1. Everyday phone surveillance by abusive partners is a terrible and underreported problem.

"A survey by Women’s Aid, the domestic violence charity, found that 41 per cent of domestic violence victims it helped had been tracked or harassed using electronic devices. A second study this year by the Digital Trust, which helps victims of online stalking, found that more than 50 per cent of abusive partners used spyware or some other form of electronic surveillance to stalk their victims."

2. James Fallows unloads on the modern American relationship with the military.

"Citizens notice when crime is going up, or school quality is going down, or the water is unsafe to drink, or when other public functions are not working as they should. Not enough citizens are made to notice when things go wrong, or right, with the military. The country thinks too rarely, and too highly, of the 1 percent under fire in our name." [Pocket]

3. One reason we pour such huge amounts of money into military projects.

"Much like corporate America in the 1960s and 1970s, the Defense Department’s strategy-making process is conducted by large planning staffs operating in a highly bureaucratized structure. However, while U.S. businesses realized the limitations of the rational design planning model a few decades ago and subsequently adopted new forms of strategy-making, the Pentagon’s planning process is still largely mired in the framework imposed by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara 40 years ago."

4. A trip to the military-run GPS headquarters. Plus spacetime and fossilized glitches.

"The very idea of a 50,000-kilometer wide super-device barreling through 'cosmic kinks' in spacetime is already mind-bogglingly awesome, but add to this the fact that the "device" is actually an artificial constellation run by the U.S. military, and it's as if we are all living inside an immersive, semi-weaponized, three-dimensional spacetime instrument, sloshing back and forth with 170-second-long tides of darkness, the black ropes of spacetime being strummed by the edges of a 32-point star. Even better, those same cosmic kinks could theoretically show up as otherwise imperceptible moments of locational error on your own smartphone. This would thus enlist you, against your knowledge, as a minor relay point in a dark matter detector larger than the planet Earth." [Pocket]

5. The deepest reflection on Corona ads you're ever gonna get. By Zadie Smith.

"Here the focus is narrow, almost obsessive. Everything that is not absolutely necessary to your happiness has been removed from the visual horizon. The dream is not only of happiness, but of happiness conceived in perfect isolation. Find your beach in the middle of the city. Find your beach no matter what else is happening. Do not be distracted from finding your beach. Find your beach even if—as in the case of this wall painting—it is not actually there. Create this beach inside yourself. Carry it with you wherever you go. The pursuit of happiness has always seemed to me a somewhat heavy American burden, but in Manhattan it is conceived as a peculiar form of duty." [Pocket]

cult, as now used (=a group of admirers), dates only from the middle of the last century; its proper place is in books on archaeology, comparative religion, & the like; see ANTI-SAXONISM.

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Create This Beach Inside Yourself, A Minor Relay Point