Reddit’s Terrorists Have Won: Ellen Pao and the Failure to Rebrand Web 2.0 in Culture

Arthur takes Reddit, it’s leadership and Web 2.0 to task in his charge against terror trolls, supporting other claims that Ellen Pao was pushed off a ‘glass cliff.’

What can we learn from this, aside from what we already knew: that boards of directors tend to put female CEOs in charge in times of crisis because they predictably serve as useful lightning rods for backlash and hate?

Letter to My Son in Policy

Ta-Nehisi releases an excerpt from his new book, Between the World and Me, drawing a response from Toni Morrison saying, “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died, clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life. I have sought the answer through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.

The Really Big One in Nature

If you live in the Pacific Northwest, do you have an earthquake survival plan, it’s all my roommate can talk about.

A century and a half elapsed before anyone had any inkling that the Pacific Northwest was not a quiet place but a place in a long period of quiet. It took another fifty years to uncover and interpret the region’s seismic history. Geology, as even geologists will tell you, is not normally the sexiest of disciplines; it hunkers down with earthly stuff while the glory accrues to the human and the cosmic — to genetics, neuroscience, physics. But, sooner or later, every field has its field day, and the discovery of the Cascadia subduction zone stands as one of the greatest scientific detective stories of our time.

Uber Could Have to Pay to Reclassify Its Drivers in California in Technology

What makes Uber special in the eyes of investors is its lower costs. It’s basically a piece of software connecting drivers to riders, which, for now, means it doesn’t have to pay those drivers’ health care, payroll taxes or workers’ compensation insurance.

If Uber does have to reclassify, it wouldn’t just be hit by additional taxes — it could suffer major penalties for all the drivers it had mis-classified up until now.

On Absurdist

A small tribute to Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo, who passed away this week. Unpacking sexual harassment, how commonplace but hidden it really is. A quick existential comic on selfies, which asks, what are we really making here? Returning to feminism, interviews with Adrianna Tan & Rene Verma offer an intersectional glimpse into women’s issues abroad. Some advice on how to appropriately gentrify a neighborhood, specifically for folks moving to Oakland.

Lastly, why courts deserve the same scrutiny as cops.