Month: April 2023
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The Covert Mission to Solve a Mexican Journalist’s Murder | The New Yorker
The Covert Mission to Solve a Mexican Journalist’s Murder
After the death of a reporter who investigated narcopolitics, her colleagues formed a secret collective to bring the killers to justice—and challenge a culture of impunity.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/17/the-covert-mission-to-solve-a-mexican-journalists-murder
The murder scene had been captured on at least five security cameras, from multiple angles. The circumstances—a mother about to start the school run killed in front of her children—had horrified the public. And the victim had had an influential friend. Despite her insistence that journalists remain aloof from politicians, she had been close to the most powerful elected official in the state: the reform-minded new governor of Chihuahua, Javier Corral Jurado, who had been a journalist himself. When he was elected, Breach had been elated. “Together, they would battle corruption,” Aragón recalled. Now, Corral signalled, he’d be personally involved in the effort to track down Breach’s killers.
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The Women of Rural America Are Dying Too Young – The Atlantic
How Rural America Steals Girls’ Futures
Death in a dying town
via The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/the-forgotten-girls-monica-potts-book-excerpt/673581/
oy crazy” was what people called it. “She was so boy crazy,” I would hear about my girlfriends. I never heard the reverse, that a boy was “girl crazy.” Girls having crushes, sneaking out at night to have fun: It seems innocent enough. But in my small, conservative town, a “wrong” choice at a young age could cut girls off from their future dreams, leaving them mired in despair.
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When the Culture Wars Come for the Public Library | The New Yorker
When the Culture Wars Come for the Public Library
A Montana county’s battle shows how faith in public learning and public space is fraying.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/when-the-culture-wars-come-for-the-public-library
The class had come from a Catholic school, and, a few days later, the teacher wrote to the Daily Inter Lake, a local newspaper, saying how “shocked and grieved” she was by the presentation of a book about “homosexual marriage.” She argued that “such a controversial topic” should not be introduced to “innocent children.” Flathead County had always trended conservative, and harbored clusters of Ammon Bundy extremists, but its mainstream politics, until recently, tended toward a live-and-let-live libertarianism. The weeks that followed stunned library staff. Newell, who is openly bisexual, was harassed: “I had people get in my face, yell, and spit, and scream an inch from my face.” At an outreach event, another librarian was grabbed by a man complaining of the “library’s agenda about transgenderism.” In April, a queer-youth support group met, as it often did, in the library basement. Afterward, several men waiting outside chased two of the teens down the street, yelling, “Fucking faggots.”
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The Hacker – Columbia Journalism Review
The Hacker
Runa Sandvik has made it her life’s work to protect journalists against cyberattacks. Authoritarian regimes are keeping her in business.
via Columbia Journalism Review: https://www.cjr.org/the_feature/runa-sandvik.php
As Sandvik saw it, that was all she could do in the face of an overwhelming digital threat. “There is just no guarantee for us that we’re never going to be hacked,” she said. “The question is, just how difficult are we going to make it for the attacker?” Sometimes, information security comes down to keeping a record of small technical adjustments. “It’s the right thing to do,” she said. She shrugged. “Also, no one else is going to do it.”