Royce Young:

We spent months bracing and preparing for the death of our daughter. But guess what? We weren’t ready.

Especially not with the way it happened.

So here’s the backstory: In December, my wife Keri and I went in for the standard 19-week anatomy scan of our second child. As a parent, you think that appointment is all about finding out boy or girl, but it’s about a whole lot more. In our case, our daughter was diagnosed with a rare birth defect called anencephaly. Some three in 10,000 pregnancies rare. Congratulations to us. The phrase our doctor used in explaining it was “incompatible with life,” which looks as terrible in words as it sounds. The child fails to develop the frontal lobe of the brain, or the top of their skull. The chance of survival is literal zero percent. If you’re Googling it now — first of all, don’t click images — and see a story about a baby that has lived a lengthy time with anencephaly, either the baby doesn’t actually have anencephaly, or it’s being kept alive with every life support function possible. So we sat in a doctor’s office, five months before our daughter was set to be born, knowing she would die.

I had to take a break halfway through reading this story to keep myself from tearing up too much. All I wanted to do when I finished was hug and hold my little boy.

I can’t imagine would it would be like going through what Royce and Keri went through. It is well worth a few minutes of your time to read their amazing story.

We have been working on this for about a year.

Mike Wolfinbarger:

Today we’re excited to launch a new premium subscription tier to RadarScope. Our original RadarScope Pro subscription is now called RadarScope Pro Tier 1. Nothing in Tier 1 or the base app has changed. You still have access to all the features you had before, including super-resolution radar products, lightning data, and multi-pane display.

Tier 2 provides new features that we’ve long wanted to add, but couldn’t at our existing price points. RadarScope Pro Tier 2 includes all the features of Tier 1 combined with three new features: a 30-day archive of all radar products, hail size and shear contours over a 24-hour period, and the ability to pay once and use your RadarScope Pro subscription across iOS, macOS, and Android platforms.

Tier 2 can be purchased for $15/month or $100/year. Pick it up for iOS, macOS, or Android.

Since the events of November, I have wanted to follow the news more closely. I discovered that staying on top of current events is hard.

Using Twitter for news, my general strategy for the last few years, is becoming more and more difficult. Lately I have settled on getting most of my news from The New York Times’ Daily Podcast and the Vox Sentences Newsletter.

Finding news is easy, but finding news that I completely trust is a bit more difficult. There are news organizations that I generally trust, but I find even they will post things that are misleading or missing important context¹.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, hopes to have a solution to the problem of untrustworthy news. That solution is Wikitribune.

Wikitribune will have four tent pole ideas that it will set it apart from other news platforms.

1. Always show sources.

This one is big for transparency. Allowing the reader to know where all the information that they are getting comes from will go a long way toward being able to trust what they say.

My big question on this point is how they will handle situations where the source needs to be anonymous.
2. No ads. Everything is free.

For me, this is the biggest one. No ads has two big advantages.

First, the reading experience will be nice. Websites that don’t have ads look nicer and are more enjoyable to read.

Second (and more importantly), the incentives of the site will align with the users. Websites that are ad-driven have a build in incentive to get page views. An exaggerated story about Trump will get more page views than the real story, so their business incentive goes against good journalism.

1. Journalists work with the community.

This one it the most interesting and the most unknown of the four. Similarly to Wikipedia, members of the community will be able to offer edits and fixes for articles. These edits will have to be approved by one of the journalists.

Out of everything, this is biggest differentiator between Wikitribune and other news outlets.

1. All financials are public.

All of the content on Wikitribune will be free to everyone. It will be financially supported by people donating regularly. As a part of that, they will regularly publish all of their financial information.

I have no idea if a site like Wikitribune can work, but I really like the idea.

They are currently doing a month-long pledge to raise enough money to hire 10 journalists. They hope to launch the site this fall.

I pledged $10/month². If you want good journalism, I encourage you to consider donating as well³.

You can donate at wikitribune.com.

Update: Jimmy Wales did a Reddit AMA about the site, where he answered my big question about anonymous sourcing.

So basically, I don’t propose an absolute ban on anonymous sourcing – just a “strict scrutiny” approach.

The entire AMA is probably worth looking though if you are on the fence about supporting.

Michael Giacchino is one of only three movie composers that I know by name and can recognize elements of their work almost immediately¹. The movie that really made me sit up and notice a Giacchino score was the 2009 Star Trek reboot – the cold open into space followed by the theme during the title sequence pulled me into a movie quicker than anything other than the Star Wars opening crawl had done before.

So when I heard that he had landed the part for Rogue One, I was excited.

On his YouTube channel, Sideways did a great job of showing how the Rogue One score was able to tie in work that John Williams did in the original trilogy while still standing on its own.

Because Rogue One was an anthology film and not a part of the main Skywalker Saga, Giacchino had the difficult job of cementing the score in the universe of Star Wars while being different at the same time. He was able deliver on both of those challenges while allegedly only having about a month from start to finish.

I want John Williams to keep composing for Star Wars for as long as he is able, but Michael Giacchino would be a worthy successor when the time comes.

Becky Hansmeyer:

Up until early June 2015, the company still ended every press release with “Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world…” Now filter “Should we kill our high end personal computer?” through that and the answer is an emphatic “Nope.”

I agree with every word of this article.