Opinion | How Trump and Xi Can Both Win Their Trade War →
What Trump also underestimated is that we don't just have a trade access problem with China today, we also have a trust shortage problem. When all we bought from China were toys and T-shirts and cheap electronics, we did not care if they were communists, capitalists, authoritarians or vegetarians. But now that China wants to sell us many of the same high-tech products that America and Europe make — from 5G infrastructure to cellphones to advanced electronics — products that get deeply embedded in our society and can be dual use (civilian and military), we need a whole new level of trust between our societies. That will take time to build.
After seven roof fires, Walmart sues Tesla over solar panel flaws →
The retail giant says Tesla's "negligent installation and maintenance" of solar panels caused fires on the roofs of as many as seven Walmart stores since 2012.
The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake →
David Brooks presents a history of the family and some shocking (and frankly) depressing statistics about its decline:
Our culture is oddly stuck. We want stability and rootedness, but also mobility, dynamic capitalism, and the liberty to adopt the lifestyle we choose. We want close families, but not the legal, cultural, and sociological constraints that made them possible. We've seen the wreckage left behind by the collapse of the detached nuclear family. We've seen the rise of opioid addiction, of suicide, of depression, of inequality — all products, in part, of a family structure that is too fragile, and a society that is too detached, disconnected, and distrustful. And yet we can't quite return to a more collective world. The words the historians Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg wrote in 1988 are even truer today: "Many Americans are groping for a new paradigm of American family life, but in the meantime a profound sense of confusion and ambivalence reigns."
Our politics should adapt to reflect this new reality, but it is also stuck:
As the social structures that support the family have decayed, the debate about it has taken on a mythical quality. Social conservatives insist that we can bring the nuclear family back. But the conditions that made for stable nuclear families in the 1950s are never returning. Conservatives have nothing to say to the kid whose dad has split, whose mom has had three other kids with different dads; "go live in a nuclear family" is really not relevant advice. If only a minority of households are traditional nuclear families, that means the majority are something else: single parents, never-married parents, blended families, grandparent-headed families, serial partnerships, and so on. Conservative ideas have not caught up with this reality.
Progressives, meanwhile, still talk like self-expressive individualists of the 1970s: People should have the freedom to pick whatever family form works for them. And, of course, they should. But many of the new family forms do not work well for most people [...].
In the end he celebrates the rise of found-families and kinship as a potential return to supportive extended-families structures.
Americans and Digital Knowledge →
American internet knowledge remains low. 41% still don't know advertising is how social media platforms make money.
US violated Constitution by searching phones for no good reason, judge rules →
The United States government violated the Fourth Amendment with its suspicionless searches of international travelers' phones and laptops, a federal court ruled [...].
"This ruling significantly advances Fourth Amendment protections for the millions of international travelers who enter the United States every year," ACLU staff attorney Esha Bhandari said. "By putting an end to the government's ability to conduct suspicionless fishing expeditions, the court reaffirms that the border is not a lawless place and that we don't lose our privacy rights when we travel."
Let's hope it sticks.
Fourth Spy Unearthed in U.S. Atomic Bomb Project →
The world's first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexican desert — a result of a highly secretive effort code-named the Manhattan Project, whose nerve center lay nearby in Los Alamos. Just 49 months later, the Soviets detonated a nearly identical device in Central Asia, and Washington's monopoly on nuclear arms abruptly ended.
How Moscow managed to make such quick progress has long fascinated scientists, federal agents and historians. The work of three spies eventually came to light. Now atomic sleuths have found a fourth. Oscar Seborer, like the other spies, worked at wartime Los Alamos, a remote site ringed by tall fences and armed guards. Mr. Seborer nonetheless managed to pass sensitive information about the design of the American weapon to Soviet agents.
[...]
His role "has remained hidden for 70 years," write Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes in the current issue of Studies in Intelligence, the C.I.A.'s in-house journal; their article is titled "On the Trail of a Fourth Soviet Spy at Los Alamos."
It got better two months later as it was learned that the spy, Oscar Seborer, had the most intimate working knowledge of the American bomb's construction of all the spies. He worked on the explosive trigger mechanism. His codename? Godsend.
Michael Tilson Thomas was once the 'bad boy of classical music.' Now, at 74, he still conducts with childlike delight. →
Michael Tilson Thomas is 74 years old. In conductor years, that's young.
He wears his elder-statesman mantle lightly, even with a kind of incredulity. He's "MTT," music director of the San Francisco Symphony, co-founder of the New World Symphony in Florida, sometime-leader of dozens of major orchestras around the world, expert communicator, breaker-down of musical genres and still, at bottom, the youngest-ever conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, of whom Leonard Bernstein once said, "He reminds me of me at that age." Thomas has been famous for so long, and boyish for so long, that he hasn't had to struggle to attain the one or ever entirely abandon the other.
It has been amazing to attend the San Francisco Symphony this season. Absolutely phenomenal works and inspiring energy, even all the way up in my cheap seats.
Total Surveillance Is Not What America Signed Up For →
The incongruity between the robust legal regime around legacy methods of privacy invasion and the paucity of regulation around more comprehensive and intrusive modern technologies has come into sharp relief in an investigation into the location data industry by Times Opinion. The investigation, which builds on work last year by The Time's newsroom, was based on a dataset provided to Times Opinion by sources alarmed by the power of the tracking industry. The largest such file known to have been examined by journalists, it reveals more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans across several major cities.
By analyzing these pings, our journalists were able to track the movements of President Trump's Secret Service guards and of senior Pentagon officials. They could follow protesters to their homes and stalk high-school students across Los Angeles. In most cases, it was child's play for them to connect a supposedly anonymous data trail to a name and an address — to a real live human being.
The collection, aggregation, and sale of personal location data needs to be be banned. Location is yet another way in which we've become the product technology companies are selling.