Author: trent

R. Crumb Means Some Offense Even from his refuge in France, the comics artist still makes America’s pulse race. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/t-magazine/r-crumb.html Encountering Crumb today feels like being in a staring match with an artist who’s still almost daring the culture to eject him. “The average people out there,” he tells me, “what they know of […]

How Trump Supporters Came to Hate the Police At the Capitol riot and elsewhere, MAGA Republicans have leaped from “backing the blue” to attacking law-enforcement officials. via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-trump-supporters-came-to-hate-the-police “We have guns, too, motherfuckers!” a man yelled over him. “With a lot bigger rounds!” Another added, “If we have to tool up, it’s […]

How Book Bans Turned a Texas Town Upside Down In a political environment where book-banning efforts are being used to drive voter sentiment, librarians find themselves on the front lines. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/magazine/book-bans-texas.html By January, the commissioners court had voted to dissolve the library board and appointed a new one, which included those who had originally […]

The Obsessive Pleasures of Mechanical-Keyboard Tinkerers On the right machine, typing can be like playing a Steinway grand. Is tactile perfection possible? via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-obsessive-pleasures-of-mechanical-keyboard-tinkerers “Second to your cell phone, the thing you actually touch the most every day is probably your keyboard.” Why shouldn’t it be perfect?

The Election Official Who Tried to Prove “Stop the Steal” How a group of conspiracy theorists enlisted a county clerk in Colorado to find evidence that the 2020 vote was rigged. via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/american-chronicles/the-election-official-who-tried-to-prove-stop-the-steal Frank told me that, after building an audience of covid skeptics with his revisionist statistics, he was invited by […]

The Safe Space That Became a Viral Nightmare An argument at Arizona State’s multicultural center spiraled into a disaster for everyone involved. Who was to blame? Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/07/magazine/arizona-state-university-multicultural-center.html I first heard about the video from a colleague and friend at my university as we waited in line to pick up our kids after school in […]

Trump’s Legal Jab Left Him Open to Justice Dept. Strike A legal back-and-forth produced a straightforward narrative of how Mr. Trump and his lawyers repeatedly dodged the government’s attempts to recover sensitive documents for more than a year. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/us/politics/trump-justice-department-special-master.html But when the delegation tried to visit the storage room, the filing said, one of […]

Jared Kushner’s ‘Breaking History’ Is a Soulless and Very Selective Memoir In this lengthy book, Kushner recounts the time he spent in the White House during his father-in-law’s term. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/books/review-breaking-history-jared-kushner.html The tone is college admissions essay. Typical sentence: “In an environment of maximum pressure, I learned to ignore the noise and distractions and instead […]