The Most Fascinating News of 2014

I went through all of the NextDraft number 1 stories of year and picked out the ones that were especially fascinating, touched on topics that will be at the forefront in 2015, or just had some decent lines. If you’re not a subscriber, get the NextDraft newsletter or iOS app here. Special thanks to WordpressVIP for the incredible support of NextDraft in 2014.

January

We Lost the War

Peter Shumlin, the governor of Vermont, dedicated his entire state of state address to one topic: Drug addiction. Like many states, Vermont has seen a significant rise in the number of drug overdoses in recent years, and Shumlin thinks the time has come to take a more realistic approach to the problem. “We have lost the war on drugs. The notion that we can arrest our way out of this problem is yesterday’s theory.”

+ The strange economics of legal weed.

You Have a Dirty Mind

We’re learning more about why sleep is so important. According to an interesting set of recent studies, sleep provides your brain with the opportunity to essentially clean itself. One researcher compares your brain to an aquarium: “Think about a fish tank. If you have a tank and no filter, the fish will eventually die. So, how do the brain cells get rid of their waste? Where is their filter?” I’m an insomniac with seventy-five open browser tabs. My aquarium is a swamp.

+ “We are at the same place that the impact of smoking was on health 50 years ago when finally there was enough evidence that the surgeon general issued a report indicating that smoking was hazardous to people’s health.” That’s Harvard Med School’s Charles Czeisler who calls sleep the third pillar of health, along with exercise and eating well.

Don’t Even Think About It

“Plenty of aspects of criminal cases involve at least some discussion of how much of a danger the accused poses to society: Judges issue warrants and set bail and sentences all based on some element of prognostication. But what made the case against Valle unique, according to his lawyers, was that absolutely everything the government was using as evidence that he was dangerous was based on his thoughts.” It’s worth reading about the trial of the former police officer known as the Cannibal Cop. His story provides a glimpse into the world of the dark web (disturbing, but worth being aware of), and a look at how technology increases the possibility that we’ll be putting people on trial for what’s going on in their heads.

Dude, Where’s My Laptop?

Over the weekend, my five year-old daughter confiscated and hid my laptop. She was tired of competing for attention with the screen, and no amount of daddy trying to convince her he was building his personal brand was going to change her mind. Similar scenes are all too common in this era when, thanks to always-on digital devices, the line between work and home life has been largely obliterated. So it comes as a welcome surprise that some firms on Wall Street?—?where overwork is viewed as a badge of honor?—?are urging their employees to take a little time off. Why? Because it’s better for business. Here’s The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki on the cult of overwork and the costs of working too much.

+ “In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million?—?and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough.” From Sam Polk in the NYT: For the Love of Money.

+ According to a recent study, money is addictive.

+ “The world’s richest 85 people control about $1.7 trillion in wealth, equivalent to the bottom half of the world’s population.”

Throwing the Bus Under the Bus

After several protests and a contentious city hall gathering, Google has agreed to pay a dollar each time its corporate shuttle uses a San Francisco bus stop (the city really should have held out for equity). This will not end the controversy over the buses from Google and other companies that transport tech workers to their Silicon Valley offices. But wait, don’t the buses reduce the traffic and emissions associated with additional cars on the road? And if some SF residents who take one kind of bus are protesting against other SF residents who take another kind of bus, don’t the people who take limos win? As Kevin Roose explains, the bus wars have never really been about Google buses: “For concerned locals, the shuttles symbolize their collective fears about the rise of the tech sector?—?that rents are spiking, that long-time residents are being pushed out by coddled 22-year-olds with Stanford BAs and venture funding, that a great American city with a rich countercultural history is turning into a staid bedroom community for Silicon Valley.”

+ There are also reports that protestors showed up at the doorstep of the Berkeley home of Google’s Anthony Levandowski who helped develop Street View and Google’s self-driving car.

+ So what exactly happens when gentrification comes to town? The longtime residents of changing neighborhoods are squeezed out, right? Maybe not. According to NPR, a series of new studies suggest “that gentrifying neighborhoods may be a boon to longtime residents as well?—?and that those residents may not be moving out after all.”

+ Full disclosure: I invest in Internet startups, including one that provides bus services for commuters from several Bay Area companies. That said, I only take public transportation when my drone is in the shop.

This is 30

“There were no tech blogs, no Facebook, no Twitter, and certainly no Mac rumor websites. There were no websites at all. So Jobs had to generate his own campaign to tell the world about the computer that he would announce on January 24, 1984, 30 years ago today.” Happy Birthday to my old friend. From Steven Levy in Wired: The Macintosh is 30, and I was there for its birth.

+ When I told her it was time to talk about converting, she thought I was talking about religion. A NextDraft Original: I Made This on a Mac.

+ Here’s a look back at Steve Jobs introducing the original Mac, along with some of the comments made by early reviewers.

+ While we’re on the topic of early computing leaders, it’s probably worth noting that Microsoft is still pulling in some pretty impressive revenues.

And that's just January....

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