‘Why you hate your weather app’
Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker
Weather apps “might be second only to social media as a space in need of fresh disruption,” says Kyle Chayka. These apps “have a tendency to alienate their user bases, perhaps because people’s physical experiences — their plans, their dress, their commutes — so directly depend on an accurate report.” But the “challenge of weather app creation lies both in the improbability of accurately predicting the weather and in the difficulty of designing something that works for any user.”
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Nicholas Creel at Newsweek
Verdicts against Meta “are being celebrated as a landmark reckoning in the long effort to hold Big Tech accountable for the youth mental health crisis it helped create,” says Nicholas Creel. But “these lawsuits will not protect our children from the harms of social media.” The “desire to sue social media giants is understandable; the anger at them is justified,” but a “damages award against Meta does not redesign the algorithm that exposes children to harmful content.”
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‘Water infrastructure in Texas is failing. A surge of new funding can fix it.’
Lajward Zahra at The Nation
How “does Houston, Texas, lose more than 30 billion gallons of water a year? With the entire state facing scarcity, the cause isn’t drought alone,” says Lajward Zahra. Infrastructure problems have “made daily life feel unmanageable,” prompting a “community-led coalition that helped shape deliberations over Proposition 4, a constitutional amendment that would authorize up to $20 billion over two decades for water infrastructure.” The proposition “exposed a gap between Texas’ political branding and what voters will support.”
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‘Americans now use marijuana more often than alcohol. Is this the new sobriety?’
Tom Greene at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A “strange thing is happening, given our national love of booze. U.S. alcohol consumption is dropping faster than Prince Harry’s approval ratings,” says Tom Greene. But when “alcohol consumption goes down, something else will replace it,” and “nearly 18 million Americans now use marijuana almost daily.” Marijuana is “mainstream, even where it’s not legal for recreational use.” Some people “suspect we will see states that legalized marijuana pull back in the next few years.”
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