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I'd never though of it that way, but all these sites pushing conspiracy theories, hoaxes and other lies are a great trap for catching and selling a gullible audience:

Jones has profited and is likely to continue to profit from his labors in the Lie Economy, the marketplace where gullible viewers are sorted from the skeptical and delivered to advertisers who make the most of their naïveté.

On the pointlessness of ego-based architecture:

Was anyone actually impressed by this building as a feat of engineering when it went up in 2009? Obviously not — by this point, it is well understood that anything in architecture is possible if you have enough money, and the Burj Khalifa cost over $1.5 billion dollars.

I knew they trucked tons of sewage out of that building due to the lack of infrastructure. I didn't know that close to a third of it was basically hollow:

The city of Dubai did not green light a building that extends a half-mile into the air because of a pressing need for residences in downtown Dubai. To the contrary, the top 800 feet (244 meters) of the building, or 29% of the structure’s total height, is devoted to non-usable floors.

Hungry. That was the word that hooked me. That’s how my brain felt to me, too. Hungry. Needy. Itchy. Once it wanted information. But then it was distraction. And then, with social media, validation. A drumbeat of: You exist. You are seen.

This really hit home: Ezra Klein, echoing Marshall McLuhan, on how the medium does shape us, not just the message.

I knew the Channel Islands had been occupied during the second world war. I had no idea there were concentration camps on one of them. The UK government originally tried to suppress knowledge of it, but there's now a heated debate going on about how many people died there and if the reality of it all should be more openly visible.