Hasnain says:

“Quarantine has given us all time and solitude to think—a risk for any individual, and a threat to any status quo. People have gotten to have the experience—some of them for the first time in their life—of being left alone, a luxury usually unavailable even to the wealthy. Relieved of the deforming crush of financial fear, and of the world’s battering demands and expectations, people’s personalities have started to assume their true shape. And a lot of them don’t want to return to wasting their days in purgatorial commutes, to the fluorescent lights and dress codes and middle-school politics of the office. Service personnel are apparently ungrateful for the opportunity to get paid not enough to live on by employers who have demonstrated they don’t care whether their workers live or die. More and more people have noticed that some of the basic American axioms—that hard work is a virtue, productivity is an end in itself—are horseshit. I’m remembering those science-fiction stories in which someone accidentally sees behind the facade of their blissful false reality to the grim dystopia they actually inhabit.”

Hasnain says:

This was way more interesting than I thought it would be from the title alone - goes into not just American history, but human history and a lot of sociology and psychology.

“After more than a year in relative isolation, we may be closer than we’d like to the wary, socially clumsy strangers who first gathered at Göbekli Tepe. “We get drunk because we are a weird species, the awkward losers of the animal world,” Slingerland writes, “and need all of the help we can get.” For those of us who have emerged from our caves feeling as if we’ve regressed into weird and awkward ways, a standing drinks night with friends might not be the worst idea to come out of 2021.”

Hasnain says:

Every time I hear of a ruling Alsup does I become a bigger fan.

“In an early case, Keller Lenkner recruited more than 5,000 DoorDash drivers who claimed they were improperly classified as contractors. When the food delivery company found itself faced with millions of dollars in arbitration fees, it attempted to push the drivers into filing a class-action lawsuit. US District Judge William Alsup instead forced DoorDash to arbitrate each claim, costing the company nearly $10 million even before the cases were decided. In November, DoorDash individually settled claims brought by 35,000 drivers for a total of $85 million.

“No doubt, DoorDash never expected that so many would actually seek arbitration,” Alsup wrote in his order. “Instead, in irony upon irony, DoorDash now wishes to resort to a class-wide lawsuit, the very device it denied to the workers, to avoid its duty to arbitrate. This hypocrisy will not be blessed.””

Hasnain says:

I still don’t get how questions like this are at all acceptable - let alone right after the press is under the spotlight for something else going on at the exact same tournament.

““You are often compared to the Williams sisters. Maybe it’s because you’re black. But I guess it’s because you’re talented and maybe American too," the reporter started off by saying.

"We could have a final between you and Serena. Is it something you hope for? I mean, 22 years separate you girls.””

Hasnain says:

I really like this take. So many hard hitting points here as it leads to this conclusion.

“Question: “You’re a pin-up now, especially in England. Is that good? Do you enjoy that?” (A 17-year-old Maria Sharapova, Wimbledon 2004.) And of course there are plenty of decent, curious journalists out there doing decent, curious things. In a way, this is what makes the chronic lack of self‑awareness so utterly self-defeating. Read the room. We are not the good guys here. We are no longer the power. And one of the world’s best athletes would literally rather quit a grand slam tournament than have to talk to the press. Rather than scrutinising what that says about her, it might be worth asking what that says about us.”

Hasnain says:

I haven’t been following sports (nor tennis) much in the last few years so this may be ignorant... but to me it seems like the tournament organizers are very clearly wrong and this will backfire. They haven’t done any self introspection on the mental health issues caused by press interviews, made a very disgraceful tweet (now deleted, but the internet has a long memory), and said she’d be fined - and when she said she’s ok with paying the fine, proceeded to go with a ban unless she relented.

It seems like the players do have more power than the tournament organizers - and they should! - and it doesn’t seem like the tournament organizers are realizing how this can backfire.

“"So here in Paris I was already feeling vulnerable and anxious, so I thought it was better to exercise self-care and skip the press conferences. I announced it preemptively because I do feel like the rules are quite outdated in parts and I wanted to highlight that.”

Hasnain says:

“If Racine succeeds in his suit, it unravels the whole scheme. As one legal analyst told me, “Let's say a product today is sold for $10 on Amazon with 'free shipping'. If Amazon is forced to unbundle the FBA fee from the product price then it would cost $6 + $4 shipping. Prime makes no sense in this world unless Amazon again decided to subsidize Prime.” Amazon, as big as it is, doesn’t have $25-30 billion of cash flow to make that happen.”

Hasnain says:

“After a high-profile fracas at the AP last week and in the midst of the fallout from the Hannah-Jones case, two prominent journalists captured the tension of the objectivity debate on Twitter.

“It’s almost as if what position is the ‘objective neutral’ is in fact a subjective determination made by those in power,” wrote Wesley Lowery, perhaps the most well-known critic of strict objectivity.”

Hasnain says:

Doing this in an opt-in manner is a huge overreach - I’m sure it’s legal in the US but it shouldn’t be.

“By default, Amazon devices including Alexa, Echo, Ring, security cams, outdoor lights, motion sensors, and Tile trackers will enroll in the system. And since only a tiny fraction of people take the time to change default settings, that means millions of people will be co-opted into the program whether they know anything about it or not. The Amazon webpage linked above says Sidewalk "is currently only available in the US."”

Hasnain says:

“And they aren’t actually being rejected; they are being asked to respect boundaries. L.G.B.T.Q. officers are more than welcome to join Pride celebrations — unarmed and in civilian clothing. They are being asked to confront their complicity with an institution that does more harm than good to vulnerable communities. It is telling that some of these officers refuse to do so. We don’t need the police marching alongside us. We don’t need them at Pride providing security.

What we need, what we’ve always wanted and deserved, is what Debbie and I found when we first marched at Pride: a welcoming space where we can be safe and free.”