Sunday Morning Reads 12/20
Hooray, it’s officially Christmas Week! I hope whatever your current local situation is, you have at least a few festive plans for the upcoming week. For all my Hanukkah celebrators, I hope your holiday was as warm and bright as it could be.
Now on to my collection of interesting links from the past week
Elizabeth Nolan Brown brings the receipts on which sites are the real distributors of child pornography. Hint - not Pornhub .
Taylor Lorenz (I know, stay with me here) reports on how the toxic world of fan armies and influencers with outsized influence has come to TikTok, resulting in the deplatforming of Perez Hilton for questionable reasons.
In a story that sounds like the basis of a Tarantino script, Azam Ahmed tells the story of a Mexican woman who stalked and captured the men responsible for the kidnapping and murder of her daughter. Interwoven into that story is the plight of another family who had their child kidnapped, and the failures of the Mexican government to bring the people responsible to justice.
Ben Dreyfuss takes us on a tragicomedic tour of his childho…I mean going through life with one eye.
Thinking about joining the alt city trend? Best to double check with your employer first; companies are moving toward basing salaries for work at home employees on the cost of living index for their chosen city. In other words, don’t expect to move to Nashville and keep your NYC / Bay Area salary.
Tim Alberta wraps up his “Letters to Washington” series with a roundup of post-election impressions from people he previously interviewed for the series, some of which will leave you feeling less than optimistic about the chances for a national healing post-Trump.
Alex Kirshner goes on a fascinating deep dive into the election betting market (did you know that the 2020 election was the most heavily betted on event in the history of online betting?) to illustrate how hard Team MAGA went betting on Trump and how that skewed the betting markets into favoring a Trump win.
One for your bookmarks - Rep. Ron Wyden and former Rep. Christopher Cox, the authors of Section 230, explain the environment pre-Section 230 and their reasons for authoring the law.
As always, if you ran across something interesting over the past week that you’d like to share the comments section is the place for you!
I wish all of you a Merry Christmas, I hope the man with the bag pays you a visit, and I’ll see you here next week