- Tristan McConnell’s series of stories from “the new Mogadishu” for GlobalPost. I think the piece on underpaid city cops is my favorite. Spend some time with his slideshow, too. (And if you haven’t you should read McConnell’s piece on Somaliland for VQR. I told you why last week, but here’s a new reason: there are some interesting parallels between what he found there, and what he’s seeing now in Somalia.)
- Patrick Ball on digital security, and why one system isn’t the fix-all that Wired magazine adoringly thought it might be
- Want to know if you’re neighbor is a Democrat? Obama has an app for that.
- You only need to read one thing about the Gabby Douglas hair debate. This is it.
- Ann Friedman’s “#realtalk from your editor” returns, at CJR, with a nice mix of media analysis for everyone and inside-journalism fun. She’s just getting started, but the third column has some great GIFs (of course), and this spot-on analysis of the mainstream media’s recent re-discovery of the faux fight between feminism and life: “This month’s Wired cover story, about how entrepreneurs reacted to the Steve Jobs biography, featured many quotes like this one: ‘But I realized that, like Jobs, I could die. Jobs missed out on his kids, and I’d have missed out on mine too.’ But the art was not a startup dude in a turtleneck and ill-fitting jeans with a Baby Bjorn strapped to his chest. The word “dad” appeared nowhere in the display copy.”
Things you should read this weekend
