| 1. A biting, surreal look at being part of the vast maintenance workforce that keeps the cable on. "I’d walk in prepared for anything. There was sobbing, man or woman, didn’t matter. There were the verbal assaults. There were physical threats. To say they were just threats undermines what it feels like to be in someone else’s home, not knowing the territory, where that hallway leads, what’s behind that door, if they have a gun, if they’ll back you into a wall and scream at you. If they’ll stop there. If they’ll call in a complaint no matter what you do. Sure, we were allowed to leave if we felt threatened. We just weren’t always sure we could. In any case, even if we canceled, someone else would always be sent to the same house later. 'Irate. Repeat call.' And we’d lose the points we needed to make our numbers. The points: Every job’s assigned a number of points — 10 points for a 'my cable’s out' call, four points to disconnect a line, 12 to install internet. We needed about 120 points a day to make our monthly quota." 2. There's so much work to be done that it feels almost inevitable to me that there will be a "Green New Deal" in the next decade or so, whether it goes by that name or not. "A Green New Deal is more than just renewable energy or job programs. It is a transition to the 21st century economy. It is a holistic combination of solutions at every level—federal, state, and local—and addresses many problems simultaneously. It does this because it must. It must meet the scale and urgency of the problems facing America and Americans. It must also meet the level of progressive ambition looking to transform the economy and the environment in ways that achieve sustainability, equity, justice, freedom, and happiness." 3. In Earthseed news, there's a Chinese spacecraft on the dark side of the moon. "The mission should beam home some intriguing and dramatic imagery as well; Von Kármán Crater lies within the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, one of the largest impact features in the solar system. The SPA basin measures a whopping 1,550 miles (2,500 km) from rim to rim and is about 7.5 miles (12 km) deep. In addition, Chang'e 4 totes a biological experiment, which will track how silkworms, tomatoes and Arabidopsis plants grow and develop on the lunar surface. The mission will also make radio-astronomy observations, taking advantage of the exceptional peace and quiet of the far side." 4. L.M. Sacasas surfaces some uncanny excerpts from Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. "New media may change the perceived effectiveness of one group’s surveillance of another, the permissible familiarity of exchange, the frequency and intensity of contact, and the efficacy of customary tests for truth and deception. Old practices are then painfully revised, and group habits are reformed. New practices do not so much flow directly from technologies that inspire them as they are improvised out of old practices that no longer work in new settings... Classes, families, and professional communities struggled to come to terms with novel acoustic and visual devices that made possible communication in real time without real presence, so that some people were suddenly too close and others much too far away.” 5. I can't stop reading about Cuarón's Roma, and the Mexico City that, because I was born there, I feel should rightfully be mine, but isn't. "[T]he camera comes to rest on a broad bas relief created by esteemed Mexican artist José Chávez Morado in 1958. The piece (which still stands) is a study of Mexican medicine through the ages, with a pair of panels, at left, that celebrate indigenous medicine. The venerative treatment outside could not be more at odds with the reality inside: a hospital where working-class (and, therefore, largely indigenous) women endure the pains of labor in chilly, cavernous rooms. It is architecture that speaks to what Cuarón sees as the hypocrisies of the country’s political leaders. 'There was a constant bombardment of ideology, the nacionalismo revolucionario of the PRI with these ideas about what mexicanismo was,' he recalls. 'It's a pride about our indigenous roots, but the indigenous community is completely ignored and marginalized.'" Bonus. I wrote a feature about how a feel-good machine-learning story in Flint got dashed on the rocks of social reality. University researchers built a tool that successfully identified which homes had lead pipes, but when a new contractor took over the program, they abandoned the tool. "Good faith notwithstanding, a heartbreaking fact can’t be ignored: Simply continuing the 2017 program’s method might have pulled nearly all the remaining lead out of the city during 2018. Instead, thousands of people got the peace of mind that comes with knowing they have copper lines. But others who are more likely to have lead lines that could leach poison into their drinking water will have to wait for digging to commence again to learn for sure." [customary tests for truth and deception] | 