Lawrence Wright exhaustively details the American response to the pandemic in the cover story for this week’s New Yorker. It is a long and infuriating read, masterfully reported and well worth your time to understand how the United States, which should have been uniquely prepared to manage the virus, instead failed in such an unprecedented and shameful way.

The debacles are too numerous to quote, here’s just one example, where the CDC and FDA failed to provide adequate testing and how disastrous that turned out for the U.S.:

Without the test kits, contact tracing was stymied; without contact tracing, there was no obstacle in the contagion’s path. America never once had enough reliable tests distributed across the nation, with results available within two days. By contrast, South Korea, thanks to universal public insurance and lessons learned from a 2015 outbreak of mers, provided free, rapid testing and invested heavily in contact tracing, which was instrumental in shutting down chains of infection. The country has recorded some fifty thousand cases of covid. The U.S. now reports more than four times that number per day.

The pandemic would have been challenging for the United States no matter who was governing — our lack of universal healthcare, how we’ve systematically defunded vital public research, and our national devotion individualism and market-based solutions over collective action show how particularly ill-prepared we are compared to every other developed nation on the planet. That we are the richest nation in the history of the world and allowed this tragedy to unfold is particularly damning. The most American of dichotomies may be it was our research that led to a vaccine but we were unable to contain the outbreak via public health guidance.

The government that faced this pandemic, though, was particularly disqualified to face such a dire threat. One of the few strokes of luck of the Trump administration prior to 2020 was the federal government faced few crises that were not of Trump’s own making — no terrorist attack, no economic collapse. The administration’s response, along with the feckless silence of congressional Republicans, to the California wildfires or Hurricane Maria showed how dismally unprepared they were to deal with the sorts of dangers every government must manage.

Republicans have been failing this test for decades now, the Trump-McConnell government disastrously so. The incompetence of human fiascos like Pence and Kushner coupled with the arrogant, uncaring pathological disdain of Trumpist apparatchiks like Mnuchin combined to debilitate the work of everyone from front line workers to long-serving civil servants. The greatest danger we face as a nation is that those responsible for this monstrous fuck-up aren’t held to account.

Just a wonderfully geeky, clear, and accessible dive into how RAW shooting has evolved for the latest top-of-the-line iPhone cameras by Ben Sandofsky. The bits about how digital cameras and RAW file formats work pair well with this Cameras and Lenses piece.

I love the Halide app that Sandofsky, Sebastiaan de With, and Rebecca Slatkin have built (Spectre is also wonderful) — on my phone it’s situated in the top right where Apple’s camera app is by default. As Apple has slowly started to open up the ability to choose default apps (browsers and email, oh my!), my hope is cameras are coming.

CalMatters has a rundown on the man who will fill Kamala Harris’s seat.

A lucid, fascinating, often funny, and enlightening piece about one of the vaccines by Bert Hubert. He not only details the vaccine itself, down to the specific sequences of RNA, but how mRNA vaccines in general work. It’s a wonderfully nerdy yet approachable read. Did you know there’s such a thing as a DNA printer¹?

Seeing this breakdown of the individual sequences, how bits get swapped in to make the vaccine undetectable or more effective at producing the spike protein in isolation, is just fascinating. The science of DNA and genome sequencing have been reality for most of my life — I can still remember what a big deal The Human Genome Project was, both when it was announced and completed — but they’ve always felt very abstract or the realm of science fiction. Seeing the diagrams with nucleotides feels like Jurassic Park, this is about as real as it gets, though.

It’s also fascinating how many of the citations and links are to what are essentially open source biology. Obviously, Covid is a unique challenge in human history and it is an indisputably amazing thing that so many scientists are working together so diligently to understand and defeat it. It’s also pretty amazing that anyone can just go to the WHO website and download the genetic sequence for the vaccine.

Every year, I say I’m going to get through the massive number of predictions that Nieman drops in December and every year I fail. Here are some that look most interesting.

Frontline’s Raney Aronson-Rath on what is probably the biggest takeaway from the election: the end of shared truth. Similarly, An Xiao Mina says the disinformation and surrealism of 2020 “isn’t a black swan — it’s a yellow canary”.

Shaydanay Urbani and Nancy Watzman write that reclaiming local news is going to be key to rebuilding trust and slowing misinformation.

Nicholas Jackson says blogging is back but better. I want to believe! Similar, Ben Werdmuller thinks the web can bloom again.

Francesca Tripodi doesn’t think breaking up Google or Facebook will solve our information problems but we might finally stop thinking of their sites as public squares. Nikki Usher doesn’t think media companies should count on an anti-trust dividend as a result of breaking up the monopolies that sucked up all the ad revenue. Kind of related: Burt Herman on post-Facebook digital communities.

John Ketchum wants to see more founders of color. Tonya Mosley says true equity means ownership.

Logan Jaffe sees history as a reporting tool. (See the _Kansas City Star_’s decision to investigate its own history as an example.)

Richard Tofel, president of Pro-Publica, calls for more reporting on how government works, less on the horse race of politics.

Taylor Lorenz reminds us that influencing isn’t easy.

“Let’s be honest: Crime coverage is terrible. It’s racist, classist, fear-based clickbait masking as journalism.” That’s a fantastic lede and argument to defund the crime beat.

Jer Thorp wants to tear down the idea that storytelling with data must be bound to programming or even computers. Somewhat related, Julia Angwin wants data journalists to show their work.

“The year of MAGAcal thinking” is a pretty good headline.

If 2020 was the year of journalists going independent and countless newsletters blooming, Garance Franke-Ruta says 2021 will be the year or rebundling.

A former Wall St. Journal publisher calling for the reform of Section 230 makes me nervous.

Olivia Nuzzi tries to come up with the definitive story, wading into a world where lies and incompetence just layer on top of one another. As you search for your own understanding of this idiotic ending to the stupidest of all presidencies, remember one thing:

If you hit the Pentecostal church, you’ve gone too far.

Substack’s founders — Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi — wrote a thoughtful piece on how the company is approaching content moderation as their platform grows. Overall, it’s a solid post and it outlines how Substack is different from the big social media platforms. Namely, Substack’s business model is built on people paying for subscriptions, not advertising, which lets them focus on building a platform that centers writers (and their subscribers) not “engagement”.

When engagement is the holy metric, trustworthiness doesn’t matter. What matters more than anything else is whether or not the user is stirred. The content and behaviors that keep people coming back – the rage-clicks, the hate-reads, the pile-ons, the conspiracy theories – help sustain giant businesses. When we started Substack to build an alternative to this status quo, we realized that a tweak to an algorithm or a new regulation wouldn’t change things for the better. The only option was to change the entire business model.

We already know what happens when platforms optimize for engagement — President Donald J. Trump for one — but also how it twists the incentives for creators.

Overall, this is a good sign that Substack understands the fundamentals of what makes social media so toxic and has a plan in place to avoid those dynamics. Even as they push into that world with their Reader app, which will bring some discovery elements along with it, it seems like they’ve built a framework for guiding their product development.

Substack’s content guidelines are pretty much exactly what you’d expect from their values statement — no hate speech, no porn, no spam, no doxxing¹. They’ve said they’re dedicated to a small-l liberalism of free speech, but without the absolutist “free speech wing on the free speech party” rhetoric that sent social media off the rails a decade ago.

We are aware of the history here, of how initial hopes about the internet’s ability to promote healthy and productive discourse have been disappointed. Look around you: the internet is broken. But we are not convinced that the solution lies in more censorship; nor do we think the problem is that almost anyone can publish on the internet. The major issue, we think, is that business models based on engagement have created a class of wildly successful media products that distort online discourse. It is increasingly difficult to participate in reasonable discussions on these platforms.

Overall, I think this is a good framework for thinking about building a content platform on the internet today. The biggest piece that’s missing from Substack’s content guidelines is it doesn’t explicitly address disinformation or conspiracy theories — there’s nothing in there that would explicitly forbid QAnon, for example, or even Holocaust deniers (the later almost certainly qualifies as hate speech). What Substack has in its favor, though, is it creates just enough friction to keep the darker, more trollish sorts from showing up in the first place.

“HTML over the wire” sounds like a joke or a parody that managed to make the homepage of Hacker News — that’s how web pages have always worked! — but I think there’s something interesting going on here. If you were building HTML from scratch and wanted all of the features we take for granted today, particularly when it comes to fully dynamic and reactive web apps, I imagine this is what you’d come up with.

I remember making a note of this when Hey was announced¹, I certainly wouldn’t bet against this crew.

Eater looks into how King Arthur dealt with everyone baking through the pandemic.

The thing is, the great flour shortage wasn’t a flour shortage at all. Our national grain stockpile wasn’t depleted, and flour still flowed in train cars and trucks and pallets. For King Arthur, the impact in the early months was small. The virus hadn’t yet reached the mills it works with, clustered in breadbasket states; Heald says none of their mill partners had staff out sick with COVID-19 or waiting on test results until much later. In the spring and summer, everyday people couldn’t buy flour because of tight bottlenecks in a national logistics system built around the logic of consumerism. The problem wasn’t the flour. The problem was getting it into bags.

The solution King Arthur used: promise every mill they work with that they’d buy whatever they could produce. Even then, they quickly ran into the problem of how to source enough bags! All told, King Arthur sold a lot of flour this year.

In related, feel-good baking news is this wonderful profile of Sarah House, the in-house baker extraordinaire and recipe writer for Bob’s Red Mill.

Kim Barker, Michael H. Keller and Steve Eder, reporting in The New York Times, on the history of police unions and how they continue to fail the citizens they are meant to protect:

The riots — among the worst in the nation’s history — gave the city’s fledgling police union leverage. The Detroit Police Officers Association was negotiating the country’s first comprehensive police contract, seeking a raise and a new disciplinary process to replace one it considered arbitrary. In what became a blueprint for union negotiations across the country, police officers promised to restore order but demanded something in return.

One feature of the reactionary nature of conservative politics is the way they take liberal or progressive culture and institutions and turn them into avatars for their own ends. Trump in many ways was the latest culmination of American conservatives finally embracing the full-throated culture war they’ve long accused the left of, but in a sad spectacle cult-of-personality built around the ego of a very broken and corrupt individual.

Police unions have the imprint of social progress but ultimately want to maintain the status quo, even as it means oppression. Reforming police departments should start with unions and holding every officer accountable.