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The Morning News

“Whispering, cajoling, lobbying, neck massaging, beard-pulling”

A few days late on this, but here's an interesting thread from New York Times East Africa correspondent Abdi Latif Dahir on what it was like to watch Somalia's presidential election up close over the weekend.

See also: "Somalia elects new President, but terrorists hold true power"

May 20, 2022
More Headlines
In case you've been getting a lot of mistaken texts from random numbers, it's called the "pig-butchering" scam.
↩︎ Read Max 2d
Q-Anon is back, and the influencers who made their names off him are thrilled. Except when he keeps showing himself to be a fraud.
↩︎ VICE 2d
Data on the rise and spread of BA.5 Covid subvariant: what we know, where it's gaining, and how to defend against it.
↩︎ Ground Truths 4d
Where are the world's millionaires moving this year? Mainly Singapore, Switzerland, Israel, the UAE, and Australia.
↩︎ Visual Capitalist 4d
The auto industry is growing wary of CATL, the industry's biggest battery company, and Beijing seems to agree.
↩︎ WIRED 4d

US leaders can’t or won’t understand that many US allies can’t and won’t stake their futures on whatever the American position happens to be at any particular moment

Washington made support of a Ukrainian victory a litmus test for American democracy. Germany and other allies have other views.
↩︎ Tablet
4d

The fiction of Batuman’s fiction is that novels are dangerous because people like Selin read them as a guide to the future. But as Batuman (and her novel) know full well, fictions offer a way for both writers and readers to understand their pasts, not their futures.

Elif Batuman’s new campus novel feels like a guidebook to being “inside a body newly being touched, and touching.”
↩︎ The London Review of Books
4d
From last January 2020 (but new to us), a candid, lucid—and, well, fictional—FAQ page about brain surgery by Mary South.
↩︎ The White Review 6d
A survey dedicated to the function and aesthetics of women's eyebrows in fine art. (And not just Frida Kahlo.)
↩︎ Hyperallergic 6d

Liberal internationalists believe that the United States can manage and predict foreign affairs. Restrainers do not. For those of us in the latter camp, the withering away of the American Century cannot be reversed; it can only be accommodated.

Daniel Bessner: We’ve exited an American century and entered a global one. Whether US foreign policy heard the news is unclear.
↩︎ Harper's
6d

An acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of 75 barrels of crude oil. A great Malibu firestorm, therefore, may generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.

The great writer and thinker (and person and activist) Mike Davis has entered palliative care. From 1996, “Let Malibu Burn.”
↩︎ L.A. Weekly, via Indymedia
6d
"Why does my old boss who loved racist jokes suddenly sound like Malcolm X?" Yet another quitting-Twitter letter, but still funny.
↩︎ The Ankler 6d
Abortion providers have been bracing for this. Here's a guide on how to access abortion services in post-Roe America.
↩︎ BuzzFeed News 1w
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