Today's Must-Reads - 26 June 2024

Exposing the narrative with the latest news, studies, reports and articles!

Naked Emperor: Exposing the Narrative

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• Russia vows retaliation against US for Ukraine's ATACMS missile attack on Crimea. The Kremlin directly blamed the United States for an attack on Crimea with U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles that killed at least four people and injured 151, and Moscow formally warned the U.S. ambassador that retaliation would follow. "You should ask my colleagues in Europe, and above all in Washington, the press secretaries, why their governments are killing Russian children. Just ask them this question," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters of the attack.

• Wikipedia’s Neutrality: Myth or Reality? According to a new study, the online encyclopedia disfavors right-wing public figures. Analysis found that Wikipedia was more likely to portray right-leaning figures negatively than their left-leaning counterparts. This “sentiment bias” was apparent across groups, including United States presidents, senators, representatives, governors, Supreme Court justices, and journalists. Notably, the disparity was not universal; There was no significant sentiment bias, for example, in the site’s descriptions of U.K. Members of Parliament.

• Biden administration moves toward allowing American military contractors to deploy to Ukraine. The change would mark another significant shift in the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy, as the US looks for ways to give Ukraine’s military an upper hand against Russia. The policy is still being worked on by administration officials and has not received final sign-off yet from President Joe Biden, officials said.

• Is the Global Inflationary Depression Already Here? What the heck is really going on? We live in data-obsessed times with seemingly magical abilities to know and calculate everything. And yet even now, we seem to be more blind than ever before. The difference is that nowadays, we are supposed to trust and rely on data that no one even believes is real.

• Boring Architecture Is Starving Your Brain. DESIGNER THOMAS HEATHERWICK thinks the construction industry is in a crisis. “We’ve just got so used to buildings that are boring,” says the man behind London’s revived Routemaster bus, Google’s Bay View, and New York’s Little Island. “New buildings, again and again, are too flat, too plain, too straight, too shiny, too monotonous, too anonymous, too serious. What happened?” While those features can often be aesthetically appropriate on their own, Heatherwick notes that it’s the relentless combination of them in the aesthetics of modern buildings and urban spaces that makes them overwhelmingly boring. This boredom, he adds, isn’t just a nuisance—it can actually be harmful. “Boring is worse than nothing,”