Interesting! Week July 29

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Often overlooked, what all the media hype did to her:

In 2005, Lewinsky retreated. She moved to London to take the course in social psychology at the LSE. “It looked at identity, and what happens when your identity is threatened. A threatened identity can be something like getting divorced: you’re someone’s wife and now you’re not someone’s wife. Or losing a child: you’re a parent and now you’re not a parent.” Her plan after graduating was to get a job and lead “a much more private life, and move towards a more normal developmental path”. But she found that nobody would employ her. The stigma outweighed her qualifications and aptitude. She couldn’t even get volunteer work with a charity.

She drifted back to London and had coffee with her old LSE professor, Sandra Jovchelovitch. “She said to me, ‘Whenever power is involved, there always has to be a competing narrative. And you have no narrative.’ It was true. I had mistakenly thought that if I retreated from public life the narrative would dissipate. But instead it ran away from me even more.” That’s when Lewinsky realised she had to do something to de-objectify herself. The same words tend to come up again and again when I’ve asked shamed people to describe the most tumultuous aspects of the experience. One of those words is “objectification”. Being shamed feels like being a victim of identity theft. One minute you’re a private individual, working out who you are, your likes and dislikes. The next minute, you’re America’s premier blowjob queen.

Monica Lewinsky: ‘The shame sticks to you like tar’ | Technology | The Guardian

For all those scare mongers:

Also, some of these writers are saying that the debt is growing faster than the economy. This was true during the years of the Great Recession, but it’s no longer the case. The federal debt held by the public is now growing at about a 3 percent rate, while the economy is growing at about a 3.4 percent rate (these are both in nominal terms). In other words, the U.S. deficit is now perfectly sustainable.

America Isn't Going Broke - Bloomberg View

Media under threat from billionaires:

Gawker isn't the only publication to be targeted by a disgruntled billionaire. Last year, the liberal magazine Mother Jones defeated a defamation lawsuit filed by Republican donor Frank VanderSloot. Winning the lawsuit cost Mother Jones, a relatively small nonprofit organization, and its insurance company $2.5 million in legal fees. If VanderSloot's goal was to punish Mother Jones for writing an accurate but unflattering story about him, a loss was almost as good as a victory. His lawsuit sought $74,999 (staying just under the $75,000 threshold that would have allowed Mother Jones to move the case to federal court and away from an Idaho jury that might have favored the hometown plaintiff). So "winning" the lawsuit cost Mother Jones 30 times as much as the amount it would have had to pay if it had lost. What was really ominous was what happened after VanderSloot's loss. He "announced that he was setting up a $1 million fund to pay the legal expenses of people wanting to sue Mother Jones or other members of the 'liberal press.'"

Even Gawker haters should fear the strategy Peter Thiel is using to destroy Gawker - Vox