In its ongoing battle to save the popular Chinese spy app, WIRED published a 2,000-word takedown of a whistleblower who alleged a dangerous link between TikTok and the Chinese government. Now, we don’t actually need a whistleblower to tell us so clear a link exists, and I’ll admit the guy does give off a kind of crazy vibe. But it’s notable how differently he’s being treated than tech’s last, far more famous whistleblower, Frances Haugen, who WIRED, along with the entire press, wildly celebrated — for months. The reason? She was going after Facebook, an American social media company, and reducing the power of American tech, along with the wealth of American “tech bros,” is the press’s only actual goal.

This week, the Biden administration is expected to unveil a series of new proposals aiming to cancel student-loan debt, less than a year after the Supreme Court struck down a prior plan that would have canceled up to $20,000 per borrower. It should go without saying that this is a naked attempt to shore up the youth vote in November. As someone who went into debt getting a degree that did less for my career than Twitter did, I’ll admit I want my money back, but these patchwork programs won’t solve the larger problem, which is that tuition is outrageous. Why should working- and middle-class families have to go into debt to send their children to state universities that their own tax dollars pay for? Any program that doesn't address the root causes completely misses the point. The administration wants to put a band-aid on a bullet hole, but instead it should figure out a way to stop shooting people.

A newly published paper in Econ Journal Watch has found McKinsey & Company studies showing a positive association between DEI and performance were unable to be replicated and "should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives." This comes after several companies and institutions from Apple to the Department of Defense used these very studies to justify their own DEI practices, despite McKinsey routinely declining to share data from them. It seems these organizations were relying on the McKinsey name as their sole rationale for outright racism, which — shocker — didn't improve anything. Blindly trusting this current batch of “elites” is a societal plague far worse than any lack of workplace diversity.

on this week’s pod, the pirate wires crew psychoanalyzes lina khan, whose job is to dismantle american businesses for the biden administration

the union has a list of abandoned properties perfect for squatting linked on its website and, through its friends in city government, has spent decades shaping the city's reckless housing policy

yolande beckles’s history of financial scandals in the u.k. and los angeles is easy to find, so why have education policymakers like jo boaler welcomed her in?

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