Matt Levine's consistently excellent newsletter for Bloomberg is called Money Stuff, and is typically focused on white collar crime and crime-adjacent behavior. Monday's edition looks at the New York Times' article on on the possible existence of Epstein-related incriminating videos, and attempts to explain why the story doesn't actually allege criminal behavior by the lawyers involved:

It’s “a long way from extortion” in the technical sense that they were lawyers and knew the proper incantations to utter to make it not extortion. It’s not a long way from extortion in the sense that they were planning to go to rich men and say “we have compromising videos of you and we will publish them unless you pay us money.” But the incantations make all the difference!

Monday's newsletter includes a summary of various ways bankers can be induced to aid financial crimes, and why Credit Suisse Group AG’s Mozambique scandal doesn't seem to fit the mold:

the Mozambique case is even weirder than I thought, because the bribes weren’t just to motivate the bankers to get the deals approved, they were to motivate the bankers to cut the fees.

...

It is honestly a bit mysterious to me how this could work. If you’re a banker and you come to your bosses with a hairy deal with a higher-than-usual fee, they will be repulsed by the hair but intrigued by the fee. If you come to your bosses with a hairy deal and a below-average fee, because you are pocketing a bribe-in-lieu-of-fees yourself, what’s in it for them?

The excellent first edition of Matthew Braga's new Secret World newsletter looks at exactly who you're calling when you use a satellite phone or Garmin emergency beacon to call for help:

It turns out that, anytime someone calls 911 on a satellite phone, or presses the SOS button on a dedicated GPS tracker — anywhere in the world — those messages typically go to one place: The International Emergency Response Coordination Center, or IERCC, about an hour outside of Houston, Texas. The center has coordinated more than 10,000 rescues in 169 countries, and responds to anywhere from 30 to 60 requests each day. Whether you’re a hermit in the Scottish highlands in medical distress, or a kayaker in eastern Tajikistan with altitude sickness (true stories) the IERCC is your point of first contact. Every hour, every day of the year, a rotating team of six watchstanders determine the closest available search and rescue team and coordinate the response.

The IERCC headquarters includes what sounds like a real-life vault from Fallout:

The entrances were hidden within a pair of massive pagodas, with gunports for the armed guards to shoot at whoever who came near.

Read the rest of the newsletter here, including a description of drone warfare involving tractor beams. Read the rest

I highly recommend McKinley Valentine's email newsletter, The Whippet. In each issue she presents interesting ideas, art, videos, and articles.

Here's an item from the latest issue (#85):

How to survive solitary confinement

I like to read things like this, keep it in my pocket, so I worry less about what if it happens.

The recommendation is more or less -- you'll go crazy anyway, so go crazy with intention, to protect your brain.

The human brain does very badly in social isolation - we're not built for it, and people start hallucinating and dissociating very quickly when it's complete. It's actual torture, but people don't expect it to be because it sounds so low-key.

So the people in this article - both people who've survived solitary, and psychologists - suggest using a lot of visualisation. Imagine yourself in a much bigger space than you are, get to know it. Have a "workspace" where you train, maybe practice a sport in your mind. Every day, regularly, like you were outside and had a proper life. Imagine meeting a friend and having conversations with them.

Part of what makes you go crazy in isolation is the lack of external cues and structures, so it has to be structured visualisations, not just panicked uncontrolled daydreaming.

From someone who survived 7 years in almost total solitary confinement (again, this is torture, it is amazing he came out of it relatively okay):

"He he used to kill time for hours working out detailed visualizations of himself in a vivid alternate reality, where he could inhabit open spaces and converse with people.

In The New York Times, Mike Isaac explains why newsletters are a better way of communicating than Facebook and Twitter.

For me, the change has happened slowly but the reasons for it were unmistakable. Every time I was on Twitter, I felt worse. I worried about being too connected to my phone, too wrapped up in the latest Twitter dunks. A colleague created his own digital detox program to reduce his smartphone addiction. I reckon he made the right choice.

Now, when I feel the urge to tweet an idea that I think is worth expounding on, I save it for my newsletter, The Dump (an accurate description of what spills out of my head). It’s much more fun than mediating political fights between relatives on my Facebook page or decoding the latest Twitter dust-up.

I agree with Mike. Platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter control every aspect of your communication. As centralized proprietary platforms, they own your content and your audience. They can deplatform you with the push of a button and permanently cut you off from a readership or viewership you've spent years to cultivate. With a newsletter, you have the email addresses of all your subscribers. Newsletters are so much better than Facebook I'm surprised Zuckerberg isn't lobbying Congress to ban them.

Speaking of newsletters, you should check out Boing Boing's newsletter! I also have a couple of newsletters you might be interested in: Recomendo, a weekly newsletter with 6 short tips and recommendations, and Book Freak, a weekly newsletter with useful quotations from books I've read. Read the rest

I've been enjoying newsletters more than ever. This old-school form of communication has made a comeback, probably in response to the way Facebook controls the content you see. With a newsletter, there's no middleman filtering out the content.

A relatively new newsletter publishing service called Revue has launched a directory of its favorite newsletters. The newsletters they have selected are not necessarily published using Revue, which is a good move on their part. I'm happy they have included my own newsletter, Recomendo (a weekly newsletter that gives you 6 brief personal recommendations of cool stuff).

Here are some newsletters I really like: Quartz Daily Brief, 5-bullet Friday, The Intercept, WTF Just Happened Today?, Tofugu Thursday, and The Journal.

What newsletters do you subscribe to that you are excited to see appear in your email inbox? Read the rest

Matt Kiser has started a good newsletter called "What The Fuck Just Happened, Today? Logging the daily shock and awe." He summarizes and links to the major political news events of the day (Trump Picks Neil Gorsuch, A Scalia Clone, For The Supreme Court") and includes a a few items of Lesser Importance (Bannon explained his worldview well before it became official U.S. policy) as well as a section called Tweets to Shake Your Head At (The estimated security cost for Melania living 200 miles away from Trump is double the annual budget for the National Endowment for the Arts.) Read the rest