Welcome back to our weekly reading roundup. Before you see what we’re loving elsewhere, don’t miss Nanette Spurr’s reminder that abortion is health care — and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.
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The Fatal Ensnaring of Dan DePew (Laura Kipnis for the New York Review of Books)
Sexual panic permeated the 1980s, dictating who was criminalized and who got locked up, and for what behaviors. On the West Coast, the notorious McMartin Preschool case dragged on for six years, the longest and most costly criminal trial in American history, with prosecutors mounting bizarre allegations of Satanic ritual sexual abuse of children against seven innocent people. All the charges were eventually dropped; the primary suspect spent five years in jail anyway. To be sure, the era’s sex criminals weren’t all suspected Satanists. With the AIDS epidemic raging, at mid-decade opinion polling found that half of all Americans thought that those who were infected should be quarantined—lock-ups with a fancier name.
The Tinder algorithm, explained (Kaitlyn Tiffany for Vox)
Tinder says that Super Likes triple your chances of getting a match, because they’re flattering and express enthusiasm. There’s no way to know if that’s true. What we do know is that when you Super Like someone, Tinder has to set the algorithm aside for a minute. It’s obligated to push your card closer to the top of the pile of the person you Super Liked — because you’re not going to keep spending money on Super Likes if they never work — and guarantee that they see it. This doesn’t mean that you’ll get a match, but it does mean that a person who has a higher “desirability” score will be provided with the very basic information that you exist.
Yelp Elite Are Becoming Obsolete (Whitney Filloon for Eater)
In that sense, Yelp was initially something of a populist victory, giving regular people the perceived ability to wield, to a certain extent, the power formerly only held by professional critics and other press. In 2008, the New York Times wrote about how Yelp’s surging popularity was helping small businesses draw in customers by turbocharging the speed and reach of peer-to-peer recommendations. The story also noted how, two years in, the relationship between users and business owners was already turning transactional: After a moving company damaged a customer’s furniture, its owner told the Times, “[The customer] wrote a one-star review. I called her. We fully replaced it. And then she upgraded me from a one star to a five-star.”
How NYT Cooking Became the Best Comment Section on the Internet (Alison Herman for The Ringer)
Despite occasional standouts like Newberry, however, the spirit of Cooking is more evenly distributed. “I don’t think we have yet found one or two people who spend their days writing notes on the recipes, in the way that, on the Times core site, there are some people who seem to spend their waking hours writing comments on news articles. Or limericks, or whatever,” Sifton says. Alexandra, for her part, thinks the design of Cooking, which has no full-fledged user profiles in the vein of a proper social network, encourages less self-aggrandizement and more actual assistance. “It’s kind of more like message boards,” she writes. “Like-minded people talking about a focused thing. You’re not trying to build a brand/profile since it doesn’t function that way, technically. It’s just folks tryna help other folks.”
The Work in Sex Work (Kit Bauer)
I once answered the “how do you differentiate sex for money and for free?” question with “think about making a short film; making one for yourself is entirely different to commissioned work. You might have fun making a commissioned film, it might have pieces of you in it, but it will never be entirely your own.” This answer speaks to the very best sides of most jobs. If a worker is lucky — very lucky — they will have enough autonomy and control over their work to feel somewhat connected to what they do. But ultimately, work is something done for someone else. It is providing something of value to another person and receiving financial compensation as a result.
Photo: Jason Jacobs
