Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #316

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another: 

• Reflections on Our World – Bill Raduchel – Medium. “In the past year many of the political conversations I’ve had suffer from a lack of first principles. We can debate whether Bernie is a populist cry, or Boris a wounded pomposity — but we seldom discuss the real knobs that adjust society. Instead, we should be asking questions like, ’is GDP the right measure of wealth?’ and ’is unemployment a bad word?’ Sadly, those are pretty nuanced, first-principle discussions. I’m not sure I agree with Bill Raduchel‘s priorities, but I like that he’s asking. He proposes that ’all Presidential candidates should be required to answer one fundamental question: At the end of your tenure as President, what will be the ratio of U.S. per capita income to global average per capita income, and why?'” (Alistair for Hugh).
• I Dared My Best Friend To Ruin My Life – He’s Succeeding – Reddit. “There are two amazing places for creativity on Reddit. One is called Writingprompts, where someone suggests the basis for a story and people upvote the best responses; and the other is Nosleep, which is horror stories that sound plausible, and often mix in elements of reality. This episodic one is fantastic, and will undoubtedly be a movie soon if anyone’s paying attention. Start at the top and see where it goes.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs A New Literary Guide – Literary Hub. “If you think Toronto has changed in the past 10, or 20 years, go visit China. This author claims that China is so crazy right now, is changing so quickly, that we need a new literary genre, the ’ultra-unreal’…” (Hugh for Alistair).
• Welcome to the new Toronto: the most fascinatingly boring city in the world – The Guardian. “The world seems to be coming unstuck… a few months ago, Greece was in crisis and we wondered whether the Euro could withstand Grexit. Instead we’re getting Brexit, driven in large part by English anxieties about immigration. The political elite in the UK, rather than having sensible ansers, seems to be collapsing in on itself. The war in Syria rages on (and don’t forget Iraq), with millions of refugees fleeing the bloodshed, seeking asylum in Turkey, Europe, Canada and elsewhere. Every week there seems to be another horrific terrorist attack. And then of course there is Donald Trump, who plans to build a wall to keep the Mexicans out, and implement an all-out ban on ’people from countries where terrorism is happening.’ We watch all this, agog in Canada, where even an armed ISIS-inspired attack in our House of Parliament barely seems to have moved the needle on our opinions of immigrants. Canada’s approach to multiculturalism seems to be working – for now anyway. Toronto is the epicentre of Canadian diversity. The scale and… hue… of the city’s growth is quite amazing. As a Montrealer, I am legally obliged to consider Toronto ’boring.’ But, as this article suggests, Toronto is boring in the most fascinating ways possible.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• Why We Need to Pick Up Alvin Toffler’s Torch – The New York Times. “There are many people who call themselves a ‘Futurist’. We recently lost the original thinker: Alvin Toffler. A Futurist is not someone who writes about what’s next… it’s actually, the work that Toffler did. He truly imagined the future. Deep thinking. A depth of philosophy. Let’s not just toss this title around. Let’s make sure to find our true futurists, and have them spend their time thinking deeply as we hold them to the highest of standards.” (Mitch for Alistair). 
• Gay Talese Isn’t Alone: Why Aren’t More Books Fact-checked? – The Daily Beast. “My friend, Ryan Holiday, wrote this amazing piece on book publishing. It’s not just about spelling and grammar, but the hardcore facts and guts of a book. Whether it’s a book or even a blog post, the vast majority of us share content not knowing if the work is true. Has it been fact-checked? Imagine this: books. Non-fiction books. They’re not being fact-checked. At all. What should we do about it? We can’t just delete it like a Facebook post, or can we?” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.