Modest Comforts

Tech and politics: For anyone (I’m looking at you #BernieorBusters) who thinks the Clinton emails showing that the campaign had a list of bloggers and columnists it liked to work with is proof of something dire, here’s Robert Farley of the Lawyers, Guns and Money blog sharing an internal email to him from the Sanders campaign showing that they, too, worked with bloggers and columnists. It’s called politics, he notes.

Among the emails released by WikiLeaks that it says are from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta is this one between him and Jake Sullivan from April 2015 where they carefully discuss how to articulate her position on section 215 of the Patriot Act, which had been used to enable mass surveillance of Americans. Sullivan says that “her natural place is to the right of [President Obama]” but that he understands why Podesta is insisting she move a tad to the left of that on the surveillance issue.

This analysis of the emotional states of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, based on facial-analysis software development by Microsoft and done by the Economist’s data team, suggests that it may be possible to read politicians’ minds. Your mileage may vary.

If you want to do a deep dive into Donald Trump’s various tactics, check out this brief video tour from Jerry Michalski, who has been busy cataloging all of them into his “brain.”

With more than half of Americans reporting that they are “highly stressed” by the election, I look at why election day is such a personally emotional experience and ponder how we might make it through this one.

This is civic tech: Washington, D.C.’s Tech Lady Hackathon is seeing a fresh burst of energy with new co-organizers at the helm, reports Samantha Sabin for DCInno. They’re working on several innovative civic tech projects, including one aimed at filling gaps in the foster care system and another aimed at helping people returning from prison become self-sufficient.

“Our democracy is currently coping with a volume of digitized noise that is crushing the civic soul of government,” writes New America fellow Lorelei Kelly in an important think-piece for TechCrunch on how to help Congress work better in the digital age.

Life in Facebookistan: Data scientist Cathy O’Neill zings Facebook for how its new “personalized learning” initiative Summit Basecamp is farming the unpaid labor of 20,000 students to train its algorithm, with no evidence that the platform will actually help the kids learn.

While Facebook insists it is not a media company, Julia Carrie Wong argues in The Guardian that its recent decisions to stop censoring graphic content that is “newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest,” plus CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to not remove offensive content from Trump, prove the opposite.

La plus ca change: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people — these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency. As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss.” Those are the opening words of the Port Huron Statement, a manifesto largely written in 1962 by Tom Hayden, who died yesterday at the age of 76. RIP.