February 10, 2017
The offer from President Trump to “destroy” the career of an unnamed state senator in Texas was prompted by a county sheriff’s opposition to a bill of theirs that would prohibit civil asset forfeiture—which, as our stack shows, is a pretty normal position for a law enforcement official to take. / Politico
“If efforts to apply the accord do not overcome…initial hurdles, parts of it may be condemned to failure before they have a chance to succeed.” A narrative report on the scrambled, and thus far successful, race to save the Colombia-FARC peace accords after the electorate (barely) rejected the plebiscite finds that peace is shakier than ever. / International Crisis Group
The segment of the Screen Actors’ Guild responsible for video game voiceovers has been on strike for nearly four months. / Deadline
Your Friday art discovery: Paintings by Allan Balisi of the Philippines, subtle, spare, and moving. (h/t Booooooom) / Allan Balisi, booooooom.com
Humans have surveyed very little of our world, not even half of the sky and less than a fifth of the ocean floor. The VQR publishes a good story about the Aurora, a sixty-foot sloop exploring the shores of eastern Greenland, and other quests to map what’s around us. / VQR
Bridges connect places, people—and underneath them live trolls, slurping, snorting, enviously watching people go by. Good (academic) reading in “Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions,” by Justin Cheng, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec. / files.clr3.com
“The problem is that travel writing, a form of writing about departures, about leaving the known in order to venture into the unknown, could become a stay-at-home genre.” Travel broadens the mind, reduces the gap between “us” and “them.” But how about travel writing? Geoff Dyer says the form is eternal, is writing itself. / Granta
Portraits of people not often found pictured (presumably from Wyoming?) by Lindsay D’Addato. / Lindsay D’Addato
Sometimes, all the time, every rabbit hole that lurks at the bottom of every second, it feels like there’s an alien species in the White House. Unfortunately, he’s all too human. Here are five things to keep in mind when you struggle to grasp his moods and behavior, excerpted below. / talkingpointsmemo.com
Admitted out of left field (or, the ad court?), but a close comparison of Roger Federer’s balletics and those of “Baby Fed” Grigor Dimitrov proves a hypnotizing study of imitation and flattery. / YouTube, Tennis.com
Too often we Americans forget prisons are supposed to be rehabilitative, that the vast majority of prisoners aren’t monsters. Whereas, in Dutch-land: / The New York Times
A great quick video by Vanessa Hill and BrainCraft about the psychology of me vs. you, us vs. them, “ingroups, outgroups, and social identity theory.” Get ready to remember, in a nice way, that doing nice things for other people is good for you. / YouTube
When the power goes out in Palestine, barbers turn to fire. / Twitter
“He didn’t choose his disciples; they chose him. And he told them what they wanted to hear until he was transformed in the process.” L. Ron Hubbard was more surprised than anyone by the success of dianetics–and quicker than anyone else to be convinced of his superiority. / Longreads
“Hitler’s method was to lie until he got what he wanted, by which point it was too late.” Looking back on the last few issues of the stalwart Munich Post, which refused to normalize Nazism, with a biographer of Hitler (and skeptic of Trump). / LA Review of Books
An entire chapter of the FBI’s until-recently secret governing rules is dedicated to how agents can use immigration status as leverage against potential informants—especially Muslims in the years after 9/11. / The Intercept
Eritrean-American writer—and judge for this year’s Tournament of Books—Rahawa Haile writes about hiking the Appalachian Trail and leaving a library of black writers in her wake. / Buzzfeed