September 15, 2016

By The Morning News — 15 Sep 2016

“Nobody really wants to advertise that they filter their beer through dead fish.” Isinglass, a coloring agent made from fish swim bladders, renders many British ales unfriendly to vegetarians—not that many of them know about it. The additive is much less common in German, Belgian, and American varieties. / BBC

In the memo line of a check for $10,000 to an “independent” fundraising PAC, a wealthy businessman wrote, “Because Scott Walker asked.” The Guardian posts investigation into the embattled Wisconsin governor’s fundraising tactics, which raises concerns not so much for the abnormality as for being the status quo of politicians relying on corporations to stay in office. / The Guardian

Nuclear-armed militaries rely on getting every detail right; Command and Control is the story of a day when they didn’t. / YouTube

Need to get outside? Hire Chuck McCarthy. He’ll walk you for $7 a mile, and the conversation is free. / The Guardian

Kenneth Roth (head of Human Rights Watch) and Salil Shetty (head of Amnesty International) make an appeal to President Obama in the New York Times to pardon Snowden on merit, and for the public good. / The New York Times

In more Snowden news, Peter Gabriel’s new song pays tribute, using “footage from military training exercises, real-life combat images and surveillance tapes” (NPR). / NPR

When assessing Snowden’s impact, it’s fun to dig back into old newspapers (old = 2013) and refresh our freak-out about the scale of surveillance that Snowden helped uncover. From the Washington Post: “The redacted 85-page opinion, which was declassified by U.S. intelligence officials on Wednesday, states that, based on NSA estimates, the spy agency may have been collecting as many as 56,000 “wholly domestic” communications each year.” / The Washington Post

In case you don’t work for the government and see this every morning by the coffee machine, here’s one of a now-retracted series of posters produced by the US Department of Defense’s Defense Security Service for Defense agencies “to download and promote security awareness in the workplace.” / Reddit, Quartz

“Unfortunately, many candidates in the political mainstream today, even pundits and commentators who aren’t running for office, believe we have to be able to do anything, no matter what, as long as there is some benefit to be had in doing so. But that is the logic of a police state.” Snowden makes his own moral case for his presidential pardon. / The Guardian

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who previously filed a pending lawsuit against Trump University in 2013, began “making inquiries” into the Trump Foundation, Trump’s nonprofit “charity,” this week. / Politico

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who has sued Trump University and is “making inquiries” into the nonprofit Trump Foundation, has declined to require the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Health Access Initiative, both nonprofits based in New York, to name the foreign governments it has accepted donations from, in violation of New York tax law. / newsnet5.com

“I sat scribbling lyrics and jotting musical notes, listening earnestly and with enjoyment, but waiting for something I couldn’t quite identify yet. Then a massive Confederate flag unfurled over the stage. Silence, the silence that falls when hundreds of people hold their breath, not knowing how to respond: with astonishment, hisses and boos, or, possibly, nostalgia?” Notes from a night at the opera—about Appomattox. / Harper’s

While promoting Trump’s newly-released childcare reform plan—at the time, the eighth “position” he has listed on his website, compared to Clinton’s 39, Gary Johnson’s 14, and Jill Stein’s 14—Ivanka Trump claimed that the Trump Organization provided all of its employees, which number in thousands, with paid maternity leave. / donaldjtrump.com, hillaryclinton.com, johnsonweld.com, jill2016.com

Colson Whitehead, Lydia Millet, Jacqueline Woodson—it’s quite a list! / NPR

If you use social media to stare at cute animals, prepare yourself: that animal might be doomed thanks to climate change (which may be the point of why the photographer’s sticking it in your face). / The New York Times

As California prepares to legalize marijuana in November, Stanford researchers create “the potalyzer,” to help cops conduct roadside tests for driving under the influence. / news.stanford.edu

In the past five years, twelve states have banned judges from being able to sentence children to life in prison without parole, either outright or in nearly all cases. / fairsentencingofyouth.org

“The discussions, frankly, were a little heartbreaking. People asked things like, ‘Does anyone know a coroner I can talk to?’ Nobody replied. Students made profiles. They had pictures of themselves. Some of the pictures looked like glamour shots, or author photos. It made me wonder if people were using the MasterClass to date.” A professional thriller writer takes an online “MasterClass” with James Patterson. / The Awl

“For every dollar in corrections costs, incarceration generates an additional 10 dollars in social costs.” A study finds that the true cost of mass incarceration, generally estimated at around $80 billion, actually weighs in at $1 trillion when costs to society are accounted for. / Concordance Institute for Advancing Social Justice at Washington University

“The two candidates have not talked about surveillance state or Mr. Snowden. Or, for that matter, about the wars America’s involved in. Or, for that matter, about environmental change. This is a strange, superficial election.” Oliver Stone does publicity for his Snowden film. / Rockcellar

“Listening habits from the dawn of Islam helped Auto-Tune mean so much here.” / Pitchfork

The Great Dismal Swamp covers 2,000 square miles in the Mid-Atlantic. If archeologists are right, it might hold a trove of insight into how runaway slaves might have lived in the swamp, a society apart that hewed closer to African traditions than to American ones, complicating the neat narrative of white saviors extricating slaves. / Smithsonian

“The purpose of President Duterte’s open calls for violence, rather ironically, is for peace—to end crime and corruption perceived as endemic in the Philippines. He offered a simple, horrifying solution that tens of millions of Filipinos elected him to implement through unrestricted police operations, death squads, and hired assassins.” Duterte has a 91% trust rating in the Philippines right now. To understand why, you have to understand what the Philippines have been through. / GQ

A characteristically irreverent biography of the allegedly charmless, transpontine South London. From the first ejection of the Romans, to the theater scene that flourished when plays were deemed too vulgar for the posh center city, to its Victorian heyday as a home to monster gin palaces, sin (and freedom) is always just across the bridge—a river apart but of the city nonetheless. / deserter.co.uk

Aaron Gilbreath writes a history of Japan’s beloved convenience stores, which function as grocery stores, restaurants, banks, and post offices, and make our versions seem very stale in comparison. / thesmartset.com

“The New Yorker poem” is a kind of poem all poets know, and many hate. Abraham Adams at Triple Canopy outlines the evolution of “the New Yorker poem,” from doggerel about panhandlers (He juggles the nickels / And jingles the dimes / And duly dispenses the quarters) and dog shows—you know, the kind of stuff we can all relate to—to a “communiqué on experience” that assumes both reader and writer share a certain, specific cultural vocabulary. / canopycanopycanopy.com

As any speaker (or reader) of the two languages know, Chinese and one form of written Japanese use the same alphabet despite not being able to understand each other’s spoken language. Since this form isn’t phonetic anyway—meaning that instead of using letters they use pictograms that have no connection to how the word sounds—does that mean that Chinese and Japanese readers can “read” the other language? Can a Japanese speaker be literate in Chinese, even if they can’t speak it? Mark Schreiber addresses this persistent claim. / japantimes.co.jp

What makes humans good? Stirring review of the science of altruism, told through the story of George Price, a self-taught evolutionary theorist who contributed one of the discipline’s central equations, which still stirs disgust, astonishment, and reverence for its “strange new formalism” called the “E=MC2 of biology.” / mosaicscience.com

Segregation is a reality in prison, and Jeffrey Sterling—sent to jail a year ago for telling James Risen state secrets—despairs at watching the news of racism with fellow black prisoners. / The Washington Post

Seeking 100 women writers and journalist to partipate in social media monitoring program developing best practices against harassment. / Columbia Journalism Review

Obama re-ups on Israeli defense aid bill, sending largest-ever sums to Jerusalem—but with requirements that the $38 billion only buy American military products. / BBC

“Superstar companies have two big faults. They are squashing competition, and they are using the darker arts of management to stay ahead. Neither is easy to solve. But failing to do so risks a backlash which will be bad for everyone.” The Economist blames finance for centralizing firms and stifling innovation. “Founders dream of selling their firms to one of the giants rather than of building their own titans.” / The Economist

Carla Hayden steps into office as the first African-American Librarian of Congress. From her prior role as a public librarian in Baltimore she inherits a ship behind schedule, as she will be the first in her post to fully embrace information technology that has changed the role of the librarian; she once opposed porn filters on public computers because they screened important information about mammograms. / baltimoresun.com, The Atlantic, Time

“National unity is the basis of national security,’ Frankfurter wrote. ‘Conscientious scruples have not, in the course of the long struggle for religious toleration, relieved the individual from obedience to a general law not aimed at the promotion or restriction of religious beliefs.” The logic behind a 1940 Supreme Court decision barring religious objection to the pledge is the same behind the “team-first” criticism now leveled at Kaepernick for his anthem protest. But the Supremes changed their minds three years later. / The New Yorker