Factual Dispatch #33: Back-To-School Reading

While Hong Kong’s protests are continuing to make headlines, those who hare attempting to draw attention to the continuing nightmare in Xinjiang have taken a powerful, yet voiceless approach.

The National Institute for Healthcare Management put together a stunning set of interactive data visualizations to document just how fucked the fentanyl & synthetic opiate crisis has gotten.

The Economist makes a case for libraries as the solution to populism, and it should be deeply considered. Alternatively, Matt Stoller documents how YouTube stoked fascism across the world. (Further reading: Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube + Full PDF)

Denmark is the only developed country that has been able to structurally prevent and reduce suicide. Here’s how they did it.

About 1 in 1,000 black men and boys in America can expect to die at the hands of police, according to a new analysis of deaths involving law enforcement officers. That makes them 2.5 times more likely than white men and boys to die during an encounter with cops. The analysis also showed that Latino men and boys, black women and girls and Native American men, women and children are also killed by police at higher rates than their white peers.

In case you weren’t sure, the New Republic has a longform explanation as to how David Koch was personally responsible for massive contributions to our ongoing climate catastrophe.

The loom, the thresher, workplace automation, 1830’s poverty, universal basic income, and labor’s continued ability to add value.

Quitting social media is like quitting gambling, in case you’ve not tried recently.

For everyone thinking about getting in on that WeWork IPO, Harvard Business Review would like to remind you that WeWork is not a tech company. In the same way that Netflix is not a tech company.

Half of searches on Google now result in the user getting their information directly from the search engine result page (SERP), without clicking on anything. With 50% of searches earning “zero clicks,” brands and marketing agencies have their work cut out for them.

Amazon however, is a tech company. If you happen to work at a company forced to compete with it, this set of graphs related to its profits and revenue can help explain why your CFO drinks.

“What we confront today—a business elite dominated by financiers and their squires, presiding over a disordered economy gutted of both its productive energy and the ability to generate mass prosperity—is a direct result of this economic and cultural evolution.”~The Financialization of the American Elite, by Sam Long 

The Brookings Institute produced a fantastic, expansive policy brief looking at Digital Authoritarianism, a phrase we’re going to become exceedingly familiar with in the coming years.

“The Broken Foot” analogy allows for a great review of the clusterfuck of bad faith arguments people make in response to calls for societal change.

Current Affairs looks at the insane way we feed ourselves, and what a decarbonized food system would look like.

We’re back next week! Any topics you’re hoping I cover before the year ends? Let me know and tell your friends!

T