I Respectfully Disagree

What a shame it is that we must disagree so stridently. What a shame it is that we cannot accept each other’s ideas and discuss them calmly in an orderly fashion.

A candidate for lieutenant governor in Idaho can’t just take the position that 20-30% of American women should be executed, for example, without coming in for such uncivil criticism that he has to walk back his statements.

Quite honestly, advocating death by hanging for any woman who’s had an abortion shouldn’t even really be controversial. It’s just a totally normal pro-life position. Mainstream opinion leader Kevin Williamson, columnist in the mainstream thought-leadership magazine The Atlantic, endorses it.  (He now claims he didn’t really mean what he said that one time on Twitter, but other interviews indicate that yes, he really did). Even the president, despite the number of times he has surely handed a woman an envelope of cash and told her to “take care of it,” would like to see some kind of punishment for women so whorish as to get knocked up.

But goodness, we shouldn’t be disagreeable about this kind of disagreement. The New York Times reminds us to be civil to people who think our friends deserve to die.

We may not agree, says the Times, with Williamson’s statements that black children are best described as “primates” and “3/5 scale Snoop Doggs,” that Laverne Cox and Chelsea Manning are grotesque parodies of women, that anyone who’s had or performed an abortion ought to be hanged. But we should be polite to Williamson and people like him.

Come now. Be reasonable, say the reasonable voices:

He has not argued the punishment should be retroactive.

Clifton Fels (@cbfels) April 5, 2018

But goodness, how could we be so uncouth as to proceed from thinking someone says “that common medical procedure is a crime worthy of death” to thinking they’re in favor of the wholesale slaughter of our friends? And to go from there to making ad hominem attacks on the person who advocates that slaughter? Uncivil discourse is a far greater threat to America than sober policy proposals to execute millions of women.

Worse still, how dare we criticize the judgement of an editor who chooses to employ and broadcast such a voice? How gauche. The very idea that people should might hold Jeffrey Goldberg accountable for anything his magazine publishes!

Williamson is an excellent prose stylist, you guys. He worked at the National Review. It’s not like he’s shitposting “Amerimutt” memes on 4chan to show that immigration means that America is already a nonwhite country of mongrel degenerates. He’s not using internet shorthand like “incel” and blaming “feminazis” for his inability to attract “females.” He’s saying these sorts of things with complete paragraphs, which makes it respectable. So treat him with respect.

Etymology

If my calculations are correct, biscuits and Triscuits hint towards a mysterious third food called “monoscuits.”

ᴬ ᵀᶦᶰʸ ᴮᵉᵉᶠˢᵗᵉᵃᵏ (@TenderBeefsteak) April 3, 2018

Cultivating joy
A word of advice: when you are bringing a suitcase full of pepperoni to your friends on the coast, don’t leave it next to an open window in your hotel room. The hotel may ban you for life when your room becomes infested with sausage-crazed seagulls.

This poor sad adorable avocado.

Dog brings tissues to crying girl. 

Disclaimer: My reply to the dog-comforting-crying-person post was my most-viral-ever Twitter moment:

If I was crying my dog would run to the window and bark at squirrels and then beg for food.

Aaron S. Weber (@Short_epics) March 30, 2018

The Internet Is Killing Me

It was more experimental, more political, and far less popular than
“Dancing on my own,” or for that matter any of her other singles, but my
favorite track from Robyn’s album Body Talk is still “Don’t fucking tell me what to do.”

Not many artists can do something so thoughtful with such a minimal beat and repetitive lyrics, but the epistrophe builds and builds over the course of the song:

My drinking’s killing me
My smoking’s killing me
My diet’s killing me
My heels are killing me
My email’s killing me
My manager’s killing me
My ego’s killing me
Can’t sleep it’s killing me
Ease up you’re killing me
Let go you’re killing me

And so we come to the basis for the pop music reference:
Your boss is killing you.

Our jobs are making us sick, to the tune of 120,000 excess deaths per year in the U.S. alone — making workplace-related illness the fifth highest cause of death.

The gig economy is killing you.

At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system.

The Superclap is killing you.
Your clutter is killing you.
Wilmington, Delaware is killing you.
A bucket of rocks won’t stop anyone from killing you.

Worst-case scenario
The ad-supported business model for the internet is terrible. What if it infects the self-driving car business?

It used to be boasted of every new innovation that it would make some old legacy system “more like the internet.” That boast carries a somewhat more ominous tone these days. Maybe there are some features of the internet we don’t want to export.

Apparent inevitability of the worst-case scenario
In 1962, the city of Artesia, NM completed its state-of-the-art elementary school, built entirely underground, so that students would be prepared for the inevitability of atomic holocaust. Ed Burmila makes the connection to today’s delirium of active shooter drills, armed schoolteachers, and bulletproof backpacks. (There are 58 of you– how many of you have done active shooter drills at your workplace or school?)

Campus political correctness is out of hand
Texas teacher suspended after telling her students she’s married to a woman.

The Atlantic, in its search for “provocative” and “challenging” ideas, has hired Kevin Williamson, formerly of the National Review. Williamson, perhaps best known for advocating the hanging of women who have abortions and caricaturing black children as “primates,” joins Ross Douthat and David Brooks in the pantheon of living insults to every unemployed writer who actually has talent or an opinion worth considering.

You can still post an apartment rental ad on Facebook and make sure that black people and families with children don’t see it.

Cultivating LOLs
I’m not sure that word means what you think it means.
Ned Flanders x Tupac.

Cultivating joy
Blep. (Yes, this is my dog. No, I’m not sorry.)
Black dogs are hard to photograph. This shot took a lot of practice.
Box-O-Huskies.
Salt water may cause your dog to malfunction.

Anyone Can Tell You There’s No More Road to Ride

The other day I passed along some speculation to the effect that the New York Times keeps publishing irrelevant opinion pieces by the likes of Brooks and Douthat because they can’t admit that the American right has gone full Nazi, but still want a “conservative” voice to prove they’re “balanced.”

This weekend they are going ahead and printing an article about genetics and race science. 

Let’s all have a round of applause for the return of respectable racism everyone!

WTF
Isopod phone case.

Cultivating joy
Ooonf.
“Not sick, just very, very dumb.”

Freeze Peach

While the “campus liberals are fascist” debates rage on, a Wisconsin high school is now banning discussion of privilege because a student-led workshop on Martin Luther King Day made certain white families uncomfortable. The principal has apparently been forced to resign.

The timing of the board’s edict, just weeks before the February resignation of Principal Joseph Moylan, has fueled speculation that Moylan was pushed out in part for allowing the student-led exercise during the assembly Jan. 15.

Moderators, please stand up
The New Yorker investigated social media moderation and toxicity, but found that Facebook and Twitter really didn’t want to show their inner workings. Only Reddit was willing to really open up. The resulting article is perhaps the funniest thing you will ever read about death threats, revenge porn, Nazis, and conspiracy theories. Describing a new rule banning revenge porn: “This rule is stupid and suppresses our rights,” u/penisfuckermcgee commented.  

Reddit is not known for being the best part of the internet, but in many cases it’s one of the best. If you remember Usenet from the pre-browser Internet, you’ll recognize Reddit: Self-organizing, self-moderating messageboards and comments, sometimes horrific and often absolutely brilliant.

Every subreddit is devoted to a specific kind of content, ranging from vital to trivial: r/News, r/Politics, r/Trees (for marijuana enthusiasts), r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts (for tree enthusiasts), r/MildlyInteresting (“for photos that are, you know, mildly interesting”).

Can you get excellent information and find a community willing to share your interest in labor law, plumbing, Filipino cooking, photography, gardening, nail polish, high-quality shoes, personal finance, your town’s local events, model trains, mental illness, endometriosis, gender transition or life after leaving your church? Absolutely. Can you also find a hive of scum and villany? Oh hell yes. 

In addition to funny, the article is truly insightful and shows us how tech giants are struggling to deal with human nature that can’t really be broken down into universal rules and clear bright lines.  

“Does free speech mean literally anyone can say anything at any time?” Tidwell continued. “Or is it actually more conducive to the free exchange of ideas if we create a platform where women and people of color can say what they want without thousands of people screaming, ‘Fuck you, light yourself on fire, I know where you live’? If your entire answer to that very difficult question is ‘Free speech,’ then, I’m sorry, that tells me that you’re not really paying attention.”

You’re not helping, traditional media
Vox has an in-depth rundown of the failures of the NYT opinion section: They think they’re aiming for “diversity of opinion” but have failed to represent any Asian or Latinx voices, or any actual leftists. Just as bad, their “conservative” voices don’t convey the racist dumpster fire that is the actual reality of the Republican party. You’d get a better idea of the reality of conservatism over at /r/The_Donald (The previous article warned you not to click on that…)

ACAB, Philly Edition
The original charge was brought by a police squad widely known for faking arrests (and robbing drug dealers with falsified warrants, and the blatant armed robbery of a string of bodegas). The arresting officer is on a leaked list of cops that prosecutors will not trust to testify under oath. Thousands of the squad’s convictions have been reversed, but not this one. The suspect served a few years for it, and was released on probation.

Every time it’s almost done, he winds up somehow locked up again, thanks to a judge who seems to have taken a particular interest in his case. Every time he releases an album she bars him from traveling to support it.  At one point she asked him and his girlfriend to sing an R&B song for her in her chambers, and got angry when he refused. She has repeatedly criticized his decision to fire an exploitative mobbed-up manager with local ties and switch to a national management company that seems less corrupt. 

The latest twist: a misdemeanor ticket, later dropped, for riding an off-road dirt bike on a city street. The District Attorney and his parole officer both said the infraction didn’t merit jail time, but the judge overruled them. He’s locked up for another 2-4 years.

Rapper Meek Mill has been in and out of prison since 2009, and it’s not clear he’s actually guilty of anything at all.

(Soundtrack: Amen, the song that got him a public scolding from his neighborhood minister for using church music in a decidedly profane manner).

Pithy
Gin & Tacos:  “Remember the final years of the USSR, when everyone in charge was 75, politics became sclerotic and incapable of action, and the government was little more than an unsustainably expensive army and a pension plan? Thank god we’re not like that.”

Tell the writers that this thriller is not at all realistic
White nationalist mosque-bombing suspect is contractor with bid on border wall.
White nationalist party collapses in love triangle and fist-fight among leadership.
White nationalist mass murderer’s kid sister arrested after bringing drugs and weapons to an anti-gun protest at her school, making racist statements about it on Snapchat.

I refuse to joke about Vanessa Trump bc it’s NEVER funny when a couple files for an uncontested quick divorce, one where assets can be swiftly transferred, on the same day an independent special counsel subpoenas their family business. People, this could happen to you someday.

John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) March 16, 2018

Cultivating joy 
A dude dressed as Disney’s Elsa helped get a police truck out of a snowbank. (Or do we get angry because why’s Queen Elsa selling us out to the cops?)
Dog trained as office courier.
Literal cat in literal hat.
This cat is not pleased by his guest.

A Significant Portion of My Income Is How Men Feel About Me That Day

It is entirely possible that reading this letter is bad for you. It is entirely possible that we would be better off with less information. The difficulty, of course, is knowing which bits of information to avoid.
 
Finally, an explanation
Why the Times and so forth keep regurgitating the “campus liberals are fascists” argument: all the other pseudo-intellectual conservative talking points are lost in the tsunami of filth that is Trump’s ascendance. They need, or think they need, a “respectable conservative” voice. And all that’s available in the “respectable” field is people complaining about how a handful of students at a handful of elite colleges are rude to conservatives. So, they’ll keep running that column, again and again, even though it’s obviously wrong and irrelevant and dumb. 

If they actually wanted to run a diversity of viewpoints, they’d bring in some actual diversity of viewpoints, like maybe some actual socialists. But no, they think Paul Krugman is as left as they can go, and David Brooks somehow represents mainstream moderates instead of a weird outlier in a party full of white nationalist zealots and gun fetishists. 

Lexicon of conservative language
Ann Coulter makes clear what she means by (((Globalist))).

Economics of subservience
Tipping considered harmful: “A significant portion of my income is how men feel about me that day,” says a waitress interviewed on the custom of tipping. 

A haunting photographic series of low-income America.

Meanwhile, in the province of wealth
Betsy DeVos did a predictably terrible interview in which she revealed that she doesn’t know how to do her job.


Adjustments

SPRING FORWARD

FALL BACK INTO A TIME IN WHICH LIFE WAS SIMPLER AND THE WORLD CARRIED A FAINT GLOW THAT YOU’VE LOST AND MAY NEVER RETRIEVE

NOT A WOLF (@SICKOFWOLVES) March 11, 2018

Cultivating joy
Cream, The Cult, …. this guy, Danzig, Darkness… 

I’m helping! I’m helping! (he’s not helping)

These puppies are also not helping.

Mainstream, Moderate, Conservative Ideas

Just as I was sending last week’s newsletter about how absurd it is for
commentators to only now pretend to notice the racism and violence
inherent in the conservative movement, Joseph Epstein published, in the
Weekly Standard, an appallingly vile piece of garbage titled “Chicago, Then and Now.” 

It’s about how blacks are going to have to bootstrap themselves up out
of this bad spot they’re in, just like the Jews and Italians and Irish
did back in the day, bwah bwah bwah you’ve heard this one before. 

This is a mainstream Republican “intellectual.” An icon of the movement. A respected scholar.

Sure, you may write off his statement that “homosexuality is a curse”
because he said that years ago, right? But what of his claim this month
that “with the advent of the pill and the sexual revolution, nice girls
have all but put prostitutes out of business?” That, tossed off as an
aside on the way to his real point, that “few people are likely to note
any valuable advances in [black] culture over the past 60 years.”

The Weekly Standard brands itself as an upstanding, respectable sort of
conservative journal, but they feel no qualms whatsoever publishing an
article to the effect that “negroes haven’t improved themselves enough
to merit my respect.” 

And of course, that’s just one facet. The rot is pervasive. EPA chief Scott Pruitt, of “I can’t fly coach because average Americans hate me so much” fame, has recently told the Christian Broadcasting Network that he thinks coal-burning is part of Jesus’ plan for America.  (If this were a network TV drama, we’d complain that the writers are repeating the 1980 James Watt storyline.)

Good news, everyone
Headline: The 99 Best Things That Happened in 2017.
A lot of good things got overshadowed by disaster. But we’re making
some important progress: Public health, carbon emissions,
conservation… There’s some good stuff in here.

Cultivating joy
Bucket o’ Panda
This dog seems to have lied on its resume
Also this cat
PLOS has a scholarly study on the competitive advantage conferred by athletes grunting.

Algorithms Rule Everything Around Me

Jeff Bezos is creating a planned economy, with algorithms instead of a politburo. Amazon seeks efficiency and growth more than profit, and the result is this juggernaut. It’s optimizing something… but it’s optimizing away humanity.

(See also articles previously mentioned: AI has already taken over; it’s called the corporation, and Dude, You Broke the Future. See also classic Slate contrarianism in which Reihan Salam thinks Amazon is awesome.)

I am not making this up
China wages war on funeral strippers.

Mainstream media
Noted Republican intellectual, National Review contributor, convicted electoral-finance felon, and AOL subscriber Dinesh D’Souza is going whole-hog on insulting the survivors of the Parkland, FL shooting. 

Everyone is focused right now on the fact that Dinesh D’Souza is a horrible person, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that he’s also not very bright.

Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) February 21, 2018

Bari Weiss, the New York Times opinion journalist who first came to fame after being outraged that Twitter would be rude to her over a minor gaffe, is shocked, shocked, at how quickly conservative intellectuals have fallen to the level of Dinesh D’Souza: 

I know I should be over it, but the speed at which the organized conservative movement became the ideological home of Marion Le Pen, Seb Gorka, Nigel Farage, Dinesh D’Souza and their ilk remains shocking to me.

Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) February 22, 2018

Of course, this has been their swamp for a very long time. As Jeet Heer and many others point out (again and again and again and again, to no avail) D’Souza is and has been a mainstream conservative intellectual since he was an undergrad at Dartmouth in the 1980s writing appallingly racist articles about affirmative action and outing gay students. Fascist sympathies? Here? In the … wait, the National Review endorsed Franco, didn’t they? Yes, they did. 

“Mainstream media,” although that term has been smeared to meaninglessness by the right, confuses neutrality with objectivity. And in trying to remain neutral they forget that there are, in fact, evils in this world. And that the Republican party has sided with them again and again for decades. Why are random teens better at asking questions of Marco Rubio? Because they’re not afraid to sound biased when they ask Marco Rubio what he plans to do to keep them from getting shot to death.

Meanwhile, Rebel Media, a right-wing outlet, have started their own investment fund, because of course they have. And Milo, his “feminism is cancer” t-shirt sales flagging, is now hawking supplements on Infowars. As Jeet Heer notes (again and again and again, to no avail), “Much of North American right-wing politics is best seen as a grift rather than an ideology.”

Wait, what now?
No, “vagility” isn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds. Still important, though.

A fascinating study of religious belief and its impact on WAIT YOU DID A RANDOMIZED HUMAN TRIAL OF WHAT?

DIY gene modification a bad idea, says DIY gene modification pioneer.

New York Fashion Week, but with WAY better captions.

Steadily growing influence of left-wing criticism
Another review of Kids These Days… 

Cultivating joy
Chinese pupper appears to be flying.
This is kind of gross but also wonderful: there is a rare species of pink slug.

They Don’t Think it Be Like it Is, but it Do

So, here we are. Another week, another mass murder. We’re at 18 so far this year.  

Fox thinks it’s because we took religion out of schools. Of course

I suppose it’s true that a lot of people are mocking him. But they’re not mocking him for his religion. They’re mocking him for being a dipshit.
(And what is it with right-wingers wanting the state to teach their children about Jesus, anyway? I thought they were all in for personal responsibility and families inculcating children with their own moral values?)

Meanwhile
McSweeney’s: To Keep Our Editorial Page Completely Balanced, We are Hiring More Dipshits
Rolling Stone: Charity is not a substitute for policy (and if Bezos wanted to make an impact and not issue a press release, he could offer health insurance to Amazon’s warehouse workers)

Why?
Why are some sports for “ladies” and others for “women?” Well, a lot of
historical baggage, of course. In some cases it’s actually a result of the translation stylebooks used by different French-dominated international sports federations.

Why are some people enraged by an explicit rejection of white supremacy?

Why is Paul Allen serving 40 months for a $3.9-billion-dollar fraud, while a homeless man is serving 15 years for stealing $100? (This sounds like an urban legend but numerous sources confirm it.)

Damn you, autocorrect (or possible Photoshop prankster)!


How to…
How to understand America.

How to understand the president’s selective love of due process.

How to interpret the apparent conflict between deregulating payday lenders while choosing groceries for the poor.

How should we interpret the fact that the parents of Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson have each donated the maximum allowable amount to his opponent?

How to interpret stories of inspirational perseverance as an indictment of the American economy and the media’s obsession with “perseverance porn.”

Cultivating joy
Puppy!
“Oh come on, just smile in your photo for once.”
Dogs on ice.

Harder Better Swifter Stronger

The International Olympic Committee is corrupt, as we all know. And the national-level organizations… well, pedos and doping are the most recent headlines, but we all know FIFA’s dirty, and the NFL’s dirty, and every stadium funded by taxpayer money is dirty, so let’s go ahead and assume that all sports management is in some way crooked. 

Malcolm Gladwell’s 2001 New Yorker article “Drug Store Athlete” was the first to introduce me to what turns out to be a line from Brecht: “Competitive sport begins where healthy sport ends.” (It’s also cited in Modern Sports Law: A Textbook, which … hey, there’s a textbook about sports law.) But it’s not a surprise. We know it’s sordid.

We know that fandom is simply the way that managers and owners hack the human need for belonging and identity to siphon our dollars while they distract us from our daily boredom.

We know that large public events are an opportunity both for terrorists and the global panopticon. This year’s celebration will feature drones with facial recognition software to identify malefactors, and also drones with drone-recognition software to identify drones that aren’t supposed to be there. Yes, anti-drone drones. 

We know concussions and CTE and plain old injuries are inevitable in our love of the game. We watch athletes cheat death to do incredible things knowing that one of these days, an Olympian snowboarder or ski aerialist will land face-first and die on camera, and when it happens we’ll be complicit in that death. 

We know that winter sports in particular are the domain of rich white people. But we can’t look away. We love sports. We love ice skating. As Patricia Lockwood (a name you must remember, a brilliant writer) notes in her profile of Jason Brown: 

At … points, onlookers burst into the spontaneous laughter of babies. I love that laughter. It happens when the viewers overlap so completely with the athlete, with one another, that they don’t know where their own bodies end anymore. We watch sports for these moments. They’re why, every two years, the planet stops spinning and everyone turns their eyes to the spectacle of the Olympics.

Sport is metaphor, ideal, goal, inspiration. Even curling. I mean, the Finland/Korea mixed-doubles match, which took place on Wednesday, was as thrilling a shuffleboard-on-ice match as you’ll ever see. 

Tonight I’ll be eating Korean takeout and drinking soju and watching the Parade of Nations to celebrate the fact that the Republic of Korea has gone almost 100% over budget and blown 13 billion dollars on this beautiful, corrupt display of glitz and fireworks and human toil. It’s wasteful and terrible and beautiful and inspiring and I love it. 

Also Korean-style fried chicken is delicious af.

Cultivating interest
New Orleans topography is a long long story.

The persistence of paper jams is fascinating (also: the first recorded fatal paper jam happened in 1867).

Smart homes are really dumb: Your vacuum can now ask you to help it clean your house. Your bed will only make you coffee in one kind of coffeepot. Your vibrator is keeping track of your orgasms. And your TV is definitely watching you.

A lengthy eulogy for Lil Peep, who seems to be taking a place in the generational pantheon like ODB and Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse — gone far too soon, and on the verge of so much more, undone by his own fuckups and his self-destructive persona and the monsters of fame and addiction and mental illness.

Our dumb news cycle
Trump administration sidelines drug policy experts when making drug policy.

On-campus white supremacy propaganda is up 258% this year.

An actual Illinois Nazi is a likely Republican nominee for congress. (See also: More Nazis).

Here’s a real example of illegal immigrants marrying for citizenship and bringing their talentless family over to mooch off the government: Melania Knauss and her parents. 

VP Mike Pence is lying about his prior anti-gay advocacy while arguing with a gay figure-skater. He’s leading the US Olympic delegation, with the support of approximately none of the athletes.

Cultivating joy
If you really lay it on thick, you may be able to get as many puns into one article as  The Economist has in an article titled Margarine sales: Investors can’t believe they’re not better. 

This dog has majestic ears.

Girl Scouts of America trying to decide whether it’s OK to sell cookies outside marijuana shops.

Crowdfunding project creates votive candles for Robert Mueller and the distribution of the Trump pee tape.

Thoughtful Young Adults

My friend Jodi is a guidance counselor at a school in Brighton, and she recruited me to help out in the writing lab today. As it goes every time I come into a high school these days, I was intimidated by the metal detectors, impressed by the school’s devotion to anti-bullying and anti-prejudice posters, and not entirely sure which young adults were the students and which were the teachers.

Then a diminutive young woman said EVERYONE, IF YOU ARE NOT HERE FOR WRITING LAB IT IS TIME TO GO and a bunch of people who looked just as old as her, many of them twice her size, scrambled to leave or sit down at their desks. One young man needed a couple quick bits of grammar and style advice before an orthodontia appointment. Another was dawdling on his phone until I tried to talk to him, and the threat of having to have a conversation with some random adult was enough to get him to turn to his homework. Then I helped a girl revise an essay about going to visit family in Somalia and the perspective on privilege and language that she’d gained from trying to attend a Somali school for a few months. After about an hour, Jodi asked us how we were doing. My student was justifiably proud of her work: “Miss Jodi it’s going great, I want you to read my essay!”

Miss Jodi replied immediately with “I wanted to read your essay last month when it was due.” Lesson: do not waste Miss Jodi’s time.

Before I left, I introduced myself to a couple more students and told the I’d be around if they had any writing questions. One asked me if I had any advice about researching the history of hip-hop and dance music, since you’re not supposed to use Wikipedia as a primary source. He may have been trying to test whether I was actually hip enough, and he may have actually wanted to know. I advised him not to cite Wikipedia, but to look up the books that Wikipedia cites, because they are valid sources. And then I told him to check WhoSampled.com, because I love that site.

For example, the Notorious B.I.G’s still-popular track Juicy owes a huge debt to Mtume’s 1983 Juicy Fruit, a song remembered less for its quality or enduring popularity than for how many different artists sampled it.

I have only ever heard Juicy Fruit once outside of samples, but was a #1 hit.

On Billboard’s “Hot Black Singles” chart.

“Hot Black Singles” was a chart category from 1982-1990 on Billboard.

It’s now called Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.

And that’s a good topic for a research paper on the history of hip-hop and dance music.

Sad!
Health insurance in America: Rationing insulin, dying.

Policing in America: Cops in Baltimore kept toy guns on hand in case they shot unarmed people and needed to frame them.

Missouri AG: Sexual freedom is sexual slavery.

Media Commentary
The NYT is like Charlie Brown, continually surprised that Lucy keeps pulling the football away at the last minute.

Ex-Great America PAC staffer, Trump appointee, banned from Uber after Islamophobic, racist, threatening comments to driver. 

Krugman tweetstorm on hypocrisy.

Stephen Miller photos + Ted Bundy quotes… kinda works.

Jacobin on poverty and surveillance (the first big data set in government hands was the eugenics commission…)

JustSecurity on The Memo.

Healy, Kieran (2017). “Fuck Nuance,” Sociological Theory vol. 35 no. 2, p. 118-127. Delivered at the symposium “What is Good Theorizing?” 

Cultivating joy
Oh no, kitty!
Local news coverage of the Boston Blizzard of 1978, featuring some great accents and hair.
Hilarious list of made-up NYT Bestsellers.