November 4, 2016

Approaching America’s abysmal voter turnout as a user-experience challenge led a Y-Combinator-backed nonprofit to a simple solution: to text unregistered voters. / Backchannel

RJ Reynolds is spending $12 million in Arkansas to support a ballot initiative to raise the cigarette tax. / NPR

A frightening new statistic: as of 2014, the suicide rate for kids ages 10 to 14 had caught up to their death rate for traffic accidents. / The New York Times

A collection of bad jokes written by children. / badkidsjokes.tumblr.com

“In a mixed reality world, computing power isn’t confined to a gadget on your desk. It’s something that you can link to any object, real or virtual, giving it awareness of its location, intelligence about its purpose and insight on how you might want to use it.” Magic Leap wants to make the world your desktop. For the first time, they’ve indicated they’ll bring a product to market; augmented reality arrives in 2018. / Forbes

It looks like someone stole Hitler’s home videos from the National Archives. / Gizmodo

A postcard from Iceland, by Travlr.photography. / travlr.photography

1. “The Jungle” has moved from Calais to Paris, where up to 3,000 migrants are camped out in tents in the city’s northern neighborhoods, with dozens arriving each day. / The New York Times

3. Views of America: Guardian reporter visits Maine, Wisconsin, and Nevada, and says that Americans have been deprived of a serious election. The Times Europe editor visits 11 states and Patrick Buchanan, and finds a country incredibly changed (but can’t make a compelling story out of it). / The Guardian, The New York Times

4. What it’s like to be an American bookseller at the Frankfurt book fair. Also, Charles Koch has 30 books to recommend, and all but one were written by men. / Literary Hub, kochstories.com

4. Interesting: Among voters supporting the Republican candidate, more are voting against Clinton than for Trump. / people-press.org

“Forgiveness, like everything else, has always followed a hierarchy in Hollywood. The elite—those who’ve won awards, broken box office records, sold successful franchises—are often welcomed back.” In the wake of Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Charlie Sheen, Paula Deen, Chris Brown or Billy Bush, forgiving Mel Gibson doesn’t seem so absurd after all. / Los Angeles Times

To teach, to tackle ambitious projects, to support artists, to fill a cultural gap in college towns—and unfortunately to sometimes to join the “worldwide arms race among museums.” / The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal

An ode to being unsatisfied. / Vimeo

Putin’s goal wasn’t to have a Trump puppet in the White House; his mission has always been, instead, to sow chaos and disruption into the American political system. And he’s succeeding. / Foreign Policy

“You’re assuming that ‘establishment Republicans’ are going to be Republicans anymore.” The Republican Party anticipates a long, bloody civil war, regardless of whether Trump wins or not. / Politico Magazine

The inhumane border policies of many Eastern European countries have forced refugees to choose between attempting to stay in Greece and suffer in camps or pay smugglers to return them to Syria. / PRI

Alec Soth photographs people doing “laughter yoga.” / New York Times Magazine

Profiles of 140 Bahraini, Kuwaiti, Omani, Qatari, Saudi, and Emirati social and political activists who have faced retaliation from their governments for speaking out about abuses on social media. / features.hrw.org

As small towns and counties across the Midwest became rapidly more diverse over the last decade, their white inhabitants became Trump supporters-in-the-making. / The Wall Street Journal

“Today, from the outside looking in, the Queer Witch Collective is a virtual ghost world, where nearly 2,000 witches vanished as if the rapture came.” How “Boneghazi” tore apart an accepting online queer witch community. / Broadly

Elmo Keep investigates the story of the Pyramid of the Plains—a nuclear defense base in rural North Dakota, now owned by a secretive but pacifict religious sect—and finds that it may be a perfect symbol for an America that has seemingly forgotten about the folly of nuclear war. / Fusion, The Atlantic

The second-largest private prison company in America, GEO Group, made a potentially illegal $100,000 donation last week to a Super PAC supporting—shocker—Donald Trump. / Fusion

The Trump Organization is, not particularly surprisingly, notorious for destroying documents relevant to ongoing court cases, and for not responding to standard discovery requests from opposing lawyers. / Newsweek