Headlines Edition, Y'all

Friday headlines: Look! The Rubicon!

Trump is considering using funds set aside for disaster relief projects in Puerto Rico, California, and Texas to pay for his border wall.

“Siphoning funding from real disasters to pay for a crisis manufactured by the president is wholly unacceptable and the American people won’t fall for it.”

Trump’s shutdown ties the longest in history. Day by day accounts of people affected, from FDA food inspectors to anyone with Section 8 housing.

Some federal workers turn to crowdfunding to pay their bills.

Populism contains two primary claims: A country’s ‘true people’ are locked into conflict with outsiders, including establishment elites; nothing should constrain the will of the true people. A lucid report sets out to define populism from a global perspective and identify some of its key trends since 1990.

A comedy writer recounts meeting some of the bright lights of Saudi Arabia's young creative types—who've since disappeared.

A fascinating account of how Russia came to possess the nerve agents used in recent poisonings around London.

Your weekly white paper: toward a hydrodynamic theory of polarized crowds (think people lining up to run a marathon).

Nine new islands are set to be constructed south of Copenhagen, which will be Scandinavia's largest land reclamation project.

A short film: In Longyearbyen, Norway, the northernmost town in the world, it’s illegal to be buried seeing how bodies never decompose.

Why do mountains make you dumber? Scientists aren't sure, but “attentional dysfunction” at high altitudes is real.

A former fit model looks back on forty years of physical maintenance.

When general suspicion of female ambition meets toxic stereotypes about black girls: how R. Kelly has avoided justice thus far.

Alyssa Milano takes a (very persuasive) stand for women suffering in our criminal-justice system.

Reporters turn back the clock on a photo taken by friends just before a gunman began a deadly rampage in their favorite bar.

A round-up of thoughtful reporting from around the globe on free speech, censorship, and human rights on Facebook.

"Glitter is made from glitter." An oddly satisfying lesson on how glitter is manufactured.