December 8, 2016
TMN / The Morning News
After San Francisco city officials ordered the large tent city on Division Street cleared in February, the San Francisco Chronicle followed seven former residents for months. / sfexaminer.com, San Francisco Chronicle
An extensive Oregonian investigation finds that thousands of National Guard armories around the country—used for family gatherings and deployments—are highly contaminated with lead picked up from firing ranges and training courses by ventilation systems and spread throughout the facilities. / oregonlive.com
Nationwide, due to outdated and patriarchal legal thinking toward preserving family relations, family court systems allow an estimated 58,000 children per year to have unsupervised visits with parents who likely sexually abused them. / 100r.org
Just 16 percent of “high-fatality” (six or more) shootings between 1966 and 2015 happened in gun-restricted or -free zones, further proving false the conservative meme that gun-free zones invite mass shootings. / thetrace.org, USA Today
“The harder it is to publish null results, the more overconfident we will be in the significance of what’s in the literature.” Dense but illuminating data dive into the publication bias problem plaguing big science. / Predictably Noisy
A week after Donald Trump’s proclaimed deal to save jobs at a Carrier plant in Indiana, there’s still no shortage of confusion about the move, which he secured by arranging tax incentives for Carrier to stay. Sarah Palin called it socialism, whereas actual socialist Bernie Sanders called it a model for corporations to escape their responsibilities. / Politico, The Washington Post
“I can’t help but think that at some point a few years ago, most of us put our heads down to our phones and haven’t really looked up since.... Have our blockades and rallies drawn us further out of our own geographies and into a network of digital affinity? Are we accumulating followers, or dismantling the regimes of power acting against the communities we actually live in? It’s honestly hard to tell, and as we raise our heads from our phones to look around, we’ll have to ask ourselves an even harder question: are our communities still here? Like, are they even out there anymore?” In the weeks after Trump’s election, young people’s social networks buzzed with plans to organize. But who are these people I’m friends with, again? / Mask
“Here we are, living in what feels like an excessively on-the-nose novel by Don DeLillo, in which a President-elect tweets of his cabinet-selection process, ‘I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!’ One all-too-schematic plot twist is the revelation that Richard Spencer—the white supremacist whose phrase ‘alt-right’ was adopted by Trump’s strategist, Steve Bannon—wrote a master’s thesis on the topic of none other than Theodor W. Adorno, arguing that Wagner’s anti-Semitism prevented Adorno from coming to terms with his love for Wagner’s music. The Department of Hitler Studies, from DeLillo’s ‘White Noise,’ is moving to D.C.” Adorno arrived in America only to fear the power of its mass media to blur fact and fiction. Oh, he’d have a field day now. / The New Yorker
This summer, 500 African migrants perished in the Mediterranean when their boat capsized near Egypt. Reuters tracked down the brokers who made travel arrangements for the migrants through social media, revealing an ad hoc network of students and smugglers eager to shed responsibility for their part in tragedy. / Reuters