This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Blame Society, Not the Screen Time - danah boyd in the New York Times: "[Children] aren’t addicted to the computer; they’re addicted to interaction, and being around their friends. Children, and especially teenagers, don’t want to only socialize with parents and siblings; they want to play with their peers. That’s how they make sense of the world. And we’ve robbed them of that opportunity because we’re afraid of boogeymen."
• Meet the Master of the Old-School Clicky-Clacky Keyboard - Matt Jancer at Wired: "Mechanical (or clicky) keyboards improve typing speed and help eliminate carpal tunnel syndrome—but the real draw is the tactile feel of typing on a real keyboard; it’s the reaction of feeling the physical switches under the keys. That “feeling” is exemplified by the Model M, and has helped create a surprisingly large market for a 30-year-old piece of equipment that weighs five pounds." At one stage I had loads of these. Why did I ever let them go?
• MIT Media Lab Knotty Objects: Phone: "This video is one of a series of videos in collaboration between m ss ng p eces and MIT Media Lab for the Knotty Objects Summit, the first MIT Media Lab Summit devoted to design."
• What is "derp"? The answer is technical. : "English has no word for "the constant, repetitive reiteration of strong priors". Yet it is a well-known phenomenon in the world of punditry, debate, and public affairs. On Twitter, we call it "derp"."
• Why a Meaningful Boost for Those at the Bottom Requires Help From the Top - Noam Scheiber, NYT: "'We should not see this as hitting the top so that the bottom looks good in comparison,' Mr. Saez said in an email. Rather, he said, it’s about preventing the rich from vacuuming up the gains that might otherwise go to the rest of the population."
• Welfare economics and the Greek crisis - Branko Milanovic: The usually spot-on Milanovic is way off here. GDP per capita is not a valid measure of general welfare if you are, like Greece, a country rich in oligarchs (not to mention unemployment).
• The Hidden Nasties In Australia's New Free Trade Deal - Ben Eltham, New Matilda: We call it free trade, you call it union busting. Let's not quibble over terms.
• Of clowns and treasurers - Richard Denniss in The Monthly: Really good long read, basically debunking VSPs, the Confidence Fairy, and the economist on the telly who's a banker, not an economist.
• EU Infrastructure Undermines Sovereignty - Michael Hudson: "A genuine market economy would recognize financial reality and write down debts in keeping with the ability to be paid, but inter-government debt overrides markets and refuses to acknowledge the need for a Clean Slate. Today’s guiding theory – backed by monetarist junk economics – is that debts of any size can be paid, simply by reducing labor’s wages and living standards plus selling off a nation’s public domain – its land, oil and gas reserves, minerals and water distribution, roads and transport systems, power plants and sewage systems, and public infrastructure of all forms. […] No wonder Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis called the Troika’s negotiating position 'financial terrorism.' Their idea of 'negotiation' is surrender. They are unyielding. Official creditor institutions threaten to isolate, sanction and destroy entire economies, including their industry as well as labor. It transforms the 19th-century class war into a purely destructive meltdown."
• Austerity Has Failed: An Open Letter From Thomas Piketty to Angela Merkel -  Thomas Piketty, Jeffrey Sachs, Heiner Flassbeck, Dani Rodrik and Simon Wren-Lewis - The Nation: "Now is the time for a humane rethink of the punitive and failed program of austerity of recent years and to agree to a major reduction of Greece’s debts in conjunction with much needed reforms in Greece."
• Yanis Varoufakis, James Dean of the European left - Philippe Marlière, openDemocracy: "He became the most hated of Syriza’s ministers in the other European capitals, and rightly so. Pragmatic, sure of himself but never arrogant, competent, funny, learned, an elegant speaker of English, Varoufakis is an atypical character in the desolate landscape of the European radical left. For all these reasons, his capitalist enemies of all creeds sniffed out the threat: Varoufakis had become the man to topple."
• Yanis Varoufakis is being pilloried for doing what had to be done - Philippe Legrain, The Guardian: "Greece’s outspoken former finance minister has long been loathed by his erstwhile eurozone counterparts, on whom he counterproductively impressed their mediocrity." The truth hurts.
• Debt Deflation in Greece - Paul Krugman, NYT: "However things play out from here — I find it hard to see a path other than Grexit — the troika’s program for Greece represents one of history’s epic policy failures. Even if you ignore the economic and human toll, it was an utter failure in terms of restoring solvency. In 2009, before the program, Greek debt was 126 percent of GDP. After five years, debt was … 177 percent of GDP."
• Hacking Team Emails Expose Proposed Death Squad Deal, Secret U.K. Sales Push and Much More - Ryan Gallagher, The Intercept: "A presentation prepared by Hacking Team for a surveillance conference in South Africa later this month shows the company complaining about the “chilling effect” that it claims regulation of surveillance technology is having on the ability to fight crime. The presentation singles out the organizations Hacking Team views as its main adversaries, noting that it is a “target” of groups such as Human Rights Watch and Privacy International and warning that “democracy advocates” are putting pressure on governments."
• A Pain in the Athens: Why Greece Isn't to Blame for the Crisis - Mark Blyth in Foreign Affairs: "Think about it this way. If 230 billion euro had been given to Greece, it would have amounted to just under 21,000 euros per person. Given such largess, it would have been impossible to generate a 25 percent unemployment rate among adults, over 50 percent unemployment among youth, a sharp increase in elderly poverty, and a near collapse of the banking system—even with the troika’s austerity package in place."
• A Day in the Life of a Prisoner - "Trevor" in The Society Pages, from prison: "In a discussion group with college students not long ago, after describing some of the opportunities available here in the penitentiary in which I reside, one student asked me if we as prisoners deserved such opportunities. I paused before answering that society deserves us to have such opportunities, because if we do not come out of prison with more skills and a more productive mindset then we came in with, we are destined to once again fail society."
• Why Greek debt is a problem - Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber: "The story of the eurozone’s relationship with Greece post-crisis is a story of external powers trying to restructure an entire political system from outside, using the crude tools of control that are available to them. The situation is somewhere between the kinds of Washington Consensus restructuring and conditionality that the IMF used to impose as a quid-pro-quo for emergency loans to countries in crisis, and the massive efforts to restructure the political systems of Afghanistan and Iraq post invasion."
• Direct aid, subsidies, tax breaks – the hidden welfare budget we don’t debate and The £93bn handshake: businesses pocket huge subsidies and tax breaks Aditya Chakrabortty at The Guardian: "Researchers and civil servants know a lot about the individuals who claim hundreds in, say, employment support allowance: every last cough, spit and missed appointment at the jobcentre. Yet of the big companies that rake off millions in direct grants, taxpayers often hear very little. The result is that the public do not know where billions of their own taxes are going."
• Germany won’t spare Greek pain – it has an interest in breaking us - Yanis Varoufakis in the Guardian: "Five months of negotiations ensued under conditions of monetary asphyxiation and an induced bank-run supervised and administered by the European Central Bank. The writing was on the wall: unless we capitulated, we would soon be facing capital controls, quasi-functioning cash machines, a prolonged bank holiday and, ultimately, Grexit."
• Feedbags - Rob Horning at the New Inquiry: "You don’t control an algorithm by feeding more information to it; you teach it to control you better. Facebook has always deferred to users because that deference allows it to gain more information that can be presumed more accurate than what it can merely infer. And it has never wanted to tell us what to find meaningful; it wants only to inscribe Facebook as the best place in which to discover our sense of meaning. "