R & M Reads

Thought Provoking Articles, Endless Cultura, & Internet Randomness

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Highlight and organize around the people,culture, technology, and policy driving us all forward.

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With IGTV, Instagram is betting that people want longer vertical videos - Digiday

Instagram has announced a new vertical video hub called IGTV. But do people actually want to watch vertical videos for longer than a few minutes?

Instagram is rolling out a new feature called IGTV allowing people to upload long-form vertical videos to compete with youtube and snapchat. 

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Nat Geo, which has 89 million followers on Instagram, said it plans to air the final episode of its TV show, “One Strange Rock,” in a vertical video format later this summer to market its long-form TV programming to its massive Instagram audience, said a company spokesperson.

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Meet the People Building Their Own Internet in Detroit

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How Facebook's News Feed Works - and What's Coming Next

Facebook's head of News Feed Adam Mosseri gave a new presentation on the platform's infamous algorithm at this week's F8 conference.

Breaking down changes coming to the Facebook News Feed. 

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Mosseri says that they’re looking to do this in three ways:

By helping people see the stories that they find meaningful - and that bring them together By figuring out they can help share the ‘moments that matter’ By working on better facilitating conversations about all of these things

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Opinion | Why Giving Back Isn’t Enough

Philanthropies can’t just compensate for the market’s shortcomings. We have to attack the roots of inequality and injustice.

The Ford Foundation’s Darren Walker on how the future of philanthropy is rooted in confronting the systemic roots of inequality. 

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Our self-awareness — our humility — shouldn’t be limited to examining the problems. It should include the structures of solutions, like giving itself. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said not long before his assassination, “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.” It is, after all, an offspring of the free market; it is enabled by returns on capital.

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Frank Ocean's Music Gets In-Depth Analysis in New Season of 'Dissect' Podcast

The new season of 'Dissect' premieres on Spotify this week.

Cole Cuchna brings his popular podcast “Dissect” officially to Spotify. This new season will focus on Frank Ocean.

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“First, his music is beautiful and thoughtful and authentic and full of sonic depth. Specifically, Blonde was like a Radiohead Kid A moment for me. Here’s this artist with a massive commercial yet artistically pure album in channel ORANGE,and he follows it with a highly experimental, nuanced, and in many ways challenging album in Blonde. I have a soft spot for artists who use their platform to challenge and progress the art form, not rest on the success they’ve had in the past.”

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Beach House remain masters of the indefinable and their seventh album is their heaviest and most immersive-sounding of their career.

The new Beach House album is, really, fucking good. 

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A new Spike Lee joint produced by Jordan Peele. The official “BlacKkKlansman” trailer dropped today. Based on “fo’ real, fo’ real shit”. 

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Mark Trahant: Tara Sweeney finally gets her day on Capitol Hill

Tara Sweeney’s confirmation hearing for the post of Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs was almost a celebration.

Tara Sweeney would be the first Alaskan Native, and only second woman, to hold the position of Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs. Amidst Trump budget cuts and sexual harassment at the Bureau of Indian Affairs her confirmation comes at a critical moment. 

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“My management style is a lot of transparency. I work to build a high caliber team. I also hold my employees accountable and provide a metric for success,” she said. “When you talk about balancing the needs with the funds, first and foremost, I want to be boots on the ground. I want to go out and consult with tribal leaders on what their needs are both in terms of funding but also the tools that Indian affairs needs to provide so they can exercise their right to self-determination.”

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Taking Children from Their Parents Is a Form of State Terror

In Putin’s Russia, threatening to separate families is a way to rule by fear. It’s a lesson the Trump Administration seems to be learning.

Award winning author Masha Gessen provides a personal and historical insight into the act of separating children from family. It’s roots are in totalitarian regimes but the practice has found a new home in the United States. 

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The spectacle of children being arrested sends a stronger message than any amount of police violence against adults could do. The threat that children might be removed from their families is likely to compel parents to keep their kids at home next time—and to stay home themselves.

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Opinion | The Charitable-Industrial Complex

As more lives are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.”

Warren Buffett’s son, Peter Buffett, describes what he sees as a broken system of charitable giving. From his POV it functions as a way to alleviate the guilt of the rich while perpetuating the suffering of those most directly impacted by inequality. 

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Early on in our philanthropic journey, my wife and I became aware of something I started to call Philanthropic Colonialism. I noticed that a donor had the urge to “save the day” in some fashion. People (including me) who had very little knowledge of a particular place would think that they could solve a local problem. Whether it involved farming methods, education practices, job training or business development, over and over I would hear people discuss transplanting what worked in one setting directly into another with little regard for culture, geography or societal norms.

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In the latest installment of Global Street Style, i-D gets to know Shanghai's bold new generation of artists, designers and musicians working their way around China's Great Firewall.

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The trouble with philanthropy is that money can't buy equality

Some of the best work is done at the grassroots, yet the power dynamic of philanthropy means this expertise is often ignored

The role of those with wealth and power in philanthropy has always been fraught with competing, conflicting, approaches. Now more than ever they must practice a radical empathy to get out of their own way and humanely uplift those they claim to want to help. 

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So what does this mean for philanthropy? It means that the only philanthropy worth engaging in – both ethically and strategically speaking – is the kind that honours the wisdom of relationships and the power of money.

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Google employees reportedly quit over military drone AI project

Project Maven uses AI to analyze drone footage and detect people and objects for humans to review later.

Around a dozen Google employees quit in response to the company’s involvement in the Pentagon’s AI drone program: Project Maven. 

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Project Maven seeks to help the military analyze drone footage faster through machine learning, as the AI detects people and objects for human review. Those who resigned from Google cited ethical concerns over the use of AI in drone operations and the company's broader involvement in political and military spheres...

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Padma Lakshmi Gracefully Destroys Spicy Wings.

Padma forever and always. 

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Why Donald Trump Can't Stop Fighting a Campaign That's Over

His first actions in office suggest his style from the trail isn’t going away soon.

Trump’s insecure response to his inaugural weekend being challenged by protests internationally tells the press, and the American people, the campaign is far from over.

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But in his appeals to the American security apparatus, his “America First” prescription of patriotism as panacea, and his insistence that the “bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” the clearest view of the next few years emerged. In the purest sense of the word, Trump has always presented an authoritarian message, and has always campaigned as a person who would restore domestic and global submission to American authority. In order to do so while in office, he has to be a perpetual convener of rallies and must always minimize even the appearance of opposition. His interest in military parades fits the bill, and provides a roadmap. For his promises to work, the legitimacy of consensus is paramount.

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We Will Miss Antibiotics When They’re Gone

To keep infections at bay, we need to fix the broken antibiotic business model.

Market based healthcare proves it’s harm once again with manufacturers of antibiotics. Lack of financial incentive to create and introduce NEW antibiotics means they don’t. And bacteria a growing more resistant and lethal every day.

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Yet few new antibiotics are in development. Most large drug companies have fled the field. The reason is simple: To conserve their effectiveness, new antibiotics are put on the shelf to be used only when older antibiotics stop working. That makes perfect sense for public health, but companies can’t make a profit on what they can’t sell. This mismatch between the huge social value of new antibiotics and the relative indifference of drug manufacturers could spell disaster.