Vox Sentences: Who bombed one of Bangkok's most popular shrines?

A mysterious bombing in Bangkok; Amazon sounds like a terrible place to work; and the White House is helping the East Coast use harm reduction against heroin.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Who bombed Bangkok's Erawan shrine?

Bomb squad police in Bangkok. (Rufus Cox/Getty Images)

• A bomb attack on the popular Erawan shrine in central Bangkok has killed at least 19 people and injured an additional 120.

  [Reuters / Amy Sawitta Lefevre and Andrew R. C. Marshall]

• The Erawan shrine is theoretically Hindu, but it's designed for commercialism as much as religion, and it's a popular destination for (mostly Buddhist) Thais and tourists.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Because the shrine's so popular, it's hard to know for sure who wanted to attack it.

  [BBC ]

• Thailand has been fighting an ongoing insurgency in the south of the country from Muslim separatists (who are ethnically Malay). But that's the one group that the government has totally ruled out.

  [The Nation]

• One of the possible motives the Thai government hasn't ruled out: political conflict. Before the current military government took power last year, political groups launched a few bomb attacks — but they were much smaller.

  [Associated Press]

• Another potential motive: internal dissent within the Thai military government, where tensions are running high because the annual promotion list is coming out soon.

  [BBC / Jonathan Head]

• The Thai government is also considering international terrorists as potential culprits. The BBC's Jonathan Marcus points out that the Muslim Uighur minority in China is upset with Thailand right now for deporting 100 Uighurs back to China last month.

  [BBC / Jonathan Marcus]

A dangerous expedition through Amazon

Jeff Bezos does his best Charlie Brown impression. (David Ryder/Getty Images)

• Over the weekend, the New York Times' Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld published a fairly horrifying piece about Amazon's cutthroat white-collar office culture.

  [New York Times / Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld]

• The article is definitely worth a read, not just for the individual horror stories (people "managed out" of the company for taking care of ailing family or even their own illness), but to see how corporate functions like annual employee rankings make it near inevitable for managers to avoid cruelty.

• Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who isn't generally known for responding to press, sent out a memo to employees urging them to tell HR if they saw anything like the kind of cruelty described in the article.

  [GeekWire / John Cook]

• What makes Amazon so interesting is that similar tech giants have been striving to make white-collar positions more appealing, with office amenities and benefits like unlimited parental leave (although both of these can end up just making people work more).

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• The difference between Amazon and other tech giants isn't just cultural, it's structural: while Google and Apple are profitable, Amazon is not. Vox's Matt Yglesias teases out the implications.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• But Matthew Schmitz of First Things points out that, if Amazon's employees are as convinced that they're working to better humanity as they claim, quasi-religious devotion to the company is just the best way to serve.

  [First Things / Matthew Schmitz]

• It's a bit eyebrow-raising that an article about mistreatment of Amazon's white-collar workers has generated so much attention and outrage, while reports of mistreatment of blue-collar workers employed in "fulfillment centers," like the ones Amazon uses to get its goods shipped, have been around for a while. If you missed it in 2013, this first-person account from Mac McClelland of a pseudonymous fulfillment center is just brutal.

  [Mother Jones / Mac McClelland]

• Vox's Ezra Klein explains why people are so worried about overwork in Amazon's heaquarters — and why they should really worry about the warehouses.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

Fighting heroin with harn reduction

Universal Images Group via Getty Images

• The White House is rolling out a new initiative to help state and local governments on the East Coast deal with heroin abuse, by focusing on medical treatment.

  [Washington Post / Marc Fisher]

• New England has been hit especially hard by heroin. This 2013 New York Times article set the template for a lot of similar stories over the last 2 years.

  [New York Times / Katharine Q. Seelye]

• Do not for a minute think this was unforeseeable. It was a wholly predictable consequence of the ongoing crackdown on prescription drug abuse. When prescription painkillers got harder to obtain, addicts switched to the far cheaper option: heroin.

  [CNN / Sanjay Gupta]

• The most promising element of the White House initiative: training for first responders in the use of naloxone, a medication that can reverse overdoses.

  [Mosaic / Carrie Arnold]

• Naloxone has become an increasingly popular option for local governments — both first responders and law enforcement professionals.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Ironically, it's one of those policies that seems so effective that no one is conducting purely randomized, controlled trials of it — which is maybe not the best thing.

  [World Health Organization]

• Naloxone fits into a broader philosophy of "harm reduction" — an approach to drug policy that focuses on treatment and support rather than on fighting drug supply.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Harm reduction has been the preferred theory of criminologists for years. Now, it appears policymakers are coming on board. (The Marshall Project's Andrew Cohen thinks race might be one reason for the shift.)

  [Marshall Project / Andrew Cohen]

MISCELLANEOUS

Most people have no idea what drowning looks like. Here's how to tell if your friend (or child) is in danger. [Slate / Mario Vittone]

• What careers do the most harm to the world? (Marketing for tobacco companies, factory farming, and homeopathy sales are high on the list.)

  [80,000 Hours / Robert Wiblin]

• Snoop Dogg owns paintings of himself as Italian duke Cesare Borgia and Austrian Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, because why not.

  [Esquire / Paul Schrodt]

• Microsoft didn't include Solitaire and Minesweeper in Windows just for kicks. They were there to teach users accustomed to command lines how to handle a mouse.

  [Mental Floss / James Hunt]

• Ad blockers are costing media companies millions of dollars. Here's the case for using them anyway.

  [Slate / Dan Gillmor]

VERBATIM

"Unlike self-aware computer networks, self-driving cars with machine guns are possible right now." [The Atlantic / Zach Musgrave and Bryan Roberts]

• "The chief was asking a bunch of addicts who until that point had violated the law to suddenly walk into the police station — armed with drugs. It was crazy. It was madness. It worked."

  [Washington Post / Terrence McCoy]

• "Man Tries to Rob Store With Sword, But Clerk Has Bigger Sword."

  [NBC4]

• "He’d gotten out of the car to check the problem when the batmobile was struck by a truck. The batmobile then hit him."

  [Washington Post / Michael S. Rosenwald and John Woodrow Cox]

• "The autism pandemic, in other words, is an optical illusion, one brought about by an original sin of diagnostic parsimony."

  [NYT / Jennifer Senior]

WATCH THIS

Vox / Joss Fong

• Baseball games are longer than ever. Here's why.

  [YouTube / Joss Fong]

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