The Top 5: Finding Putin, call centers, Criterion Channel, girl blogging, & sports gambling
Bonus this week - the SOTU bingo card is back!
Welcome to the latest 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!
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The Top 5 articles for your week:
“How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets—and Vladimir Putin” (Wired)
Because in a new book, Byron Tau shows how ad data on smart phones is being used by US intelligence agencies.
They realized they could track world leaders through Locomotive, too. After acquiring a data set on Russia, the team realized they could track phones in the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s entourage. The phones moved everywhere that Putin did. They concluded the devices in question did not actually belong to Putin himself; Russian state security and counterintelligence were better than that. Instead, they believed the devices belonged to the drivers, the security personnel, the political aides, and other support staff around the Russian president; those people’s phones were trackable in the advertising data. As a result, PlanetRisk knew where Putin was going and who was in his entourage.
“The last stand of the call-centre worker” (The Economist)
Because Sophie Elmhirst writers about how AI is changing the customer service sector.
…he was proposing that each agent would have a sort of inexhaustible, automated co-worker and spy-manager, monitoring every conversation, every decision and then relentlessly suggesting improvements. Yes, calls have always been recorded for training purposes – words we know like a previous generation knew the Lord’s Prayer – but this surveillance lived, inescapably, on your desktop, and was focused entirely on you. It did not need to sleep or eat. It never went for coffee, or asked you what film you watched last night. It had no marital problems that you could chew over on a break. It just indefatigably and dispassionately existed to watch you and make you better.
“Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion?” (NYT)
Because Joshua Hunt chronicles the rise of the streaming channel, Criterion.
Each year, Criterion selects 50 or 60 new entrants to add to its catalog, which now includes 1,650 films. Some Hollywood directors campaign relentlessly for their films — or their favorite films from the past — to make the list. For legions of film fans, Criterion is akin to the Louvre, but with “an aura of hip,” the writer and director Josh Safdie told me in an email.
“Girl blog” (Vague Blue)
Because Terry Ngyuen makes some interesting observations about personal essays.
…it makes sense why the Tumblr generation would define themselves in relation to external media, to collective/shared narratives. When you grow up on the internet, the possibility of an original thought, an original take, feels impossible. Your age, at once fixed and ever-changing. The possibility of confronting adulthood on the platforms that you once loitered on, as a girl-child, feels foreign and strange.
“Did Apple Just Make a Gambling App?” (The Atlantic)
Because Jacob Stern noticed that “If the sports app really is a nascent sports-betting venture—still a big if—that would be the final confirmation of gambling’s acceptance into mainstream American culture, and a move that would mainstream gambling even more. Apple Sports, despite such limited functionality, is already high on the App Store charts. It could become a default, like the weather app or the camera app, potentially putting sports betting a touch-screen tap away from the world’s 1.5 billion iPhone users.”
ICYMI on Wear We Are:
The Morning Five: February 26, 2024
The Morning Five: February 28, 2024
The Morning Five: February 29, 2024
Episode 101: The State of the 2024 Race