So, what I’ve decided to do is not close down my linkdumps; enough people find value in them to keep it going. I guess this question was raised, in part, by my desire to have something that enriched my readers a bit more. Well, I think I’ve come across what I’ll do: a Sunday linkdump of longer-form reading. These are the really interesting things I’ve found on the Web this week, powered by Instapaper, which I use to digest long-form Web reading for later perusal.

• The Most Hated Name in News [walrusmagazine.com]. It’s a 2009 look into Al-Jazeera English, which I went into the article thinking I wouldn’t like but now find myself wanting to watch it some.
• The Data-Driven Life [nytimes.com], an overview of the concept of self-tracking that Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf call The Quantified Self. This left me wanting to find more ways to effortlessly track myself. I’ve actually been using one for the last week or so, but that’s for a separate post.
• Debt: The First Five Thousand Years [longnow.org]. A brief history of debt in its societal forms, which seems to oscillate between virtual and commodity money. I am no Ron Paul, back-to-the-gold-standard person, by any regard. The key point, though, is that periods of virtual money are coincidental to periods of overarching societal institutions. I would really love to read a lot, lot more on this subject.
• Too Weird for The Wire [washingtonmonthly.com]. Baltimore-area drug dealers/murderes ended up using a defense tactic used by … the KKK. No, really.
• Goldman Sachs, Obama, and Wall Street reform [newyorker.com]. One of many pieces these days about the mess we’re in, it strongly points out that we won’t get out of this quickly, either. Up my alley after reading The Big Short.