“Africa’s largest democracy will hold its presidential election on Saturday. As many as 93.4 million registered voters will determine who gets to be the next president of the continent’s most populous country. They will also decide the composition of the two chambers of Nigeria’s parliament.” (Al Jazeera)
“Eight months ago, the odds-on favourite was the candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Bola Tinubu. A 70-year-old long-time politician, Tinubu is widely considered to be one of Nigeria’s chief “godfathers” — very wealthy political actors who engage in industrial-scale vote-buying, paying poor citizens cash to support their candidates. Tinubu openly brags about how many politicians owe him their positions, including current president Muhammadu Buhari.” (Unherd)
“Stimulated by the COVID recession, the supply chain crisis, and the urgent need for renewable energy, Biden’s administration has sponsored an industrial policy, actually several industrial policies, intended to reclaim technological leadership and domestic manufacturing. Jubilant liberals, who have long called for this, are now a little like the dog who caught the car. Coordinating these diffuse policies into a coherent whole and enabling them to succeed is a staggeringly complex enterprise.” (Robert Kuttner/The American Prospect)
“By most appearances, Fox News is a well-managed, tightly run outfit. It’s America’s most popular cable news channel, thrashing CNN and MSNBC with a prime-time audience of more than two million. It’s highly profitable, as its parent Fox Corp. reported more than $1 billion in net income last fiscal year. But a very different picture emerges in the wake of the internal emails and texts that became public last week, as part of a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over Fox’s airing of conspiracy theories about its machines. " (CJR)
“Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School, described Dominion's evidence as a ‘very strong’ filing that "clearly lays out the difference between what Fox was saying publicly and what top people at Fox were privately admitting.’ A cache of behind-the-scenes messages included in the legal filing showed Fox Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch called Trump's claims ‘really crazy stuff,’ and the cable network's stars — including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham — brutally mock the lies being pushed by the former president's camp asserting that the election was rigged.” (Reliable Sources)
“We heard that an ‘unreliable narrator’ was ‘what readers were craving’; that ‘psychological suspense’ is ‘very big’; that ‘historical fiction is red hot’; that ‘sexy vampires’ can yield a ‘franchise author’; that ‘it’s very hard to make a success out of short stories’; and that it’s ‘very difficult to create success out of whole cloth just through marketing.’” (Harpers)
"I have worked as a music critic for the past 20 years, and spent the last five as a documentarian making film, TV and podcasts that focus on understanding women’s ambitions in music: what drives them, their artistic self-conception, the onus for their work and, perhaps most importantly, what their work endows." (Jessica Hopper/The Guardian)
“As for the non-Trump lane of this GOP primary, I just don’t understand how these more normal candidates break the fever that is Trumpism.” (Molly Jong Fast/VF)
“On Feb. 23, Weinstein was sentenced in Los Angeles to 16 additional years for the rape of the anonymous woman known only as Jane Doe 1. Finally ready to tell her story, Evgeniya Chernyshova opens up about the long road to justice and why she has chosen to reveal herself." (THR)
“Traveling at five miles a second, 250 miles above the Earth’s surface, Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev wakes to a message from his handlers on the ground: the Soviet Union is collapsing. And so is the Soviet Space agency. You have a choice: come down as planned and abandon the world’s only space station to an unknown fate. Or stay, protect the final outpost of a falling empire and risk your life?” (The Last Soviet)
“‘This is one of the busiest times of the year for us,’ says Dr. Andrew Jacono, New York plastic surgeon to the one percent, pointing to the over-subscribed calendar of social events and charity benefits in the lead-up to Memorial Day. ‘It’s really the last hurrah if you’re going to do a procedure and be ready by the end of May. But this season, there is more of a rush than usual, and people are looking to make a more dramatic reentry.’” (Avenue)
"(James Stewart) has a doozy with 'Unscripted', the new book he co-wrote about the last days of media mogul Sumner Redstone, who at one point was one of the most powerful men in the industry, and whose decline fueled years of fighting between his family, his employees, and his mistresses.” (Recode)
“While editing the film, he employed the same mathematical approach that made “Pi” such a success. The entire film essentially builds up to an intense musical climax, and Aronofsky and his editors made a point of using math to meticulously build up to the final close-ups.” (IndieWIRE)
“So far, however, there is nothing to indicate that India is about to change its position. In an interview with the news portal ANI this week, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar described India's relations with Russia as ‘extraordinarily stable, and that's in the midst of all the global political turmoil.’” (DW)
50 Greatest Rappers of all time (Billboard/Vibe)