George T. Conway III writes: This is what happens when you don’t pay your legal bills. President Trump, whose businesses and now campaign have left a long trail of unpaid bills behind them, has never discriminated when it comes to stiffing people who work for him. That includes lawyers — which is part of the reason he found the need to make some curious last-minute tweaks to his team, announcing the addition of the legal odd couple of Alan Dershowitz…
Garrett Epps writes: Quick: What’s the most common word in the English language that does not appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution? The answer is a revealing one: she. Presidents, senators, and representatives are always designated as “he.” Even the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, simply bans abridgment of that right “on account of sex.” That resolutely masculine language will not change, no matter what happens over the next few months. But something more significant may:…
Michael Sainato writes: About 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh, along the Ohio River, lies one of the largest active construction projects in the United States. Dozens of cranes dominate the more-than-300-acre site, where hundreds of construction workers assemble a massive petrochemical facility set to convert natural gas into plastic pellets used to develop a range of products from plastic bottles to car parts. The ethane cracker plant being developed in Monaca, Pennsylvania, by Royal Dutch Shell is one of at…
Thomas T Hills writes: Shamanism is as varied as those who practise it. Its practitioners range from indigenous lineages who have passed down their craft over thousands of years to the modern ‘plastic shamans’, who represent no specific culture but have adapted shamanism to meet the demands of metropolitan markets. However, there is a common theme to shamanism wherever it is practised: the use of spiritual (or shamanic) trance to facilitate journeys to a non-ordinary reality. Here, in this non-ordinary…
The Intercept reports: In September 2009, over 3,000 bee enthusiasts from around the world descended on the city of Montpellier in southern France for Apimondia — a festive beekeeper conference filled with scientific lectures, hobbyist demonstrations, and commercial beekeepers hawking honey. But that year, a cloud loomed over the event: bee colonies across the globe were collapsing, and billions of bees were dying. Bee declines have been observed throughout recorded history, but the sudden, persistent and abnormally high annual hive…
The Daily Beast reports: George Soros, an American billionaire who has invested heavily in progressive political causes and philanthropies around the world, has long been a bête noire of conservatives and regularly vilified in Russian propaganda—the same kind that Trumpworld is accused of subscribing to in its Ukraine dealings. Giuliani, diGenova, and Toensing were particularly opposed to Soros’ work, Parnas said. “Soros became Enemy Number One, and it was understood that Soros infiltrated the U.S. government and State Department over…
Margaret Sullivan writes: A sense of proportion — what’s significant and what’s trivial — seems strangely missing. What truly deserves our all-out attention and outrage? What’s the small stuff? Numbed by the barrage of news, dazzled by distraction, many citizens don’t seem to know anymore. And news sources, particularly TV and social media, show little ability or desire to help. (As Pew Research in late 2018 revealed, TV is still the main way that all Americans get their news; and…
Simon Tisdall writes: News that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s latter-day tsar, is making plans to cling to power indefinitely comes as no surprise. All the same, it is deeply worrying for Putin’s prey – principally the Russian people and the western democracies. Putin, 67, has run Russia, as president and prime minister, for 21 years, a feat of political longevity surpassed only by Joseph Stalin. Like Stalin, he has made many enemies and caused untold misery along the way. Russia under…
The Washington Post reports: The large color photograph that greets visitors to a National Archives exhibit celebrating the centennial of women’s suffrage shows a massive crowd filling Pennsylvania Avenue NW for the Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration. The 49-by-69-inch photograph is a powerful display. Viewed from one perspective, it shows the 2017 march. Viewed from another angle, it shifts to show a 1913 black-and-white image of a women’s suffrage march also on Pennsylvania…
The New York Times reports: Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos. Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and…
Monkey Business Images By Leonard Schalkwyk, University of Essex and Jonathan Mill, University of Exeter From the tap dancing 90-year-old to the 40-year-old who struggles to run a mile, we all know people who seem surprisingly young or old for their age. Scientists believe that it may be possible to distinguish between two types of age: biological age, a measure of how well the body functions, and chronological age, your age in years. Epigenetics, the science of how environmental factors…
NBC News reports: The Supreme Court agreed Friday to take up an issue that could change a key element of the system America uses to elect its president, with a decision likely in the spring just as the campaign heats up. The answer to the question could be a decisive one: Are the electors who cast the actual Electoral College ballots for president and vice president required to follow the results of the popular vote in their states? Or are…
NPR reports: News organizations and journalists’ advocates are battling restrictive new ground rules for reporters assigned to cover the Senate impeachment trial. Correspondents who submit to an official credentialing process are granted broad access throughout the Capitol complex and usually encounter few restrictions in talking with members of Congress or others. But now Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger has imposed new requirements for the impeachment trial, negotiated in part with Republican leadership: Reporters are being confined to small cordoned-off sections of…
Jonathan Chait writes: In May of 2016, shortly after Donald Trump had wrapped up his party’s nomination, but when the notion he might win the presidency seemed remote at best, Benjamin Wittes wrote one of the very early essays attempting to analyze how an obviously authoritarian president might abuse his powers. “The soft spot, the least tyrant-proof part of the government, is the U.S. Department of Justice,” he argued, laying out how prosecutorial discretion could allow a president to harass…