Music: Tigran Hamasyan, Arve Henriksen, Eivind Aarset & Jan Bang — ‘Tsirani Tsar’
The Green New Deal battle ahead
Naomi Klein writes: “I really don’t like their policies of taking away your car, taking away your airplane flights, of ‘let’s hop a train to California,’ or ‘you’re not allowed to own cows anymore!’” So bellowed President Donald Trump in El Paso, Texas, his first campaign-style salvo against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution. There will surely be many more. It’s worth marking the moment. Because those could be the famous last words of a…
Trump’s face-saving way out of a self-created political crisis raises fears over rule of law
Mike Pence: The president usurping power and end-running Congress is "a profound mistake." pic.twitter.com/GjDbHDvh0u — Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) February 15, 2019 The New York Times reports: The White House’s announcement Thursday that President Trump would claim emergency powers to build his border wall without congressional approval was a way out of the political crisis he created over shutting down the government. But while the move means the country will avoid another protracted shutdown, legal specialists warned that the long-term costs…
The American aversion for psychological complexity
Dahlia Lithwick writes: The launch of the 2020 presidential contest has triggered yet another round of uniquely American anxiety around the stability of character. We’re only a few weeks into the nascent primary campaign, and already the public discourse is mired in a debate that seems to be consumed with which of the Democratic candidates is in fact tricking us. Amy Klobuchar appears to be a sweet Minnesota girl, but is she secretly a crazed, potentially abusive harpy? Elizabeth Warren…
Latest hack proves Facebook’s a dangerous monopoly that a fine won’t fix
Sarah Miller and David Segal write: Facebook is too big to control. That simple reality becomes clearer with each passing day. The most recent example is the news this past Friday of a security breach that allowed hackers to access at least 50 million accounts; earlier that week, Facebook admitted to sharing phone numbers users provided to improve their account security with advertisers. Over the past year, the social media giant has experienced scandals like these on a regular basis,…
A border agent detained two Americans for speaking Spanish in Montana. Now they have sued
The New York Times reports: The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Thursday against United States Customs and Border Protection on behalf of two American women who were stopped last spring in a small Montana city by a border agent who said he was asking for their identification because he heard them speaking Spanish. The border agent, identified in the lawsuit as Paul A. O’Neal, stopped the women, Ana Suda and Martha Hernandez, inside a convenience store in…
McCabe’s disturbing account of working for Sessions and Trump
Greg Miller writes: He didn’t read intelligence reports and mixed up classified material with what he had seen in newspaper clips. He seemed confused about the structure and purpose of organizations and became overwhelmed when meetings covered multiple subjects. He blamed immigrants for nearly every societal problem and uttered racist sentiments with shocking callousness. This isn’t how President Trump is depicted in a new book by former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. Instead, it’s McCabe’s account of what it was…
People who are moved by sad music may be better at feeling the pain of others
Amy X. Wang writes: While research into human cognition has long noted that music—chords, harmonies collections of sound comprising something of a universal language—has a profound relationship to the thoughts and emotions of people all over the world, a study published in the scientific journal Frontiers of Psychology peers into qualities and effects specifically associated with sad music. Think somber, angsty, tugging-at-your-heartstrings type of melodies. According to the study, appreciation for such melancholy tunes is intriguingly linked to one particular…
Music: Jan Bang, Erik Honoré, Gaute Storaas, Arve Henriksen, Tigran Hamasyan & Bratislava Symphony Orchestra — ‘Night Encounter’
From Tahrir to Trump: How dignity was reduced to pride
Ece Temelkuran writes: Thousands of people in Tahrir Square chanted the slogan: “Bread! Dignity! Freedom!” It was 2011, and the height of the Arab spring. Standing on my own in the crowd, I recalled a middle-aged worker I’d met in Buenos Aires a decade earlier telling me why he and his colleagues had taken over a factory during Argentina’s economic collapse. He rattled off reasons such as hunger, poverty and inequality. But then his voice changed: “And the boss ……
Every day a new low in the Trump White House
Andrew McCabe writes: On Wednesday, May 10, 2017, my first full day on the job as acting director of the FBI, I sat down with senior staff involved in the Russia case—the investigation into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. As the meeting began, my secretary relayed a message that the White House was calling. The president himself was on the line. I had spoken with him the night before, in the Oval Office, when he…
Trump is making ‘socialism’ sound pretty damn good
Jamelle Bouie writes: Only a handful of Democrats in Congress (and just one Democrat-adjacent presidential contender) identify as “socialist,” but they appear to be the chief targets of President Trump as he faces a confident Democratic opposition in the House of Representatives. “We are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” he said in his State of the Union address two weeks ago, declaring that “America will never be a socialist country.” The White House actually presaged…
Trump plans fake national emergency to build border wall as Senate passes spending bill
The New York Times reports: President Trump plans to declare a national emergency so he can bypass Congress and build his long-promised wall along the border even as he signs a spending bill that does not fund it, the White House said Thursday. The announcement of his decision came just minutes before the Senate voted 83-16 to advance the spending package in anticipation of final passage on Thursday night by the House. Mr. Trump’s decision to sign it effectively ends…
Undefeated, ISIS is back in Iraq
Aziz Ahmad writes: Inside a prison in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, vanquished Islamic State fighters who once swept through much of the country now mill about sullenly on a bare, tiled floor, reflecting on a cause they insist will endure. Many spend hours in fierce debate, apparently undeterred by their movement’s apparent military defeat. Their cause, they say, remains divinely ordained. Their capture incidental. “Hathi iradet Allah,” they say. This is God’s will. A Kurdish guard called for a…
AI that writes convincing prose risks mass-producing fake news
MIT Technology Review reports: Here’s some breaking fake news … Russia has declared war on the United States after Donald Trump accidentally fired a missile in the air. Russia said it had “identified the missile’s trajectory and will take necessary measures to ensure the security of the Russian population and the country’s strategic nuclear forces.” The White House said it was “extremely concerned by the Russian violation” of a treaty banning intermediate-range ballistic missiles. The US and Russia have had…
Brittany’s seafaring hunter-gatherers were the first to build Europe’s ancient megaliths
Big Think reports: The origin of the roughly 35,000 ancient monuments that dot Europe and the British Isles has long been a haunting mystery. From the Ring of Bodnar in the Scottish Orkney Islands to Stonehenge in the English countryside, to the Carnac stones in France, these ancient monuments have fascinated people for as long as they’ve been known. Remarkably, there’s never been a serious effort made to date all of these structures in order to establish a single credible…