February 22, 2017
As liberal as we are, we do like reading things that don’t necessarily carry water for the White House, but shade in some blank spots.
1. “How disorderly is Sweden really?”, Marginal Revolution / Marginal Revolution
2. Bill Maher takes credit (not convincingly) for Milo Yiannopoulos’s downfall, New York Times / The New York Times
3. “Reality Begins to Set in on Obamacare—For Both Sides,” Mother Jones / Mother Jones
4. “When the Enemy of Your Enemy Is... Your Enemy,” National Review / nationalreview.com
The Long Tail of the Attica Prison Riot / TMN
A reading of different reports on contemporary leaking in government reaches the following conclusion: “Leaks are part of how the government manages the press and maintains its own popularity. A leak can get a story onto the front page, or if the first leak did not create the right impression, the information flow can be massaged by yet another leak.” / cpj.org, Bloomberg
Meet Christian Fuchs, Peruvian artist and photographer, who’s been dressing up as his illustrious ancestors since the age of 10. / BBC Magazine
Prior to his death on Feb. 22, 1987, Warhol had been ill for at least a month, but had delayed treatment due to his fear of hospitals. He needed gall bladder surgery, which many assumed would be a simple operation, enough that it triggered a wrongful-death lawsuit four years later: / The New York Times
Ryan found that Warhol’s hypochondria probably killed him. When Warhol finally checked into the hospital for surgery—after at least a month of illness—the operation turned out to be anything but routine: / The New York Times
Andy lives on, though, at @WarholLives, which “live” tweets The Andy Warhol Diaries—and it was hard to pick just three: / Twitter, Amazon
“I get screeners from SAG. Some, not as much as I got from the Academy. I lend them to my neighbor.” Can’t teach an old Italian mobster actor new tricks? A shocking admission from Carmine Caridi, the Godfather actor who was kicked out of the Academy for sharing his copies of screeners. / The Hollywood Reporter
A data-visualization deep dive into North Korean news propaganda: who they mention, word frequency, topic frequency over the year, and more. / Xavier Marquez
“In my job I oversee about 250 enemies of the people. We have enemies of the people who make maps, cover high school baseball, send tweets about the Cowboys, assign book reviews, critique restaurants, track North Texas home prices and write profiles of tech entrepreneurs. One enemy of the people spends his days talking to grieving families and carefully crafting the stories of the dead.” Trump’s broadsides at the “elite media” defile the contributions of yeoman local journalists. / Dallas Morning News
A dispatch from “First Ladyland,” Melania Trump’s Slovenian hometown. / Vimeo
“Any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?” Elizabeth Kolbert dives into history to see why facts don’t change our minds. The frightening answer: because humans are bad at thinking. / The New Yorker
Credit: Hannah Price / TMN
“You’re actually dangerous when you do what Yiannopoulos did in the ‘pedophile’ tapes: defend society’s most hated outcasts, and tell the truth about the complexities of gay men’s sexuality. You’re dangerous when you stick up for those on the fringes rather than kicking them.” A knotty take on Yiannopoulos: Many accommodated his racism and sexism, but not a frank discussion about his taboo sexual history. / Current Affairs
Dev Patel is the third actor of Indian origin to be nominated for an Oscar. The first was half-Sri Lankan (then Ceylonese) Merle Oberon, who refused to appear on camera without makeup. / Mic
“When dead migrants are made visible, it also becomes a moral obligation to do something about it.” There is no official database of refugees who die crossing Europe’s borders, in part because countries will need to take responsibility as opposed to foisting blame on smugglers and migrants. / Refugees Deeply
Childhood is fertile terrain for the genre of horror, as Stephen King explains in the 1989 interview featured in this video. Via Aeon. / Aeon
“At its core, the initiative appears to be an elaborate marketing tool.” An investigation into the much-hyped project to cure cancer (“cancer moonshot”) by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong—the world’s richest doctor, linked to both Trump and Tronc—finds that there is little actual medicine being practiced. / STAT
If Trump’s border wall becomes a reality, it will run through the middle of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation in Arizona. / The New York Times
“Stories are routinely harvested from Native communities by non-Native journalists, exported to newsrooms and ‘processed’ for the benefit of non-Native audiences. Sadly, the word ‘Native’ can be substituted with nearly any other ethnic group in the country.” What mainstream American journalists need to understand and rectify about reporting on Native communities in the wake of Trump. / Al Jazeera
In December, “Trump advisors” told Reuters that the plan going forward is to essentially coerce Native tribes into allowing private oil and gas companies to access potentially huge deposits of oil and natural gas under or around their reservations. / Reuters
“I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up the reservations.” An overview of Trump’s pre-presidential interactions with Natives is about as ugly as you’d assume, running from insinuating that some tribes were lying about their status to repeatedly trying to tie them to organized crime. / The Washington Post
“This is America. When did we become afraid of one man? We cannot allow our fears to hold us back any longer.” Native organizers and activists are ready to battle Trump on every front—in many ways thanks to the massive national Native American protest networking event that was the Standing Rock camp. / The Huffington Post