October 26, 2016

A company told a black woman she couldn’t wear dreadlocks. She alleged racial discrimination. And while the court said dreadlocks weren’t an “immutable” characteristic of black racial identity, it remained reluctant to define race itself. / NPR

Andrew WK is actually Dave Grohl, Stevie Wonder can really see, Jack the Ripper wrote Through the Looking Glass, Laurel Canyon was full of CIA agents, and more. / Vulture

Wine drinkers understand there is a range of quality. Olive oil consumers, on the other hand, do not. But many olive oil producers see wine as the only economic model they can emulate. They also face large-scale fraud that undermines the viability of small- and medium-scale operations. / National Geographic, Mother Jones

As it tries to ingratiate itself to antitrust regulators, AT&T faces a report that it directly profited from building and maintaining a massive, secretive database of Americans’ phone records while distributing information about unsuspecting customers to law enforcement agencies without warrants. / The Daily Beast, eff.org, The New York Times

“GINSBURG: If we were to demand that judges write their own opinions, would that be a good thing? POSNER: Oh, it’d be great! Half of them would resign immediately.” Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit, egregiously honest and a leading judicial intellect, makes waves with comments to the legal community. / Above the Law

Your Wednesday Kickstarter project of note: “Retracing Reggae Record Sleeves in London.” / kickstarter.com

“States have again become what US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called them almost a hundred years ago—laboratories of democracy.” State elections matter again: They will decide everything from minimum wage to marijuana policy to minority voting rights. / Dissent

Winner of the 2016 Tournament of Books, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout has won the Booker—the first book to do so by an American author. / The New York Times

“Recently, a new sense for conflate has emerged, meaning ‘To mistake one thing for another,’ as if it were a synonym for confuse.” Behold, a new verb sense emerges for conflate. In other news, “speedrunning” means to play through a video game as fast as possible. / The American Heritage Dictionary

Putin isn’t the only one interested in restoring his nation’s previous borders. Turkish President Erdogan has started playing to an irredentist flank of his nationalist base with crude maps that put Greek islands and even Mosul under Turkish control. / Foreign Policy

“The triumph of populism has left conservatism marooned, confused, uncertain, depressed, anxious, searching for a tradition, for a program, for viability.” How populism displaced conservatism in the Republican Party. See also: Ross Douthat is lost in a dark wood. / The Washington Free Beacon

Exposure of high-end poker cheating devices. “Using a modified phone as a cheating device offers the key advantage that it is impossible to tell that it is a cheating device unless you know what to look for.” / elie.net

“Vagina gonna win the race.” Pussy Riot weighs in on the US presidential election with a perfectly timed ode to the ladyflower. / YouTube

In time for Halloween, here’s some occult art history: The first known depiction of a witch on a broom is from the 15th century—and no, it’s not exactly a coincidence that the broom is a phallic symbol. / hyperallergic.com

When American companies try to rebrand overseas, what’s the best way to translate their names? Jane C. Hu explains how and why phono-semantic matching works, i.e., finding something that matches both the sound and the meaning. / Quartz

How do you translate “quidditch” into Dutch? Tight deadlines and many, many pages meant the Harry Potter books were a translator’s nightmare. / Vox

A young Hong Kong lawmaker is getting what Americans are starting to see as the “Hillary treatment”—being brutally excoriated online and at demonstrations by opponents with gendered slurs and threats. / The Washington Post

Map of London social and functional analysis / Mapping London

“Even when we think we’re being different, we’re being influenced. Avoiding influence doesn’t mean we’re still not subject to it.” A true rebel has never existed. / Nautilus

“For eight years, nearly every decision made by Republican lawmakers has been motivated by a paralyzing fear of a base whose news diet has become completely detached from reality.” Obama’s old speechwriter is pulling for reasonable Republicans to win the party’s civil war, but the balance of power in the GOP leaves him no reasons for optimism. / The Ringer

“The future that actually happens will never feel quite as futuristic as the one that gets frozen in time. Our self-driving cars will still feel like ordinary cars, even if they can do things that we once thought impossible.” How we found (and lost) the dream of Personal Rapid Transit. / The Verge

“Her Republican opponents will quickly argue that her election was not a referendum on her immigration-reform plan, her infrastructure spending ideas, or her childcare and family-leave proposals... The campaign, they will claim, was simply a rejection of Trump.” Ryan Lizza says President Hillary Clinton is going to have a mandate problem. / The New Yorker

A quest to find the origin of pencil lead, “a truly remarkable history.” / NPR

“This is my dad lecturing us on the meaning of social media.” Even the president of the United States gets embarrassed by his children on Snapchat. / BBC

Following the DOJ’s decision to end use of private prisons, the privare prison industry is ramping up its lobbying. / The Washington Post

With the Department of Homeland Security now in the position of being private prisons’ last federal sugar daddy—CCA got a secret, no-bid $1 billion contract to build and run the country’s largest family detention center from ICE earlier this year—what can it do to ratchet down its increasing reliance on the industry? Luckily the ACLU has a helpful white paper that lays out what steps it should take: / The Washington Post, ACLU

There are obstacles, though: an anonymous ICE official told the Journal last month that ending ICE’s use of private prisons would require an 800 percent expansion of the agency’s capacity. / The Wall Street Journal

“It shouldn’t have taken the ACLU to make the government realize that holding innocent children in a converted medium-security adult prison is a bad idea.” Former ACLU attorney Vanita Gupta reflects on her fight to close America’s first big experiment with private family detention. / The New Yorker

Prior to the DOJ’s recent decision to end the use of private prisons, bureaucrats created a lucrative new classification of prisons, specifically built for immigrants who have solely been charged with immigration-related offenses. / ACLU

The government has no reliable data on whether private prisons actually save taxpayers money—which is ostensibly the entire reason they exist. / gao.gov