The Top 5: Cybersecurity, migrant boats, the crisis of work
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:
“Honey, I Sold the Kids” (Aeon Magazine)
Because the momfluencer economy is absolutely booming, and their kids are its backbone.
“The Hacker” (Columbia Journalism Review)
Because this is an interview of one the world’s top cybersecurity experts, and it’s eye-opening. “She expressed a wariness of the internet, of how and where her data was stored. She was, in other words, privacy obsessed. When I asked Sandvik what would be required to make yourself entirely safe from cyber threats, she replied: you wouldn’t be online at all, and you would have to live in the forest. I often found her prudence perplexing. I wondered if there were things she was hiding from me—an awareness of risks that only someone with her expertise could appreciate. Or if, in her affable bluntness, she simply wanted to convey that most of us are blind to the surveillance dystopia in which we live.”
“America Fails the Civilization Test” (The Atlantic)
Because “How’s the U.S. doing on the civilization test? When graded on a curve against its peer nations, it is failing. The U.S. mortality rate is much higher, at almost every age, than that of most of Europe, Japan, and Australia. That is, compared with the citizens of these nations, American infants are less likely to turn 5, American teenagers are less likely to turn 30, and American 30-somethings are less likely to survive to retirement.”
“Adrift” (AP)
Because the amount of migrants trying to cross into Europe but ending up in the Western Hemisphere is increasing. “These ‘ghost boats’ — and likely many others that have vanished — are in part an unintended result of years of efforts and billions of dollars spent by Europe to stop crossings on the Mediterranean Sea. That crackdown, along with other factors such as economic disruption from the pandemic, pushed migrants to return to the far longer, more obscure and more dangerous Atlantic route to Europe from northwest Africa via the Canaries instead.”
“The Age of the Crisis of Work” (Harper’s Magazine)
Because “While the right-wing chestnut that ‘no one wants to work anymore’ is an exaggeration, so too is the progressive retort that ‘workers are finally standing up for themselves.’ Something slipperier is at hand: an inchoate sense of disillusionment. Tendrils of dissatisfaction are solidifying. Talk of a crisis of work suggests that many people today understand work itself, I think accurately, as a governing institution in its own right, analogous in some ways to the state. Like the State of the Union address, meditations on the state of work have become an annual ritual for consultancies, IT companies, and other purveyors of ‘work solutions.’ In a sense, work functions as a nation within a nation—an imagined community, in Benedict Anderson’s famous definition. Its moral health is of obscure but paramount significance.”
You talked about Tim Scott wanting to potentially run similarly to Biden while I have been wondering if Pence might be the Republican mirror of Biden as a boring candidate with real party & ideology bona fides who's previously been VP? Even if that lane isn't wide enough to challenge Trump in a Republican primary...