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George Michael | Freedom!

American politicians routinely warn against “politicising” mass shootings. Although they take to the airwaves to discuss airline safety in the wake of a plane crash, discussing gun laws after a lunatic shoots scores of people to death is understood to be somehow in bad taste. As Barack Obama said after one such event in California in 2015, “This is a political choice we make to allow this to happen  every few months in America.”

From The Economist.                                                    

“La reacción del pueblo de la ciudad de México, sin distinción de clases, mostró que en las profundidades de la sociedad hay -enterrados, pero vivos- muchos gérmenes democráticos. Estas semillas de solidaridad, fraternidad y asociación no son ideológicas, quiero decir, no nacieron con una filosofía moderna, sea la de la Ilustración, el liberalismo o. las doctrinas revolucionarias de nuestro siglo. Son más antiguas, y han vivido dormidas en el subsuelo histórico de México. Son una extraña mezcla de impulsos libertarios, religiosidad católica tradicional, vínculos prehispánicos y, en fin, esos lazos espontáneos que el hombre inventó al comenzar la historia. Kropotkin y santo Tomás, Suárez y Rousseau, suspendiendo por un momento sus disputas, habrían aprobado con una sonrisa conmovida la conducta del pueblo. Las raíces comunitarias del México tradicional están intactas. La acción popular recubrió y rebasó en unas pocas horas el espacio ocupado por las autoridades gubernamentales. No fue una rebelión, un levantamiento o un movimiento político: fue una marea social que demostró, pacíficamente, la realidad verdadera, la realidad histórica de México. O, más exactamente: la realidad intrahistórica de la nación. La enseñanza social e histórica del sismo puede reducirse a esta frase: hay que devolverle a la sociedad lo que es de la sociedad.“

Have you submerged an Oreo into a glass of milk and lingered too long? Did you watch in horror as America's supposedly favorite cookie disintegrated before your very eyes? Fear no more! Here's how to find (and elongate) your optimal dunk time.

THE SHORT ANSWER

Dip your cookie for three seconds, give or take. Carry on with your life, dear reader.

Solange K | I Could Fall in Love with You (Selena Cover) 

It’s safe to say, I think, that the American experiment is at an end. No, America might not be finished as in civil war and secession. But it is clearly at an end in three ways.

First, to the world, as a serious democracy. Second, to itself, as a nation with dignity and self-respect. Third, its potential lies in ruins. Even if authoritarianism is toppled tomorrow, the problems of falling life expectancy, an imploding middle class, skyrocketing inequality, and so on, won’t be.

New Order | Your Silent Face

We already rely on machines to build our cars, trade our stocks, and answer our customer-service calls. In the near future, they’ll likely drive our cars for us, care for our elderly, and even, in a limited form, replace us when we die. This week we explore this future in Machines with Brains, a 13-part series on the nature of humanity in an increasingly automated world.

But although machines are learning to do what only humans could once handle, how they learn is very different. A human artisan, trader, driver, or caregiver relies to a large degree on empathy—her ability as a human to infer what another human might want. Even bored ticket sellers or call-center operators use empathic cues to figure out how to serve you, not least because they have been on the other side of that conversation. Algorithms, though, learn through pattern-matching and repetitive training against quantified goals, and while this can make them very good—even better than humans—at certain things, they achieve them without any true understanding of what a human actually wants.

As computers serve more of our needs, empathy is drained out of our interactions, forcing us to adapt to the machine mind. You query Google using weird Google-search-speak, modify your enunciation for Alexa or Siri, spend minutes trudging obediently through automated phone menus when a single sentence could easily communicate what you want. It’s not only our digital servants who are being trained. So are we.

Increasingly, empathy will be treated as a luxury. We’ll pay more for a real human whose job is to understand us just as we are. As with bespoke shoes, artisanal coffee, or handmade clothes, we’ll shell out a premium for financial services, medical care, and even companionship that isn’t machine-made. Normally it’s the rich who benefit first from new technology; the irony of the AI revolution is that the rich will be those who can afford to benefit last.—Mike Murphy and Gideon Lichfield