John Cox

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Interesting

Mother Jones

Follow the Dark Money | Mother Jones

# Summary This article traces the century-long battle over campaign finance regulation in American politics, showing a cyclical pattern where scandals prompt reform efforts that are subsequently dismantled through court decisions and legal loopholes. From Watergate's revelations about secret corporate donations funding the break-in, through the post-Watergate reforms of the 1970s that were partially gutted by the Buckley decision, to the soft-money scandals of the Clinton era that led to McCain-Feingold in 2002, the article documents how conservative legal strategists like James Bopp Jr. systematically challenged campaign finance laws—culminating in the Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate spending and ushered in the super-PAC era. The author argues that money in politics behaves like water, finding new channels around each regulatory dam, and that we are now back to the pre-Watergate era of massive undisclosed donations despite public demand for stricter controls.

Permalink historypoliticsinvestigation

The Marginalian

The 11 Best History Books of 2011 | Brain Pickings

James Gleick's *The Information* traces humanity's relationship with information from African drum languages through the Morse code and French optical telegraph to the digital age, arguing that understanding information's past is essential to navigating its future. Rather than adopting a pessimistic stance toward information overload, Gleick celebrates our capacity to find meaning within it and positions the information flood as an opportunity for intellectual elevation. The book ultimately presents humanity as creatures engaged in an endless search for patterns and meaning, mirroring Borges' vision of people navigating endless archives in pursuit of understanding.

Permalink historybooksrecommendationsliterature

kottke.org

Boing Boing

September 11: Found artifacts at the 9/11 Museum – Boing Boing

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum, opening in 2012, preserves personal artifacts recovered from the attacks and their aftermath, each carrying stories of both loss and survival—from Chief Joseph Pfeifer's helmet (whose brother Kevin died in the North Tower) to Linda Lopez's blood-stained shoes (worn as she fled the 97th floor of the South Tower) to Gennie Gambale's wallet (found on a nearby rooftop weeks after her death). The collection includes belongings of first responders like firefighters Kevin Prior and Liam Callahan, as well as objects discovered during the nine-month cleanup operation, creating a material record of individual experiences during one of America's greatest tragedies.

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Boing Boing

How the first image of the whole Earth was taken – Boing Boing

Kelly celebrates the remarkable engineering achievement of Lunar Orbiter 1's 1966 photograph—the first image of Earth from space—which required an ingenious analog system with mechanical moving parts to capture, develop, scan, and transmit film across the vacuum of space without any digital technology. The anecdote serves as a counterpoint to modern technological assumptions, highlighting how earlier generations solved complex problems through mechanical ingenuity rather than electronics.

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The New Yorker

The Mission to Get Osama Bin Laden : The New Yorker

This New Yorker account details the May 1, 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, tracing the operation from its planning stages through execution, focusing on the Navy SEAL Team Six assault on his Abbottabad compound despite significant obstacles. The narrative reveals how a Black Hawk helicopter crashed during insertion due to aerodynamic complications, forcing the SEALs to adapt on the ground, and reconstructs the precise moments when bin Laden was located and killed on the third floor, along with several family members and associates who posed threats. The piece also examines the broader intelligence, political, and military context—including President Obama's decision to authorize the raid over cautious advisers' objections and the operational precedent it set for future unilateral U.S. military actions inside Pakistani territory.

Permalink historypoliticsnewsmilitary

Readability

Black, Brown, and Beige — www.newyorker.com — Readability

I don't have access to the actual content of these articles—only their titles and publication metadata. To write accurate summaries that distinguish each piece and explain why it was worth saving, I would need you to provide the full text or a detailed description of what each article actually argues or reports. Could you share the content of the specific article you'd like me to summarize?

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the Guardian

The Atlantic

The Management Myth - Magazine - The Atlantic

The author, a philosophy PhD who became a management consultant and founding partner of a consulting firm, argues that management theory is fundamentally unscientific and philosophically hollow—rooted in Frederick Taylor's dubious "scientific management" of the 1890s, which masked subjective judgments as objective data, and perpetuated through later theorists like Elton Mayo who merely recycled humanistic platitudes as revolutionary breakthroughs. Business schools provide little genuine education beyond credential-signaling and networking, and management theory itself is essentially a moralizing discipline disguised as technical expertise, one that corporate executives manipulate to justify control over workers while remaining insulated from accountability for their failures.

Permalink historyeducationbusiness

TechCrunch

How We All Missed Web 2.0′s “Netscape Moment”

DST's 2009 investment in Facebook at a $10 billion valuation marked a pivotal shift in startup economics comparable to Netscape's 1995 IPO, not because it was itself a liquidity event, but because it enabled a new model where high-growth companies could avoid going public indefinitely while still accessing capital through secondary markets and providing investor returns. Just as Netscape's IPO proved that unprofitable startups could access public markets, Facebook demonstrated the inverse—that companies didn't need to go public at all to achieve growth, liquidity, and strategic flexibility—a change driven by structural shifts in public market regulations and sentiment that made IPOs increasingly unattractive for tech founders. The secondary market explosion that followed has already rippled through the Valley's investment strategies and employee incentives, though the risk of degradation and excess looms if the industry fails to exercise restraint.

Permalink technologyhistorybusiness

Flickr

Flickr: The Commons

The Flickr Commons is a collaborative platform launched in 2008 by Flickr and the Library of Congress that allows over 100 cultural institutions to publicly share photographs from their archives. The program aims to increase public access to photography collections, enable crowdsourced metadata improvements, and facilitate knowledge contribution from users while ensuring the long-term preservation of these digitized materials. Cultural institutions with photography collections can register to participate and contribute their holdings to the growing commons.

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www.youtube.com

taoyue.com

taoyue.com: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men

The author argues that he avoids hiring purportedly "brilliant" men because they are typically fast-talking con artists who start projects enthusiastically but lack the discipline to finish them—the real problem being not intelligence itself but the combination of overconfidence and inability to handle repetitive work. Drawing on personal experience with charismatic failures like his former partner Carroll, he illustrates how such men generate excitement around grand schemes, then lose interest when faced with practical details and modest execution. Instead, he advocates for hiring ordinary, steady workers who possess five simple qualities: good health, thriftiness, clear communication, attention to detail, and courage—arguing that business success comes from extracting consistent effort from reliable people rather than depending on the erratic brilliance of talented misfits.

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This American Life

This American Life

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Kraft Heinz

Damn Interesting

Damn Interesting » Blog Archive » The Phantom Time Hypothesis

German scholars have proposed that roughly 297 years were fictitiously inserted into our calendar during the early Middle Ages—meaning it's actually 1708, not 2005—based on inconsistencies like the Gregorian calendar's correction being smaller than it should be and mysterious gaps in historical construction records. While the proponents point to evidence of medieval document forgeries and historical discontinuities, their conclusions rest on circumstantial evidence at best, and their proposed motives for such a vast conspiracy (like Otto III wanting his reign to include the year 1000) strain credulity. The hypothesis, though intellectually intriguing for raising legitimate questions about historical dating, ultimately reflects an unscientific leap from ambiguous data to an extraordinary claim.

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