The Top 5: AR-15s, LED bulbs, influencer online courses
Catch up on Wear We Are
Welcome to your weekly edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation! Please also consider becoming a paid subscriber if this is one of those newsletters you open up all the time or look forward to each week. We also greatly encourage gift subscriptions!
The Top 5 articles for your week:
“The gun that divides a nation” (Washington Post)
Because “The AR-15 has gained a polarizing hold on the American imagination. Its unmistakable silhouette is used as a political statement emblazoned on T-shirts and banners and, among a handful of conservative members of Congress, on silver lapel pins. One Republican lawmaker, Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama, introduced a bill in February to declare the AR-15 the “National Gun of America.” It also has become a stark symbol of the nation’s gun violence epidemic. Ten of the 17 deadliest U.S. mass shootings since 2012 have involved AR-15s.”
“How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them” (Pro Publica)
Because this investigation reveals a practice by one of the US’s largest health care companies that denies care of all kinds. “The company has built a system that allows its doctors to instantly reject a claim on medical grounds without opening the patient file, leaving people with unexpected bills, according to corporate documents and interviews with former Cigna officials. Over a period of two months last year, Cigna doctors denied over 300,000 requests for payments using this method, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each case, the documents show.”
“The New Light is Bad” (New York Magazine)
Because LED bulbs are finicky and don’t work like we are told they should, and they’ll soon be the only kind of bulb we can buy in the US.
“The influencers getting rich by teaching you how to get rich” (Vox)
Because “influencers are cashing in on the online course boom, a cottage industry in which anyone can learn a money-making or otherwise life-improving skill — the Microsoft Office suite, email marketing, “gut health,” equitable household labor, how to get a tech job, self-confidence — from someone they already trust. These courses, hosted on one of the dozens of make-your-own course platforms like Teachable or Kajabi, can run from a few hundred bucks to thousands of dollars, from a day-long “intensive” to a months-long course.”
“Why this extremely viral poll result might not be real” (Substack)
Because “Surprising numbers and big shifts garner outsized attention—when best practice is simply to average the polls and be skeptical of outliers. That’s never more true then when these big shifts appear to confirm pre-existing media narratives. Reality is almost always a lot more boring.”