The Conversation may well be the most remarkable news site you’ve never heard of. After a start in Australia in 2010, the site has since added five editions: UK, the US, Africa, France, and a Global edition. The premise is simple enough: academics, researchers, and PhD students write news backgrounders, special reports, and explainers for complex topics, targeting a general audience. Readers are encouraged to engage in discussion with clearly stated and enforced community standards – and authors frequently participate in those conversations, as well.

The whole operation is fully non-profit, with funding that comes primarily from a large array of foundations and participating academic institutions. The most recent available tax return for the US edition, which is only 2 years old, notes about $2.3M in annual revenue, but The Conversation Media Group in Australia from which it spun off is a separate entity.

With a network of more than 36,000 writers, the scale of this project is staggering. These authors write in partnership with professional journalists who are part of the Conversation team. All content is under the Creative Commons Attribution/No-Derivatives License, which allows free republication without modifications, including commercial re-use. Because many sites do pick up their content, The Conversation’s reach extends well beyond the 3.7 million monthly users that go to the site directly.

The website runs on a custom content management system which is proprietary and likely to remain so. It is is quite well-designed: pages load fast, the multi-column layout is easy on the eye, the navigation makes sense, and it’s mobile-friendly. The commenting system is one of their own creation which, as of this writing, lacks functionality to edit one’s own comments but is otherwise easy to use.

Each edition has its own Twitter/Facebook/RSS feeds, so in order to get a mix of global and US posts, for example, you can just subscribe to both feeds.

So, what’s the content like? If you’re familiar with Vox.com, think of The Conversation as a less sensationalist version that is more careful with the facts while serving up more diverse views from around the world. Alongside lots of mundane stuff (the US frontpage article right now is “How making fun weekend plans can actually ruin your weekend”), that includes radical perspectives from time to time when they can be found in academia, such as articles by Greek academic and progressive firebrand Yanis Varoufakis.

And it also includes charming articles like How majority voting betrayed voters again in 2016, where a French mathematician advocates that the US should immediately adopt a voting method for presidential elections called “majority judgment” he and a colleague have devised. (The argument is interesting enough, but without grounding in any kind of political reality it is indeed a purely academic one.)

Consistent with standards in academic publishing, authors must disclose conflicts of interest and “relevant affiliations”, making it harder for the site to act as a conduit for advocacy by special interests.

All articles I’ve read meet a certain minimum bar of quality (they make an effort to engage the reader, they’re accurate and clear), but the ceiling varies considerably. In quite a few cases, you’d be better off heading over to Wikipedia to understand a subject, not because the backgrounder by The Conversation is wrong, but because it just consists of a few links and some fairly banal observations. Still, the site is (in my view) vastly preferable to commercial offerings like Vox because it publishes a truly diverse and increasingly global community of authors.

The Verdict

The Conversation is unique, and the site’s founders deserve credit for realizing a bold vision of a non-profit platform that helps us engage in smarter conversations with each other about the world we live in. Whatever your political views, I suggest adding one or more of their feeds to your news mix to sample their content.

If I could pick one area for the site to improve in, it would be to focus more on truly excellent journalism at the expense of sheer volume. Beyond that, a stronger commitment to open source values (opening up the platform, engaging the community in governance issues, using a more permissive license for the content) would be lovely to see. 4 out of 5 stars.

Não é preciso ser especialista em comunicação para atestar o óbvio: a grande mídia no Brasil é controlada por poucas famílias, milionárias e com um interesse premente na manutenção do status quo. Muito do que se chama de “opinião pública” nada mais é que o eco dos mesmos jornalistas, sempre com a mesma agenda liberalizante e sob um cínico véu de imparcialidade. É nesse contexto que pequenas publicações como o Outras Palavras se fazem necessários.

O Outras Palavras é uma plataforma com uma perspectiva de esquerda, e conta com uma riquíssima gama de temas, da economia às artes e da política à tecnologia. Nenhuma temática é imune de problematização, e isso inclui a própria esquerda, que é frequentemente autocriticada.

O site, que ostenta uma licença Creative Commons BY-SA, republica textos de outros autores, traduz peças de pensadores contemporâneos e cria conteúdo original, numa mistura bastante abrangente e interessante. É um dos poucos veículos de esquerda que não insistem no governismo tosco típico da Carta Capital, por exemplo, ou que sentem nostalgia por experimentos socialistas fracassados, como o vermelho.org.br.

Quanto à sua independência financeira, cabe aqui ressaltar uma informação importante sobre como o portal é financiado:

Em 2015, os leitores contribuíram com R$ 140 mil – o que correspondeu a 71% de nossas despesas. Em 2016, planejamos gastar R$ 238,8 mil […]. Deste total, R$ 210 mil – ou 87,5% – virão de contribuições solidárias, por meio de Outros Quinhentos.

Recomendo a todos que desejam estar a par dos acontecimentos recentes do mundo, sempre com um olhar afiado e crítico.

In 2008, journalist and author Bill Bishop co-authored The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. It examines how communities across the US are becoming more politically one-sided. This isn’t just a Kentucky vs. California thing – within these states, you’ll find increasingly sharp political divisions. Part of the reason is that people like to live with others who think like them: they “sort” into communities that reflect their values.

In this climate of polarization, it can become easy to fall into stereotypes, and to lose sight of common concerns that all communities share: jobs, access to health care, working infrastructure, clean water and clean air, and so on. Bishop is also a journalist and the co-founding editor (with his wife) of the Daily Yonder, a website that focuses specifically on the needs of rural communities. As such, it also seeks to overcome stereotypes and help people see the diversity of rural America.

The Daily Yonder is published by the Center for Rural Strategies, a non-profit based in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and Knoxville, Tennessee. The Center had about $832K in revenue in 2014, much of it from well-established foundations like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (yes, named for the guy who founded the cereal company) and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Although there’s a big fundraising button on every page, individual or small organization contributions average to only about $20K a year.

Its reach can only be described as tiny at this point: The publication has about 3,500 followers on Twitter and another 3,500 on Facebook (the Facebook page is more regularly updated); its traffic rank is similarly underwhelming. There are some self-inflicted reasons for this: once you get past the frontpage, it’s easy to get lost in the laundry list of topics and inscrutable headlines without any kind of content preview. If clickbait is one extreme of how to present news and analysis, the Yonder is close to the other end.

This also shows a fundamental challenge covering “rural America” as a whole: it’s big, and it’s hard to make local stories exciting for people who aren’t from that specific part of the country. Right now, the frontpage tells me in large letters: “DYNAMIC DELTA LEADERS: EDUCATION IS THE KEY”. Is that a story I want to read? Who knows!

But if you dig, there is lots of good content here. The Viewfinder series, for example, showcases rural photography. The In the Black series is a column that relates the experiences of an underground coal miner. Beyond Coal examines the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy. The “Speak your piece” columns reflect on many aspects of rural life while staying clear of the vitriol that has become a mainstay of US politics.

Bill Bishop himself followed up on his “The Big Sort” analysis with an insightful article that examines the rapidly increasing percentage of voters who live in “landslide counties” where one of the two parties is likely to win a presidential election with large margins.

Each story has a small Disqus-enabled section for comments, though few stories attract significant discussion. The content is under conventional copyright, and some is syndicated from other sources.

The Verdict

The Daily Yonder deserves to exist, because it provides a much-needed journalistic perspective on rural America. But to truly reach people (rural or not), it will need to strive to become a more engaging source that can successfully perform the difficult task of translating local experiences into public interest journalism with broad appeal to readers in different parts of the country. Because it falls short of that potential, I give it 3 out of 5 stars. If you are interested in authentic perspectives on rural America, I do nevertheless recommend liking their Facebook page or subscribing to their RSS feeds as a way to keep up with their important work.

Suicide Squad is exactly what the trailers suggest it is: a bunch of villains (Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, etc.) are captured and (under threat of execution) forced to cooperate against a common threat. Many of the characters are entirely forgettable, the two exceptions being Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and Deadshot (Will Smith). Jared Leto pops in from time to time to play the Joker in a very polarizing performance (I personally didn’t find him interesting at all).

The plot is minimal and centers around Enchantress who fits the “awakened ancient alien/super-human who wants to destroy/rule the world” stereotype.

What do you do when you have a bunch of morally irredeemable characters? You make the rest of the world morally irredeemable as well. The prison guards are Abu Ghraib style sadists and perverts. The government official who convenes “Task force X” is herself a villain who doesn’t hesitate to kill anyone who gets in her way.

We’re supposed to root for the most morally ambiguous characters – the very confused and anarchistic Harley Quinn, and the “I don’t kill women and children” hitman with a heart Deadshot. But except for a bit of Joker/Quinn backstory, we don’t spend enough time with any one character to really get interested in them. Quinn is the most entertaining of the bunch, pulling off exactly the right mix of seductive, deceptive, and just plain fucked up to make it work.

So what are we left with? A memorable and enjoyable performance by Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, some solid work by Will Smith, a lot of special effects, and a lot of senseless violence. Skip it or save it for when there’s truly nothing better to watch.

The Center for Media and Democracy is a pretty small organization, with just a $1M budget, stretched across many different projects. Yet they draw a lot of attention from right-wing sources (example: Fox stories, Breitbart stories), often centered around a grant from the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations (which give support to many progressive organizations while being at the heart of every “globalist new world order” conspiracy theory).

Why is CMD so heavily targeted? I can only conclude that it’s because they attack disinformation where it hurts the most: at the source. It documents the connections of right-wing spinmeisters like Steven Milloy, who are paid to attack environmental science or other findings and activism that could affect a company’s bottom line, as well as the activities of ALEC, a right-wing group that drafts (usually reactionary) legislation for Republican-controlled state legislatures.

Long before most people had heard of Wikipedia, CMD set up an instance of MediaWiki to document funding connections, revolving doors, and influence networks, calling the result SourceWatch. You need to send an email to become an editor – I’m unclear as to whether they do any kind of additional vetting. It’s a typically chaotic wiki where it’s not always clear why something is categorized in a certain way. The abundance of branded micro-projects like “ALEC Exposed”, “Koch Exposed”, “FrackSwarm”, “CoalSwarm”, “NFIB Exposed”, Fix the Debt", and occasional links to other micro-sites can be confusing, as well.

But there’s a lot of high quality information, much of it footnoted. If you ever see an expert talking head spout off something suspiciously corporation-friendly, chances are SourceWatch will tell you a lot about the think tank they’re part of, the corporations that are funding it, and the causes they’ve previously supported. And if the journalist who gave that person a platform doesn’t mention those pertinent facts, you can point that out – and ask journalists for more disclosure and careful selection of exports.

So, as with any wiki, read it critically, and expect to get lost a little bit – but SourceWatch is unique, and if you ever want to track information provenance, it’s a useful resource to know about.

Jacobin is a New York based socialist quarterly magazine founded by Bhaskar Sunkara when he was 21 years old. It was started online in 2010 and is now also in print, with some content only available to subscribers of either edition. The website features news and analysis on an ongoing basis.

Sunkara is also a vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and he takes the “democratic” part seriously (“Any socialism we build will need to have a free, open civil society and multiparty democracy”, he recently tweeted). At the same time, you will find in Jacobin a perspective that is deeply critical of US mainline politics. On Bernie Sanders’ run, Sunkara predicted that Sanders would lose in the primaries, but that his run could be “an opportunity for movement building”.

In an interview with New Left Review, Sunkara articulated this focus on movement-building as core to his political philosophy: “What’s needed is to build movements until we reach a point where electoral options are actually viable.”

The organization behind Jacobin is a non-profit with about $300K in revenue in 2014. There is no Annual Report, which is not surprising for a tiny organization. In the aforementioned interview, Sunkara stated that most of this revenue is from subscriptions, with donations accounting for about 20% of the budget. In spite of its political radicalism, Jacobin is under conventional copyright terms (including back issues), and offers no discussion forums or other interactive components.

The print issue of Jacobin contains in-depth articles alongside beautiful graphic design (example issue). Unlike quite a few leftist magazines, Jacobin doesn’t engage in a lot of postmodernist piffle; its articles are often supported by charts and data, and tend to share a focus on issues that have real world relevance, including occasional departures into sci/tech themes like 3D printing or Silicon Valley politics.

So what can we find here that’s not reported elsewhere? Here are a few examples:

• an in-depth analysis of the prospects of the Kurds in Turkey, written by Djene Bajalan, an assistant professor with focus on Middle Eastern affairs
• a reasonable critique of Chuck Schumer, the prospective Democratic minority leader in the US Senate
• an analysis of the US media industry and the impact of the profit motive by Annenberg media studies scholar Victor Pickard.

One might wonder how a socialist magazine treats left-wing authoritarians. Will it applaud or rationalize as they restrict speech and political freedom, or will it criticize? The coverage of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s elected authoritarian Nicolás Maduro give us some idea. The Jacobin Castro obituary is in fact one of the better ones I’ve read, and is unambiguous in its criticism, for example:

“It was relatively simple to dismiss the calls for democracy from internal critics as imperialist propaganda, rather than a legitimate claim by working people that a socialism worthy of its name should transform them into the subjects of their own history. Public information was available only in the impenetrable form of the state newspaper Granma, and state institutions at every level were little more than channels for the communication of the leadership’s decisions.”

“An opaque bureaucracy, accountable to itself alone, with privileged access to goods and services, became increasingly corrupt in the context of an economy reduced to its minimal provisions. Castro’s occasional calls for ‘rectification’ removed some problem individuals but left the system intact.”

It concludes that “any socialism worth its name needs a deep and radical democracy.”

Jacobin’s coverage of Venezuela’s dysfunctional, corrupt and increasingly authoritarian government has been less robust and more likely to look for justifications primarily in the behavior of the right-wing opposition, though the article “Why ‘Twenty-First-Century Socialism’ Failed” by Venezuela-born socialist Eva María offers a more critical perspective which echoes the commitment to worker-focused democracy that defines Jacobin’s politics:

“The party, however, did not rely on its members’ active participation no matter how much Chávez liked to say it did. Instead, a bureaucratic structure, where criticism, open debates, and rank-and-file power were more often the exception than the rule, took over. The party formalized the bureaucratic layer of nominal Chavistas who were put in charge of different state sectors. In no time, this new caste engaged in corrupt behavior while continuing to deploy socialist rhetoric. The government’s ideas of funding and supporting popular power didn’t work in practice.”

The Verdict

Operating on a tiny budget, Jacobin offers a much-needed, intellectually coherent journalistic challenge to the prevailing social and economic order. The pitfalls of its political position are easy to pinpoint: the history of socialism and communism is riddled with failed economies, brutal autocrats and centralized bureaucracies, which calls into question whether its aspirations can ever be achieved in practice.

To build a mass movement for democratic socialism in the United States may seem like the remotest of possibilities, but the political successes of Bernie Sanders and the failure of the Democratic party to protect the progressive gains it has made under the Obama administration will lead many young people to search for alternatives.

Whether Jacobin can be a leading voice of that search for alternatives (within the two-party system, or outside mainline politics) will largely depend on whether it can maintain its commitment to a vision of radical democracy, consistently oppose political violence, and overcome any impulse to jump to the defense of authoritarian leaders who share some political objectives. The left is not immune to group polarization, and unreconstructed old-school socialists who habitually defend the indefensible are the political anchor around its neck.

I recommend Jacobin with reservations: read critically, it offers a useful complement to anyone’s diet of news and analysis. It is also aesthetically pleasing and edited with care, and their Twitter account is a good way to follow their work. 3.5 out of 5 stars, rounded up.

Fantastic Beasts is only loosely inspired by the mini-encyclopedia of the same name that formed a small addendum to the Harry Potter canon. But its screenplay was written by J.K. Rowling herself, which makes it a proper contribution to the popular fictional universe.

The film’s protagonist, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), is a magizoologist from Britain. Traveling with a suitcase that contains multitudes of magical beasts, he finds himself immersed (and scapegoated) in a sinister plot revolving around a child with magical powers. Along the way, he befriends a muggle (or “no-maj” as the Americans say, a person without magic) and two sisters who work for the Magical Congress of the United States of America.

Much of the film deals with capturing some of the beasts that have escaped from the suitcase, and they are indeed a joy to behold. The niffler in particular steals every scene it is in, looking for opportunities to amass wealth while avoiding re-capture. But there’s a beast for everyone to enjoy, and lots of merchandising is sure to follow.

At times, the film introduces characters we only meet once or twice without giving us much of an understanding why they are there, like the newspaper magnate Henry Shaw Sr. (played by Jon Voight) and his family. A sequel to the film is planned, so this may well tie into a larger story that is yet to unfold. Either way, the storytelling isn’t always as smooth and coherent as it could be. But the film’s upsides strongly outweigh these deficits: imaginative visuals, lovely chemistry between the main characters, lots of attention to detail, and an extension of the Harry Potter universe that feels organic rather than forced.

The Verdict

If you enjoy the Harry Potter universe, you will most likely enjoy this film and look forward to the sequel. If you aren’t too familiar with the franchise, you’ll miss some interesting references (and contrasts between the American world of magic and the British one that the franchise previously focused on), but you’ll still be able to have fun. Recommended.

When I started my video podcast I needed a suitable microphone. The Samson Meteor Mic received a lot of good reviews, so I went with it (you can hear it in all episodes except the first one). It uses a cardioid pattern, meaning that it picks up most sound in front of the mic. Indeed, ambient noises that are far away don’t get a lot of pickup, so the occasional background noise won’t disturb your recording or call.

The mic comes with a mute button and a headphone jack/volume knob (so you can monitor your input without latency). It is chrome-plated and looks quite nice on any desk. The three legs are foldable, so it won’t take up a lot of space in your laptop bag. It also has a mic stand adapter, which I haven’t used.

Linux compatibility

This USB mic works fine under Linux (tested with the last three Ubuntu releases); it gets immediately recognized. You may just need to activate it in your sound preferences and in some applications (browser may require a restart).

The Verdict

As of this writing the Samson Meteor is priced at $55 on Amazon. That’s a pretty good deal for a very high quality device.

The wacom intuos drawing tablet is fully supported out of the box on ubuntu and other distros with the xserver-xorg-input-wacom package installed. The tablet is configurable through the xsetwacom command line tool. While the cli tool is not as user friendly as the GUI tool for windows and macOS it is feature complete and can configure the tablet buttons as well as many other settings for the tablet.

Powell’s is the real deal. If you love books, you can spend a day here and still not want to leave. Nice in-store cafe, re-sorting racks for the books (so you don’t have to worry about putting them back in the right place), great used book bargains, nice staff picks & descriptions, information desks everywhere, clear maps and reasonably sane categorization. What’s not to like? Well, you’ll occasionally pay a good bit more for a new book than on the soulless-website-that-shall-not-be-named. But if you want this kind of place to exist in the world, that’s worth it, isn’t it?