Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles we enjoyed this week, good for consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

In the Shadow of the CMS

This is a splendid history of/future of piece on content management systems. These systems, which are the entry point and the delivery vehicle for the words and images you read online, have a powerful and mostly invisible influence on what you read and see, and the spirit in which they are designed haunts everything promoted by them. Kyle Chayka gives us a brief history of the CMS and its impact on everything from fake news to social media to the scourge of digital advertising.

The clean, glossy surface of content against the vacuum of white digital space encourages you, the reader, to forget about the CMS, rendering it invisible. But the machine is still there, humming in the background—serving up stories and ads, maybe charging you once a month, and feeding your consumption habits back to publications or brands. The most disruptive thing we can do is to be aware of the technology and understand how it shapes the business of media.

The Year in Chores

With the new year fervor safely behind us, it’s easier to appreciate the best of the annual flood of reminiscence, self-reflection, and remorse. Here’s a great one by Rachel Khong (author of Goodbye, Vitamin) on the meaninglessness and meaningfulness of the petty tasks of daily life.

This year I washed out the sponge-y filter in my vacuum for the first time! I’d never known this was a thing you should do until I Googled it. I washed it with soap and water and watched the water run out when I squeezed it, blackened. Once, tiredly, doing a load of laundry, I forgot the detergent. It seemed like every other week I was scooping molding hummus and salsa from out of their tubs, and rinsing the tubs, and putting them in the recycling bin. The mold was living its best life, and was I?

Jack Dorsey Has No Clue What He Wants

Does power create stupidity, reward it, or merely tolerate it? Why is this happening? Here’s Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and controller of the online destiny of millions, sounding just as unhinged and incoherent as Donald Trump. Interviewer Ashely Feinberg is incredibly restrained, all things considered, but she has a couple of zingers that may make you spit your coffee.

When asked how Twitter is handling the problem in the meantime, Dorsey had this to say:

Most of our priority right now in terms of health, which is the No. 1 priority of the company, is around being proactive. How do we remove the burden from the victims or bystanders from reporting in the first place? It’s way too mechanical. It’s way too much work. ... But ultimately, we want to make sure that the number of reports that we receive is trending downward. And that will be because of two reasons. One, people are seeing far less abuse or harassment or other things that are against the terms of service. Or that we’re being more proactive about it. So we want to do both. So a lot of our work is that, and then better prioritization in the meantime. A lot more transparency, clearer actions within the product.

Those are certainly words.

Death on demand: has euthanasia gone too far?

Euthanasia has been legal in The Netherlands long enough for its boundaries to begin to blur. Is it legal or right or obligatory to euthanize someone who suffers from intolerable mental illness? Or someone who signed a directive to ensure they could exit dementia, and then, as the disease advances, seems to recover the will to live? Christopher de Bellaigue assesses the current state of the right to die. It is a mathematics far more complex than a political slogan can ever capture.

That not all planned deaths correspond to the experiences of Bert Keizer or the de Gooijer family is something one can easily forget amid the generally positive aura that surrounds euthanasia. The more I learned about it, the more it seemed that euthanasia, while assigning commendable value to the end of life, might simultaneously cheapen life itself. Another factor I hadn’t appreciated was the possibility of collateral damage. In an event as delicately contractual as euthanasia, there are different varieties of suffering.