This week: The Facebook strategy / Beto and Julian / Bodies in the ice / Africa’s renaissance / Spain’s Queen Sofia
Most of these great items come from my social media networks. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism.
1. Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis
By Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew Rosenberg and Jack Nicas | The New York Times | November 2018
“In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising business and daily life around the world. Along the way, Facebook accumulated one of the largest-ever repositories of personal data, a treasure trove of photos, messages and likes that propelled the company into the Fortune 500.”
Also see, from Politico Magazine: Facebook reconsiders Washington approach after Times reveals hardball tactics
2. Navy SEALs, Marines Charged With Green Beret Logan Melgar’s Murder
By Kevin Maurer and Spencer Ackerman | The Daily Beast | November 2018
“The victim allegedly discovered SEALs in Mali were stealing money from an informant fund and soliciting prostitutes.”
3. Is Beto O’Rourke a Problem for Fellow Democrat Julián Castro’s Presidential Prospects?
By Carlos Sanchez | Texas Monthly | November 2018
“Castro has been enormously politically adept ahead of an expected run. O’Rourke’s popularity could present new challenges.”
Also see, from Politico Magazine: How Democrats Won Over Older Voters — And Flipped the House
4. How Marijuana Harms a Developing Baby’s Brain
By Dana G. Smith | Scientific American | November 2018
“Three studies in rodents suggest prenatal exposure to the drug may pose risks for infants”
5. The Ghosts of the Glacier
By Sean Flynn | GQ | October 2018
“What happens when climate changes quickly in a previously frozen place, when the earth heats up and the mountains melt? In the high Swiss Alps, here’s what happens: The ice gives up the bodies — and the secrets — of the past.”
6. The First Choice
By Rebecca Carroll | Columbia Journalism Review | Fall 2018
“Here’s the thing: neither traditional journalism nor New Journalism has ever been for us, black people.”
7. Obama and the Legacy of Africa’s Renaissance Generation
By Aminatta Forna | NYR Daily :: The New York Review of Books | November 2018
“The generation of Africans to whom the task fell of creating new countries knew, or came to know, that alongside the desires and dreams, and the promise of a new-found freedom, they had been set up to fail. Their real courage lay in the fact that they did not surrender, that they tried to do what they had promised themselves and their countries they would. They went forward anyway.”
8. What She Wore
By Mimi Swartz | Texas Monthly | January 2010
“My relationship with my mother was sometimes combative, usually affectionate, always complicated. But we never failed to bond over a mutual passion: the clothes in her closet.”
9. 6.3 million girls are out of school in Nigeria. Meet one
By Masuma Ahuja | Girlhood Around the World :: The Lily | October 2018
“According to UNICEF data, there are an estimated 10.5 million children, 60 percent of them girls, who are not in school in the country. Poverty and child marriage are cited as two of the main reasons that keep girls out of classrooms.”
10. Sofía: a queen who has grown stronger in the face of adversity
By Mabel Galaz | El Pais | October 2018
“As she turns 80, the mother of King Felipe VI is enjoying huge popularity after incidents such as the “Corinna case” and a very public spat with her daughter-in-law Letizia”