In today's edition: portable benefits, stingrays, sleep music, accidental apocalypse, and digital work in the country's poorest places.

1. Unlinking benefits from W-2 employment has long seemed like a sensible idea, but now there is a political constituency (gig economy companies) to push it.

"We need a portable vehicle for worker protections and benefits. Traditionally, benefits and protections such as workers compensation, unemployment insurance, paid time off, retirement savings, and training/development have been, largely or partly, components of a worker’s employment relationship with an employer. The Affordable Care Act has disrupted that model, providing more independent workers a different avenue of access to health insurance. Another new model is needed to support new ways of work."

2. A judge warns other judges that they might not really know what a stingray, or cell-site simulator, is.

"When presented with an application to use a cell-site simulator, at a minimum, courts should review this document to understand exactly what the United States is requesting of the court. Some commentators argue that judges may be allowing the use of cell-site simulators without possessing a complete understanding of the device and how it works, because, in part, the information is buried in technical jargon in the application."

3. That sleep music.

"But whereas Keenan used the concept solely as metaphor, there is a rich musical tradition of engagement with the foggy states that bookend sleep. In Western art music, the history of pieces that tease out some sort of slumber, riding the crest of dreams like a surfer, stretches back more than a century, at least on paper, to Erik Satie's 1893 composition 'Vexations'. The work consists of a half-page's worth of score—a strange, sidewinding motif lasting some 80 seconds—and the instructions that it is to be repeated 840 times."

4. We almost went to war with Soviet Russia by mistake in 1983.

"'This new report is the first all-source assessment, as of 1990, and should clinch the debate: This is hugely important. This war scare was real,' said Thomas S. Blanton, the archive director. 'Turns out, 1983 is a classic, like the Cuban missile crisis, where neither superpower intended to go nuclear, but the risk of inadvertence, miscalculation, misperception were just really high. Cuba led J.F.K. to the test ban. Nineteen eighty-three led Reagan to Reykjavik and almost to abolition.'"

5. An atmospheric, tough read about the challenges of bringing digital work to the rural poor.

"According to the Brookings Institution, every one-percent increase in broadband saturation increases employment opportunities between 0.2 and 0.3 percent each year. Every job that’s lost to the Internet, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, is replaced by 2.6 new ones that hadn’t previously existed. The problem is that the private broadband providers don’t often want to go to the Dumases of the Delta, because there isn’t enough revenue there. Average connection speeds remain below national standards in over half the districts. And many homes, including Franklin’s, are zoned out of any high-speed options."

On Fusion: We used machine learning to tag the incredible torrent of images rushing out of the presidential candidates and onto the social web. It's a fascinating way to explore (post)modern, decentralized campaigning.

1. medium.com | @lydiadepillis 2. cases.justia.com | @csoghoian 3. pitchfork.com 4. nytimes.com | @michaelroston 5. psmag.com

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Inadvertence, Miscalculation, Misperception