Browser Daily Newsletter 1341
What Really Happened In Congo
Stephen Weissman | Foreign Affairs | 17th June 2014
A BROWSER BONUS: Thanks to our content partnership with Foreign Affairs, we can bring Browser subscribers the full text of selected Foreign Affairs articles. This piece from the July-August issue draws on newly declassified papers to trace how the CIA managed the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba and the rise of Joseph Mobutu (4,720 words)
The Pivot
Scott Adams | Dilbert | 16th June 2014
Notes on start-up culture in Silicon Valley. "The Internet is no longer a technology. The Internet is a psychology experiment. Building a product for the Internet is the easy part. Getting people to understand the product and use it is the hard part. The only way to make the hard part work is by testing one hypothesis after another. Every entrepreneur is a behavioral psychologist with the tools to pull it off" (1,000 words)
Nightmare On Connected Home Street
Mat Honan | Wired | 13th June 2014
Satire; or futurology; you decide. "I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows. My house has a virus again. Technically it’s malware. But there’s no patch yet, and pretty much everyone’s got it. Thankfully this one is fairly benign. It sets off the alarm with music I blacklisted decades ago on Pandora. It takes a picture of me as I get out of the shower every morning and uploads it to Facebook. No big deal" (770 words)
Thoughts On The Crisis In The Middle East
Sir Humphrey | Thin Pinstriped Line | 15th June 2014
I imagine Sir Humphrey to be a civil servant in the British Ministry of Defence; at any rate, he has the tone and vocabulary. His main worry here concerns the effect of the Iraq crisis on Gulf States: It can only weaken their confidence in America as an ally; they may even suspect American complicity in the partitioning of Iraq; and if they seek new protective allies, the only useful options would be Russia or China (1,630 words)
Style Over Substance
Leland de la Durantaye | Boston Review | 16th June 2014
Scott Moncrieff's English translation of "A La Recherche du Temps Perdu" is a masterpiece. But it takes liberties with Proust's original that would not be forgiven today. Yale University Press errs by adopting Moncrieff's English text for its new annotated edition, ignoring the contributions of later and more faithful translators; and the annotations in Yale's first volume, "Swann's Way", are often problematic (4,820 words)
Video of the day: Why You Should Vaccinate Your Child
What to expect: Graphs and commentary
Thought for the day:
"A rule of thumb with humor: If everybody laughs, you have failed" — Christopher Hitchens
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