Letter-writing staved off lockdown loneliness. Now it’s getting out the vote.

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09.18.20

Good morning! Today: the pandemic is fueling a rise in letter-writing, and Trump's rollbacks could add half an EU's worth of climate pollution by 2035. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day.

Letter-writing staved off lockdown loneliness. Now it’s getting out the vote.

What’s happening: In this weird pandemic year, we’re sending more letters than usual. A combination of social distancing measures and a volatile political year has made the traditional act of putting pen to paper suddenly mean a lot more.

Pen pals: There are Instagram-led social projects for people in quarantine that promise to match writers up to new potential pen pals. And there are art projects collecting letters about isolation—it turns out, humans experience loneliness in much the same way everywhere.

It’s getting political: In the US, the USPS’s financial and leadership-related woes have led to calls to #savetheusps by buying stamps and writing more letters. Organized letter writing has also become a form of retro-political activism to help get out the vote in battleground states. It might sound crazy, but in our noisy, information-saturated environment, opening a letter and seeing that a fellow citizen cared enough to spend the time and money to send you a hand-written note has its own special power and significance. Read the full story.

—Tanya Basu

Trump’s rollbacks could add half an EU’s worth of climate pollution by 2035

The big picture: US President Donald Trump has successfully moved the nation backwards on climate change, even as the world grapples with increasingly devastating fires, heat waves and droughts. His rollback of major environmental policies, should they survive, could pump the equivalent of 1.8 billion additional metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2035, according to a new Rhodium Group analysis. That’s a little more than Russia’s total annual fossil-fuel emissions, or more than half the European Union’s in recent years.

How? It’s all down to unravelling of regulations, mostly implemented under President Barack Obama, in several key areas: vehicle emissions, methane pollution from landfills, rules to prevent methane leaks, and easing of regulations covering hydrofluorocarbons. Read the full story.

—James Temple

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet 'em at me.)

+ The moment when the TV news reporter realizes… that’s not a microphone. That’s a turkey leg.
+ One-pot Japanese curry chicken and rice. (NYT $)
+ Forget to-do lists. Start writing “done” lists.

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The top ten must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 How you’re most likely to catch the coronavirus
In short, talking to people indoors. (Elemental)
+ White covid death rates are lower than “normal” Black American death rates. (Slate)
+ More new cases have been reported in Europe in the last week than during the first peak. (BBC)
+ The UK could be heading for another national lockdown as hospital admissions double every eight days. (Reuters)
+ A former White House aide revealed some damning insights into Trump’s handling of covid-19. (The New Yorker $)

2 It looks like TikTok and WeChat will be banned in the US from Sunday
It's unclear if this leaves the possibility of a deal being done before then to keep them running. (CNBC)
+ Anyone else sick of hearing the same tune over and over on TikTok? (Slate)
+ Will anyone buy TikTok’s Indian operations? (Quartz)
+ TikTok is helping to make OnlyFans stars rich. (The Verge)

3 Why kids need special protection from AI’s influence
Algorithms are increasingly shaping children's lives, but new guardrails could prevent them from getting hurt. (TR)
+ Fake data could help solve machine learning’s problem. (Slate)
+ A new task for AI: speeding up insurance claims. (NYT $)

4 Facebook is curbing internal debate over sensitive topics
Turns out, Silicon Valley companies are just as much a part of society as any other. (WSJ $)
+ Google is doing the same, as message boards get more heated while people work from home. (CNBC)
+ Behind Facebook’s big bet on hardware. (Axios)

5 Don’t get your election information from social media, says FBI director
Given it’s awash with misinformation, this seems good advice. (CNET)
+ Twitter is encouraging high-profile accounts to tighten their security ahead of the election. (The Verge)

6 Democracy is dying in Hong Kong
Recent crackdowns are part of an audacious long-term plan by the Chinese Community Party to reshape the region. (Wired $)

7 When ransomware turns deadly
A German hospital was hacked, and a patient taken to another city died. (NBC)

8 Eco-fascists are using the climate crisis to try to go mainstream
They never like to waste a good catastrophe. (Earther)

9 Communes are back in fashion
This might be the logical conclusion of pandemic pods. (Vice)

10 Don’t wait to take your vacation days
It can be even easier to burn out when you’re working from home (and especially during a global pandemic.) (Wired UK)

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Quote of the Day

“The Republican party has been deeply infected by QAnon.”

—Scott Wiener, a California state senator, tells The Guardian how he became a target of a misinformation and harassment campaign by a movement which is implicitly endorsed by Trump.

Top image credit: MS TECH | UNSPLASH

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Follow me on Twitter at @charlottejee. Thanks for reading!

—Charlotte