Thought Provoking Reads
Provocative and interesting articles from around the web.
Collection by Charles Baldwin
Vox
Was Etsy too good to be true?
20+ min · · The people who built Etsy dreamed of remaking commerce with their bare hands. Fifteen years later, its sellers are being asked to compete with Amazon. · Shared by 57, including David Nagel, Charles Baldwin, BigCommerce, #MuskOut (not parody)
Longreads
In the Age of the Psychonauts
20+ min · · Three psycho-spiritual “events” of the 1970s — involving Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, and Terence and Dennis McKenna — had a strange synchronicity. · Shared by 114, including Merkstatt@troet.cafe 📯, Tauno, MIT Press, fnord, Charles Baldwin, Gabriele
Phys.org
Complex quantum teleportation achieved for the first time
2 min · · Austrian and Chinese scientists have succeeded in teleporting three-dimensional quantum states for the first time. High-dimensional teleportation could play an important role in future quantum… · Shared by 116, including Martina Grolimund, Charles Baldwin, Rick King, Thomas Power, SusanaDeLeón, MD, tcherno, 瑞拿頭, Jonathan Kogan
The New Yorker
Dangerous Minds | The New Yorker
20+ min · · Criminal profiling isn’t a Whodunit; it’s a Hedunit. But how useful are those profiles, really? · Shared by 16, including Charles Baldwin, Rick Powell, Merkstatt@troet.cafe 📯
The Atlantic
What Happened to Aung San Suu Kyi?
20+ min · · A human-rights icon’s fall from grace in Myanmar · Shared by 55, including Howard Getson, Rick Powell, Charles Baldwin, Vikram Dutt, Felix M
The Atlantic
The Media Erased Latinos From the Story
2 min · · It was the deadliest attack targeting Latinos in recent U.S. history. Why wasn’t that the headline? · Shared by 14, including Charles Baldwin, Philanthropy News Digest
The Wall Street Journal
The Librarian Who Saved Timbuktu’s Cultural Treasures From al Qaeda
6 min · · A middle-aged book collector in Mali helped keep the fabled city’s libraries, books and manuscripts safe from occupying jihadists. · Shared by 9, including Charles Baldwin
The New York Times
The Problem With Greta Thunberg’s Climate Activism
5 min · · Her radical approach is at odds with democracy. · Shared by 85, including ❤️ Umair, Mike Butcher, Katja Evertz, Claudia Sommer, Glyn Britton, Charles Baldwin, Frederic Filloux, Stephanie A Kowalski, Thomas Power, Liliane Ferrari ™, felix salmon
CJR
The complex case of Rui Pinto
11+ min · · In 2016, a man who called himself John gave Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, 1.9 terabytes of data, or the equivalent of 500,000 Bibles. The cache included emails, contracts, and other documents… · Shared by 11, including luis antónio santos, Charles Baldwin
Aeon+Psyche
For a radical new perspective on immigration, picture the US as an ancient tree
2 min · · With the overheated rhetoric around immigration dominating the political sphere, an imaginative, historically rooted perspective can be something of a tonic. This short video from Pedro M Cruz, a data… · Shared by 15, including 🇺🇦Evan Kirstel #B2B #TechFluencer, Charles Baldwin
cathedral.org
Have We No Decency? A Response to President Trump
3 min · · What will it take for us all to say, with one voice, that we have had enough? The question is less about the president's sense of decency, but of ours. · Shared by 32, including Guy Kawasaki, Jane, Charles Baldwin, Bryan William Jones, Larry Balaclava, Esther Schindler
Aeon+Psyche
Extremophiles and life in the most unlikely of places
9 min · · Human life is fragile but tardigrades and other extremophiles show that life itself is in little danger of disappearing · Shared by 23, including Howard Getson, Charles Baldwin
National Geographic
The Sahara buried this ancient Roman city—preserving it for centuries
· Once a thriving North African military outpost, Thamugadi was forgotten under desert sands, until a Scottish explorer went looking for it centuries later. · Shared by 7, including Charles Baldwin
Aeon+Psyche
Our ideas about what early movies looked like are all wrong
2 min · · ‘It’s not so much being seduced by a story. It’s the thrill of seeing in itself.’During the first film screenings in the 1890s, viewers marvelled at moving images that had an unprecedented power to… · Shared by 15, including Jason Silva, Charles Baldwin
The New Yorker
The Incredible Life and Tragic Death of Lyra McKee
19+ min · · When the the twenty-nine-year-old journalist was killed in a riot, in Creggan, Ireland, it was implied that somehow her death had happened in the pursuit of Irish freedom. But Lyra embodied Irish… · Shared by 24, including Toby Coppel, Charles Baldwin, Nieman Reports
The New York Times
Trump’s Inhumanity Before a Victim of Rape
4 min · · In his boundless self-absorption, this president is capable of anything. · Shared by 32, including Charles Baldwin, Philippe Surber