them across a busy parking lot.  And the chances of someone breaking into your car and stealing them is infinitesimally small.  And all of us spent hours and hours sitting in the car on weekend mornings while our parent’s ran errands - a few minutes at the store and then at the bank and then at the post office-most of the time we were happy not to go in and stand in line.  I much preferred to wait in the car with my book.  My parents were not worried that a stranger would come by, see me in the car, assume my parents were negligent and abusive and then call the cops.  But now, it is a genuine fear - I don’t trust my neighbors to be on my side, they have become the enemy in my quest to raise my kids. My generation has found other means of supporting each other - online communities and MOPS groups and structured playdates - but there is not a sense that we can rely on our neighbors and community members to have our backs.  it is a lonely and terrifying feeling. 

The phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” has long been bandied about as an “African proverb” - which is kind of a silly notion considering there are upwards of 1500 languages spoken on this massive continent. But regardless of the origins of the phrase, it is a truism about how children are viewed here.  It is a common understanding that everyone within earshot is tacitly responsible for any kids nearby - on the street, in a store, in a restaurant.  And our community of teachers who live on this street are neighbors in the best way - sharing food and kitchen appliances and a helping hand at a moments notice. 

And in this year where I have been alone so much of the time, I have leaned on this village of understanding and generous people many many times.  There was the time at Halloween when I was trying to wrangle two overstimulated and exhausted kids out of Ebbets Field and into the busy night time streets when Mateo suddenly dropped to the ground, in a complete meltdown and I lost Enzo in the rush of people leaving.  A colleague who happened to be behind me scooped up Mateo, a different friend stopped Enzo before he got to the street and a THIRD person, who had just pulled his car up to the gate,  offered to drive him so I only had to lug one kid through the heat to my car.  Once, when I ran out of water I called my friend, Torie, who lives across the street to ask her if she would be willing to come sit in my house while one kid was asleep and the other was watching TV so I could run out and buy water.  She readily agreed, and when I got home (30 minutes later, because of course I had to go to two stores) she was washing my dishes.  Adam and Kayla, who live across the street, host Enzo for a few minutes every week when he chugs over to their house to pick up our weekly yogurt delivery.  He plays with their dogs and helps himself to their food and they are incredibly kind and good humored about it. One day, when it was raining cats and dogs, he was there for more than an hour - I finally dashed over to collect him only to discover that he had nearly talked Kayla into making him lunch. 

This weekend our friends Bill and Cairn (two of our favorite members of the parenting village) asked what we were going to miss the most in Dakar, what we were most worried about moving back to the US.  The number one top of my list item is returning to the world of competitive parenting, of being afraid to ask my neighbors to help, of getting caught up in the madness of shutting kids to “activities” and forgetting to just let them be, of constantly failing to live up to this invisible standard and letting that nasty voice back into my head, the one that tells me that I am not enough.  Instead I need embrace that notion, of course I am not enough, no one is, and the important thing is to find the people who will help you fill in the gaps, and whose gaps you can help to fill as well.  To find the village.  

[mastcomm]

Chocolate Chip Cookies for Everyone

In July 2009, The Times ran an article by David Leite, a cookbook author and food writer, that chronicled his quest for the perfect chocolate chip cookie. The recipe he developed as a result of his deep dive into flour types, hydration periods, chocolate percentages and salt ratios is loosely adapted from Jacques Torres, the famous pastry chef and chocolatier. David’s recipe, which calls for two kinds of flour and 36 hours of “aging” in the fridge, has become a cult favorite among NYT Cooking readers. One reader wrote that it’s “THE only chocolate chip cookie recipe you’ll ever need.”

But if you eat a gluten-free or vegan diet, you’ve been out of luck. Until now!

The editors at NYT Cooking charged me, a recipe developer and food stylist, with the task of developing vegan and gluten-free versions of the famous recipe. After many hours of baking, 400 cookies, seven types of flour and endless taste-tests, I am happy to say that I landed on two great recipes that will satisfy your chocolate chip cookie craving. Here’s how I did it.

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookie

“Veganizing” the original meant I had to replace the butter and eggs, as well as the granulated sugar, which — don’t shoot the messenger, if you didn’t already know this — uses animal products in the refining process. For the butter, I tried olive oil, coconut oil, vegan butter and shortening. Much to my surprise, vegan butter won out: It provided the best flavor and best replicated the qualities of dairy butter, like browning and spread. For the egg, I tried leaving it out entirely, or replacing it with flaxseed powder, applesauce or powdered egg replacer. The flaxseed powder provided structure, contributed a delightful chew, and didn’t adversely affect the flavor or color of the cookies. Substituting the sugar was the biggest challenge. Vegan go-tos like agave, maple syrup and brown rice syrup required significant alterations because they are liquid, and caused the cookies to brown and spread unevenly. In the end, a combination of unrefined cane sugar and coconut sugar, which makes an excellent brown sugar substitute, produced the best results. As for the chocolate, it’s relatively easy to find vegan chocolate, but check the ingredients to be sure there’s no added sugar or dairy. Once I’d figured out the substitutions, I tweaked the recipe to accommodate them.

Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookie

Developing a gluten-free version turned out to be a surprising process. My goal was to create a recipe that required just one type of flour, rather than several, as is the case with a lot of gluten-free baked goods. Honestly, I thought I’d end up resorting to a blend, but after trying a number of flours (white rice, brown rice, potato, chickpea, coconut, store-bought gluten-free all-purpose blends and almond), I was shocked (and thrilled!) when every taste tester preferred the same cookie: the one made with store-bought almond flour. It created a cookie that was beautifully chewy and golden brown. All that was left were some tweaks — like reducing the ratio of butter and eggs — to get it closer to the original recipe.

(If you want a gluten-free and vegan cookie, substitute the all-purpose flour with 2 ¾ cups/310 grams finely ground almond flour in the vegan recipe.)

Two things to note: Neither of these recipes benefits from the 36-hour aging period that’s called for in the original. In the gluten-free recipe, the almond flour won’t absorb moisture the same way wheat flour does, making chilling unnecessary. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to chill the vegan dough, but I found no significant difference in the texture when I did so. Also, unlike the original recipe that called for two types of flour, the vegan cookie ended up using only all-purpose flour; for some reason (science!), in that version, the two flours yielded cookies that were consistently dry and crumbly. In the development process, the constant tweaking of ingredients also altered the yield slightly, which is why the recipes produce a different quantity than the original.

Whatever you do or don’t eat, absolutely everyone deserves a go-to chocolate chip cookie in their recipe box. Here’s hoping one of these recipes earns a spot on your “most baked” list.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/life-style/chocolate-chip-cookies-for-everyone/

[componentplanet]

Blizzard Lowers Penalty on Hong Kong Streamer, Says China Uninvolved in Censorship

Last week, several events have shown a spotlight on Chinese censorship of the ongoing Hong Kong protests. Chinese censors have been taking increasingly draconian action to crack down on criticism of the country. When a Hong Kong-based Hearthstone streamer voiced support for the protesters who have battled for their right to a fair trial, Blizzard cracked down harshly. Chung ‘blitzchung’ Ng Wai was suspended from Hearthstone for a year and forced to forfeit his prize money. A similar punishment was applied to the two individuals who were interviewing him at the time.

The community response has been withering. Multiple casters and streamers have announced boycotts or stepped away from various positions and roles in the Hearthstone community. Now, Blizzard has released a lengthy statement on the matter, written by the company president, J. Allen Brack. It announces that the full-year ban against Blitzchung has been reduced to six months and that his prize money is no longer forfeit. It also claims: “our relationships in China had no influence on our decision… If this had been the opposing viewpoint delivered in the same divisive and deliberate way, we would have felt and acted the same.”

This pair of excerpted statements are a master class, ironically enough, in self-censorship. Let’s talk about why.

How Chinese Censorship Works

When people think of censorship, they tend to think of a government or corporation suppressing information by refusing to allow it to be published. This is one type of censorship, to be sure, but it’s not very compatible with the existence of the modern internet. Simple anti-publishing mandates are fairly easy to route around on the internet, where an article that exists online even for an instant can be screen-shotted and disseminated.

A far more effective tactic is to teach people to self-censor by convincing them that speaking up is not in their own best interest. A related term, soft censorship, refers to the practice of using financial pressure on media companies to “persuade” them not to speak up on certain topics out of concern for having their access restricted or revoked.

As we detailed in our previous coverage, China has directly encouraged self-censorship by enforcing severe penalties against offenders. In 2018, Marriott published an online poll listing Tibet as a separate country rather than a part of China. A Tibetan separatist group published a link to the survey. A Marriott employee, Roy Jones, liked the post the separatist group made. He wasn’t Tibetan. He knew nothing about China-Tibetan relations. He was doing his job — promoting content created by people who appeared to be fans of Marriott.

Jones, who made $14 per hour, was fired within a week.

In February 2018, Mercedes-Benz took down an Instagram post because it quoted the Dalai Lama and enraged China in the process. The offending quote? “Look at the situations from all angles, and you will become more open.” I have no idea why anyone thought this statement would be useful when selling cars, but it’s objectively meaningless as far as any reference to the political situation between China and Tibet. Instagram is also banned in China, meaning few-to-no Chinese users would have even seen the ad.

China’s disproportionate responses are not mistakes. They’re the whole point.

If you want people to self-censor, fear, uncertainty, and doubt — FUD — are your absolute best friends. When China cracked down on popular online bloggers and opinion-makers in 2013, it claimed it did so to prevent fraud, abuse, and slander — but many of the accounts taken offline had a political edge to them. 9,800 social media accounts were banned in a single action. Afterward, the government introduced new laws governing online speech. At least one woman went to jail for three years for breaking them. This year, the Chinese silenced a social media star named Ma Ling, with more than 16 million followers. The NYT reports she posted about a young man with cancer “whose talent and virtue were not enough to overcome problems like corruption and inequality.”

The Chinese government obliterated her social media accounts and erased her online presence.

Egregious overreaction to seemingly minor events is how China maintains the necessary climate of fear. While it cannot directly jail the employees of Americans who mouth off on Twitter, it can certainly make retaining those employees incredibly expensive for companies wishing to do business in mainland China.

Let’s get back to Blizzard. China is a major market for the company. While Blizzard no longer releases player data for World of Warcraft, China currently accounts for 5.2 percent of Activision Blizzard’s revenue, almost double from its share one year ago. Activision Blizzard earned $7.2B in 2018. Assume equivalent revenue for 2019 (just to make the math simple), and that means China would be worth about $360M to the combined company.

You are Blizzard. A streamer from Hong Kong makes a statement you know will enrage the Chinese government. Do you instantly take action to remove the content, thereby preserving your harmonious relationship with the Chinese people, or do you wait for the censors to act, knowing how you will be treated if you do? Keep in mind, there is explicitly no guarantee whatsoever that you will not be punished. Others in your exact situation have been punished. But if you act instantly, there’s a chance you’ll be deemed to have been acting in good faith.

Presented, once again, without commentary. But you might infer insinuation.

This is why I suspect J. Allen Brack could write that China had nothing to do with his company’s decision. It could very well be true. Blizzard didn’t make this decision after its lovable pal Xi Jinping stopped by with a pot of honey problem that needed solving. It made this decision “independently,” knowing that its entire Chinese business could be at stake if it did not. This, my friends, is what is often referred to as motivated reasoning.

As for the second part of the statement, I suspect it’s true as well. Would Blizzard have cracked down on a streamer with a big pro-China message? Very possibly — but importantly — not for the same reason. Blizzard likely cracked down on pro-Hong Kong statements to save its own ass. It would crack down on a pro-mainland China statement to preserve the illusion of neutrality. The only way for Blizzard to superficially appear to be neutral is to declare that it will crack down on both viewpoints. Neutrality, by its very nature, supports the status quo — in this case, the idea that no one is allowed to talk about Hong Kong unless it’s the government of mainland China. And mainland China has precious little interest in allowing news of what’s actually going on to reach its own citizens.

Image by Polygon

J. Allen Brack’s statement makes no mention of the fact that a Hearthstone team from American University attempted to get itself suspended by doing exactly what Blitzchung had done just days before. That team has not been penalized. In fact, it received a next match assignment after its action — a match it will forfeit in protest. Evidently China still recognizes that there are certain people it would be unprofitable to go after or Blizzard realizes that its efforts to curry favor with Xi Jinping’s administration have already been catastrophic for its brand. Possibly both.

This Happens

Everyone practices self-censorship to a certain extent. I personally learned the value of the concept around age 10, when I called a church deacon a bastard for not taking my money during the offertory. My mother turned a shade so alarming, my father thought she’d choked on a mint. But when applied at the corporate or government level, self-censorship isn’t just a personal decision we all make to smooth social interactions. In situations like this, it’s poison to the very idea of transparent or accountable governance. And I’ve seen the impact in my own work.

Since I ran my first story on this topic, multiple readers have reached out to tell me they don’t dare share the link. Some of them travel to China regularly. Some of them have friends and family there. This is precisely how self-censorship and China’s social credit monitoring system are supposed to work. When I heard this from readers, it then occurred to me that I might be targeted in some fashion. This is also by design. Anxiety is socially transmissible.

This article is my response.

China’s censors know they can’t control every word that people say on social media. They know even the most ardent human filters cannot read every single line of text before it’s put online. Instead of attempting an impossible task, they rely on the rest of us to do their dirty work for them. I have known people at Blizzard for 20 years. I participated in the closed beta tests for Diablo II, Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft, Diablo III, and many of the WoW expansions. I have written tens of thousands of words about World of Warcraft over the last 15 years. I admire many aspects of the company, but its initial response to this situation was flatly unacceptable. Its current half-retreat wears the queasy smile of an abused individual hoping immediate obeisance will stave off a blow. Having rushed to defend the tender feelings of the Chinese government, the company now feels compelled to tack backward in response to public opinion.

Blizzard could and should do better. It’s one thing to promote free trade of goods and services. It’s another thing entirely to do business when the cost of doing so is the suppression of the rights of private US citizens to speak their minds concerning public affairs of the day. A low-level Marriott employee was bullied off his job for the crime of failing to grasp the context of a complex geopolitical situation on Twitter. This is not some hypothetical “what-if” scenario. China’s censors are already changing content, getting people fired, and controlling the larger narrative around geopolitical events in important ways now.

If we stand by and allow this to happen we will be giving up the right to free speech in the corporatized public-private spaces that now dominate the internet. China will not allow internet companies to operate within its borders without agreeing to enforce its censorship policies. We already know Google was willing to build Project Dragonfly, a new search engine for the Chinese market, despite having previously publicly pledged not to work in the country. Based on how the country is now acting, we can assume any companies with a media presence that extends into China will find themselves policed for improper references to China. How we collectively respond to these events will determine what happens when these collisions of values occur. Google killed Dragonfly only after widespread public outcry and protests from its own employees. When employees, users, and citizens demand companies stand up for the values they claim to stand for (and that Americans wish to stand for in general), there’s a much greater chance of affecting change.

Stand for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.

Now Read:

US Government Blacklists 28 Chinese Facial Recognition and AI Companies

China Is Installing Android Malware on Tourists’ Phones

Capitalism Didn’t Bring Democracy to China, but It’s Yoking the Rest of the World to Chinese Authoritarianism

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/300200-blizzard-reduces-ban-hong-kong-streamer-china-censorship from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2019/10/blizzard-lowers-penalty-on-hong-kong.html

[oditile]

A Tidytext Analysis of the Weinstein Effect

From: https://www.gokhanciflikli.com/post/weinstein-effect/

Dec 3, 2017 · 3099 words · 15 minutes readPLOT R TIDYTEXT

Quantifying He-Said, She-Said: Newspaper Reporting

I have been meaning to get into quantitative text analysis for a while. I initially planned this post to feature a different package (that I wanted to showcase), however I ran into some problems with their .json parsing methods and currently waiting for the issue to be solved on their end. The great thing about doing data science with R is that there are multiple avenues leading you to the same destination, so let’s take advantage of that.

My initial inspiration came from David Robinson’s post on gendered verbs. I remember sending it around and thinking it was quite cool. Turns out he was building on Julia Silge’s earlier post on gender pronouns. I see that post and I go, ‘what a gorgeous looking ggplot theme!’. So. Neat. Praise be the open source gods, the code is on GitHub. Let’s take advantage of that too.

I still needed a topic, and even though both the Wikipedia plots and the Jane Austen datasets sound interesting to look at, I felt that there is another, obvious choice.1 It has a Wikipedia page and its own subreddit. Also, the title might have given it away. Let’s get to work.

Getting Full Text News Articles

My first instinct was to check out the NYT APIs—it made sense, given that they broke the news (along with the New Yorker). Everything seemed to be working out just fine, until I realised you cannot get the full text—only the lead. Staying true to my strict data scientist training, I googled ‘full text newspaper api r’ and there it was: GuardianR. Sorry NYC mates, we reckon we will have to cross the pond for this one.

Note that any one source will always be biased. If you are not familiar with the Guardian, it’s British and has a left-centre bias. It might be prudent to pair it with a right-centre newspaper, however not all newspapers provide APIs (which in itself is another selection bias). Alas, we will move on just with the Guardian—insert idiom regarding salt. Finally, you will need to get a free API key from their open source platform. You still have to register, but you are only in danger if you vote Tory and stand on the left side of the escalator. Once you got it, install/load the package via CRAN:

library(GuardianR) ls(pos = "package:GuardianR")

## [1] "get_guardian"     "get_json"         "parse_json_to_df"

As you can see, the GuardianR package is a simple one: it contains only three (but powerful) functions. We only need the first one to get a hold of the full text articles, and the syntax is super simple:

#not evaluated articles <- get_guardian(keywords = "sexual+harassment",                         section = "world",                         from.date = "2012-11-30",                         to.date = "2017-11-30",                         api.key = "your-key-here")

Running the above chunk with your own key will get you all articles published in the Guardian in the last five years tagged under the news section ‘world’2 and containing the keywords ‘sexual harassment’ in the Guardian API. The keywords can be as simple or complicated as you want; just add more terms using the plus sign.

You might think the time frame is a bit skewed towards the ‘pre’ era—the news broke out on October 5, 2017. Going all the way back five full years, we are comparing 58 months worth of ‘pre’ to only 2 months of ‘post’ Weinstein. However, luckily for you blog posts are not written in real-time, meaning you get to see a (somewhat working) final result so just bear with me. And no, this is not at all like scientists running 514 regressions and failing to mention this tidbit in their publication. Relevant xkcd.

No, the reason is pure pragmatism. It’s not that running the code ‘live’ and getting the articles ‘real-time’ would not slow down this page—it’s not how it works.3 However, it is good practice to extract a tad bigger chunk than you think you will need, as you can always slice it up later to suit your needs better.

In any case, I am working with downloaded data so I will just load it up. Feel free to subset the data to see whether the results change if you use a different cut-off point. Also, if you go back the same amount of time (i.e. two months before October 5), that would lead to 183 articles for pre and 121 articles for the post time period—it is a reckoning, alright. Going back five years gets us 1224 articles in total; so we actually have 1103-pre and 121-post articles (89% to 11%). That’s more or less cross-validation ratio (well, a bit on the less side maybe), and we will roll with that for now.

articles <- read.csv("articles.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE) dim(articles)

## [1] 1224   27

sum(articles$wordcount)

## [1] 1352717

colnames(articles)

##  [1] "id"                   "sectionId"            "sectionName"         ##  [4] "webPublicationDate"   "webTitle"             "webUrl"               ##  [7] "apiUrl"               "newspaperPageNumber"  "trailText"           ## [10] "headline"             "showInRelatedContent" "lastModified"         ## [13] "hasStoryPackage"      "score"                "standfirst"           ## [16] "shortUrl"             "wordcount"            "commentable"         ## [19] "allowUgc"             "isPremoderated"       "byline"               ## [22] "publication"          "newspaperEditionDate" "shouldHideAdverts"   ## [25] "liveBloggingNow"      "commentCloseDate"     "body"

We get a bunch of variables (27) with that call, but we won’t be needing most of them for our analysis:

#laziest subset for only two variables want.var <- c("webPublicationDate", "body") want <- which(colnames(articles) %in% want.var) articles <- articles[, want] articles$webPublicationDate <- as.Date.factor(articles$webPublicationDate)

The body contains the full-text, however it’s in HTML:

dplyr::glimpse(articles$body[1])

##  chr "<p>Numerous women have accused Don Burke of indecent assault, sexual harassment and bullying during the 1980s a"| __truncated__

At this point, I must admit I resorted to hacking a bit. I’m sure there is a more elegant solution here. I’ll go with this SO answer to extract text from HTML. Basically, the cleaning function removes the HTML using regex. Unfortunately, this does not clear up various apostrophes found in the text. For that, we switch the encoding from ASCII to byte:

articles$body <- iconv(articles$body, "", "ASCII", "byte")

cleanFun <- function(htmlString) {  return(gsub("<.*?>", "", htmlString)) } articles$body <- cleanFun(articles$body) dplyr::glimpse(articles$body[1])

##  chr "Numerous women have accused Don Burke of indecent assault, sexual harassment and bullying during the 1980s and "| __truncated__

This will end up cutting some legitimate apostrophes (e.g. “hasn’t”, “didn’t” to “hasn”, “didn”) in some cases, but we will fix that later on.

Let’s split the data on date October 5, 2017 and get rid of the date column afterwards:

#You can also use negative index for subsetting articles.before <- articles[articles$webPublicationDate < "2017-10-05", ] articles.after <- articles[articles$webPublicationDate >= "2017-10-05", ] full.text.before <- articles.before[, 2] full.text.before <- as.data.frame(full.text.before) full.text.after <- articles.after[, 2] full.text.after <- as.data.frame(full.text.after)

N-Grams and Combinatorics

To me, n-grams are what prisoner’s dilemma to college freshman—that ‘wow, so simple but so cool’ moment. As in, simple after the fact when someone has already figured it out and explained it to you. N-grams are essentially combinations of n words. For example, a bigram (2-gram).4 Using the tidytext package developed by David and Julia, we can create them in a flash with unnest_tokens. After that, we will separate the bigrams into two distinct words. Next, we will subset the bigrams so that the first word is either he or she. Finally, we will transform the words into frequency counts. I’m heavily recycling their code—no need to reinvent the wheel:

library(tidytext) library(tidyverse) #or just dplyr and tidyr if you are allergic #Create bigrams bigrams.before <- full.text.before %>%  unnest_tokens(bigram,                full.text.before,                token = "ngrams",                n = 2) nrow(bigrams.before)

## [1] 1311051

head(bigrams.before)

##        bigram ## 1    the walk ## 1.1 walk from ## 1.2  from the ## 1.3  the gare ## 1.4   gare du ## 1.5   du nord

#Separate bigrams into two words bigrams.separated.before <- bigrams.before %>%  separate(bigram, c("word1", "word2"), sep = " ") head(bigrams.separated.before)

##     word1 word2 ## 1     the  walk ## 1.1  walk  from ## 1.2  from   the ## 1.3   the  gare ## 1.4  gare    du ## 1.5    du  nord

#Subset he and she in word1 he.she.words.before <- bigrams.separated.before %>%  filter(word1 %in% c("he", "she")) #Fix the missing t's after apostrophe fix.apos <- c("hasn", "hadn", "doesn", "didn", "isn", "wasn", "couldn", "wouldn") he.she.words.before <- he.she.words.before %>%  mutate(word2 = ifelse(word2 %in% fix.apos, paste0(word2, "t"), word2))   #10 random samples; the numbers are row numbers not counts set.seed(1895) dplyr::sample_n(he.she.words.before, 10)

##       word1  word2 ## 4403    she doesnt ## 3732     he    was ## 5222    she  wasnt ## 11862   she   said ## 3972    she  wrote ## 3189     he   says ## 3952    she   sees ## 4878     he    was ## 9314     he   went ## 9408    she  noted

#Transform words into counts, add +1 for log transformation he.she.counts.before <- he.she.words.before %>%  count(word1, word2) %>%  spread(word1, n, fill = 0) %>%  mutate(total = he + she,         he = (he + 1) / sum(he + 1),         she = (she + 1) / sum(she + 1),         log.ratio = log2(she / he),         abs.ratio = abs(log.ratio)) %>%  arrange(desc(log.ratio)) #Top 5 words after she head(he.she.counts.before)

## # A tibble: 6 x 6 ##       word2           he          she total log.ratio abs.ratio ##       <chr>        <dbl>        <dbl> <dbl>     <dbl>     <dbl> ## 1 testified 0.0002194908 0.0027206771    18  3.631734  3.631734 ## 2     awoke 0.0001097454 0.0010580411     6  3.269163  3.269163 ## 3     filed 0.0002194908 0.0021160822    14  3.269163  3.269163 ## 4      woke 0.0002194908 0.0019649335    13  3.162248  3.162248 ## 5    misses 0.0001097454 0.0007557437     4  2.783737  2.783737 ## 6   quickly 0.0001097454 0.0007557437     4  2.783737  2.783737

A couple of observations. First, n-grams overlap, resulting in 1.6M observations (and this is only the pre-period). However, we will only use the gendered subset,5 which is much more smaller in size. Second, as we define the log ratio as (she / he), the sign of the log ratio determines the direction (positive for she, negative for he), while the absolute value of the log ratio is just the effect size (without direction).

Good stuff, no? Wait until you see the visualisations.

Let There Be GGraphs

Both David and Julia utilise neat data visualisations to drive home their point. I especially like the roboto theme/font, so I will just go ahead and use it. You need to install the fonts separately, so if you are missing them you will get an error message.

devtools::install_github("juliasilge/silgelib") #Required Fonts #https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Condensed #https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto library(ggplot2) library(ggrepel) library(scales) library(silgelib) theme_set(theme_roboto())

We are also loading several other libraries.6 In addition to the usual suspects, ggrepel will make sure we can plot overlapping labels in a bit nicer way. Let’s start by looking at the most gendered verbs in articles on sexual harassment. In other words, we are identifying which verbs are most skewed towards one gender. I maintain the original logarithmic scale, so the effect sizes are in magnitudes and easy to interpret. If you read the blog posts, you will notice that Julia reports a unidirectional magnitude (relative to she/he), so her scales go from

.25x .5x x 2x 4x

whereas David uses directions, i.e.

'more he' 4x 2x x 2x 4x 'more she'

In both cases, x denotes the same frequency (equally likely) of usage. I don’t think one approach is necessarily better than the other, but I went with David’s approach. Finally, I filter out non-verbs plus ‘have’ and only plot verbs that occur at least five times. If you are serious about filtering out (or the opposite, filtering on) classes of words—say a certain sentiment or a set of adjectives—you should locate a dictionary from an NLP package and extract the relevant words from there. Here, I am doing it quite ad-hoc (and manually):

he.she.counts.before %>%  filter(!word2 %in% c("himself", "herself", "ever", "quickly",                       "actually", "sexually", "allegedly", "have"),         total >= 5) %>%  group_by(direction = ifelse(log.ratio > 0, 'More "she"', "More 'he'")) %>%  top_n(15, abs.ratio) %>%  ungroup() %>%  mutate(word2 = reorder(word2, log.ratio)) %>%  ggplot(aes(word2, log.ratio, fill = direction)) +  geom_col() +  coord_flip() +  labs(x = "",       y = 'Relative appearance after "she" compared to "he"',       fill = "",       title = "Pre Weinstein: 2012-17 The Guardian Articles on Sexual Harassment",       subtitle = "Top 15 Most Gendered (Skewed) Verbs after he/she; at least 5 occurrences.") +  scale_y_continuous(labels = c("8X", "6X", "4X", "2X", "Same", "2X", "4X", "6X", "8X"),                     breaks = seq(-4, 4)) +  guides(fill = guide_legend(reverse = TRUE)) +  expand_limits(y = c(-4, 4))

Several immediate and depressing trends emerge from the data. The top active verbs for women cluster on bringing charges: ‘testified’, ‘filed’; whereas male verbs seem to react to those with ‘argued’, ‘faces’, ‘acknowledges’, and ‘apologized’. Women ‘awoke’ and ‘woke’, matching the more violent male verbs such as ‘drugged’, ‘assaulted’, ‘punched’, and ‘raped’. ‘Alleged’ occurs four times more after she relative to he, and there is no mention of denial (e.g. ‘denied’, ‘denies’) after he. A note on word variations: in some cases, it might be better to combine conjugations into a single category using a wildcard (such as expect* in the graph above). However, I thought the tense can also contribute to a quantitative story, so I left them as they are.

Another way of visualising the gendered differences is to plot their magnitude in addition to their frequency. This time, we are not limited to just verbs; however we still filter out some uninteresting words. There are additional ggplot and ggrepel arguments in this plot. First, I added two reference lines: a red y-intercept with geom_hline to act as a baseline and an invisible x-intercept using geom_vline to give the labels more space on the left-hand side. Do you not love tidy grammar? Last but not least, I insert geom_text_repel to give us more readability: segment.alpha controls the line transparency, while the force argument governs the aggressiveness of the jittering algorithm. We could supply it with a fill argument that corresponds to a factor variable to highlight a certain characteristic (say, total occurrence), however there is not much meaningful variation there in our case.

he.she.counts.before %>%  filter(!word2 %in% c("himself", "herself", "she", "too", "later", "apos", "just", "says"),         total >= 10) %>%  top_n(100, abs.ratio) %>%  ggplot(aes(total, log.ratio)) +  geom_point() +  geom_vline(xintercept = 5, color = "NA") +  geom_hline(yintercept = 0, color = "red") +  scale_x_log10(breaks = c(10, 100, 1000)) +  geom_text_repel(aes(label = word2), segment.alpha = .1, force = 2) +  scale_y_continuous(breaks = seq(-4, 4),                     labels = c('8X "he"', '6X "he"', '4X "he"', '2X "he"', "Same",                                '2X "she"', '4X "she"', '6X "she"', '8X "she"')) +  labs(x = 'Total uses after "he" or "she" (Logarithmic scale)',       y = 'Relative uses after "she" to after "he"',       title = "Gendered Reporting: Pre Weinstein, The Guardian",       subtitle = "Words occurring at least 10 times after he/she:                  160 unique words (100 displayed) | 11,013 occurrences in total") +  expand_limits(y = c(4, -4))

Plotting frequencies complement the first plot quite nicely. We can infer reported characteristics more easily when there is a tangible baseline. Words around the red line occur after she or he more or less equally: the y-axis determines the relational effect size (with regards to gender), and the x-axis displays the total amount of occurrences. Some additional insights: we see that ‘sexually’ and ‘allegedly’ popping up after he quite frequently. There is also the verb ‘admitted’, as well as ‘denies’ (even though visually it is located above the red line, if you follow the grey segment, it’s located around 1X ‘he’). For women, more morbid words like ‘suffered’, ‘died’ are added to the mix. There are also nuances regarding the tense; ‘claims’ follows she twice more than he, while ‘claimed’ is twice likely to come after he.7

Moving on to the post-Weinstein period (‘the effect’), I quietly run the same code, and plot the equivalent graphics below. Some caveats: with the smaller sample size, I lowered the inclusion threshold from 5 to 2. Additionally, although it is top 15 most skewed verbs per gender, because of frequent ties, it ends up having more than that at the end.

After the scandal broke, we see that women are reported to have ‘complained’, ‘hoped’, and ‘became’. On the other hand, men are vehemently denying the accusations, with ‘denies’ and ‘denied’ being the most skewed verbs following he. Random point: in the pre-period, it’s ‘apologized’, in the post-period, it’s ‘apologised’. Maybe Brexit can manifest in mysterious ways.

Again we turn to the frequency plot to infer more. In addition to denial, men are also reported to use words such as ‘categorically’ and ‘utterly’. Both ‘claims’ and ‘claimed’ occur more after she, not repeating the earlier dynamic regarding the tense. In addition, we don’t see ‘alleged’ or ‘allegedly’ featured in the plot at all. How much of this change can we attribute to the effect? At a glance, we definitely see a difference. For example, verbs display a good variation for both genders. The post-frequency plot features less violent words than the pre-frequency plot. There is a lot more ‘denying’ and not much ‘alleging’ in the post-Weinstein period.

Some are definitely data artefacts. The post-frequency plot is ‘cleaner’—in addition to (and directly caused by) the smaller n—because the cut-off point is set to ‘more than once’: if we remove the filter, all the violence and harassment terms are back in. Some are probably reporter/reporting biases plus the prevalent gendered thinking (that occurs both on a conscious level and below). And perhaps some are genuine effects—true signal. It is still too early to pass judgement on whether the Weinstein effect will result in tangible, positive change. Currently, all we can get is a short, limited glimpse at the available data.

Hopefully you managed to enjoy this rather depressing data undertaking using the tidytextpackage. As usual, the underlying code is available on GitHub. N-grams are powerful. Imagine the possibilities: assume you have access to a rich dataset (say, minimum 100K very long articles/essays). You can construct n-grams sequentially; i.e. 2-grams; 3-grams, 4-grams etc., separate the words, and subset for gendered pronouns. This would give you access to structures like “he” + “word” + “her” (direct action) and “she” + “word” + “word” + “him” (allowing for adjective + verb). Then it would be possible to look for all kinds of interactions, revealing their underlying structure. I will be reporting more on this front, until I move onto image processing (looking at you, keras).