a tale of two-and-a-half headlines

In March last year Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog was ridiculed here for having the word "Trump" in 14 out of 40 headlines: "This isn't necessarily cynical but it is mindless." Cole is still at it! Consider what he did with a thought-piece today by a private investigator about what it's like to be a PI in a time of of pervasive snooping.

TomDispatch, which originally published it, titled the piece Goodbye to All That: A Private Investigator on Living in a Surveillance Culture

Naked Capitalism reblogged it under the title A Private Investigator on Living in a Surveillance Culture

Professor Cole takes the exact same article and calls it Are You Ready for the Trump Admin. to Know Everything about You? (the word "Trump" doesn't appear once in the article)

Surely if there are clickbait awards this takes the trophy. Keep pushin' those buttons, Informed Comment!

kobo's infernal bargain

For the small minority who like reading books on e-ink readers and don't want to use Kindle, options are shrinking.
"Why buy ebooks?" a smug millennial asks. To support the authors, of course. A pittance from a publisher is more than they'll get from a torrent.
Kobo, the Canadian e-book company, has been the Kindle-alternative-of-choice for the past couple of years. They manufacture the e-reader hardware and also offer a selection of books in epub format. (Adobe DRM'd, but that can be, um, dealt with; also DRM-free, which they sell but stopped flagging in search a few years ago.)
Apparently Kobo has been struggling, though. First they merged with a Japanese company, Rakuten, and now Rakuten Kobo is "partnering" with Walmart, the Bezos of the Arkansas hills. Simply pathetic.