Welcome! Let’s figure this out together, shall we?

If you wanted to pick a week to start a newsletter about tech and media, I'd recommend doing so when everyone is talking about Facebook censoring the news. Gizmodo broke a somewhat sketchily sourced story claiming Facebook’s trending news team “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers”. Everyone has chimed in, these are my favorite takes:

• Ben Thompson on Facebook’s actual news problem

• Nilay Patel reminds us that the trending topics box sucks anyway and offers a few other obvious (his words!) but necessary insights

• And Kate Losse, who as an early Facebook employee turned cultural critic brings an invaluable perspective, sums up the Facebook ethos perfectly, as “an engineering department that curates news”

Conservative politicians, of course, wasted no time pouncing, if only to stoke the narrative that it’s the mostly old, mostly white, mostly male demographic they represent that are the real victims in America today. Cue Harry Reid.

This whole thing reminds me of the IRS pseudo-scandal from 2013, where auditors were caught investigating tax-exempt political groups using search keywords like “Tea Party”. In the end, there was no grand conspiracy, but the optics were all wrong and mostly served to inflame the already easily aggrieved.

I’ve argued before that, as tech companies subsume every form of media, we’d all be better served if they were more transparent about how they operate.

Moving on.

Our best media critic these days, John Herrman, on podcasts and why Apple has never really shown them any love. Marco Arment, himself a prolific podcaster and builder of a podcast app, speaks for the geeky, indie podcast scene and says Herrman has it all wrong. Nick Quah, writing at Hot Pod, sums up the tension between podcasts wanting to be big business vs. keeping their indie roots. We’ve seen this story before with blogging, we’ll no doubt see it again.

Mandy Brown says gendered bots are a failure of imagination. If you only have time in your life for one email newsletter, unsubscribe from this one and subscribe to Mandy’s.

The New York Times has shuttered its R&D lab after a little more than a decade. I always found the lab pretty interesting because they really were doing some out-there stuff, building prototypes (even hardware!) that were often tangential-at-best to the news business. Unlike many media companies that have an “R&D department” mostly just for show or to build new ad formats, it seemed like the Times was really looking for a news business moonshot.

The post-recession world doesn’t scale says Conor Sen in a smart, quick but dense post that touches on everything from fast food to Trumpism.

More bots: Robin Sloan, novelist and media inventor (there are few people who can actually pull that title off), built a neural net powered ghost writer/assistant. It’s such a perfectly Sloanin device, right down to http://text.bargains

Superhero movie season is well underway, replete with the usual parade of forgettable interviews and stunt appearances. I found this Deadline chat with the Russo brothers, directors of Captain America: Civil War, interesting in ways that these things seldom are.

Quartz has evolved their Chartbuilder app into a full-fledged platform for everyone’s charts and data.

Finally, The Los Angeles Times has an incredible story about Oxycontin and its contribution to the epidemic of prescription painkiller abuse. It’s a wrenching story and has the potential to lead to real reform, in the way the best journalism can.

Thanks so much for reading! If you have questions, comments, rude remarks, or fashion tips, please don’t hesitate to pass them along.