Music: Aaron Parks — ‘Small Planet’
‘If giving water to someone dying of thirst is illegal, what humanity is left in the law of this country?’
The Washington Post reports: During the summer of 2017, when temperatures reached triple digits in Arizona, four women drove to a vast desert wilderness along the southwestern border with Mexico. They brought water jugs and canned food — items they later said they were leaving for dehydrated migrants crossing the unfriendly terrain to get to the United States. The women were later charged with misdemeanor crimes. Prosecutors said they violated federal law by entering Cabeza Prieta, a protected 860,000-acre refuge,…
Waiting for a shutdown to end in disaster
McKay Coppins writes: As the longest government shutdown in American history lurches toward its fifth week, a grim but growing consensus has begun to emerge on Capitol Hill: There may be no way out of this mess until something disastrous happens. This is, of course, not a sentiment lawmakers are eager to share on the record. But in interviews this week with congressional staffers on both sides of the aisle (whom I granted anonymity in exchange for candor), I heard…
Protecting the work of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, isn’t the Attorney General’s only job
Jeffrey Toobin writes: When William Barr testified last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee as President Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, he gave the impression that he would be an aberrational figure in the Administration. Unlike many members of the President’s Cabinet, Barr is experienced, knowledgeable, and clearly qualified, in any formal sense, for the job, which he has held before, under President George H. W. Bush. In addition, he has a reputation for integrity and straight dealing. Most of…
What boys are learning from men
Melinda Wenner Moyer writes: No one who saw the new Gillette ad “The Best Men Can Be” thought it would be universally embraced. It establishes the state of masculinity today with various scenes of men acting sexist, boys physically and mentally terrorizing each other, and dads accepting a “Boys will be boys” mentality, before dramatically pivoting. The wide range of reactions was, of course, the point: to create a conversation starter. To rile people and get them talking about Gillette….
The age of surveillance capitalism
John Naughton writes: We’re living through the most profound transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa 1439. And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run we’re all dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg’s home town) in, say, 1495…
The plot against George Soros
Hannes Grassegger writes: The glass tower that houses George Soros’s office in Manhattan is overflowing with numbers on screens, tracking and predicting the directions of markets around the world. But there’s one that’s particularly hard to figure out — a basic orange chart on a screen analyzing sentiment on social media. The data, updated regularly since 2017, projects the reactions on the internet to the name George Soros. He gets tens of thousands of mentions per week — almost always…
Time to break the silence on Palestine
Michelle Alexander writes: On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to the lectern at the Riverside Church in Manhattan. The United States had been in active combat in Vietnam for two years and tens of thousands of people had been killed, including some 10,000 American troops. The political establishment — from left to right — backed the war, and more than 400,000 American service members were in Vietnam,…
Music: Snarky Puppy — ‘Xavi’
The evidence that Donald Trump never expected or wanted to become president
Frank Bruni writes: I’m struck in particular by how the indisputable parts of the BuzzFeed article underscore what many Trump observers have long believed, an insight that explains so much about his eccentric campaign and unethical governance: He never really expected to be president. More than that, he never really hoped to be. That’s why he didn’t put business matters on hold or disentangle himself from glaring conflicts of interest. That’s why he refused to yoke himself to the sorts…
Sixfold increase in ice loss from Antarctica since 1970s, new research finds
The Washington Post reports: Antarctic glaciers have been melting at an accelerating pace over the past four decades thanks to an influx of warm ocean water — a startling new finding that researchers say could mean sea levels are poised to rise more quickly than predicted in coming decades. The Antarctic lost 40 billion tons of melting ice to the ocean each year from 1979 to 1989. That figure rose to 252 billion tons lost per year beginning in 2009,…
How the Assad regime has exploited ‘evacuation deals’ to redirect ISIS against the rebels
Omar Sabbour writes: On September 2018, when the Assad regime was preparing to launch its (now on-hold) offensive against rebel-held Idlib in northern Syria, a rather surprising report emerged in TheTimes. The report alleged that the regime had transported 400 Isis fighters from the province of Deir Al-Zor, where the group has been under siege by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces and the regime, to the vicinity of Idlib. Idlib had been Isis-free since 2014, when opposition fighters managed to…
Why do people fall for fake news?
Gordon Pennycook and David Rand write: What makes people susceptible to fake news and other forms of strategic misinformation? And what, if anything, can be done about it? These questions have become more urgent in recent years, not least because of revelations about the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 United States presidential election by disseminating propaganda through social media platforms. In general, our political culture seems to be increasingly populated by people who espouse outlandish or demonstrably false claims…
Music: Esbjörn Svensson Trio — ‘Tide Of Trepidation’
Why Trump’s directing Cohen, others to lie would be far worse than Watergate
The first article of impeachment against Nixon was just this: obstruction by directing others to lie. This is not hysteria or hyperventilating. It’s history. — Jon Meacham (@jmeacham) January 18, 2019 Ryan Goodman writes: If the President of the United States directed his personal attorney and fixer to help sabotage the Russia investigation by lying to Congress, there is no turning back for the nation. Given the independent corroborating evidence that special counsel Robert Mueller reportedly has to show that’s…
‘This shutdown is about the erosion of American democracy’
First House Floor speech from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC): “The truth of this shutdown is that it's actually not about a wall…The truth is, this shutdown is about the erosion of American democracy and the subversion of our most basic governmental norms." pic.twitter.com/r8tmsGSNtT — CSPAN (@cspan) January 17, 2019