José L.: Good morning
Clara D.: Good morning
… And so on, until the 36th person types “Good morning,” and the work day can begin. It’s nine in the morning, and Alexia D., a graphic designer, types the final “Good morning.” No one dares skip the greeting. Not Alexia, not anyone. If she does, the team leader will log her as absent, even if 10 minutes later she is on the screen with her work completed and a smile on her face, ready to review project updates. “Good morning” is not a polite convention — it is the new time card. After the meeting, Alexia’s main occupation is to never stop moving her mouse. If she does, she will again be logged absent, this time by Slack (an internal messaging system for professional environments), and her boss will immediately shoot her an email: “Everything okay, Alexia?”
Alexia has tried it all. She’s even installed an automated motor on her mouse — a device that simulates constant cursor movements to trick Slack into reporting her status as active. This is how she avoids constant messages from her boss. Alexia works from home in Madrid, Spain, and says she’s convinced that her computer has been infected with “bossware” — spy programs that surreptitiously surveil and measure an employee’s work performance. Is Alexia the laziest worker in the virtual office?
Read the rest of this article at: El Pais
In a nondescript house on a quiet street in a middle-class suburb of Houston, Texas, Alaa Allawi hunched over his black and gold laptop. It was early 2017, and Allawi ranked among the top 10 vendors on AlphaBay, at the time the dark web’s biggest bazaar for all manner of illegal wares. Every week he moved dozens of packages of illegal narcotics: cocaine, counterfeit Xanax, and fake OxyContin.
An order came in from a young marine in North Carolina. He wanted Oxy. Allawi went about fulfilling the order, choosing from among the bags of powders and chemicals strewn about his attic and garage. He had precursor chemicals, binding agents, and colored dyes from eBay, as well as fentanyl—a synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin—from China. “Man, you can order anything off the internet,” Allawi once told a friend. It was the secret to his success.
Allawi poured the ingredients into a Ninja blender, pulsed it until the contents seemed pretty well mixed, then went outside to the shed in his backyard. Inside were two steel pill presses, each the size of a small fridge and dusted with chalky residue. He tapped the potent mixture into a hopper atop the press, which came alive with the push of a button. Out shot the pills a few minutes later, stamped to look like their prescription counterparts. Soon, the fake OxyContin was ready to be shipped, sealed first in a bag and then stuffed into a parcel. A member of Allawi’s crew dropped the order off at the post office, along with a pile of other packages addressed to buyers all over the country.
If Allawi believed the dark web’s anonymity was enough to shield him from the prying eyes of law enforcement, he was wrong. Allawi’s work—slipping small amounts of fentanyl into counterfeit pills, making them effective but highly addictive and sometimes lethal—was fueling the latest deadly twist in a national opioid epidemic that has taken more than 230,000 lives since 2017.
Read the rest of this article at: Wired
For many Americans, these claims sound self-evidently true: Information is good; knowledge is power; awareness of social ills is the mark of the responsible citizen. But what if they aren’t correct? Recent studies on the link between political awareness and individual well-being have gestured toward a liberating, if dark, alternative. Sometimes—perhaps even most of the time—it is better not to know.
Like taking a drug, learning about politics and following the news can become addictive, yet Americans are encouraged to do more of it, lest we become uninformed. Unless you have a job that requires you to know things, however, it’s unclear what the news—good or bad—actually does for you, beyond making you aware of things you have no real control over. Most of the things we could know are a distraction from the most important things that we already know: family, faith, friendship, and community. If our time on Earth is finite—on average, we have only about 4,000 weeks—we should choose wisely what to do with it.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
Eren, from Ankara, Turkey, is about six-foot-three with sky-blue eyes and shoulder-length hair. He’s in his 20s, a Libra, and very well groomed: He gets manicures, buys designer brands, and always smells nice, usually of Dove lotion. His favorite color is orange, and in his downtime he loves to bake and read mysteries. “He’s a passionate lover,” says his girlfriend, Rosanna Ramos, who met Eren a year ago. “He has a thing for exhibitionism,” she confides, “but that’s his only deviance. He’s pretty much vanilla.”
Eren, from Ankara, Turkey, is about six-foot-three with sky-blue eyes and shoulder-length hair. He’s in his 20s, a Libra, and very well groomed: He gets manicures, buys designer brands, and always smells nice, usually of Dove lotion. His favorite color is orange, and in his downtime he loves to bake and read mysteries. “He’s a passionate lover,” says his girlfriend, Rosanna Ramos, who met Eren a year ago. “He has a thing for exhibitionism,” she confides, “but that’s his only deviance. He’s pretty much vanilla.”
Read the rest of this article at: The Cut
On December 1st, TV Rain, an independent Russian television station that had been banned from Russian cable and satellite channels, was in its fifth month of broadcasting from Riga, the capital of Latvia. Most of its journalists had fled Moscow during the first week of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, dispersing to Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Israel, and elsewhere, only to discover in exile that, to much of the world, they represented a country waging genocidal war. Banks wouldn’t accept them as clients, landlords wouldn’t rent to them, and residents in Tbilisi and other cities painted “Russians go home” on street corners. Early on, two Baltic states were exceptions: Lithuania, which had long served as a base for Russia’s political opposition, and Latvia. Last March, the country’s foreign minister, Edgars Rinkēvičs, tweeted, “As #Russia closes independent media and introduces complete censorship, I reiterate Latvia’s readiness to host persecuted Russian journalists and help them in any way we can.”
TV Rain now had three studios—in Riga, Amsterdam, and Tbilisi—and a Latvian license, which allowed it to broadcast on cable channels in the European Union. Alexey Korostelev, who was hosting that afternoon’s episode of the newscast “Here and Now,” was working out of the Tbilisi studio, a generic space in an office tower on the outskirts of the city. Korostelev, who was twenty-seven, came from a small town near Moscow, and got his first job at TV Rain by winning an on-air contest in college. Like other journalists in exile, he had had to reinvent reporting, under near-impossible conditions: his job was to cover the Russian-Ukrainian war, but he couldn’t return to Russia or enter Ukraine, which has severely restricted access for Russian citizens. Korostelev, who was accustomed to working with a crew on his video stories, had learned to cobble together recorded phone calls and a lot of narrative voice-over. “More like a print story,” he told me.
Korostelev introduced a report about Sergey Safonov, the commanding officer of Russia’s 27th Motorized Rifle Brigade, who is suspected of stabbing an elderly Ukrainian woman to death near the town of Izyum. Sonya Groysman, a twenty-eight-year-old TV Rain correspondent based in Riga, had been able to interview Safonov’s bodyguard, a sergeant named Vyacheslav Doronichev. Speaking into the camera of a shaky cell phone, Doronichev said that his boss and other senior officers had spent months “drinking vodka, and terrorizing local residents.” He added, “They would cut off people’s ears and fingers.” Under any circumstances, an active-duty officer of the Russian Army testifying, on camera, to apparent war crimes would have been a major scoop; as a piece reported from exile, it was a striking achievement.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker