Welcome back to PGL. Even though I know February is shorter than the other months, its end always seems to catch me by surprise. That feels increasingly true every year, even though I don’t officially cover college basketball in March the way I once did. Maybe it’s because our extremely weird weather patterns keep spiraling further from the ones I swear were much more predictable in our youth.
To that end, it was 78 degrees in D.C. on Thursday. On one hand, that’s a welcome reprieve in the dead of winter; on the other, it’s a harbinger of the larger climate trends that we’re still struggling to confront.
I hope this month’s set of links is a good mix of pleasant distractions and thought-provoking stories, a 78-degree February day in your inbox. As always, feel free to drop me anything else you think I should include in next month’s PGL in the comments below, and check out January’s links if you missed them the first time around.
Recommended Newsletter
Many, many people are writing about the crisis point in social media and technology that we’re currently encountering. It feels, in many ways, unsustainable, but it’s often hard to make sense of which decisions are helping, or hurting, or sending us off the cliff into the ocean. Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At? newsletter is some of the best writing on the topic, if you’re inclined to try to keep up and stay ahead of the next impending disaster (I’m looking at you, Meta subscription service).
Other Links
Let’s start with a fun distraction, shall we? If you’re looking to clear your brain and kill a few minutes, this game presents you with five photos taken between 1900-2022. It’s your job to guess, as closely as possible, the year of the photo. You’ll be scored according to how close you get to the exact year on each guess. Fun? Yes. Addicting? Absolutely.
Alright, let’s get to the serious topics. You may have noticed that some of the powers that be in our country have decided to target, demonize, and wage a war on one of our most vulnerable populations in recent months. This campaign has largely been supported by no less Than Paper of Record, whose refusal to acknowledge that they’ve done anything wrong, doubling down on their reporting, and threatening their own journalists with retribution has only served to reinforce the question of: why? It’s worth answering at length, which Tom Scocca does here.
The water crisis is real, and it’s here. If you’re not paying attention to what’s happening out west, you’re missing a preview of the next half century (and beyond) of resource wars we’re about to be dealing with.
If you’re wondering about all the COVID disinformation and conspiracy theories that somehow still permeate social media networks, it’s helpful to understand who profits from their spread. Wonder no more.
Elected leaders in our country love to talk about justice for criminals. But at what cost? And how does someone with a very good case for his innocence spend nearly 40 years behind bars? Read James Reyos’ story in Texas Monthly.
Cory Doctorow’s treatise on what he calls the “enshittification” of TikTok is really an explainer of the lifecycle of any technology beholden to the power of a capital market. If you want to know why Twitter is failing, why Facebook is basically unusable, or why even Google search — once the gold standard online — has become a minefield of useless ads — this is required reading.
And if you’ve ever felt your true self being compromised to uphold some persona you’ve created for yourself online, Freddie deBoer distills the difference between life in the 90s and today, and the erstwhile separation of ourselves from our online selves. I have a feeling I’ll be revisiting this piece frequently in the coming months and years.
Here’s a great feature, the kind I love as a sportswriter, about another sportswriter who is also…an actor that portrays historical figures on a childrens television program. A good reminder that we aren’t defined by our jobs, and that we can be many different things in our lifetimes.
Let’s finish on a high note, with a recipe for not stromboli. This is, truly, a guide for pizza babka. Pizza + babka. Pizza babka. Results below.
My Links
It’s been a busy month for me on other fronts, so I’ve got nothing new published this month. Hopefully more coming soon, but TBD for now. Have a great weekend.