February 2, 2017
Alex Stamos defended Aaron Swartz and embarassed the NSA chief after Snowden revelations. If Trump tries to strongarm Zuckerberg into collaboration, Stamos will be how we know. / boingboing.net
“Facts were insults of the king you could go to prison for. Fictions were stories of the king that weren’t true.” Blow-your-mind moment this morning, courtesy of a historical look at fake news: The categories of “fact” and “fiction” originally arose as a legal distinction for what could and couldn’t be printed. / emptywheel
Striking taxi drivers were able to react to the travel ban as human beings precisely because they were organized. Uber’s independent contractors, drawn from the same labor pool, couldn’t pull the same thing off. / Deadspin
On the muxes—a regional term roughly analogous to genderqueer—of Juchitán de Zaragoza, Mexico: / narrative.ly
“We are all gonna end up in this fucking Turkey… It’s hell. It’s fucking hell.” Queer refugees living in Turkey, but desperately trying to gain asylum in America, reassess their situations now that President Trump’s Executive Order has been signed. / BuzzFeed News
“Like Monaco, this is gonna be Princess Pamela’s Kingdom Come and the only passport anyone is gonna need, is lovin’ kindness and a good appetite for soul cookin’.” The mystery of Princess Pamela, the South Carolina home chef who ran an idiosyncratic Manhattan restaurant for decades and then vanished without a trace. / Food52
In the late 1990s, in order to get out from under federal supervision, the Chicago Housing Authority undertook an ambitious plan to completely destroy and rebuild the city’s public housing stock. Nearly two decades later, the “rebuild” part still hasn’t been completed. / Patricia Evans
“In an 1888 lecture, James Russell Lowell, a founder of this magazine, challenged the happy assumption that the Constitution was a ‘machine that would go of itself.’ Lowell was right. Checks and balances is a metaphor, not a mechanism.” David Frum puts forth an uncharacteristically coherent case: Trump’s autocracy will be legal. / The Atlantic
“In the founders’ day, the ratio between the most and least populous state was 12 to one. Today it’s 67 to one; by 2030, it’s expected to reach 81 to one.” We’re in this place because the Constitution is increasingly out of date, and the issue of over-representation by rural states is almost impossible to roll back. / Jacobin
Border Patrol, apparently under orders only from the top, is spawning panic from some who take their refusal to cooperate with court-mandated Federal Marshals as a sign for existential concern. / CNN, electronicintifada.net
Contrary to what you remember from civics, the courts are not an autonomous domain untainted by public opinion. And the idea that they naturally safeguard our rights is just historically wrong. It’s when courts feel the pressure of social movements that they’ve issued their most enlightened opinions. / Jacobin
Yes, Neil Gorsuch really did quote a frighteningly apt Kissinger quip in his yearbook. / Snopes