John Brown's Notes and Essays

Mary Jo Murphy, "How Trump Changed my Country: By 13 Writers from Around the World ," The Washington Post . [Selected quotations from an important article; please refer to the original article for its individual authors.] image from article Russia : "Today, visionless and rudderless, the United States is a laughingstock to Kremlin mouthpieces like Solovyov — and a source of bewilderment, if not disgust, to the country’s liberal critics of President Vladimir Putin. Embodying that disillusionment is Trump, who seems intent on proving decades of Kremlin propaganda about America’s cynicism and lack of scruples. ... Emerging is a healthy feeling that Russians should go ahead and change their country without waiting for the Trumpian West to sort itself out." Nigeria : "If Trump’s words are popular in this deeply religious nation [Nigeria], the most populous in Africa, the man himself is more so, perhaps because of his blunt, tough-guy image. Almost 60 per...

Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel, The New York Times , DEC. 19, 2019 VERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY,  everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times  Privacy Project  obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the...