This one’s a bit personal for me, given I threw my support behind Colonel Moe Davis, the imminently qualified Democrat who ran to represent my home district of NC-11. Beyond my personal disgust towards Cawthorn, this piece captures an essence of the next generation of Republicans that we all need to prepare for. They’ve been forged by a decade of Tea Party astroturfing, McConnell’s cynical abdication of all responsibility and shame, and the proto-authoritarianism of Trump. Younger people may be trending in a slightly more liberal direction overall, but the next generation of conservative leaders are going to be more vile than anything we’ve seen before.

Benjamin Mullin and Keach Hagey, in The Wall St. Journal:

BuzzFeed Inc. has agreed to acquire Verizon Media’s HuffPost in a stock deal, the companies said Thursday, uniting two of the larger players in digital media as companies across the sector search for ways to jump-start growth.

The acquisition is part of a larger deal between BuzzFeed and Verizon Media, a unit of Verizon Communications Inc. Under the pact, the companies will syndicate content on each other’s platforms and look to jointly explore advertising opportunities. Verizon Media will get a minority stake in BuzzFeed as a result of the tie-up, the companies said.

Verizon Media is also making an undisclosed cash investment in BuzzFeed in addition to the stock deal for HuffPost, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s founder and chief executive, will run the combined company. BuzzFeed will lead the search for a new editor in chief of HuffPost.

That’s quite an arrangement — I’d even forgotten HuffPost was acquired by Verizon (when it bought AOL) in the first place.

I don’t much understand the point of having two media properties with ideologically overlapping audiences (though I’m sure they know how much overlap there actually is demographically). Maybe the idea is to share infrastructure and build a backend and ad business that stands up to the Google/Facebook online advertising duopoly?

Sarah Zhang has a great piece in The Atlantic about the two vaccines announced this week:

Both vaccines, from Moderna and from Pfizer’s collaboration with the smaller German company BioNTech, package slightly modified spike-protein mRNA inside a tiny protective bubble of fat. Human cells take up this bubble and simply follow the directions to make spike protein. The cells then display these spike proteins, presenting them as strange baubles to the immune system. Recognizing these viral proteins as foreign, the immune system begins building an arsenal to prepare for the moment a virus bearing this spike protein appears.

It’s truly amazing that almost exactly a year since the virus was first diagnosed, and only nine months after the DNA of COVID-19 was sequenced, we have a viable vaccine. Two actually! Not only that, no one was quite sure the mRNA approach would even work — this is cutting edge science based on years of research, but it is an entirely new approach. What a testament to human ingenuity!

A truly incredible resource from Texas Monthly.

A compelling, if equally depressing, piece by Nathan Tankus looking at the dire straits of the economy as we head into winter with a third COVID-19 wave in full bloom and no sign of help on the horizon from a distracted and gridlocked Congress. Perhaps this is why Mitch McConnell is trying to sabotage the Fed as a Democratic president takes over? [via Lawrence Wilkinson’s excellent Roughly Daily]

Nice roundup of election visualizations this year. (A bit shocking to see Stamen of all places moved their blog to Medium)

Paul Ford, who is a delight, has some thoughts and dare I say hopes about what’s in store for tech.

A sharp piece by Harris Mayersohn drawing a through-line from the nihilistic ironic detachment of the Bush era to a certain return to decency here at the end of the Trump horrorshow through Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G and Borat. Honestly, not the worst framing, even as it necessarily skips the Obama years and the rise of tech oligarchs who allowed Trump (among other sins) to happen.

This is a fine move, even if it’s pretty late and in response to the DOJ antitrust investigations. I’d still like to see something like a 5% fee for devs that make less than, say, $100k a year. I’d also like to see these changes made permanent, not just in response to the economic fallout from the pandemic (which doesn’t seem like something that’s affecting small business software developers all that much?).

Kyle Chayka on television you keep on in the background while scrolling through your phone.