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Welcome to The Interpreter newsletter, by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, who write a column by the same name. |
On our minds: The same thing that's on everybody's minds right now. The Trump-Ukraine story and impeachment inquiry. So, as a break, we're offering you three thought-provoking quotes and three great reads, none of them related to Ukraine or impeachment. |
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Quote of the Day #1: Why TikTok Scares Us |
Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker on TikTok, a popular new social media app that plays short videos based almost entirely on its algorithms' deductions about what will keep you watching: |
| I was giving TikTok my attention because it was serving me what would retain my attention, and it could do that because it had been designed to perform algorithmic pyrotechnics that were capable of making a half hour pass before I remembered to look away. |
| We have been inadvertently preparing for this experience for years. On YouTube and Twitter and Instagram, recommendation algorithms have been making us feel individually catered to while bending our selfhood into profitable shapes. TikTok favors whatever will hold people's eyeballs, and it provides the incentives and the tools for people to copy that content with ease. The platform then adjusts its predilections based on the closed loop of data that it has created. This pattern seems relatively trivial when the underlying material concerns shaving cream and Crocs, but it could determine much of our cultural future. The algorithm gives us whatever pleases it. As the circle tightens, we become less and less able to separate algorithmic interests from our own. |
Quote of the Day #2: Hong Kong's Identity Crisis |
Alan Yau, a grad student and researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, talked to Max for his story on how pressures on Hong Kong identity are helping to drive the uprising there. But American-style social division and partisan polarization are especially dangerous for Hong Kong, he said, for one simple reason: There can be no underlying, agreed-upon national identity in a place that has never been a nation. |
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| In the United States, American identity is a given. You don't need to question it. We cannot say the same thing about Hong Kong. We have to question our national identity. And the fact that we need to question it tells us something about the dynamics in Hong Kong. We can no longer define what is a Hong Konger anymore. That is the struggle. It means we do not have the means to cultivate a collective discourse as Hong Kongers. It's what makes the Hong Kong identity so fascinating. |
Quote of the Day #3: Literature That Doesn't Age |
Patricia Lockwood reviews the works of John Updike for The London Review of Books: |
| I was hired as an assassin. You don't bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you're hoping to see blood on the ceiling. 'Absolutely not,' I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man's dong in print. But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are. |
What We're Reading |
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How are we doing? |
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