STATE OF AFFAIRS

• All of 2016's top mobile apps are owned by either Google or Facebook
• How the 2016 US election blew up in Facebook's face
• It's five times more likely that you will die from a human extinction event related to climate change than in a car crash
• The seven deadly things we're doing to trash the planet (and human life with it)

LONGER

Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture by Chantal Panozzo in Vox
Reading time: 10 minutes
If you took a look at my CV, you might be a little surprised at which of those jobs paid well and had fair leave practices. That said, I'm glad I live in a country with Medicare, where paid sick and vacation leave is a legal requirement for full time workers. We must protect that at all costs. 

"The Swiss work hard, but they have a strong work-life balance. According to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the average Swiss worker earned the equivalent of $91,574 a year in 2013, while the average American worker earned only $55,708. But the real story is that the average American had to work 219 hours more per year for this lesser salary."

Keep Your Identity Small by Paul Graham
Reading time: 5 minutes
Why do people get so riled up by politics and religion so quickly? It's all about identity. 

More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people's identities. But you could in principle have a useful conversation about them with some people. And there are other topics that might seem harmless, like the relative merits of Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, that you couldn't safely talk about with others.

You Don’t Have To Go Home, But You Can’t Stay Here: A Eulogy For Yet Another Queer Space by Lazy Susan in Junkee
Reading time: 7 minutes
The Greyhound Hotel (aka The GH) is a famous gay venue in Melbourne which has finally fallen prey to property developers. I'd had a great time going there to see any of the dozens of RuPaul's Drag Race alumni perform, and this is a good eulogy/look at the current state of gay venues and culture generally. 

"Anyone could tell me why the closures of queer venues are inevitable and it will make sense. But ‘good sense’ was never something we traded in. We don’t sculpt a pound of makeup onto our faces for good sense. We don’t scream until hoarse over a wig reveal because it makes sense. And I sure as hell didn’t ugly cry to a lip sync of ‘And I Am Telling You’ because it made any kind of sense."

The Coming Tech Backlash by Ross Mayfield on LinkedIn
Reading time: 7 minutes
"In 4–8 years there will be a populist politician who will point the finger at the tech industry as enemy number one. In a way, Trump already has. This person will yield a backlash against tech that will stunt progress and make it a far worse instrument of her or his control. This is more than stones hurled at Google Buses. When people start to feel their unhappiness is because of tech, the post-truth era of Trump and post-ethics of the GOP elite will pale in comparison to the real movements someone could control.

Tech still has time. Lean your products towards augmentation and job creation. Solidify your principles for what is humanely right against fear-mongering and scapegoating. Foster education, and not just what worked for you, but what junior colleges can do to help people transition. Tech company policy needs to go beyond the regulations that risk a single company wants to manage, and reflect it’s inherently progressive value set. Admit disruption is a bad word, and at least cause-relate your marketing and mission."

How to escape the over-thinking trap: stop judging yourself by Mark Rice-Oxley in the Guardian
Reading time: 6 minutes
"We need a completely new relationship with our thoughts. Instead of viewing the world and our experience as we think they ought to be, we need to treat them as they actually are. We need to recognise when we are ruining a day, a week, a moment or a relationship with catastrophic thoughts and judgments, and understand that often it is the thought itself that makes us feel bad, not the experience itself."

Emotional Intelligence: the social skills you weren't taught in school by Eric Ravenscraft in Lifehacker
Reading time: 8 minutes
I learned everything in this article through years of therapy. It groups "emotional intelligence" into the categories of self-awareness, self-management, motivation, empathy and social skills. Save yourself a lot of time and money and read this instead. It'll make your life and relationships easier to navigate. 

Who Killed Virginia Woolf by Karrie Higgins
Reading time: 15 minutes
This is the best piece of first-person memoir I have read recently, but it's also incredibly full-on and has explicit discussion of sexual abuse, suicide, mental illness and drug abuse ... so consider this a content warning for that.