| 1. After this jaw-dropping story, but also for her body of work, Jenny Odell is hereby declared the madstone of the internet. "Indeed, at some point I began to feel like I was in a dream. Or that I was half-awake, unable to distinguish the virtual from the real, the local from the global, a product from a Photoshop image, the sincere from the insincere. Still harder for me to grasp was the total interpenetration of e-commerce and physical space. Standing inside Stevens Books was like being on a stage set for Stevens Books, Stevens Book, Stevens Book Shop, and Stevensbook — all at the same time. It wasn’t that the bookstore wasn’t real, but rather that it felt reverse-engineered by an online business, or a series of them. Being a human who resides in physical space, my perceptual abilities were overwhelmed. But in some way, even if it was impossible to articulate, I knew that some kind of intersection of Olivet University, Gratia Community Church, IBPort, the Newsweek Media Group, and someone named Stevens was right there with me, among the fidget spinners, in an otherwise unremarkable store in San Francisco." + “I have never seen the madstone in actual use, but they tell me that if the dog was really mad the stone sticks fast to the wound and draws the ‘pizen’ out.” 2. This is unfathomable. "According to the ruling Communist Party’s official newspaper, as of the end of September, 1.1 million local government workers have been deployed to ethnic minorities’ living rooms, dining areas and Muslim prayer spaces, not to mention at weddings, funerals and other occasions once considered intimate and private... Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Uighur homeland has been blanketed with stifling surveillance, from armed checkpoints on street corners to facial-recognition-equipped CCTV cameras steadily surveying passers-by. Now, Uighurs say, they must live under the watchful eye of the ruling Communist Party even inside their own homes." 3. The East German computer lovers, and the spies who watched them. "The young informant, who was apparently still in school, may have hoped the computer club visit would increase his profile. Either way, the observations he made there as an informal collaborator were then given to a Stasi officer, who in turn summarized them in his 'Operational Information' report. The document is part of a collection of Stasi documents pertaining to the youth scene in the GDR shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. They provide a deep look into how government agencies viewed computer games and computer enthusiasts – and how they saw the emerging information age." 4. If you're not a lawyer, a fun way to read this paper is as a catalog of bad things that will be done to machine learning systems. "Jagielski et al. [2018] poison a healthcare dataset quite effectively that a tenth of the patients have their dosages changed by 359%... Papernot et al. [2015] propose to fool a bank’s image recognition system to misrecognize checks to higher value... Tramèr et al. [2016] reconstruct a model hosted behind a prediction API... Brundage et al. [2018] discuss how a drone’s image recognition system could fail owing to adversarial examples and potentially cause damage. While the authors discuss this in the context of military drones, we will assume that the drone is consumer grade (as used in photography)." 5. This is as good as a profile can be, even if you don't care about impossible card tricks or the arcane history of magic. "Jay’s collection—several thousand volumes, plus hundreds of lithographs, playbills, pamphlets, broadsides, and miscellaneous ephemera—reflects his interest not only in magic but also in gambling, cheating, low life, and what he described in the subtitle of 'Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women' as 'unique, eccentric and amazing entertainers: stone eaters, mind readers, poison resisters, daredevils, singing mice, etc., etc., etc., etc.' Though Jay abhors the notion of buying books as investments, his own collection, while it is not for sale and is therefore technically priceless, more or less represents his net worth." [right there with me, among the fidget spinners] | 