Eyes On The Prize, Folks, And Other Things I Mutter To My French Press When I First Wake Up
Why, hello! How’s your morning so far? Did you get enough sleep last night? Did you emotionally prepare yourself for the inevitability of an acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial this morning by stress eating chocolate covered almonds? Side note: if you’re wondering why I haven’t spent much time talking about impeachment in a newsletter that is ostensibly based in politics and yelling at screens because of them, it is due to that very inevitability and my personal inability to thoughtfully articulate how much that freaks me out. I’ll just let Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi sum up my 2020 feelings for me:
BTW, I just searched “stress eating” and “chocolate covered” in quick succession to see if either had a hyphen in it, and now I think Google is concerned for me. But in actually-good news,
Last night was the season opener of Odd Salon, and we had nearly 400 people attend. It was insane, and co-founder Annetta Black and I got super emotional remembering when we’d have to bribe our friends with drinks to come and listen to us enthusiastically yell about history. Now, a room half-filled with strangers—and half-filled with found family—buy tickets and laugh and yell at ships and learn something weird. It's a beautiful thing that co-founders Tre Balchowsky and Annetta created, and I am just tickled I've been able to shine in their reflection since before the beginning. As Friend of the Missive (and Odd Salon fellow!) Casey once reminded me, If anyone ever tells you there's no culture in San Francisco, tell them to shut up and come hang out with hundreds of delightful nerds who will prove them otherwise with their applause and laughter and support.
TO THE INTERNET!
If you were one of the folks claiming you could have built the Iowa Caucus app in a weekend, a) you couldn’t have and b) if you still think an app will save us, we’re in trouble. Charlie Warzel’s take on the Iowa tech cluster gets this “potentially deadly combination of techno-utopianism and laziness. The two fuel each other: The overarching belief that software will fix everything leads to slapdash engineering, procurement and deployment.”
And that combination has created the perfect Petri dish for misinformation. As Cat Zakrzewski writes, the chorus of conspiracy theories that followed the caucus SNAFU created a quandary beyond the policies of most social media platforms.
And finally, Oh. My. Goodness. Did you know that the editors of JSTOR Daily do a round-up of well-researched stories around the web? And you know they must be good, because JSTOR!
Alright folks, imma keep today’s Missive on the shorter side because I just opened Twitter to see what was up and… that wasn’t a great idea! Be kind to yourselves!
Xoxo Amy