Each week, BIV staff will share with you some of the interesting stories we have found from around the web.
Mark Falkenberg, deputy managing editor:
Writing about the book An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, the Forward’s Dan Friedman likens Facebook to a monster of Jewish legend:
“Like a golem created by a careless yeshiva boy, it has careened out of control, its phenomenally powerful limbs serving all manner of hateful masters.” – Forward
https://forward.com/culture/472950/how-mark-zuckerberg-and-sheryl-sandberg-created-golem-sheera-frenkel/
With the Delta variant surging, many U.S. employers are pushing back the date by which they were going to bring employees back the the office – some of them indefinitely. Reporter Noah Lanard notes the extensions “mark a new, unfortunate, phase in the slow reopening of society. But the reality is that for many people, particularly people of color, working remotely has never been an option.” – Mother Jones
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/07/coronavirus-remote-work-office-tech/
Timothy Renshaw, managing editor:
More summer reading recommendations:
For people who value numbers over rumours when weighing information, Vaclav Smil's Numbers Don't Lie is recommended summer reading. The book from the professor emeritus in the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Environment would make for good factual company in the winter, too. Smil applies his meticulously gathered numbers to an eclectic range of subjects ranging from the real cost of electricity to planet of the cows and what's worse for the environment: your car or your phone?
Speaking of summer and In the interests of lowering the volume on one of the the season's more annoying sounds, former SpaceX engineers are hard at work developing what could be the first commercial electric speedboat, according to this story in the Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/01/ex-spacex-engineers-commercial-electric-speedboat
With water top of mind as drought continues to suck the life out of large swathes of North America, this look at making better use of what we have and reducing the threat of increased water scarcity qualifies as more recommended summer reading – Nature Communications
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25026-3
Glen Korstrom, reporter
Government attempts to silence reporters increasingly using high-tech tools.
Spyware used to hack phones, get sensitive photos and then misrepresent those photos is something now being done. This piece documents how female journalists in the Middle East are being targeted. – NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/i-will-not-be-silenced-women-targeted-hack-leak-attacks-n1275540
This detailed analysis of the state of COVID-19 in Southeast Asia has many internal links, and makes clear why tourism there is unlikely to normalize until 2023. – Couchfish blog
https://couchfish.substack.com/p/couchfish-see-you-in-2023
With Prince dying without a will, his back catalog remains tied up in probate, with a bank, lawyers, advisers and heirs haggling over fees and the reclusive artist’s assets, unreleased music and legacy. The IRS is also vying for its stake. – WSJ
Nelson Bennett, Reporter
A new species of bear has appeared in Canada’s north -- the grolar bear. It is a new hybrid resulting from polar bears and grizzly bears mating. – The Sierra Club
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/meet-polar-bear-tomorrow
One of the more gruesome but intriguing things I saw when travelling in Asia in the 1990s was a mummified Buddhist monk, still sitting in the lotus position hundreds of years after he died. Scientists are now taking a serious look at the Tibetan practise of thukdam, in which monks basically meditate themselves to death. For some reason, their bodies do not begin to show signs of decomposition for quite some time after brain death. “After the apparent death of some monks, their bodies remain in a meditating position without decaying for an extraordinary length of time, often as long as two or three weeks,” this report notes. – Big Think
