Longest-Working Comics Artist In History, Mad Magazine’s Al Jaffee, Is Retiring At 99
“To mark his farewell,Mad‘s ‘Usual Gang of Idiots’ will salute Jaffee with a tribute issue next week. It will be the magazine’s final regular issue to offer new material, including Jaffee’s final Fold-In, 65 years after he made his Maddebut” and 78 years after he began his career. – The Washington Post
FedScoop: “…The latest FireEye Mandiant Security Effectiveness Report which assesses the effectiveness of security controls used at participating organizations around the world, by executing thousands of mock attacks on more than 120 market-leading security technologies deployed by those organizations. It probably won’t come as a surprise that these large-scale organizations manage between 30 to 50 different security tools. What is surprising: In spite of the investment in all of these tools — or, perhaps because there are so many — these organizations only succeeded in detecting 26% of Mandiant’s various attacks, on average, and preventing just 33% of them…”
NSW government failed to update public on true cost of light rail
MIT Technology Review – Facebook and Twitter might have the bells and whistles, but the word processing software’s simplicity and accessibility have made it a winning tool. “In the week after George Floyd’s murder, hundreds of thousands of people joined protests across the US and around the globe, demanding education, attention, and justice. But one of the key tools for organizing these protests is a surprising one: it’s not encrypted, doesn’t rely on signing in to a social network, and wasn’t even designed for this purpose. It’s Google Docs. In just the last week, Google Docs has emerged as a way to share everything from lists of books on racism to templates for letters to family members andrepresentatives to lists of funds and resources that are accepting donations. Shared Google Docs that anyone can view and anyone can edit, anonymously, have become a valuable tool for grassroots organizing during both the coronavirus pandemic and the police brutality protests sweeping the US. It’s not the first time. In fact, activists and campaigners have been using the word processing software for years as a more efficient and accessible protest tool than either Facebook or Twitter…Now, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder on Memorial Day weekend, communities are using the software to organize. One of the most popular Google Docs to emerge in the past week is “Resources for Accountability and Actions for Black Lives,” which features clear steps people can take to support victims of police brutality. It is organized by Carlisa Johnson, a 28-year-old graduate journalism student at Georgia State University…”
THOSE OF US WHO SPEAK OUT DO IT BECAUSE THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE LEFT. WE — OR AT LEAST I — WOULD MUCH RATHER STAY QUIET AND TEND OUR GARDENS. BUT THAT’S NOT THE TIMES WE LIVE IN: As mob power grows, speak now or forever (be forced to) hold your peace.
via @ad_magazine
DOMINIC GREEN: The war of the statues is a battle for freedom. “Statues, like all monumental architecture, are visible symbols of a political order. This is why their identity and placement matter so much. This is why revolutions begin by attacking symbols: the Virgin and Child, the Bastille, Lenin, Saddam. And this is why pulling down a monument is always a mere prelude to the real action. The iconoclast never stops there. He is clearing the ground for building a new order, as the Taliban smashed the Bamiyan Buddhas and Isis blew up ancient Palmyra.”
DOMINIC GREEN: The war of the statues is a battle for freedom. “Statues, like all monumental architecture, are visible symbols of a political order. This is why their identity and placement matter so much. This is why revolutions begin by attacking symbols: the Virgin and Child, the Bastille, Lenin, Saddam. And this is why pulling down a monument is always a mere prelude to the real action. The iconoclast never stops there. He is clearing the ground for building a new order, as the Taliban smashed the Bamiyan Buddhas and Isis blew up ancient Palmyra.”
Delivery workers navigate a pandemic, protests and curfews to make ends meetCNN
This fantastical sea creature helps remove planet-warming gases from the atmosphereLos Angeles Times
Central banks’ response to Covid-19 in advanced economies Bank of International Settlements
The Great American Housing BubbleCredit Slips. Adam Levitin’s new book, The Great American Housing Bubble: What Went Wrong and How We Can Protect Ourselves in the Future. Yves: “Levitin was Special Counsel to the Congressional Oversight Panel, so he had an insider vantage, and also worked a great deal behind the scenes with anti-foreclosure activists.”
What If Working From Home Goes on … Forever? - The New York Times – Miserable as it can often be, remote work is surprisingly productive — leading many employers to wonder if they’ll ever go back to the office. “…In a May working paper, Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor in management science at M.I.T., and a group of academics reported survey results indicating that half of those who were employed before the pandemic were now working remotely. That’s a significant increase — pre-Covid-19, the paper estimates, the figure was about 15 percent. (In 2018, a U.S. Census Bureau survey found that just 5.3 percent of Americans worked from home full time.) It’s a situation deeply skewed toward the privileged: Many employees who work in health care, public transportation or the service sector, for instance, have never been given the option to work remotely, during the crisis or before. At companies where remote work is possible, though, many now expect it to continue for quite some time….
What If Working From Home Goes on … Forever? - The New York Times – Miserable as it can often be, remote work is surprisingly productive — leading many employers to wonder if they’ll ever go back to the office. “…In a May working paper, Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor in management science at M.I.T., and a group of academics reported survey results indicating that half of those who were employed before the pandemic were now working remotely. That’s a significant increase — pre-Covid-19, the paper estimates, the figure was about 15 percent. (In 2018, a U.S. Census Bureau survey found that just 5.3 percent of Americans worked from home full time.) It’s a situation deeply skewed toward the privileged: Many employees who work in health care, public transportation or the service sector, for instance, have never been given the option to work remotely, during the crisis or before. At companies where remote work is possible, though, many now expect it to continue for quite some time….