1. End of the shopping mall: “Sears is closing another 43 struggling stores.”. Wow! Sears Holdings announced last week that it will close eight of its Sears department stores and 35 Kmart locations, adding to the list of 236 stores the company plans to shut down in 2017. In March it said that it had “substantial doubt” about its ability to remain in business. It’s lost $10 billion since 2010, the last time it turned a profit. Sears closed 240 stores in 2016 and 53 in 2015.

2. How often do people have sex?. Only Google knows, apparently.

3. Echoes of Wall Street in Silicon Valley’s grip on money and power. Yep.

4. LSE Blog: Seven Signs of Over-Hyped Fintech. Useful. Doesn’t just apply to Fintech either.

1. “Emmanuel Macron’s official portrait is a symbolic celebration of centrism”. Clever analysis of the semiotics of Macron’s official portrait — which hangs in every office of the French state. That’s a lot of offices. Very interesting in the way it demonstrates Macron’s astonishing attention to symbolic detail.

2. By me: “Challenges to Silicon Valley won’t just come from Brussels”. Why the Reality Distortion Field centred on Palo Alto doesn’t get what’s happening in the rest of the world.

3. Diane Coyle’s Reading List

4. Memo to Board: spend money on cybersecurity or pay the price. New York Times report on what a cyber attack can do to your profits — and your share price.

5. Katie Hope, BBC: “Inside the secret and lucrative world of ‘the super tutor'”. Or how to earn between £150 and £1,000 an hour tutoring rich kids so that they can get into private schools. The gig economy on steroids.

Links for 8/7/2017

1. Jonathan Penney: “Whose Speech Is Chilled by Surveillance?”. Answer: more people than most of us thought. And women and young people more than most. Intriguing and important research.
2. New York Times:“As Elites Switch to Texting, Watchdogs Fear Loss of Transparency”. This is interesting, not just because some of those self-same elites want to switch off encryption for the rest of us, but also because it means that financial and other regulation — which depends on being able to subpoena records of corporate correspondence — may be undermined.
3. Andrew Adonis: “I put up tuition fees. It’s now clear they have to be scrapped.”. Buyer’s remorse from the inventor of the idea.
4. “Corporate Surveillance in everyday Life”. Useful insight into surveillance capitalism.
5. Sue Halpern: “How He Used Facebook to Win”. ‘He’ being Trump, of course.

1. Martin Kettle: “Here is Britain’s new place in the world – on the sidelines”

2. Eric Posner:“Twenty Theses about Twitter”. Spot on.

3. Reuters:“EU considers record fine as panel checks Google Android case”

4. “Transparent, explainable, and accountable AI for robotics”. In Science Robotics.

5. New York Times: “Lasting Damage and a Search for Clues in Cyberattack”

6. Julia Powles: “Why are we giving away our most sensitive health data to Google?”. Why indeed.

The Tragedy of Donald I: Act 1, Scene 1. The Trump story as told by Ellis Wiener (aka Will Shakespeare). Now is the discount of our winter tents.

If wind and solar power are quicker and cheaper, do we really ned Hinkley Point?. Thoughtful piece by Terry Macalister.

Brexit Armageddon was a terrifying vision – but it simply hasn’t happened. Strange piece by Larry Elliott, normally a pretty thoughtful economics editor, which seems to draw premature conclusions from a few weeks’ data. Still, he did vote for Brexit, so perhaps there’s an element of wish-fulfilment here?

Journalists grappling with Trump, day 2. Very insightful blog post by Dave Winer on why American journalism can’t handle Trump. For example, why no explicit discussion of his implicit encouragement of assassination as a way of overcoming political obstacles? Winer asks why journalists weren’t talking about the substance of what Trump said, as opposed to trying to discern why he said it.

Joe Stieglitz on what’s wrong with the EU, why policy-makers persist with bad ideas, and more.

“The concept of ‘cat face'”. Terrific (long) LRB article by Paul Taylor on machine learning. Best non-technical account I’ve seen.

The leak of alleged NSA hacking tools is genuine. For those who are interested in the UK’s Investigatory Powers bill, this is what ‘Equipment Interference’ looks like.

The 98 things that Facebook knows about you — just so you get the right ads, you understand.

Intellectuals are freaks – and that’s not a criticism.

The Best Bookshops in Copenhagen. If you like bookshops (and I do), Copenhagen is a great place to live.

Puzzled by the rise of Snapchat? Hint: it’s about fleeing the performance anxiety induced by Facebook and Instagram. Perceptive piece by Farad Manjoo. There is, however, a downside: people want to escape the news.

Twitter suspends 235,000 more accounts over extremism. Yep, that’s 235,000. But Trump is still there.

A new research study suggests that the use of wearable video cameras by police officers is associated with a 3.64% increase in shooting-deaths of civilians by the police. The study also found that “found that body cameras were associated with a larger increase in shooting deaths of African Americans and hispanics than whites and Asians”.

Ford promises “a fully automated driverless vehicle for commercial ride-sharing in 2021”.

Wintel Rides Again: Intel and Microsoft are teaming up to bring Virtual Reality to ordinary folks.

Anti-trust’s blind spot – swallowing your start-up competitors before they can really get going. All the digital giants are doing it. They hate competition, you see.

“The Generations of Economic Journalism”. Great essay on the significance of Walter Lippmann.

The Wall Street Journal is tweaking its firewall. Intelligently.

How a (daft) conspiracy theory about the Clintons has gone viral in China. Interesting for those of us who study conspiracy theories.

Why Monday was a very bad day for the NSA. (And it’s not something to cheer about.)

Puzzled by Virtual Reality’s potential? Me too. But Ben Evans’s The VR Idea Maze is insightful and persuasive.

Data-mining shows that Donald Trump’s most angry or intemperate tweets come from an Android phone. The less contentious tweets come from an iPhone.

Werner Herzog has made a documentary, Lo and behold, about the internet and its implications which premieres this week. He’s done an interview with TechCrunch about it.

The IBM PC – the machine that made personal computers acceptable to chartered accountants – was launched 35 years ago this month.

27,000 computers in London’s Metropolitan Police are still running Windows XP. Here are some reasons why.

Google plans to obliterate Flash from its Chrome browser from next month.

Joe Nye on the fragmentation of the Internet.