The Grim Journey of the Accused Brooklyn Subway Shooter - Frank James, the man charged with carrying out the Sunset Park attack, appears to have inhabited a world of conspiracy theories, grievance, and mental illness. - link
The Siege of Chernihiv - For more than a month, the Russian military pummelled residents with bombing raids and missile fire, turning a locked-in Ukrainian city into an urban death trap. - link
The Case for an Immediate Energy Embargo on Russia - An aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky argues that halting the purchase of oil and gas is the surest way to stop Vladimir Putin’s military machine. - link
“Petite Maman” Is a Minor Miracle - Céline Sciamma’s new film taps into our secret wish to learn what our parents were like when they were young. - link
Growing Up an American Child of Undocumented Parents - The new documentary “Mija” considers the burdens imposed on an increasingly politicized generation. - link
From Vox
Atlanta’s third season explores the horrors of intimacy with whiteness -
Zazie Beetz as Van, Donald Glover as Earn Marks, LaKeith Stanfield as Darius, Brian Tyree Henry as Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles on Atlanta. | Oliver Upton/FX
The FX hit leans into the surreality of being Black.
The long-awaited third season of Atlanta aims to interrogate “the curse of whiteness,” according to head story writer Stephen Glover, who’s also the brother of creator Donald Glover. The FX comedy/drama/horror series has been on hiatus since 2018. In that time Atlanta’s voice has grown more assured in Afrosurrealism, making its depiction of the monstrosity of whiteness a smart, gloriously depraved, weird, condemning commentary.
The theme of whiteness and how it haunts and damns its own recipients becomes almost cartoonishly apparent by the first scene of season three, later revealed to be a dream within Earn’s (Donald Glover) own dream sequence. Dreams have long been the perfect medium for surrealist art. A stylistic movement developed in the aftermath of World War II, surrealism uses discomfiting, contradictory, irrational images to evoke a dream-like state of being. The subconscious takes these images and reorders them, and attempts to make sense of the images’ own reality. Afrosurrealism is, then, a movement that uses these tools to look closely at the already-surreal reality of Black people.
The opening scene features two fishermen at night — one Black and one white — and evokes the terrifying history and folklore behind Georgia’s Lake Lanier, where the government flooded an entire community, including a graveyard, so they could build a lake that would generate power and water supply to surrounding areas. In the eyes and professed experiences of many locals and visitors, Lake Lanier is haunted with ghosts who sometimes appear and drag people underneath the waters. Atlanta’s mock Lake Lanier is built on top of a Black town.
“With enough blood and money, anyone can be white,” the white fisherman says, sipping a can of beer amidst the dark waters. “The thing about being white is, it blinds you. It’s easy to see the Black man as cursed because you’ve separated yourself from him, but you don’t know you’re enslaved just like him.”
This is a clear thesis for the third season as well as a warning for our foursome currently traveling Europe while Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) is on a seemingly wildly successful tour: Don’t get caught up with these white people, don’t lose yourself in the money. Atlanta started off as a show about intermittently homeless Earn managing his drug dealer/rapper cousin Paper Boi’s burgeoning music career, while navigating a complex relationship with Van (Zazie Beetz), who is the mother of his child and on-again off-again girlfriend. While season three may not have stability in terms of relationships — it’s hard to know where Van and Earn stand as she explores Europe with him and his friends — it does mark the first time that the characters are not embroiled in a crisis of financial survival.
But for anyone who thought Earn, Darius (LaKeith Stanfield), Van, and Alfred’s European travels would be a lighter romp than their adventures in Atlanta, season three quickly proves them wrong. The world of whiteness the characters are exposed to in London and Amsterdam is perhaps more frightening and monstrous than the one they left behind in the sprawling urban forest of Atlanta, surrounded by Confederate flags and monuments to slavery. This genteel horror is viscerally explored in an episode two scene where a white death doula comforts Van as a Black man lies dying. That same doula later pulls a lever that results in the Black man’s violent assisted suicide by suffocation, as a room of white people watch. It’s not transferring white souls into Black bodies like in Jordan Peele’s movie Get Out (2017), but it’s somehow more horrifying in its dream-like believability.
Atlanta’s firm hold on reality, even within its wild plotlines, is perhaps no clearer than in the first episode, “Three Slaps.” Viewers are introduced to Loquareeous, a Black boy who causes disruptions at school. His mother and grandfather are called to the school for a disciplinary meeting, and after a harsh lecture from his mother, he is given three light slaps across the face by his grandfather. A school administrator calls Child Protective Services, and Loquareeous is then taken to live with a white lesbian couple with three other Black children. His name is changed to “Larry,” and he is starved and forced to work in the garden and at the market.
The episode is based off the real-life story of the Hart family, who drove off a cliff with their adopted children in tow, in a murder-suicide. The children had repeatedly complained to neighbors about the starvation, abuse, and racism they faced at the hands of the Harts. Loquareeous is based on Devonte Hart, who had previously gone viral in a tearful photo of him hugging a police officer, which now has a sinister implication. While “Three Slaps” is often humorous, it’s disturbing and deeply uncomfortable when one realizes that the script is so close to the Hart murders. Black reality is horrifying, Atlanta states simply. And white people are monstrous.
Guy D’Alema/FX
In the center, Christopher Farrar as Loquareeous, based on Devonte Hart, in the first episode of Atlanta’s third season.
Yet, Atlanta’s strongest episodes have always been when they lean into what some rather lazily call “Get Out-esque” writing. In truth, Atlanta is very far from Get Out. It’s more ambitious and nuanced, more masterfully funny, more heartbreaking and thought-provoking. Plotlines are less obvious and yet completely familiar, weirder and more rooted in reality. As opposed to Get Out’s rather sci-fi exploration of racism, Atlanta’s most terrifying moments still manage to feel plausible and deeply familiar.
That sci-fi exploration of racism that made Get Out so successful is not necessarily a present element in Atlanta’s third season. Comparing the two might seem innocuous, but in many ways, Get Out is more Afrofuturistic than it is Afrosurrealist. Yes, the film does use Afrosurrealist aesthetics, but overall it seems more concerned with the frightening possibilities of Black life in tandem with increasing technological advancement.
Atlanta’s season three, on the other hand, is concerned with dissecting the present, the mode of Afrosurrealism. As writer D. Scot Miller said, contrasting Afrofuturism and Afrosurrealism, “There is no need for tomorrow’s-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened … What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.”
Get Out engages the fantastic — the unbelievable, the impossible, the mind-boggling, like human souls being transplanted into Black bodies. Atlanta is rooted in the marvelous — images of daily life made more striking, more dream-like, the wit of it all sharpened to an impossibly lethal point, while not compromising on the brutalities of reality. Think of Alfred not getting his money back from the billionaire in London with South African ties. This powerful white man preferred to pretend to be asleep rather than confront his gambling debt. He wakes to an angry Alfred, who tries to negotiate between Atlanta-style conflict resolution and European-style conflict resolution, and ultimately chooses Atlanta as he takes a chainsaw to the man’s priceless tree.
The marvelous is a key feature of Afrosurrealism, as explored by Suzanne Césaire, a surrealist thinker and wife of French Martinican poet, author, and politician Aimé Césaire. The season’s intensified dedication to Afrosurrealism, to seeking the marvelous, is embedded in the promotional poster itself, which renders the cast into abstract surrealist paintings.
Loquareeous’s story, brutal and enraging as it is, exemplifies the marvelous in many ways, especially in how he survives at the end. That survival both mimics the fact that Devonte Hart’s body has never been found and simultaneously enters Devonte Hart into a fictional place of rest. We see this in the ending scene, where Loquareeous is watching TV and eating spaghetti. As the camera steadies its gaze on Loquareeous’s back and zooms in, the reader becomes overcome with emotion, remembrance, rage, and awe. This is the marvelous: A simple image of a boy eating the food he once rejected and watching TV, weighted with meaning. This is Black reality, made clearer by its placement within a dream.
Atlanta doesn’t need to decide if it’s horror, or comedy, or a tender show depicting life’s daily moments of despair and triumph. For Black people, our realities enmesh all three into an absurd plateau. For other writers and creators, the absurdity might seem to mock the oppressed. But in the Glovers’ and the rest of their team’s deft hands, the absurdity becomes an indictment of our oppressors as well as a celebration of Black people’s humor. I intentionally say that Atlanta celebrates Black humor and not the way that Black peopleusehumor as resilience, because it is the latter that Atlanta seems firmly set against.
Anywhere there is humor and Blackness, the impulse to say the art celebrates “Black resilience” emerges, partly because of this country’s obsession with depicting Black people as hardy creatures meant to endure the worst of atrocities, all while singing and laughing. But while Atlanta constantly depicts resilience, it does not celebrate it. It scorns the conditions that make that resilience necessary, and it uplifts those who find it hard to navigate the expectation of resilience. In fact, it derives a significant part of its absurdity from the characters’ varying degrees of resilience.
The further this show’s characters get away from their eponymous city, the further they get from the intimacy between Black people that made Atlanta special. Instead, however, a new kind of intimacy is forged. A discomfiting, thought-provoking, and one-sided intimacy with whiteness.
It’s that forced relationship to whiteness that gives Atlanta its absurdity — not just the presence of whiteness, but the influence on our spaces. Atlanta is a story of people who already knew these horrifying truths, to the point where they find them predictable, nearly boring. Atlanta doesn’t expect more from white people, it believes they are capable of anything. And in fact, it shows us, through modeling episodes based on real-life events and dynamics, that perhaps white people are capable of anything.
“Now it’s the Blackest, the most surreal, the most hilarious. I say this shit with no fear, because I already know what it’s going to be: the most unexpected thing you have ever seen,” LaKeith Stanfield told GQ Hype of Atlanta’s junior season. “But the truth is, it’s becoming hard to make shit up, because the actual reality is crazier than the shit you could come up with.”
Intimacy with whiteness is not novel or inauthentic. It is just as much a cornerstone of the Black experience in America as our closeness with each other is — which is the most surreal thing, when you think about it. How does one feel this anticipatory closeness to one’s oppressor? A violent disinterest and boredom with them, because we know so much?
James Baldwin spoke of this phenomenon at length, perhaps most damningly here: “You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves. And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage. You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me.”
The characters of Atlanta embody this quote, in that they are constantly being forced to observe and analyze whiteness against their will. They are, even in their indifference towards whiteness, experts in the field. When Earn walks into the household of the white South African whose family owned the first bank and he sees a picture of a Black servant in the background of one of their pictures, he isn’t shocked but depressingly bored.
Atlanta’s glorious weirdness, its dive into the surreal, is what makes the show nimble and wonderfully written. It covers a wide spectrum of Blackness, all while being relatable. If it’s hard to imagine that a show where invisible cars run people over outside the club, alligators hang out in bathrooms, and old white men profess their love for the sexual “ectoplasm” of Black ghosts could be relatable to Black people, then you’ve missed the point. Blackness is strange, inherently bizarre. Shows that attempt to depict Black life without reveling in weirdness feel too curated, too stifling and specific. Other works may represent a slice of Blackness, but Atlanta’s oddities are more legible, and manage to fit us all underneath its strange and marvelous umbrella.
One Good Thing: Have you heard of this Shakespeare guy? Pretty good! -
Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). | 20th Century Fox
Juliet and her Romeo are dead, but Romeo and Juliet lives forever.
Friends, I come before you today to address an injustice. For too long have we, as a culture, allowed ourselves to take Romeo and Juliet for granted.
For too long have we sneered at it as adolescent and mawkish when compared to brooding Hamlet or tragic Lear! For too long have we tolerated those pedants who like to smugly opine that if you think Romeo and Juliet is romantic, you’re reading it wrong! For too long have we cast it into the dark pits of eighth-grade language arts curricula, tainting it with memories of Brian G. and Natasha S. protecting their mouths with their hands during the kissing scenes!
No more. There comes a time in life when everyone has to take a stand, and mine is that Romeo and Juliet is good, actually, and furthermore, it’s astonishing that we don’t just spend every day talking about how good it is.
Obviously we all know that Romeo and Juliet is influential. It’s the basic template for all our culture’s tragic love stories, and it’s the reason we’ve got West Side Story and Shakespeare in Love and that early 2000s action classic, Romeo Must Die. But we don’t pay enough attention to the reason it has such a presence, the reason it is as influential and foundational as it has become: namely, that it’s managed to keep working all the way from the 1590s, when it was first written, into the present.
Romeo and Juliet is early-ish Shakespeare, and there’s an argument to be made that it’s his first really beautiful play. After the bawdy slapstick of Comedy of Errors and the bloody horror of Titus Andronicus, after the cynicism of Richard III and Richard II — after something like five years of turning out steady journeyman dramatic work, then Shakespeare wrote lovely, lyrical Romeo and Juliet, with its series of love sonnets embedded into the dialogue. “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright,” Romeo says on seeing Juliet, and with that line Shakespeare became “mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare,” celebrated by his contemporaries for the sheer beauty of his language.
Romeo and Juliet isn’t only beautiful. It’s also funny and sexy, sometimes shockingly so. “O, I have bought the mansion of a love but not possessed it,” Juliet laments as she awaits her wedding night, “and, though I am sold, not yet enjoyed.” So intense is the force of her desire that she starts to fantasize sadistically, declaring that after she dies, someone should “cut [Romeo] out into little stars” and hang them in the sky. Romeo, for his part, can’t manage to look at anything touching Juliet — gloves, sleep, prayer books — without rhapsodizing about how much he wants to be that thing. Never were there two characters in English literature quite so ready to bone.
Perhaps because Juliet and her Romeo are so palpably lusty and teenage, killjoys are apt to remark smugly that they were absolute idiots for dying for one another, and that for this reason it’s a mistake to read the play as romantic. It remains a testament to Romeo and Juliet’s powers that even if you choose to read it so cynically, it still works. It is entirely possible to consider Romeo and Juliet to be stupid horny teenagers who would have broken up within days if they’d survived the end of the play, and still find yourself crying at the end as they die.
And in the end, perhaps that’s what remains most taken for granted about Romeo and Juliet: that it is an indestructible play. We can pelt it all we like with our mockery, our indifference, our misreadings, our bad eighth- grade productions. It is so perfectly constructed that we will still find ourselves holding our collective breath in the final act, hoping that this time Friar Lawrence’s message will get to Romeo in time, and he and Juliet won’t die. It can survive swings in cultural attitudes on sex and romance and childhood rebellion, can make it through the bawdy Elizabethan era through the prudish Victorian age and into the sex-crazed 1990s, and always still seem perfectly modern, perfectly of our moment.
This play is bigger than us. It can take whatever we throw at it, and it will still be beautiful and funny and sexy and tragic, no matter how badly we treat it. Romeo and Juliet always die, but Romeo and Juliet will always survive our scorn and endure. It lives forever.
You can find Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet streaming on HBO Max, and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet for rent on most streaming services. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.
Companies lose your data and then nothing happens -
Your personal information is probably all over the internet and no one is accountable. | Grant Faint via Getty Images
Data breaches are everywhere and consequences are ???
At this point, it’s hard not to imagine that at least some of your personal information isn’t for sale in some dark corner of the internet. After all, data breaches are happening constantly. Companies suck up customers’ details and then, try as they might — and let’s assume they really try — declare that it’s been leaked or hacked. You know the drill; the subsequent breach announcement goes a little something like this: “Oops!! We were the victims of a cyberattack, and by extension, so were you! It affected ??? people and we think ??? information was involved, but we’re still kind of guessing here at what happened. Hopefully you have some sort of identity theft protection, which maybe we’re offering and maybe not. But regardless, love you! We’re family! Please come back soon!”
The whole situation isn’t great.
High-profile data breaches have been in the headlines for years. In 2013, Target lost the credit card, debit card, and other information of tens of millions of customers. In 2018, Marriott disclosed a data breach that impacted up to 500 million people; in 2020, it got hit again. In 2021, hackers got a bunch of customer information from T-Mobile that the company reportedly tried and failed to get back. The list of breaches goes on and on.
Of course, these companies would surely rather not be dealing with these situations — data breaches cost firms millions of dollars and are often accompanied by reputational damage and sometimes fines. At the same time, that doesn’t mean the constant loss of consumer data is acceptable. Sure, we live in the era of the internet, and some security risks are inevitable. But that shouldn’t mean that you have to throw your hands up and accept your data is safe, basically, nowhere. The Targets and Equifaxes of the world got hit with big fines, but they still get to exist — lucratively. And they’re still constantly sucking up and monetizing consumers’ personal information.
There’s a simple reason companies collect so much of our data — money — but why they get to collect so much, keep it, and monetize it is more complicated. There are some laws around data privacy and security, but they’re scattershot and generally handled state by state, and they could be better. Companies keep screwing up with our data, and there are no good answers on what to do about it.
Companies after a data breach: Sry bae
In September 2017, credit bureau Equifax announced the information of over 100 million people it was holding onto had been compromised, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, and addresses. It took the company weeks to make the breach public, and shortly after that happened, its CEO stepped down. For a while, it continued to hedge about what exactly was compromised in the breach. In 2019, Equifax was fined hundreds of millions of dollars by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and states over the breach. It was also required to take other measures, including providing consumers with six free credit reports each year and providing up to 10 years of free credit monitoring for people affected. Data breach victims were supposed to be able to claim $125 checks from the company, but because so many people signed up, that amount translated to mere cents.
But afterward, Equifax — which makes money, in part, by selling people’s personal information to third parties — didn’t drastically change its business practices when it comes to collecting and selling data. The basic incentive for the company to scoop up and monetize as much data as possible remains.
In a statement to Vox, Jamil Farshchi, chief information security officer at Equifax, said that the company has invested over $1.5 billion to rebuild its security and technology systems “from the ground up” and hired upwards of 600 cybersecurity professionals to try to better protect consumer data. “Multiple independent ratings show that our security maturity and posture now exceed every major industry average. Few companies have invested more time and resources in the last few years into ensuring that consumers’ information is protected,” he said, pointing to its latest security report.
Still, it’s hard not to wonder whether any of this is really enough. After all, Equifax is still one of the three major credit bureaus in the United States that consumers have to rely on to navigate their financial lives, and its business is still humming along. Equifax, despite its major missteps, is fine. It’s also evidence that there are no easy answers on how to deal with data breaches or punish companies that have broken laws, to the extent that there are applicable laws in the first place.
To start from square one: There is no federal privacy law in the United States. Instead, it’s sort of a mishmash of federal laws covering certain areas (think HIPAA, the federal privacy law pertaining to health) and state laws. Currently, California, Colorado, Virginia, and Utah have what are intended to be more comprehensive consumer privacy laws (some, experts say, are more effective than others).
All 50 states have laws that require businesses and in most cases government entities to issue notifications about data breaches. But they often differ on what happens next in terms of who’s allowed to enforce the laws and go after companies who screw up, explained Caitriona Fitzgerald, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “Some states give attorneys general sole authority to enforce data breach laws, but they don’t give them any resources to do it,” she said. Some states allow for a private right of action, which allows private citizens to sue a company directly, but that can be tricky to navigate. Fitzgerald said courts have often made it hard for individuals to sue because it’s hard to quantify harm and show exactly the cost of your data being lost.
At the federal level, it’s largely the FTC that is charged with handling data breaches. It does so under the FTC Act, which allows it to go after practices that are deemed either deceptive or unfair. It has brought about a number of cases on data security, including going after Uber, Equifax, and Facebook over their handling of privacy. But there are limits on what the FTC can do — companies don’t have to say anything about how they secure data, and again, there’s no federal privacy law outlining any rules. Last year, the Supreme Court also limited the FTC’s ability to seek monetary relief, which ties the agency’s hands even further.
In the meantime, companies keep collecting and losing data, and when that happens, the consequences are underwhelming.
Daniel Solove, a law professor at George Washington University and co-author of Breached! Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It, pointed to the example of data breach notifications, which he says have been taking place since about 2005, when companies started being required to say when a breach happened. (Before that, a lot of the time, no one knew). Yes, it’s good that companies have to say when a breach has occurred, but that doesn’t fix the breach, it just sheds light on it. It’s like a doctor telling you that you have cancer, and when you ask about next steps for treatment the doctor saying that’s it, now you know. “Legislators like to pass a breach notification law because it looks like you’re doing something for security, but you’re not,” Solove said.
There are all sorts of ideas out there about what better data privacy and security laws might look like, including taking a look at what information companies collect, what they do with it, how they monetize it, and how they’re required to protect it. “Enforcers need to require changes to business practices,” Fitzgerald said.
Solove argues that the privacy and security components of data need to be less siloed — basically, good privacy leads to better security. He also notes that there’s only so much you can get from companies, punishment-wise, after a data breach happens. The government sometimes fines businesses when they lose data, but it’s hard for those fines to be big enough to make a real dent. When the FTC fined Facebook $5 billion over its privacy mishaps in 2019, for example, its stock price went up after investors found out.
Oftentimes, fines get passed on to shareholders and workers anyway. And even when businesses are nominally required to change business practices, if they don’t, they’re just hit with another fine. And, again, no company wants to suffer a data breach — to a certain extent, in the modern world with hackers and bad actors out there, they’re inevitable. One person gets fooled by a phishing email and boom.
“There’s no silver bullet,” Solove said. “Breaches are never going to go away — there’s going to be breaches.”
Data that’s never collected can’t be breached
We’ve become pretty accustomed to giving over a lot of information about ourselves to participate in the economy and live in the online world. Sometimes, it’s stuff we know we’re handing over — a credit card number and address to make a purchase, an email address to sign up for a website. Other times, it’s a lot less visible, like when companies are tracking our moves and interests online to package and sell that data to advertisers. But like it or not, data is a big part of the way the economy runs. As Louise Matsakis outlined for Wired in 2019, information about people fuels the digital economy; it’s kind of like oil. Much of the time, we don’t even know what data is out there or who has it because companies sell it and swap it among themselves.
When we talk about data breaches, we often start at the end: the moment the information has already been leaked or hacked. But some privacy advocates say we need to start at the beginning.
“There is a common business model, which is to vacuum up as much personal information about people as possible, even if you have no use for that information, and then sell it to data brokers who then do all kinds of things with it, especially to sling advertisements,” said Adam Schwartz, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “With so much information being systematically vacuumed and monetized, it increases the problems from these data breaches. To say the obvious, the best form of securing data from attack is to not collect it in the first place.” Or, once it’s collected, to delete it once it has been used.
To offer an example, let’s say I order a pizza from Domino’s. I’m going to hand over my address because I want the pizza delivered, and my credit card number if I don’t want to pay in cash. I’m also going to tell Domino’s what kind of pizza I want. All of this makes sense for Domino’s to have — in the moment. They don’t need a permanent record of where I live or what my credit card number is or whether I want pepperoni or sausage on my pizza. They also don’t really need me to create an account to order the pizza, which their website nudges me to do.
In a better and perhaps less risky world, companies like Domino’s would undertake an effort at data minimization, Schwartz said, meaning the business only collects from the consumer the specific information they need for the task at hand. Might it make ordering a pizza from Domino’s slightly less frictionless next time around when I have to input my information again? Sure. But maybe it’s worth it — just ask the hundreds of thousands of Domino’s customers in India whose credit card and order information was exposed in 2021.
On the collection front, Schwartz said it would be better if businesses used opt-in consent, which means they would have to get specific permission from users before collecting and using their personal data. It would be better if people were also able to ask what companies have and have that information deleted. In some places, such as California, there are privacy laws that allow for that. The problem is, oftentimes, people don’t even know who has their data, especially after it changes hands. (Europe’s privacy law does some of this, with varying degrees of success.)
Many of these measures aren’t ones companies are going to take on their own. If data equals money, and it often does, there aren’t incentives for them not to collect it.
“The market isn’t going to give us the right amount of security here,” said Solove. “We need to create some kind of an incentive so that companies can have at least a minimum level of security on what they’re creating — they need to be responsible for what they’re doing and what they’ve built and the costs they’re creating.”
We often take it as a given that companies are going to suck up our data. We know Facebook takes our information and monetizes it so we can use the site for free because, as Mark Zuckerberg explained to the Senate in 2018, “Senator, we run ads.” We create an account to buy concert tickets or order clothes online without thinking, seeing it as part of the game. But we often don’t interrogate how much personal information companies actually need from us, or how long they should be allowed to keep it.
“Data breaches are really dangerous to millions and millions of people. It allows them to be subjected to identity theft, financial fraud, stalking, and much more needs to be done to stop this,” Schwartz said. “At a minimum, that’s strong anti-breach laws that allow the victims to sue the negligent data managers, but more than that, it’s necessary to go to the source, which is businesses vacuuming up our information in the first place.”
We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Every two weeks, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze.
Manchester United name Erik ten Hag as new permanent manager - He will be Manchester United’s fifth full-time manager in nine years since Alex Ferguson’s retirement
Bumrah, Rohit among Wisden's five ‘Cricketers of the Year’ - The list also features New Zealand batter Devon Conway, England pacer Ollie Robinson and Proteas women star Dane van Niekerk
Kieron Pollard announces retirement from international cricket - Kieron Pollard made his ODI debut back in 2007, and fittingly played his last series against India, a country which has become his second home due to his long association with Mumbai Indians
Man City goes top of Premier League after beating Brighton, Everton steers clear of relegation - City fans saw the horrific graphic on TV showing a draw will mean Manchester City drops behind Liverpool, but Kevin De Bruyne and Manchester City dug three goals out to remain in the pole position for the title race
From The Hindu: National News
Gadkari inaugurates, lays foundation stones of 33 NH projects worth ₹9,240 crore in Chhattisgarh - He said these projects will provide better connectivity between Chhattisgarh and other States, including Odisha, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and U.P.
Watch | How are Kerala’s unique vettu cakes made? -
Revenue department distributes 4,660 title deeds in Kozhikode district - Construction of Vadakara revenue tower also launched
Assam CM Himanta claims he wasn’t aware of Jignesh Mevani’s identity - The State Congress unit smelt a conspiracy behind the arrest and rushed legal experts to the aid of the apprehended Dalit leader
You get salary from common man’s tax: Karnataka CM tells government employees - Sarvothama Awards, meant for government employees, were presented
From BBC: Europe
French election: Macron and Le Pen clash in TV presidential debate - Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen take part in an animated contest ahead of Sunday’s run-off vote.
French election: Le Pen impresses but Macron holds firm in TV debate - Marine Le Pen’s last presidential debate was a disaster - but five years on things are different.
French election: Le Pen and Macron clash over headscarves - The two candidates meet in a heated TV debate days before France votes on its next president.
Russia releases video of intercontinental ballistic missile launch - President Putin says the new Sarmat missile is food for thought for those who try to threaten Russia.
Covid: Woman caught virus twice within record 20 days - Spanish researchers say it’s the shortest-known gap between two coronavirus infections.
From Ars Technica
Stone Age people may have gathered at night to watch animated “fireside art” - VR simulations showed firelight would make images on engraved stones move and flicker. - link
CDC decides to appeal to restore travel mask mandate; DOJ files notice [Updated] - It’s a fraught decision at a time when the pandemic’s outlook is murky. - link
Biden to use infrastructure money to keep nuclear plants open - Up to $6 billion total, with plants already scheduled to shut down the top priority. - link
Forget passenger cars, here’s where hydrogen make sense in transport - Hydrogen is attractive to trucking and ports, but only if it’s clean. - link
We don’t know who made the giant stone jars found in northern India - Local oral history suggests the jars are probably massive, ancient burial urns. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
A Jewish man on the subway is reading an Arab newspaper -
A friend of his, who happened to be riding in the same subway car, noticed this strange phenomenon. Very upset, he approached him. “Moshe, have you lost your mind? Why are you reading an Arab newspaper?” Moshe replied, “I used to read the Jewish newspaper, but what did I find? Jews being persecuted, Israel being attacked, Jews disappearing through assimilation and intermarriage, Jews living in poverty. So I switched to the Arab newspaper. Now what do I find? Jews own all the banks, Jews control the media, Jews are all rich and powerful, Jews rule the world. The news is so much better!”
A young Arab boy asks his father “What is that strange hat you are wearing?” -
The father said: “Why, my son, it is a ‘chechia.’ In the desert it protects our heads from the intense heat of the sun.”
“And what is the long flowing robe you are wearing?” asked the boy.
“Oh, my son!” exclaimed the father “It is very simple. This is a ‘djbellah.’ As I have told you, in the desert it is not only very hot, but the sand is always blowing. My djbellah protects the entire body.”
The son then asked: “But Father, what about those ugly shoes you have on your feet?”
“These are ‘babouches’ my son,” the father replied. You must understand that although the desert sands are very beautiful, they are also extremely hot. These babouches keep us from burning our feet."
“So tell me then,” added the boy.
“Yes, my son…”
"Why are we living in Birmingham and still wearing all this shit?
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Guy D’Alema/FX
