Happy weekend! We have a great crop of longreads for you:
-“Inside the Obama Campaign’s Hard Drive” by Tim Murphy for Mother Jones profiles the head of Obama For America’s enormous tech team. His name is Harper Reed, he helped create Threadless, and his excellent moustache is pictured above. The strategies that Reed and his colleagues are borrowing, adapting, and creating from a number of commercial and political sources are proving to be hugely effective and incredibly creepy. As Murphy points out, “The line between data mining and cyberstalking is already blurred,” and the terabytes of data that OFA and other political organizations keep about their donors, volunteers, and targets demands scrutiny.
-Jadaliyya ran a recent article entitled “Jon Stewart’s Theater of the Absurd,” questioning The Daily Show’s curious seriousness while hosting King Abdullah II of Jordan. The article’s pseudonymous correspondents point out that while Abdullah is often upheld as the reformist head of a modern Arab constitutional monarchy, the sovereign has repeatedly hampered electoral and journalistic freedoms in the Kingdom. It’s natural to want a dependable “good guy” in the Middle East, but sadly reality is far more complicated. Stewart seemed not to question Abdullah as rigorously as he would other guests—and his viewers took away an uncomplicated reading of a very complicated monarch. Click through!
-MakeUseOf interviews Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, and the results are pretty damning. Johnson’s message: “heavily processed information, like heavily processed food, isn’t healthy but for some reason we can’t get enough of it.” This interview covers all of our favorite bases, from time management to the perils of confirmation bias in a politicized, media-heavy age. Check it out.
