November 22, 2016
Maryland’s Cowgirls of Color are fighting to prove they can excel in a sport long dominated by white men. / The Guardian
“Goldman and Wade often tell each other they aren’t creating anything that’s not already there, that they’re simply fanning it, that readers know not to take their hyperbole and embellishments seriously.” They’d write real news stories, except nobody would click on them! Meet more of the news fakers, driven by profit but happy to profit from delusion. / Washington Post
Donald Trump’s grandfather begged not to be deported from Bavaria. / The Washington Post
A man calling himself Benjaman Kyle was found in the woods with dissociative amnesia. Investigators finally figured out who he was, though he’d had no legal identity for three decades. / The New Republic
The rise of Hindu nationalism via Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India’s Trump—who seeks to impose upper-caste Hindu traditions on the rest of India—has lead to the emergence of violent “cow protector” gangs, who rove around killing those transporting cattle for slaughter. / Quartz, The Guardian
“Over the weekend, Comet Ping Pong received dozens of calls from people screaming obscenities and threats. Mr. Alefantis got 50 nasty Instagram direct messages, including one that warned, ‘This place should be burned to the ground!’” A D.C. pizza restaurant is not home to a child-abuse ring run by Hillary Clinton and John D. Podesta, but try telling that to the alt-right. / New York Times
This Forbes profile of Trump son-in-law and Observer-ruiner Jared Kushner, the first interview he’s granted anyone since joining the campaign, has it all: a horrible smirking photo of Kushner in front of Trump Tower; a quote from Henry Kissinger comparing Kushner to himself (and thus Trump to…Nixon?); mumbo-jumbo about “secret data initiatives,” ROI, and software named Deep Root. / Forbes
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman propounds conscious realism, which avoids quantum physics’ difficulty with one reality beheld by many observers to basically argue that we all do share in some world, but the reality we know is just an evolutionarily useful fiction. / quantamagazine.org, The Atlantic
Current mapping technologies distort our wayfinding instincts out of their natural balance between “egocentric” (process-oriented) and “allocentric” (context-oriented) navigational modes. / Mother Jones
Magic Leap, the world’s biggest startup you’ve never heard of, is working to make augmented reality—customized information projected into the three-dimensional world as we move about it—possible in the next decade. / Wired
The alt-right’s intellectual firepower comes in part from a Thiel-funded Silicon Valley think-tank that has promoted the idea that reality is a simulation run by ultra-powerful computers from the future. / Fusion
“Our production of the world, our interpretation of it, what we’ve been told to experience and what we’ve been told we have to do, both bore and distress me. I don’t want to live in someone else’s dream.” Poet Alice Notley draws from unreality, “where nothing coheres.” / University of Arizona
“Humayun Khan risked his life for a lost cause, and now, his parents have done the same.” Op-ed: Khizr and Ghazala Khan became just more brown collateral damage of Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign. / The New Inquiry
Cup one, small sips: “Judges strike down partisan gerrymander in Wisconsin, likely sending issue to Supreme Court.” / Los Angeles Times
Cup one, cooling middle: Drug testers have been testing old urine samples from previous Olympics. “The results are devastating.” / Mother Jones
End of cup one: F. Scott Fitzgerald conjugates the verb “to cocktail.” / openculture.com
Cup two, beginnings, middle, maybe a bit more: “Zhao Lingmin on the roots of Chinese elite support for Trump.” / andrewbatson.com
Cup two, ending: “Where do Democrats go from here?” Cup two, empty, contemplating cup three: Perhaps the answer isn’t always, “Move more left?” / The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast
Cup three, all of it: David Remnick gets the fly-on-the-wall report from Trump’s off-the-record meeting with TV media. “Trump’s behavior was ‘totally inappropriate’ and ‘fucking outrageous.’” (Trump cancelled a meeting with the New York Times becuase they would’ve required him to be on the record.) / The New Yorker, The New York Times
Update! It’s happening, with live tweets. / The New York Times
“We don’t recognize advanced life because it forms an integral and unsuspicious part of what we’ve considered to be the natural world.” Caleb Scharf: What if life itself is part of the fabric of reality? / Nautilus
The Tournament of Books is just three months away, and we’re busy compiling our annual long list of potential contenders in the 2017 Tournament of Books. Expect to see our 2016 long list the first week of December. In the meantime, welcome back to our 2017 sponsors, Field Notes and Powell’s, and if all this got you into that Rooster spirit, you can always relive previous tournaments at the official ToB website. / fieldnotesbrand.com, powells.com
The Kremlin’s influence in Western governments is much more pronounced in Europe than it is in the US. / atlanticcouncil.org
Some Black Friday deals we can get behind. / Huge Black Friday Deals
Great travel story by Ron Stodghill about Charleston, S.C., where most people go for cobblestone streets and low country cooking, not to learn about the epicenter of America’s slave-trading history. / New York Times
“The president-elect we have, whether he knows it or not, already has figured out how to maximize the number of illegal Mexican immigrants.” Proposal after proposal, decision after decision, Trump shows he wants more illegal immigration, not less. / Bloomberg
Got those tiny-home tinglings? Want to live #vanlife for real? (And not just for the romantic encounters?) Vanual will walk you through all the steps of being the Dwell-subscribing dirtbag of your dreams. / Instagram, thevanual.com, dwell.com
The Brookings Institution analyzes the election returns and comes up with this interesting fact: The economic divide between Trump and Clinton voters is massive. / The Washington Post