1. This little essay is, ostensibly, about how much Union soldiers loved coffee, but it's really about closing the distance between their time and ours.

"Union troops made their coffee everywhere, and with everything: with water from canteens and puddles, brackish bays and Mississippi mud, liquid their horses would not drink. They cooked it over fires of plundered fence rails, or heated mugs in scalding steam-vents on naval gunboats. When times were good, coffee accompanied beefsteaks and oysters; when they were bad it washed down raw salt-pork and maggoty hardtack. Coffee was often the last comfort troops enjoyed before entering battle, and the first sign of safety for those who survived."

2. The anthropology of organ trafficking. 

"Scheper-Hughes’ investigation of the organ trade would be a test case for a new kind of anthropology. This would be the study not of an isolated, exotic culture, but of a globalized, interconnected black market—one that crossed classes, cultures, and borders, linking impoverished paid donors to the highest-status individuals and institutions in the modern world. For Scheper-Hughes, the project presented an opportunity to show how an anthropologist could have a meaningful, real-time, and forceful impact on an ongoing injustice. 'There is a joke in our discipline that goes, ‘If you want to keep something a secret, publish it in an anthropology journal,’' she once told me. 'We are perceived as benign, amusing characters.' Scheper-Hughes had grander ambitions. She decided it was time, as she puts it, to stop following the rumors and start following bodies."

3. Meet, John Arrillaga Sr., the real estate developer who made a killing on the creation of Silicon Valley.

"He and business partner Richard Peery are the real estate developers who had the foresight in the 1960s to buy up the Valley’s fruit orchards and turn the farmland into thousands of acres of low-slung office parks and campuses that have come to house Intel, HP, Apple, Google, and more. All told, the duo have erected more than 12 million square feet of office space and sold or leased tens of billions of dollars in property–an effort that has made Arrillaga, worth more than $2.5 billion, perhaps the richest man in Silicon Valley who didn’t make his money by starting a tech company. (Peery is also a billionaire.)"

4. The dangers of mass surveillance do not fall neatly within the boundaries of our notion of 'privacy.'

"Mass surveillance controls without necessarily knowing anything that compromises any individual’s privacy. To the degree that they have access to the devices we use to mediate our relation to everyday life, companies deploy algorithms based on correlations found in large data sets to shape our opportunities—our sense of what feels possible. Undesirable outcomes need not be forbidden and policed if instead they can simply be made improbable. We don’t need to be watched and brainwashed to make them docile; we just need to be situated within social dynamics whose range of outcomes have all been modeled as safe for the status quo. It’s not: 'I see what you are doing, Rob Horning, stop that.' It’s: 'Rob Horning can be included in these different data sets, which means he should be offered these prices, these jobs, these insurance policies, these friends’ status updates, and he’ll likely be swayed by these facts.'"

5. What Microsoft says it is. 

"At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more. We think about productivity for people, teams and the business processes of entire organizations as one interconnected digital substrate. We also think about interconnected platforms for individuals, IT and developers. This comprehensive view enables us to solve the more complex, nuanced and real-world day-to-day challenges in an increasingly digital world. It also opens the door to massive growth opportunity – technology spend as a total percentage of GDP will grow with the digitization of nearly everything in life and work. We have a rich heritage and a unique capability around building productivity experiences and platforms. We help people get stuff done."

Today's 1957 American English Language Tip

cantatrice is usually pronounced as Italian, sometimes as French; singer should be preferred when it is not misleading; other English substitutes, as songstress, female singer, are seldom tolerable; but see FEMININE DESIGNATIONS.

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