October 3, 2016

“Today, we had the chance to finish off the FARC as an armed group, and it didn’t happen.” Colombians rejected a peace deal to end the Americas’ longest war by a mere 2,500 votes, leaving supporters of the deal reeling. / Fusion

Cave biologists confirmed that 22 “baby dragons,” properly called olms, are entering adolescence in Slovenia’s Postojna Cave, the first cohort ever hatched by humans. The blind, rare salamanders can live for a century and are spoken of as holding secrets to longevity. / New Scientist, blogs.discovermagazine.com

The New York Review of Books just published an investigation into the identity of Elena Ferrante, author of the much-loved Neapolitan series, identifying an Italian translator as the most likely candidate based on fluctations in her finances. / The New York Review of Books

“I think having a youth-based social justice movement is a bad idea. Not because it’s youth, but because it’s homogenous.” Thoughtful interview with Daniel McGowan, one-time “ecoterrorist” and political prisoner. Having returned to New York, he’s sorting out what contributions he can still make. / Mask

Scholars & Writers for America bands together a group of signatories who believe “Donald J. Trump is the candidate most likely to restore the promise of America.” / scholarsandwritersforamerica.org

“Mr. Mitnick not only said the records appeared to be authentic; he also solved the mystery of the digits that did not line up. It turned out that the tax preparation software he had used did not allow him to enter a loss of nine figures. So, he recalled, he had to manually enter the first two digits, using an IBM Selectric typewriter.” New York Times reporters explain how they broke the story on Trump’s $900 million tax dodge, from anonymous packages to a bagel shop appointment in Florida with Trump’s former accountant. / New York Times

Drug use by Nazis arguably affected history significantly. / The Guardian

Harrowing investigation by the Washington Post into the “cobalt pipeline”—workers in Southern Africa, including children, who risk their lives mining for cobalt, which is essential to producing the lithium-ion batteries that power our smartphones, laptops, and electric cars. / The Washington Post

Traveling while African is, at the very least, a colossal pain in the ass. / Quartz

“I did it for three or four years, and I quite enjoyed it, and then it is like falling out of love. You wake up one day and you look at the person lying next to you, and you think, I’m not in love anymore. That’s what happened to me with the little blue bird.” Salman Rushdie quits Twitter. / New York Magazine

Let’s say that aliens do manage to make contact. How would we figure out how to communicate with them, and is that even possible? Linguists and sci-fi authors weigh in. / cbsnews.com

Most of us know about Esperanto, the world’s most famous (and widely spread) constructed language. Lesser-known is the fact that its inventor was a renowned Yiddish scholar persecuted by Hitler, and that the language he envisioned as helping to foster global communication was “viewed with deep suspicion by totalitarian states.” / drvitelli.typepad.com

Colombian voters declined to approve a referendum that would have ratified the government’s peace agreement with the country’s oldest and largest armed militia, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, by a margin of less than one percentage point. The turnout for the referendum was extremely low, under 40 percent, and an analysis of the geographic distribution of the vote showed that Colombians who deal directly with FARC—poorer, rural descendants of slaves brought from Africa, who live in the outskirts of the country—voted for the deal, while the better-off central urban parts of the country voted against it. / telesurtv.net

Colombia’s armed conflicts with various militias began with La Violencia, a 1950s civil war between armed conservative and liberal peasant groups that claimed 300,000 lives. After the government attacked a small village—that had declared itself independent from the country in 1964—the US got involved. Kennedy ordered US troops to train the Colombian military to invade the largest armed peasant enclaves. An Army official later wrote that, “In order to shield the interests of both Colombian and US authorities against ‘interventionist’ charges any special aid given for internal security was to be sterile and covert in nature.” / colombiareports.com

President Álvaro Uribe’s administration, working with Clinton and Bush, renewed America’s love for military and financial interventions in Colombia, with extremely mixed results. / The Washington Post

“How do you fill the vacuum in these areas where the criminal economy makes up 70 percent of the whole economy?” With FARC (potentially) going legit, what will happen to Colombia’s massive cocaine trade? / The Atlantic

The leader of the efforts for the “no” vote has been Álvaro Uribe, a former president and current senator whose father was killed by FARC. / The Washington Post

As it turns out, Canadians do not say “aboot.” What they do say is actually much weirder. / Atlas Obscura

For those in Southern California who are concerned about the earthquake reports: What you can do to be prepared. / Los Angeles Times

A fake museum, spoof documentary, and an actual bronze monument installed in Battery Park pay tribute to New York’s “most horrific maritime disaster,” when a giant octopus drowned the Staten Island ferry (not really). / The Guardian

“I believe the reason we didn’t do it was because all the physicists didn’t want to do it, on principle. If we had all wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded.” Actual transcript of a dinner party where a drunken German physicist reveals to his colleagues that the Allies succeeded where they failed: in building the bomb to end the war. / German Historical Institute

Marvel just added Luke Cage, a strong and silent black man, to its cinematic universe, and some eager audiences expected “the Black Lives Matter show.” The reality is more complicated. / Mother Jones

“Witness a version of black pleasure that renders black people as sexual beings but not as sexual objects.” Ode to Love Jones and the rest of the ’90s-centric “Black Sex Onscreen” canon. / LitHub

Selma director Ava DuVernay dishes on secrets of black Hollywood, including this one: few directors know how to light actors of color. “Historically, you’ve had really muddy, unforgiving, unintentional images of black people. Usually, you have two people in a scene, and in the history of cinema the hero is most likely going to be the white guy. And the other guy is his friend who is carrying the bag or whatever, and you’re not going to light for that guy.” / Vulture

If Luke Cage seemed to shy from the Black Lives Matter mantle, The Birth of a Nation seemed to run toward it. But apparently the film isn’t worth defending: its poor pacing and unselfconscious posing contribute to its inability to communicate what is so enthralling about the paradox of righteous black revenge embodied by Nat Turner’s vicious rebellion. / The New Yorker