Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Black Friday Sale! Small-Business Saturday Savings! Maura’s Cyber Monday Mania!

Wait, no, that’s not right. I’ve read those words so many times in the past few days, I forgot that I’m not here to sell anything. Nor do I have a holiday gift guide to share. There’s nothing to buy here, just a handful of links to read as the weekend—and the month—comes to an end.

Thanks for joining me this week.

Recommendations

China Stories

Helen Davidson and Shanshan Kao, “‘We can’t get any answers’: grief and anger in Hong Kong after deadly high-rise fire”

Throughout mid-October to early November, the erroneous claim that China issued sweeping new rules to limit what influencers can say online originated as viral social media content and snowballed into a global story whose credibility was steadily strengthened by the growing number of news outlets around the world that repeated the claim and perpetuated the misinformation.

— Wenhao Ma, “Anatomy of a Fake Story”

Christian Shepherd, Rudy Lu and, Lyric Li, “Hong Kong apartment fire tests Beijing-backed rule as anger mounts”

Wanderings Around the World

Roma Ayuobi, “We live beneath a dark roof: what it means to be an Afghan woman today”

Christina Cala, Gene Demby, B.A. Parker, Leah Donnella, and Jess Kung, “Tribal colleges are a unique resource — and they’re under threat” (audio)

Brendan Quinn, “A journey to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where the Lions and Packers draw the lines”

Stephanie Wong, “Cloth and Complicity: Seth Rockman on Plantations, Textiles, and the Art of Weaving”

Standout Story

Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They’re taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud—where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more “content” have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.

— Nicholas Hune-Brown, “Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era”

Also: a follow-up interview with Hune-Brown at The Walrus and a feature at RE:PUBLIC about how they also narrowly avoided getting scammed by “Victoria Goldiee.”

Featured photo: High-rise apartment buildings in Hong Kong, October 20, 2013; two on the left are wrapped in the green plastic construction netting that the Hong Kong government blames in part for the severity of last week’s deadly fire.