Reads: Planet or Plastic, Snapchat's Decline & More

A wrap on some of the interesting reads from across the web...

1. Are Algorithms Hacking Our Thoughts? - TechCrunch
2. What Do AI and Blockchain Mean for the Rule of Law? - TechCrunch
3. Batteries Still Suck, But Researchers Are Working on It - Wired
4. Online Ad Targeting Does Work—As Long As It's Not Creepy - Wired
5. What Happened to Facebook's Grand Plan to Wire the World? - Wired
6. We Made Plastic. We Depend on It. Now We're Drowning in It. - National Geographic
7. What Happens to the Plastic We Throw Out - National Geographic
8. Are My Friends Really My Friends? - The New York Times
9. Facebook and the 'Dead Body' Problem - The New York Times
10. In a Warming West, the Rio Grande Is Drying Up - The New York Times
11. Welcome to the Age of the Twink - The New York Times
12. Is a Dumber Phone a Better Phone? - The New York Times
13. My Adventures With the Trip Doctors - The New York Times
14. The Moat Map - Stratechery
15. The 100 Stories That Shaped the World - BBC News
16. Ignore the Hype Over Big Tech. Its Products Are Mostly Useless - The Guardian
17. Deadly Chinese Fentanyl is Creating a New Era of Drug Kingpins - Bloomberg
18. Apple, Influence, and Ive - Hodinkee
19. The Decline of Snapchat and the Secret Joy of Internet Ghost Towns - The Verge
20. Driven to Despair - NYMag
21. What I Learned on My Date With a Sex Robot - NYMag
22. What's That Smell You’re Reading? - Science History Institute
23. Can AI Usher in a New Era of Hyper-personalized Food? - The New Food Economy
24. Why New Antibiotics Are So Hard to Find - Nautilus
25. How Nations Stay Together - Aeon
26. Talk to me: Is Animal-Translation Technology Truly on the Horizon? - Engadget
27. Who's Afraid of Kaspersky? - Motherboard
28. Age of Enlightenment: The Promise of Circadian Lighting - Undark
29. Email is Dangerous - The Atlantic
30. The Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints - The Paris Review