Linked List: August 2, 2021

Monday, 2 August 2021

‘The Costs of Selling COVID Fear’ 

James Surowiecki:

When the CDC changed its guidance on masking earlier this week — recommending, among other things, that even vaccinated people start wearing masks in indoor public spaces in areas of substantial to high Covid transmission — it cited “unpublished data” as a reason for its decision. The next day, the internal CDC document that seems to have prompted the shift was published — by the Washington Post. And when major news media got a look at, the message they sent vaccinated people was pretty simple: “Panic!”

This reaction was not justified by the actual data in the CDC document.

Headlines matter, and the headlines for these stories have been grossly misleading.

Brief Reviews of (Nearly) Every Mac Keyboard 

Griffin Jones:

The AppleDesign Keyboard is a cheap cost-cutting imitation of the Extended Keyboard. It doesn’t even have an embedded Apple logo, just its silhouette punched into the mold of plastic. The symbolism that Apple was only a shadow of its former self in the mid-90s could not be any clearer.

I rate it 2⁄5 stars.

Spot-on reviews.