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How the Koch brothers built the most powerful rightwing group you’ve never heard of

How the Koch brothers built the most powerful rightwing group you’ve never heard of

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Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Caroline Tervo, and Theda Skocpol write: The cries of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” rang throughout the marbled walls of the Wisconsin state assembly chamber. Disgusted Democratic politicians, some of whom had been up for over 60 hours by this point, punctuated their chants by throwing papers – and even drinks – at their Republican counterparts. Police officers had to be summoned to physically restrain one Democratic representative yelling “Cowards!” across the aisle. The source of this confrontation, in the…

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Satellite images show ‘runaway’ expansion of coal power in China

Satellite images show ‘runaway’ expansion of coal power in China

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The Guardian reports: Chinese coal-fired power plants, thought to have been cancelled because of government edicts, are still being built and are threatening to “seriously undermine” global climate goals, researchers have warned. Satellite photos taken in 2018 of locations in China reveal cooling towers and new buildings that were not present a year earlier at plants that were meant to stop operations or be postponed by orders from Beijing. The projects are part of an “approaching tsunami” of coal plants…

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Skripal suspect ‘Ruslan Boshirov’ identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga

Skripal suspect ‘Ruslan Boshirov’ identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga

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Bellingcat Investigation Team reports: Bellingcat and its investigative partner The Insider – Russia have established conclusively the identity of one of the suspects in the poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal, and in the homicide of British citizen Dawn Sturgess. Part 1 and Part 2 of Bellingcat’s investigation into the Skripal poisoning suspects are available for background information. In these previous two parts of the investigation, Bellingcat and the Insider concluded that the two suspects – traveling internationally and appearing…

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As a ‘stumbling’ drunk, Kavanaugh sang, ‘I look like a fool’

As a ‘stumbling’ drunk, Kavanaugh sang, ‘I look like a fool’

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The Washington Post reports: On Monday night, Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh said in a nationally televised interview that in his younger years, he was focused on sports, academics and “service projects.” But it was his comments about drinking that rankled some Yale University classmates, prompting them to speak out for the first time. Liz Swisher, who described herself as a friend of Kavanaugh in college, said she was shocked that — in an interview focused largely on his…

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Brett Kavanaugh and the cruelty of male bonding

Brett Kavanaugh and the cruelty of male bonding

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Lili Loofbourow writes: For what it’s worth, and absent evidence or allegations to the contrary, I believe Brett Kavanaugh’s claim that he was a virgin through his teens. I believe it in part because it squares with some of the oddities I’ve had a hard time understanding about his alleged behavior: namely, that both allegations are strikingly different from other high-profile stories the past year, most of which feature a man and a woman alone. And yet both the Kavanaugh…

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I used to vet judicial nominees. Here’s why Kavanaugh needs the FBI

I used to vet judicial nominees. Here’s why Kavanaugh needs the FBI

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Mike Zubrensky writes: From August 2010 to January 2017, I served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy. In the role, I supervised the vetting of about 300 judicial nominees and reviewed the FBI’s background investigation report for each nominee. We initiated a supplemental investigation of a judicial nominee on numerous occasions. These would occur after the FBI had already conducted basic background vetting, but when there were factual discrepancies in an FBI…

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The male cultural elite is staggeringly blind to #MeToo. Now it’s paying for it

The male cultural elite is staggeringly blind to #MeToo. Now it’s paying for it

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Moira Donegan writes: First, it was Harper’s. In their October issue, the magazine published an essay by John Hockenberry, the disgraced former public radio host who was accused of sexual harassment and racially inappropriate comments by women he worked with. He sent them emails asking for dates, made comments on their appearance and made sex jokes. In August 2017, after multiple complaints about his behavior were made to WNYC management, Hockenberry quietly retired from his program, The Takeaway. His behavior…

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Hurricane Florence crippled electricity and coal — solar and wind were back the next day

Hurricane Florence crippled electricity and coal — solar and wind were back the next day

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CBS News reports: Nearly two weeks after Hurricane Florence swamped North and South Carolina, thousands of residents who get power from coal-fired utilities remain without electricity. Yet solar installations, which provide less than 5 percent of North Carolina’s energy, were up and running the day after the storm, according to electricity news outlet GTM. And while half of Duke Energy’s customers were without power at some point, according to CleanTechnica, the utility’s solar farms sustained no damage. Traditional energy providers…

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Nanotubular highways between cells act as conduits for transferring all kinds of cargo

Nanotubular highways between cells act as conduits for transferring all kinds of cargo

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Viviane Callier writes: When the physician and scientist Emil Lou was an oncology fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center about a decade ago, he was regularly troubled by the sight of something small but unidentifiable in his cancer-cell cultures. Looking through the microscope, he said, he “kept finding these long, thin translucent lines,” about 50 nanometers wide and 150 to 200 microns long, extending between cells in the culture. He called on the world-class cell biologists in his building…

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Rosenstein is keeping his job for now, but our democratic institutions aren’t looking so healthy

Rosenstein is keeping his job for now, but our democratic institutions aren’t looking so healthy

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Yascha Mounk writes: Humans are tribal animals. As Jonathan Haidt argues in The Righteous Mind, even—perhaps especially—the smartest and best educated among us don’t look at a body of evidence dispassionately, drawing logical conclusions from objective data. Instead, we approach any question with strong priors. If we want to believe some proposition because it fits our general worldview, we ask: “May I believe it?” If we know that it would challenge some of our long-held beliefs, we go: “Do I…

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Trump allies pushing him to ditch Kavanaugh and nominate a woman

Trump allies pushing him to ditch Kavanaugh and nominate a woman

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Gabriel Sherman writes: On Monday morning, a Republican briefed on Trump’s thinking said the president has been considering pulling Kavanaugh’s nomination. According to the source, Trump allies are imploring him to cut Kavanaugh loose for the sake of saving Republicans’ electoral chances in the midterms. The argument these advisers are making is that if Kavanaugh’s nomination fails, demoralized Republicans will stay home in November, and Democrats will take the House and the Senate and initiate impeachment proceedings. The end result:…

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How Russia swung the election for Trump

How Russia swung the election for Trump

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Jane Mayer reports: [W]hen I met recently with [Kathleen Hall] Jamieson, in a book-lined conference room at the Annenberg Center, in Philadelphia, and asked her point-blank if she thought that Trump would be President without the aid of Russians, she didn’t equivocate. “No,” she said, her face unsmiling. Clearly cognizant of the gravity of her statement, she clarified, “If everything else is a constant? No, I do not.” Jamieson said that, as an academic, she hoped that the public would…

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Yemen’s three wars

Yemen’s three wars

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Gregory D. Johnsen writes: Last month, over the course of a few days in Yemen, one governor survived a roadside bomb while a second was denied entry through a checkpoint ostensibly run by his own government. At a military college in Aden, the government’s temporary capital, pro-secessionist soldiers opened fire on a graduation ceremony in response to the raising of the national flag. Three small security events—barely blips in Yemen’s daily catalogue of strikes that have already disappeared from the…

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A tiny change in brain organization without which humans never could have evolved

A tiny change in brain organization without which humans never could have evolved

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Douglas Fox writes: Suzana Herculano-Houzel spent most of 2003 perfecting a macabre recipe—a formula for brain soup. Sometimes she froze the jiggly tissue in liquid nitrogen, and then she liquefied it in a blender. Other times she soaked it in formaldehyde and then mashed it in detergent, yielding a smooth, pink slurry. Herculano-Houzel had completed her Ph.D. in neuroscience several years earlier, and in 2002, she had begun working as an assistant professor at the Federal University of Rio de…

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