Week of July 23, 2018

A few things of note from around the Internet this week…

Deranged

The story behind the unraveling of Lane Davis, alt-right troll. The part about the content creators not realizing that people take them seriously was enlightening.

I went to try to find some answers about Lane. I discovered that his life leading up to the killing — isolated, dependent, resentful, and ruled by the perverse incentives of internet content production — has much to tell us about the kind of man for whom the new fringes of American life are most dangerous. In his room, online, as a combatant in an endless culture war, Lane found what had eluded him everywhere else in life: a sense of purpose. And then something happened that threatened to take it all away.

Generosity

Susan Unterberg anonymously gave a \$25,000 gift each year for the past 22 years.

The gift is part of a grant program that has paid out a total of \$5.5 million over the last 22 years to support underrecognized female artists over age 40. It is called Anonymous Was a Woman, in reference to a line in Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” to pay tribute to female artists in history who signed their paintings “Anonymous” so that their work would be taken seriously.

Learning

An interesting post on learning and thinking from Jana Vembunarayanan.

Learning is hard. Your brain takes time to consolidate different pieces into one chunk to form a cohesive whole. Do you remember how much time you took learning to ride a bike? You need to have the courage, patience, perseverance, curiosity, reflection, and rest to allow the brain to learn, form chunks, and to rewire. Do not compare yourself with others. It will create anxiety and lead to frustration. You are different from others. Learn at your own pace.

Unclear

Doug Clark cuts through a lot of the noise with regard to Otto Warmbier and tries to piece together the actual story, not the common narrative.

From that point on, the White House no longer focused on Otto's tragedy. In fact, it swung so far in the opposite direction that civil-rights groups complained about human-rights issues not being on the agenda for the summit in Singapore. When the three remaining American detainees were released in May, Trump welcomed them home by saying, “We want to thank Kim Jong-un, who really was excellent to these three incredible people.”

The story of Otto being brutally beaten had outlived its usefulness.

Oven

The great migration out of India as it becomes uninhabitable is going to be a geopolitical nightmare. Syria on a monstrous scale.

“These cities are going to become unlivable unless urban governments put in systems of dealing with this phenomenon and make people aware,” said Sujata Saunik, who served as a senior official in the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs and is now a fellow at the Harvard University School of Public Health. “It’s a major public health challenge.”