The collapse of the pin trading market will hardly register amid the more than $15 billion cost of the Tokyo Games, but for avid traders, it’s a huge letdown.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/business/pin-traders-tokyo-olympics.html
“I have a very patient wife,” said Mr. Kling, unnecessarily.
The mainstream narrative is that a pop star ripped up a photo of the pope on “Saturday Night Live” and derailed her life. What if the opposite were true?
But O’Connor doesn’t see it that way. In fact, the opposite feels true. Now she has written a memoir, “Rememberings,” that recasts the story from her perspective. “I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career,” she writes, “and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.”
There’s no ignoring the plight of the Palestinians.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/opinion/us-israel-palestine-jared-kushner.html
To circumvent that dispute, the United States set about bribing other Arab and Muslim countries to normalize relations with Israel. The United Arab Emirates got an enormous arms deal. Morocco got Trump to support its annexation of the Western Sahara. Sudan got taken off America’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.
A booming, renegade private intelligence industry is increasingly shaping (and misshaping) the news.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-private-spies-news-media.html
The short answer is no. To learn from the dossier episode, news organizations would have to examine their ties to private intelligence agents, including why they so often granted them anonymity. But as long as the media allows private spies to set the rules, journalists and the public will continue to lose.
A bank shot carried Duncan from St. Croix to Wake Forest, five championships with the Spurs and now the Hall of Fame.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/sports/basketball/tim-duncan-hall-of-fame.html
When we were playing together, he’d come in after a loss and he’d be like, “That’s my fault guys.” And you’d look at the box score, he’d have 30 and 17 and 6 blocks.
A spokesman led the international media to believe that Israeli forces had entered Gaza. They hadn’t. But the army wanted Hamas to think they had.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-disinformation.html
All through the week, the conflict has inspired a broader storm of misinformation on social media, as well. False claims are being widely shared around the world — sometimes with misidentified or mischaracterized photos and videos, or fake rumors about Israeli troop movements or Palestinian threats.
Jake Hanrahan of Popular Front is part of a new wave of war reporters making their own documentaries and podcasts to offer us a candid look at conflicts around the world.
via Hyperallergic: https://hyperallergic.com/645721/the-raw-diy-documentaries-transforming-journalism/
“Honestly, I got sick of commissioning editors who are completely out of touch with their audience telling me what people are and aren’t interested in,” Hanrahan explained to Hyperallergic. “These commissioners sit in their offices making hundreds of thousands a year doing very little — they’re never in the field, many of them have never even been in the field, yet they dictate what people in the field get to do. I’ve been reporting on war and conflict on the ground, on the frontlines, since I was 24 years old. By the time I was 28, I found myself constantly battling with these short-minded editors, and I was getting sick of it. I wasn’t seeing the kind of journalism I wanted to make and I was constantly broke, so I thought, fuck it, I’ll start my own thing, and if it fails it fails. I started Popular Front in 2018 with a grassroots ethos, and ever since it’s been doing great. I’m really happy with the growth. We’re free to report on whatever we want and there’s no corporate investment dictating what we do. Popular Front is always adversarial as well; I think journalism is supposed to be like that.”
As bullets from a Taliban machine gun ricocheted through the street below, an Afghan soldier wearing an “I Heart Kabul” T-shirt took a brief rest. “There has been fighting day and night.”
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/world/asia/afghanistan-helmand-taliban.html
As the planes departed and the smoke drifted lazily into the air, Captain Safi laid back on a green cot and put his hand to his temple, exhausted. At 28, he had been in the military for 11 years.
“It has been a tough decade,” he said.
The Biden administration has begun more aggressively investigating episodes that left spies, diplomats, soldiers and others with brain injuries.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/us/politics/biden-cia-brain-injury.html
And in one case in 2019 that has not previously been reported, a military officer serving overseas pulled his vehicle into an intersection, then was overcome by nausea and headaches, according to four current and former officials briefed on the events. His 2-year-old son, sitting in the back seat, began crying. After the officer pulled away from the intersection, his nausea stopped, and the child stopped crying.
Wednesday’s House leadership vote is one step among many that will hurt America.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/opinion/liz-cheney-gop.html
There are also the new laws to enable Republican legislatures to legally manipulate the administration and counting of the votes in their states. Election expert Rick Hasen explained it all in an essay in this newspaper last month: “At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count. The danger of manipulated election results looms.”
The strange fate of a group of skiers in the Ural Mountains has generated endless speculation.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/17/has-an-old-soviet-mystery-at-last-been-solved
All the Dyatlov theories share a basic assumption that the full story has not been told. In a place where information has been as tightly controlled as in the former Soviet Union, mistrust of official narratives is natural, and nothing in the record can explain why people would leave a tent undressed, in near-suicidal fashion. For decades, the families and the Dyatlov Group Memorial Foundation pressed for a new investigation; two years ago, elderly relatives of several victims finally succeeded in getting the case reopened.
How Doug Mastriano’s rise embodies the spread of a movement centered on the belief that God intended America to be a Christian nation.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/a-pennsylvania-lawmaker-and-the-resurgence-of-christian-nationalism
Later that evening, Mastriano appeared on Facebook Live for his fireside chat, looking spooked. He told viewers that he had left the Capitol after he saw things “get weird,” saying, “When it was apparent that this was no longer a peaceful protest, my wife and I left the area.” Mastriano later told a radio interviewer that he stayed long enough to witness both the first and second breaches of the building. “There were several speaking events planned,” he told me, by e-mail. “It was to be a peaceful gathering as it had been previously. When it no longer looked that way, the buses departed.” James Sinclair, a man from Bensalem, Pennsylvania, who rode one of the buses to the Capitol, was arrested for a curfew violation and possession of a weapon. Sandy Weyer, a bus rider who was photographed at the door of the Capitol with her first raised, tweeted, “Truth be known about storming the capitol . . . we were sick and tired of DITHERING!!!” Rick Groves, another bus rider, told a local radio host, of the insurrection, “All I saw was unity and love, and it was a beautiful thing, like Woodstock almost, with Trump flags.”
When I told my editors at The Daily Beast that I needed to quit my job as the newsroom’s lead COVID reporter, I couldn’t even say the word “quit.”Even now, weeks later, it feels like a
Link: https://studyhall.xyz/the-reporters-are-not-okay-extremely-not-okay/
I was struggling to stay above water when the footage of the January 6 insurrection triggered the post-traumatic stress disorder I thought I’d shaken years ago. By the time someone I loved died a few weeks later, I was already drowning.
Social and psychological forces are combining to make the sharing and believing of misinformation an endemic problem with no easy solution.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/world/asia/misinformation-disinformation-fake-news.html
We are in an era of endemic misinformation — and outright disinformation. Plenty of bad actors are helping the trend along. But the real drivers, some experts believe, are social and psychological forces that make people prone to sharing and believing misinformation in the first place. And those forces are on the rise.
The Republican Party trounced the Democrats at every level in Texas in November, only to see its politicians turn on one another over the pandemic and voter-fraud conspiracy theories.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/magazine/texas-republicans.html
Early on the morning of Oct. 19, an air-conditioner repairman named David Lopez was driving his small box truck in Houston, Texas, when a black S.U.V. slammed into him from behind and forced him off the road. After the vehicles came to a stop, Lopez heard the S.U.V.’s driver scream for help. He approached the vehicle, whereupon the driver, a man named Mark Aguirre, jumped out and ordered him to the ground at gunpoint. Aguirre had been surveilling Lopez for four days, convinced that he was the mastermind of a scheme to steal the election from President Trump.
The neglected middle child of mental health can dull your motivation and focus — and it may be the dominant emotion of 2021.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/well/mind/covid-mental-health-languishing.html
Part of the danger is that when you’re languishing, you might not notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive. You don’t catch yourself slipping slowly into solitude; you’re indifferent to your indifference. When you can’t see your own suffering, you don’t seek help or even do much to help yourself.
The trouble with waiting to address problems long after you know that they exist.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/facebook-and-the-normalization-of-deviance
“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry,” Zhang wrote in the memo, which, the Guardian reports, Facebook tried to suppress. “We simply didn’t care enough to stop them.” A known loophole in one of Facebook’s products enabled corrupt governments to create fake followers and fake “likes,” which then triggered Facebook’s algorithms to boost their propaganda and legitimacy.
The first major interview with one of the most revered comedy writers of all time.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/john-swartzwelder-sage-of-the-simpsons
Swartzwelder’s specialty on “The Simpsons” was conjuring dark characters from a strange, old America: banjo-playing hobos, cigarette-smoking ventriloquist dummies, nineteenth-century baseball players, rat-tailed carnival children, and pantsless, singing old-timers. After leaving the show, in 2003, Swartzwelder wrote and self-published the first of his thirteen novels, all but two of which feature one of the most wonderful creations in printed comedy: Frank Burly, incompetent private eye and occasional time traveller. None of the books run more than a hundred and sixty pages; all are packed, like a dense star, with more material than seems physically possible.
When Mike Beck developed a rare form of Parkinson’s US intelligence concluded he was the victim of a hi-tech weapon
via the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/02/havana-syndrome-nsa-officer-microwave-attacks-since-90s
That raises more questions about why the CIA and state department were so reluctant to believe their own officers could have been targeted by such weapons when cases appeared in Cuba and then China in 2018 and elsewhere around the world.
What it was like to be in Mr. Bailey’s eighth grade English class.
via Slate Magazine: https://slate.com/culture/2021/04/blake-bailey-lusher-journals-teacher.amp
Mr. Bailey had opinions about many of Sam’s options. One female classmate, the teacher wrote, “is a splendid girl. I never have understood why you’ve hesitated there.” When Sam said he wasn’t interested in being a different girl’s boyfriend, Mr. Bailey asked, “Why not? [She]’s a babe. Smart, too.”