Your reading material for today, folks

Behold a selection from my weekly "Linkfest" on @Medium: follow here (clivethompson.medium.com/subscribe) or subscribe to Medium here if you don't already (clivethompson.medium.com/membership)

First up!

🐀Rats navigating DOOM in VR hackaday.com/2021/12/29/rat…

1/11 🕹️The Prince of Persia, done in Javascript: princejs.com

2/11

I'm reporting a feature on ... the eternal struggle of the to-do list.

What's your fave way of organizing to-dos?

Is there a particular method or app that suits you best?

Or have you UTTERLY GIVEN UP

Lemme know! Via tweetz or clive@clivethompson.net, I'm all ears I am interested even in *crappy* ways of managing to-dos that *just barely work*.

Given the ever-expanding demands of work qua work, one's to-do management style can be like Aristotle's praise for democracy -- the least bad of the bad options

In 2016, the National Security Council wrote a playbook for dealing with a pandemic. Trump's administration ignored it: politico.com/news/2020/03/2…

Mitch McConnell denied it existed, then admitted it did: boingboing.net/2020/05/15/mit…

Want to read it? Here: assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6819…

1/x It's interesting to read!

When the plan warns of what types of pandemics might be coming, it includes coronaviruses: assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6819…

2/x

For aeons, poverty has been cast as a behavioral defect -- the poor are poor because they make bad decisions.

Research is now proving the exact opposite: Being poor worsens decision-making, by crowding one's mental bandwith -- thecorrespondent.com/283/why-poor-p…

Consider this data ... 1/x Jane Costello had been studying kids in the Great Smoky Mountains since 1993, documenting behavioral problems amongst poor members of a Cherokee tribe.

In 1997, a casino opened up, giving tribe families $6,000 in new income a year.

Behavioral problems immediately *plunged*. 2/x

Behold Mary Allen Wilkes -- in the early 1960s, she wrote the operating system for the first personal computer. She walked into MIT with no experience; they hired her. Why? Women were considered *naturals* at coding. nytimes.com/2019/02/13/mag… (From my book CODERS, out 3/26!) 1/x This is mini-thread because the @nytmag has just published an except from CODERS -- adapted from my chapter on the history of women in coding. Some highlights to follow ... 2/x

So, an amazing detail inside @taffyakner's superb profile of Gwyneth Paltrow: She initially planned to do a Goop magazine with Conde Nast. But the deal broke down because Conde insists all articles be fact-checked; Paltrow refused. nytimes.com/2018/07/25/mag… 1/x A few thoughts ... First, there's a striking resonance between a) Paltrow's refusal to have her unscientific woo verified by fact-checkers b) the language of today's right-wing conspiracy theorists: "We’re just asking questions," as Paltrow's business partner says. 2/x

Here, @NellieBowles writes a superb profile of Jordan Peterson: nyti.ms/2k4Hya2 There’s the stuff he says to her that is obviously headline-generating, such as this soulless and (in his case, ideologically hypocritical) “enforced monogamy” stuff 1/x But what also stands out here, and in his book, is his idea that mythological and religious tales are reflections of objective facts; that chaos is often presented in mythology as female because women are, in objective fact, associated with chaos. 2/x