January 18, 2017

“At the American Federation of Teachers, there were always Republicans we’d endorse. And it got to the point where … the Republicans would say, ‘Please don’t endorse me because it will hurt me with the DeVoses.’ They’d send back money because the DeVoses would punish them.” How Trump’s education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos came to control Michigan’s education system, the legislature, and more. / Politico

The frame cuts out everything but the nipple, so the algorithm has no idea if it’s looking at a man’s nipple (OK) or a woman’s nipple (not OK). / papermag.com

Can’t say we loved reading all of these, but they certainly were all interesting. —“The Science of Swearing,” Timothy Jay and Kristin Janschewitz, Association for Psychological Science / psychologicalscience.org

Good to know: Japan’s Sanitary Equipment Industry Association agreed yesterday to standardize the iconography used on control panels for toilets. / It’s Nice That

Carved into a cliff outside Cape Town, a rare depiction of how it looks to see your colonizers arriving. / Hakai Magazine

After eight years of relatively normalcy from the Executive Branch under President Obama—whose oddest trait might be his anal nighttime nut habit, or the vast and unscrupulous expansion of the surveillance state and drone warfare, take your pick—we are now about to enter at least a few years of President Trump, who exhibits, shall we say, questionable tendencies for a commander-in-chief. Even outside of his Nuremburg-style rallies and tiny hands. / The New York Times, dissentmagazine.org, The Intercept

For example: “I would rarely leave the White House,” Trump told The Hill in June 2015. At the time it seemed like a negligible line, because, obviously, the thought of him entering the White House to begin with was…well. / The Hill

Anyway, it bears a look back on now, particularly in light of his recent and historic agoraphobic behavior. The president-elect rarely leaves Trump Tower or Mar-a-Lago, and during times of crisis he holes himself up in his office and surrounds himself with yes men. / Jezebel, The New York Times, The Washington Post

See also: Trump’s germophobia—he once described shaking hands as “barbaric”—which he tried to use as a reason why he would not have had two Russian prostitutes pee on a bed. Also his rumored dependency on “cheap speed,” which, given the man that he parades around as his doctor, seems all but guaranteed? And then there’s his weird burger order ($36 and well-done), and, of course, his Nazi fetishism. / New York, cosmopolitan.com, Gawker, STAT, The Washington Post

One of Trump’s top advisors is the unfortunate Silicon Valley cyborg concept of a human being Peter Thiel, who—in addition to advocating for going Galt in the middle of the ocean, allegedly taking advice on the Presidential transition from alleged floor-shitting troll Chuck Johnson, being anti-women’s suffrage, and, of course, running a yearslong covert legal operation to shut down Gawker—is interested in injecting young blood in his body to stay alive forever. / Gawker, Forbes, cato-unbound.org, inc.com

See also: When asked, Anne Rice voiced support for Thiel’s proposed slow transformation into vampire. / The Daily Beast

“Executives of other oil companies describe Exxon Mobil as ‘ruthless, self-isolating and inscrutable … priggish Presbyterian deacons’ who maintain ‘kind of a 1950s Southern religious culture. They’re all engineers, mostly white males, mostly from the South. … They shared a belief in the One Right Answer.’” At ExxonMobil, top leadership operates in a cult-like fashion, and likely Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all but grew up in it. It’ll be interesting to have a cult leader as our chief diplomat. / In These Times

This is incoming Small Business Administration head Linda McMahon. / YouTube

“The eighties were Trump’s era, where he still seemed to live. But he was also reminiscent of the older comics who once roamed the Catskills, those dark and angry men who provided a cathartic outlet for harsh ideas that both broke and reinforced taboos, about the war between men and women, especially. Trump was that hostile-jaunty guy in the big flappy suit, with the vaudeville hair, the pursed lips, and the glare. There’s always been an audience for that guy.” Basically, Trump is the very worst kind of comedian. / The New Yorker

“It seems it’s been forgotten that even in the realm of information technology, many of the same technical challenges, partial solutions, and problem areas have been around since the beginning of the discipline.” Some info about the “neophilic” tendency to forget that concerns about privacy have dominated computer circles for decades. / Freedom to Tinker

Lovely photographs by Daniel Ranalli that show how snails travel when left on their own. At Laurence Miller Gallery in Los Angeles this weekend. / Daniel Ranalli, laurencemillergallery.com

Sometimes books actually work quite well as websites: Matt Warshaw’s coffetable titan The History of Surfing is now available online. Similar to the terrific Encyclopedia of Surfing website, but more narrative in laying out the sport’s chronology. / Amazon, historyofsurfing.net, encyclopediaofsurfing.com

“I’ll take a chicken nugget any day over a chicken tender. If the tender is more pure product, more Jonathan Waxman, the nugget is more food science, more Wylie Dufresne, more manipulation—a polite way of saying more processed. It is cooking as transformation.” Eater ranks America’s chicken nuggets. Wendy’s wins, White Castle loses, and McDonald’s nuggets are compared to golden labs. / Eater