DAVID FRUM: What happens in the next four years will depend heavily on whether Trump is right or wrong about how little Americans care about their democracy and the habits and conventions that sustain it. If they surprise him, they can restrain him. Public opinion, public scrutiny, and public pressure still matter greatly in the U.S. political system. In January, an unexpected surge of voter outrage thwarted plans to neutralize the independent House ethics office. That kind of defense will need to be replicated many times. Elsewhere in this issue, Jonathan Rauch describes some of the networks of defense […]
‘Yesterday Was A Trial Balloon For A Coup d’Etat’
EDITOR’S NOTE: Yonathan Zunger is principal engineer at Google and Chief Architect for Social Media. Prior to that he was a physicist at Stanford’s Institute for Theoretical Physics. His opinions are his own and do not represent the opinions of Google. MEDIUM: Note also the most frightening escalation last night was that the DHS made it fairly clear that they did not feel bound to obey any court orders. CBP continued to deny all access to counsel, detain people, and deport them in direct contravention to the court’s order, citing “upper management,” and the DHS made a formal (but […]
BEING THERE: Alt-Fact Kelly Is Not A Joke
Anti-Trump protest, Frank Rizzo Statue, noonish, 1/26/16 by Jennifer Raphael This guy, who prefers to remain anonymous, is HIV positive and applying for #ACA, according the Inquirer’s Jason Nark. He made his #alternativefact Kelly costume himself, and paired it with Gucci sneakers and a large Flyers tattoo on his calf.
My Dad Voted For Trump, I Did Not, Hilarity Ensues
BY MAX B. ABRAMS There is an old saying that, like so many other worn out platitudes, only carries weight when someone defies it: There are two things that should not be discussed at a dinner table — politics and religion. I don’t think my father has ever heard this saying. My father is a devout follower of Fox News. He is also an intelligent man who is excellent at discourse. He knows how to argue his opinion in a manner that is admittedly pretty convincing, even when I think he is wrong. His debating style is like a […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: Journalist Luke Harding has an insider’s understanding of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Harding served as Moscow bureau chief for the British newspaper The Guardian from 2007 until 2011. During his tenure, Russian agents followed him, tapped his phone and repeatedly broke into his home. “I almost feel like I could write the KGB handbook, I lived it for quite a long time,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. Harding was expelled from Russia after four years, in part due to his reporting on Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who defected to England and died in 2006 […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: The Case For Illegitimacy
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY This just in: Donald J. Trump announces that the November results give him an unequivocal “mandate” to govern, and to do so as he sees fit. First and foremost: I’ll take those assertions as your attempt at jocularity, Mr. Trump. But as you and I both know, the closest thing you’ll ever get to a “mandate” is probably a clandestine “man date” with your equally pseudo-macho boyfriend in his private Kremlin bathroom. So, how about we clarify a few things right up front: 1) You did NOT win the election, in fact you LOST it […]
TELEVISION: Mary Tyler Moore, Who Made Prime TV Time Ready For Modern Women, Dead @ 80
NEW YORK TIMES: At least a decade before the twin figures of the harried working woman and the neurotic, unwed 30-something became media preoccupations, Ms. Moore’s portrayal — for which she won four of her seven Emmy Awards — expressed both the exuberance and the melancholy of the single career woman who could plot her own course without reference to cultural archetypes. The show, and her portrayal of Mary as a sisterly presence in the office,as well as a source of ingenuity and humor, was a balm to widespread anxieties about women in the work force. It modeled a […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: Widespread fears about the future — including concerns about politics, the economy, the environment and all-out nuclear war — have led some people to prepare for ways to defend themselves. The “survivalists” include some Silicon Valley executives, who worry about the tech future they have helped to create. Journalist Evan Osnos, who recently wrote about doomsday prep for the super rich for The New Yorker, tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that tech survivalists are stockpiling weapons and food, and, in some cases, preparing luxury underground bunkers. “They feel a sense of fragility in our politics,” Osnos says. […]
THE REVENANT: I’m Going Back To Standing Rock
Photo by LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS via THE GUARDIAN BY ERIC ASHLEIGH As a long-suffering progressive in good standing with my own conscience, I’ve stood silently by for a decade watching each emerging call for revolution thwarted across the globe by a much more organized enemy — the forces of unapologetic greed, intolerance and state-sanctioned violence. I’ve been waiting impatiently to find a cause that wasn’t just talk, or casual activism but something that had a physical manifestation and on the endless horizon of the Great Plains, I believe we’ve found the template. To see the remnants of a once-proud and thriving […]
THE DYING OF THE LIGHT: In 1995 Carl Sagan Foretold The Dim Present With Terrifying Accuracy
Rage against the dying of the light.
FATHER JOHN MISTY: Pure Comedy
Details of the new Father John Misty album have begun to emerge: It will be called Pure Comedy, it will be released on March 31st on Sub Pop and the cover looks like this [see above]. A video for the title track has just dropped. Directed by Matthew Donald Siskin, it heralds the coming apocalypse of our Bozo Republic, now that its Cheeto-tinted Idiot-Messiah/Anti-Christ has been enthroned, with a combination of primitive neo-Hieronymous Bosch doodles (presumably inked by FJM’s Josh Tillman) along with found footage chronicling the accelerating decline of Western Civilization. This is a state of the art […]
THE ONION: The Devil And Kellyanne Conway
THE ONION: Who among you wouldn’t do the same exact thing if an evil 400-year-old witch had trapped your father’s eternal soul inside a cursed iron lantern, flickering faintly each time his agonized moans escaped the murky, otherworldly ether that is his prison? Look me in the eye and tell me that you would not heed the crone’s disgusting instruction to divert attention away from Donald Trump’s glaring conflicts of interest, nor undermine the nation’s entire intelligence apparatus to salve your boss’s ego, nor categorically deny objective reality time and time again if so doing released your father’s tortured […]
CINEMA: Being Mike Mills
THE NEW YORKER: His interest is in people and their trajectories; a maximalist, he wants to reveal the entirety of his characters’ lives and minds. In “20th Century Women,” the five main characters periodically narrate their own and one another’s biographies. Their stories are accompanied by montages of period photos intended to create an air of credence. A believer in sympathetic magic, Mills gathers dog-eared objects and forgotten rituals to summon a world of mixtapes and Judy Blume and Three Mile Island and skateboarders who grab their boards behind their front leg. Julie (Elle Fanning), a seventeen-year-old who cuddles […]