October 17, 2016

The Obama administration and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, under pressure from Clinton-connected airline lobbyists and Rahm Emanuel, failed despite efforts to block the US Airways-American airline merger—which has enriched executives and hiked prices for consumers. / ProPublica

Fiber and beans might make you fart more, but don’t blame them for the smell. / New Scientist

“The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power.” Richard Hofstadter on the “paranoid style of American politics,” from 1964. / Harper’s

“I can’t see the fever swamp, alt-reality media universe on the right learning the lessons of this. Can you see Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham saying, ‘OK, sorry, we screwed up’?” Trump’s conspiracy-theorist, group-thinking supporters are unlikely to accept defeat in November. / Politico

“The election proved to be the longest, closest, most hostile, and most controversial—up to that time—in the history of the United States.” The most contested American presidential election win in history is Rutherford B. Hayes’s “victory” over Samuel J. Tilden in 1876, in which Tilden received 250,000 more popular votes but “lost” the election due to actual rigging by the Republicans. / The Miller Center at the University of Virginia

It’s true! A brief list, with some recent examples: / HuffPost

Honduras, where a failure by Hillary Clinton’s State Department to condemn a violent coup d’état legitimized it. / democracynow.org

Iran, where the US launched its own coup in 1953 against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. / The Guardian

Haiti, where the US regularly installs puppet governments and otherwise intervenes in elections. / globalresearch.ca, cepr.net

Chile, where the CIA admitted to kidnapping a top general for refusing to prevent Salvador Allende from taking power. / ABC News

Indonesia, where the US, with the UK and Australia, was found complicit in the mass killing of communists after the Community Party was offered proportional representation in the parliament. / tribunal1965.org

“An African amulet. Individual or team scores of 111 or multiples thereof. The first person to step over a threshold on New Year’s Day.” A glossary of terms related to luck. / Lapham’s Quarterly

TV executives have long used the NFL’s live games as a last defense against cord-cutting; no longer. / The Washington Post

Philippine president Duterte prepares to concede the South China Sea to China. / defenseone.com

How to reduce Latin America’s current murder rate by 50 percent in 10 years: multiple specific measures, including “collective efficacy,” the ability of community members “to control the behavior of others, especially in violence-prone neighborhoods.” / americasquarterly.org, lanacion.com.ar

“Watching [Zadie] Smith’s progress from dazzling ingenue to acute self-critic to wiser old hand has been fascinating.” Review of Zadie Smith’s Swing Time goes semi-haliographic. / Prospect

On any given day in the US, at least 137,000 people are behind bars on simple drug-possession charges, and nearly two-thirds of them are in local jails. / The Washington Post

“O Great Teacher, if you haven’t done anything wrong, don’t stay in Pennsylvania.” The twisted, endlessly complex tale that lead up to the coup attempt in Turkey this year, expertly told by Dexter Filkins. / The New Yorker

The judicial and legal presumption that police officers have some kind of special knowledge about human interactions that we mortals do not—which “has pervaded our legal system more broadly than typically imagined”—has contributed to “structural biases” toward the police and “newly deferential” approaches on the part of judges. / papers.ssrn.com

A Maine anarchist explains how working with drug users convinced him to vote this year. / Truthout

Political influence on Wall Street is real: “A 114-character tweet from Senator Bernie Sanders’ twitter account cost Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc. investors as much as $387 million on Friday afternoon.” / Bloomberg

“In 2015, nearly half of all drug possession arrests (over 574,000) were for marijuana possession. By comparison, there were 505,681 arrests for violent crimes.... This means that police made more arrests for simple marijuana possession than for all violent crimes combined.” Every 25 seconds, someone in America is arrested for personal drug possession; they are over two and a half times more likely to be black than white. / Human Rights Watch/ACLU

Primetime shows on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC spent a collective two hours and 22 minutes discussing student debt and college costs in the last full year. / mediamatters.org

Lost in the fuss about Hillary’s media strategy, WikiLeaks transcripts show how a transition team that was largely picked from—and even by—industry set the agenda for President Obama’s biggest first-term policy decisions. / The New Republic

“Let’s all pitch in, no matter what your party affiliation, and get that office open again quickly.” Democrat starts fund to rebuild firebombed GOP office in North Carolina, quickly raises $13,000. / Quartz

“To rig an election, you would need (1) technological capabilities that exist only in Mission Impossible movies, plus (2) the cooperation of the Republicans and Democrats who are serving as the polling place’s election officials, plus (3) the blind eyes of the partisan pollwatchers who are standing over their shoulders, plus (4) the cooperation of another set of Republicans and Democrats—the officials at the post-elections canvass, plus (5) the blind eyes of the canvass watchers, too.” FYI the election is not rigged / Extra Newsfeed

An interview with a historian of medicine cabinets touches on scientific motherhood, snoopy houseguests, and how “the practices and the aesthetics of the medicine cabinet grew up together.” / cabinetmagazine.org

Hillary Clinton’s “ambitious but politically attainable” plan for tackling poverty would allow poor families to claim child tax credits they currently can’t. That answers a call from some circles for her campaign to address poverty, and specifically the shortcomings of the welfare reforms her husband ushered through two decades ago. / Vox, dissentmagazine.org

If Dylan can win the Nobel with his growl, why is Joanna Newsom—several brilliant albums deep—still broadly characterized by her voice’s perceived, gendered deficiency, rather than as an award-worthy musical and lyrical creator? / The Awl

China might have lifted the one-child policy, but that doesn’t mean Chinese parents want to have any more children. Demographics suggest parents taking advantage of the two-child policy will only add 50 million children to China’s peak population around 1.45 billion in 2029. / Pacific Standard

“In businesses, on the street, and in peer groups, ideas are shaped more by face-to-face interaction than by digital media.” Face-to-face is the biggest determinant of voting behavior. Sociologists show that communities in physical proximity share voting behaviors far more closely than broad demographics like race, income, or age. / Nautilus

Not an Onion headline: The Nobel committee can’t reach the famously mercurial singer, who has yet to return an RSVP to the award banquet. / The Guardian

1. She did not attempt to murder Julian Assange with a vegan sandwich over the weekend. / The Guardian

2. She did give a speech about pornography addiction at the Oxford Union—an issue she aims to fight through “a sensual revolution.” / oxford-union.org, The Wall Street Journal

Don’t know what you’re doing tonight, but we’ll be over here, reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s jaunty new Greeland travel diary—aka, Installment #648 on the end of Earth as we know it. “In effect, we are living in the climate of the past, but already we’ve determined the climate’s future.” / The New Yorker

Laszlo Foldenyi, a Hungarian professor of art, has written a literary history of melancholy. Dan Wang’s review tells you pretty much everything you need to know (without reading the book). / danwang.co

“The problem is... we have accepted as our social reality that it is okay for half the people arrested to never go home until their trial.” Lengthy investigation into how Chicago and Cook County’s bail system traps thousands of poor black people in jail, sometimes for years on end, at high cost to taxpayers. / Injustice Watch

“The truth is that we ran the flag up the pole too soon. No doubt about it.” Prominent in the catalog of Cubbie woe: In 1969, a black cat circled star Ron Santo on the field, and Mr. Cub Ernie Banks wasn’t enough to stave off a furious finish by the Miracle Mets. / Chicago Tribune

“That mounting sense of dread accompanying escalating blunders is what sportswriter Thomas Boswell once called ‘the spooky music’ that runs under baseball. And yet it’s easier for us to focus on a single mistake and call that ‘the turning point.’” / The A.V. Club

See also: The 30 for 30 Catching Hell, a feature-length documentary on the Bartman incident. / espn.com

Despite their regular-season advantage, the Cubs find themselves tied with the Dodgers, and even behind in championship odds, 31 to 35 percent. / fangraphs.com