The coronavirus has illuminated the stark divides in a global game—and spurred new efforts to bridge them.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/the-fractured-world-of-tennis-amid-a-prolonged-pandemic
The coronavirus has illuminated the stark divides in a global game—and spurred new efforts to bridge them.
Apple Daily, a pro-democracy paper known for celebrity gossip and hard-hitting investigations, has become a target in Beijing’s new national security law in Hong Kong.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/world/asia/hong-kong-apple-daily-jimmy-lai.html?ref=oembed
Apple Daily, a pro-democracy paper known for celebrity gossip and hard-hitting investigations, has become a target in Beijing’s new national security law in Hong Kong.
Corruption, as much as violence, makes Iraq unlivable. It helped fuel the rise of ISIS. And America provides the cash to sustain it, at least $10 billion a year in hard currency.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/magazine/iraq-corruption.html?ref=oembed
Early last October, while working in his office in Baghdad, a businessman named Hussein Laqees got a phone call from a number he’d never seen before. “We need to talk,” the caller said. The man’s voice was gruff and self-assured, a little menacing. He demanded that Laqees come meet him but refused to give his name.
The arrest of the tycoon and democracy activist Jimmy Lai has reinvigorated defiance rather than demoralize his supporters.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/chinas-arrest-of-a-free-speech-icon-backfires-in-hong-kong
Last September, when I was in Hong Kong reporting on the anti-government protests engulfing the city, I spent an afternoon in the industrial-looking headquarters of Apple Daily, a popular tabloid owned by perhaps the city’s most unusual tycoon, an outspoken democracy activist and one of the Communist Party’s leading critics. To meet Jimmy Lai, I walked through the publication’s vast open-plan office, where hundreds of staff members busily put out the day’s news. “When I went into the publishing business, twenty-five years ago, it was a no-brainer,” Lai told me in his office, which resembled the appearance of its owner: determinedly functional and, unusually for Hong Kong, absent of status markers. “Information is freedom, and I wanted to be in the business of delivering freedom.” Lai admitted that back then he hardly thought this was a risky proposition. “I believed that all of China was going forward, that it was inevitable China would adapt to openness.”
At least three correspondents have tested positive for the coronavirus, along with the press secretary and two of her deputies.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/business/white-house-coronavirus.html
Throughout a pandemic that has now landed squarely in the West Wing, Trump officials — who routinely shunned masks — declined to institute thorough safety protocols to protect the White House press corps, according to interviews with reporters who now face the prospect of a rapidly escalating outbreak in their daily work space.
Progressives are wary of the conservative group hammering the President, but its founders say they’re fighting for all Americans.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/12/inside-the-lincoln-projects-war-against-trump
After Obama won his second term, the Republican National Committee commissioned a study that became known as the “autopsy report.” The country’s voting population was diversifying rapidly, and, the report said, young voters were “increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents.” It noted, “Many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” In a recent book, “It Was All a Lie,” Stevens writes, “How do you go from dedicating a political party to expansion and inclusiveness and two years later rally around a man who calls Mexicans ‘rapists,’ and called for a religious test to enter the United States?” He goes on, “For decades, conservatives attacked liberals for living by ‘situational ethics,’ but the ease with which Republican leaders abandoned any pretense of being more than a whites-only party is the ultimate situational ethic.” In January, Wilson told Trevor Noah that Trump “has broken the Republican Party—it doesn’t believe in anything.” Stunningly, the 2020 Republican National Convention put forward no new platform, signalling that the Party’s sole position was fealty to Trump.
Teens have taken a technology that was supposed to help grownups stop smoking and invented a new kind of bad habit, molded in their own image.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-promise-of-vaping-and-the-rise-of-juul
How a scandal started with a poor housemaid and ended up taking down the most powerful woman in Africa
via Medium: https://medium.com/latterly/cashgate-2e6628549bf5
More than a year after American diplomats began to suffer strange, concussion-like symptoms in Cuba, a U.S. investigation is no closer to determining how they were hurt or by whom, and the FBI and CIA are at odds over the case. A ProPublica investigation reveals the many layers to the mystery — and…
via ProPublica: https://www.propublica.org/article/diplomats-in-cuba
A series and podcast from Longreads, in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting.
via Longreads: https://longreads.com/bundyville/
A collection of Twitter accounts that has criticized Joel Embiid and Markelle Fultz, disclosed sensitive information, and outlined team strategy shares eye-opening similarities. What does that have to do with the Philadelphia 76ers’ decision-maker?
In 2014, Russell Bonner Bentley was a middle-aged arborist living in Austin. Now he’s a local celebrity in a war-torn region of Ukraine. His journey reveals a troubling development in Putin’s information war.
via Texas Monthly: https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/son-wealthy-businessman-foot-soldier-vladimir-putin-russia-hacking/
The inside story of the first homicide in America’s most secure prison.
via The Atavist Magazine: https://magazine.atavist.com/murder-adx-florence-fbi-mexican-mafia
How a senseless double murder in Florida exposed the rise of an organized fascist youth movement in the United States
via Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/all-american-nazis-fascist-youth-united-states-w519651
The city’s Establishment will ignore unscrupulous acts to serve its interests — just look how it treated the onetime lawyer to the president.
via Intelligencer: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/frank-rich-roy-cohn-the-original-donald-trump.html
Why an expert in counterterrorism became a beat cop.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-came-home
For years, inventive companies like The Onion and Funny or Die capitalized on a culture that just wanted to laugh online. But after massive disruptions in digital advertising and on social media platforms, those companies find themselves imperiled. Did th
via The Ringer: https://www.theringer.com/2018/3/26/17157020/online-comedy-the-onion-funny-or-die-digital-media
It was more than five years ago when Lance Armstrong went on Oprah, looked her in the eye, and admitted to the world that his iconic comeback story was fueled by the most comprehensive doping regimen in cycling history. The seven-time Tour de France winne
via Deadspin: https://deadspin.com/the-ridiculous-saga-of-lance-armstrong-the-cheater-who-1802288537
Get the latest news and updates on art, literature, music, travel, and history in a fun and interesting way.
via Culture: https://www.believermag.com/issues/201211/?read=interview_sendak
In his work with the White House, is Mohammed bin Salman driving out extremism, or merely seizing power for himself?
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/09/a-saudi-princes-quest-to-remake-the-middle-east