Morning Reading – Wednesday, December 23, 2020
Eight days remain before we close the door on the year 2020.
The Department Store That Does Holiday Cheer Like No Other – The New York Times
On the night before Christmas, my father would leave a cigar and a drink on the mantel for Santa. (This was Greenwich Village.) In the morning, while I pillaged the presents, I never failed to notice that the cigar had been smoked down to the butt. And the brandy in the glass was all gone.
Fauci’s Christmas Eve: Turning 80 and fighting the pandemic – The Washington Post
“There is no option to get tired. There is no option to sit down and say ‘I’m sorry, I’ve had enough,’ ” he said. When fatigued, he recalled, he would tell himself: “I’m gonna dig deep and just suck it up.”
How to Abuse a Presidential Pardon – The Atlantic
As we await Trump’s Christmas pardons, with the expectation that many will be self-serving and injurious to the pursuit of justice, the intertwined tales of Taft and Nixon help explain why, after two centuries, we are still so vulnerable to bad pardons, a power that the Framers left unchecked.
How Biden’s design team helped defeat Donald Trump
Unlike Trump’s branding, which used a sledgehammer of aggressive, repetitive, messaging, the Biden design team reached key demographics with the precision of a scalpel.
How Claude Shannon’s Information Theory Invented the Future | Quanta Magazine
When I started graduate school, my adviser told me that the best work would prune the tree of knowledge, rather than grow it. I didn’t know what to make of this message then; I always thought my job as a researcher was to add my own twigs. But over my career, as I had the opportunity to apply this philosophy in my own work, I began to understand.