:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63702245/9190784811_a8d5b4ff6e_o.0.1510661073.0.jpg)
Good morning!
The Internet is dark and full of terrors, so here are some links from the Re/code team to guide you through it:
- Since Edward Snowden came forward in the summer of 2013 to tell the world about the ever-increasing size and scope of the American government’s surveillance activities, we’ve learned a lot about privacy and security on the Internet, but not that much about how Snowden came to tell his story. In Wired, you can now read the encrypted emails he sent to reach out to filmmaker Laura Poitras, which set in motion one of the biggest government scandals of this generation. The emails themselves are prescient, seemingly self-aware of just how much everything was about to change once the story went public.
- Kris Sanchez is the founder and manager of the highly popular and accuracy-challenged Twitter account @UberFacts. Sanchez currently makes $500,000 a year tweeting sponsored links to the account’s 7.28 million followers, and stands to make $60,000 a week more from the soon-to-be functional advertising on the UberFacts iOS app. Read more about Sanchez at Fast Company, and then head over to The Awl and read John Herrman’s hysterical six-part poem consisting entirely of UberFacts, straight from the horse’s mouth.
- If you could sum up in one phrase the legacy of Larry Summers, the high-profile economic adviser to presidents Clinton and Obama (and failed candidate for the job of Federal Reserve chairman), that phrase would perhaps be “a tidal wave of deregulation.” Under Summers’s watch as treasury secretary in the late ’90s and as the director of the National Economic Council in the late 2000s, the financial sector prospered, imploded and then recovered rapidly as Summers continually lobbied for easing restrictions on the industry. Now, in the Harvard Business Review, he and a Google exec have penned a post titled “How Uber and the Sharing Economy Can Win Over Regulators.” Can you guess what his advice is?
- If you’re going to write a list of the books that men need to read, it’s easy to say those by Hemingway, Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson and maybe a few other Grand Adventurer-types. What’s harder is to recommend the parts of the feminist canon that men should be acquainted with. Thankfully, Flavorwire has a comprehensive list that does just that.
- Yesterday, we submitted this fantastic Associated Press story as a candidate for the headline of the year. Re/code reader John K. wrote in to nominate an even stronger candidate (for the same story), from Toronto’s National Post: “Teen dressed as zombie struck and killed by bus full of paintballers at Washington state corn maze.” To quote John K., “Canadians sometimes do it better.” If you have any great headlines from this year you think we should be writing about, send them in!
- Anyone who has seen the YouTube video of the (now Google-owned) Boston Dynamics “Big Dog” robot knows that the future of robotics could be very scary, and vaguely Terminator-esque. But it doesn’t have to be that way! At Science, you can look at some of the not-totally-heart-attack-inducing robots that different researchers are working on.
If you see any stories or ridiculous headlines you’d like to send our way (or have any questions/comments about stories we’ve recommended), feel free to shoot an email to noah@recode.net.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
