To be honest, I knew almost none of this before reading @VivekYKelkar's piece. Once I'd read it, though, I realized that I'd been poorly served by the news outlets I read: How could you possibly understand what's happening there unless you know this, at a minimum?
This is exactly the kind of piece I hoped we'd publish: I think it meets all of the criteria we decided we wanted to fulfill on our very first Zoom call:
It gives me so much satisfaction that we said, "We want to make *this* exist" ... and it now exists! If you've never brought a complex project into being, starting from scratch, I highly recommend you do it once in your life. It's really satisfying.
It's also a complete vindication of my propensity to waste years of my life on Twitter. I either met, or reconnected with, every single person involved in the project on Twitter. (Is that right? I think it is.)
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"Each night for more than a week, unregistered flights between Yangon and Kunming have been transporting unknown goods and personnel from China to Myanmar. The military regime that’s now in charge of Myanmar is trying very hard to hide the flights.
"Whoever has arranged these flights is going to great lengths to hide them. The planes’ transponders have been turned off, a violation of international aviation rules. .. Beyond that, the Kunming Airport hasn’t registered them online as arrivals.
"The situation in Myanmar suggests two possibilities for what the planes are carrying. One is that they’re bringing in Chinese troops and cyber specialists to help the Tatmadaw control access to information and the internet.
Two days ago I ordered delivery of six full-sized bottles of San Pellegrino. I woke up this morning to discover there are none left. I've drunk them all.
I feel such mixed emotions.
Shame: I went on a gluttonous sparkling-water bender. The stuff's expensive.
Pride: I *dare* the next person to lecture me about the importance of drinking enough water.
Bafflement: Why did I mindlessly drink six full-sized bottles of San Pellegrino? It's not like editing @cosmo_globalist is thirsty work.
Meta-shame: What's wrong with me that I can feel guilty about something like drinking San Pellegrino?
Do you live in a country where the only vaccines available are from China or Russia? @cosmo_globalist correspondent @akshaya_jose is writing for us about vaccine diplomacy and wants to know about your experiences of it. Would you please let her know if you do?
You needn't be any kind of expert. She just wants to know how you feel about these vaccines and the countries that made them available to you, or perhaps how you feel about US/EU vaccine diplomacy @0kanAltiparmak@omersayli, @navalny@NighswanderJon
Re. "spreading disinformation," this is built into the social media business model, for this and many other reasons. We still haven't the first clue what to do about this very useful tool we're using. Humans are very inexperienced with it. washingtonpost.com/opinions/anti-…
I worry the First Amendment won't survive it, because at some point, we're going to say, "Our society can't survive unless we have *some* shared sense of epistemology." And we will be right to say that. If @Twitter and other social media companies don't figure this out,
they'll break liberal democracy for good. It's a massive, historic responsibility, and since I have no idea how to solve the problem, I don't envy them. I just hope they have a sense of how high the stakes are.
I'm sitting comfortably and healthily in my apartment while meanwhile in hospitals all around me they're fighting a war. And the trauma and stress of this for the medical professionals can, I think, reasonably be likened to wartime.
Around them people are dying, they are almost helpless to stop it, and their own lives are at immediate risk. It is not as loud and shocking as war and doesn't involve the same confrontation with the enormity of human evil,
Hey, @washingtonpost? This is disgusting. Give the man's family space to mourn privately. He didn't ask to be in the news; he didn't ask to be murdered; and they just lost their father, husband, son. How would *you* feel? washingtonpost.com/local/william-…
He's not the news. He's the *victim of a crime.* And you're stalking his family? Reporting every detail you can find about his family and their--until yesterday--perfectly normal, happy life? Why? To tantalize readers? For clicks?
It's in the public interest to know more about the murderer. It is not in the public interest to know so much about the victim that the press, minutes after the family, ---including his kids--have received by far the worst and most traumatic news they've received in their lives,