Weekend Reading
Long reads for the weekend
“Ocean photographer and advocate Rachel Moore is fortunate enough to spend a lot of time swimming and interacting with whales and dolphins. On one particular day, she swam with a humpback whale she’s nicknamed Sweet Girl, capturing extraordinarily detailed photographs of the whale’s eye. Tragically, four days later Sweet Girl was struck and killed by a fast-moving ship. After a long full-day tour, including swimming with a male whale, Moore nearly didn’t enter the water to swim for a second time. However, after noticing a juvenile whale playing with some spinner dolphins near the surface, she decided it was worth it, given how curious the whale seemed to be. ‘She seemed very curious, so we decided to get back in the water for one more swim. I'm so glad we did! That whale was Sweet Girl. As soon as we got in, she approached us very closely,’ Moore told IFLScience. While Moore and the whale stayed together for some time, the photographs of the eye were actually captured the following day. ‘After missing the opportunity to capture her eye on our first encounter, I knew I didn’t want to miss it the second time. The way she looked at me left an indelible mark on my memory – it was one of the most powerful and profound moments of my life. I wanted to capture that direct eye contact so I could always feel the power of that encounter.’” (Eleanor Higgs/IFLScience)
“Wyoming — the least populated U.S. state — has overtaken Delaware for the most corporate registrations per capita, cementing the Cowboy State’s reputation as a top secrecy destination for the ultrawealthy, according to new data released today. The analysis, compiled by corporate data firm OpenCorporates and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, shows that the number of Wyoming incorporations shot up by 30% in 2023, while Delaware’s rate of growth slowed. The spike in new incorporations has raised concerns in Wyoming about a possible influx of bad actors seeking to exploit the state’s laws that allow anonymous limited liability companies, or LLCs, to overlay highly opaque trusts. Local officials are scrambling to keep up with a proliferation of anonymous entities in the state. ‘The obvious question is: Who is incorporating there, and for what purpose,’ Chris Taggart, the founder of OpenCorporates, told ICIJ.” (Spencer Woodman/ICIJ)
“The assassination of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson outside the New York Hilton at dawn, while undeniably horrifying and tragic, especially for his friends and family, feels like lancing a boil. Rage and macabre glee course through the sewer of social media. So much cheering of the assassin on Xitter and Threads. As one wag put it, Thompson’s was the most celebrated death since Kissinger’s. Civilized hand-wringing over this spectacle of heartlessness is being drowned out by orders of magnitude. Why? Yes, we’re a flinty lot (see my post-election Freakshow on that national trait here). But one reason for our flintiness is that most Americans live with the total or near-total absence of the most fundamental pillar of human security. I’m not talking about guns. I am talking about health care. The sleight of hand that circus-barker-crowned-King Donald pulls every time he blames brown people coming over the border for the miseries and panics of average Americans is a sick, slick trick from the old Republican playbook. Reagan plied it first and most effectively at the dawn of the new anti-progressive era, gulling middle America into voting for its own extinction by blaming welfare queens for their unhappiness. Sadly the trick works just as well almost a half century later. Blaming immigrants is a reliably crowd-pleasing diversion from the real problem: the abomination of private, for-profit, market-driven health care. One huge reason Americans are so stressed out and mad is the sheer difficulty of achieving and maintaining access to what should be a basic human right. Chemo? Or a roof over your family? Meanwhile, health care profiteering is obscene. Did you know United Health Care hauled in $371 billion in revenue last year? Did you know United Health Care has the highest claim denial rate in the already flinty American insurance industry? (At 32%, four and half times higher than Kaiser, with the lowest rate.)” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“Even before Mr. Trump had secured the Republican nomination, his operation had obsessed over finding ways to offset the expected Democratic money edge. The campaign deployed creative bookkeeping to offload payroll and rally costs. Door-knocking operations were coordinated with outside groups. But at the very top of the list was finding ways to spend money on ads efficiently. Tony Fabrizio, who began the year as the lead pollster for Make America Great Again Inc., commissioned a 20,000-person survey in early 2024 to study not just who was genuinely persuadable in the swing states but also how they got their news. The findings were a revelation. The swing vote in 2024 skewed younger, and more Black and Hispanic, than usual, the survey found. And crucially, a disproportionate share of those undecided or swayable voters could be found on streaming services. Roughly half of them used such services exclusively, and another third used streaming in addition to more traditional television. The Trump super PAC team drew up a plan to target these so-called streaming persuadables relentlessly. It worked with political modelers to pair the polling data with consumer information and match it to the voter rolls in the seven swing states. The end result was an actual list of 6.3 million individual voters. It amounted to the team’s best guess of the universe of undecided voters who would ultimately decide the 2024 election — and now it could target them on streaming television, in their mailboxes, by phone and at their doors.” (Shane Goldmacher/NYT)
“‘Character is Destiny,’ Heraclitus warned us twenty-five centuries ago. But so intent are Trump’s late-breaking voters — his irregular army, I call them — in breaking the wheel altogether, that they elected him to have another go at it, Character be damned. Even though last time his sloppy transition out of power involved a lot of urine and feces spread about in order to degrade the Capitol building. Who, exactly, are these irregular voters that lack political memory? They are a species of voter — the most important species of voter — disengaged from the election until its last moments.” (The Corsair)
“There is a chill descending over America’s corporate newsrooms, driven by fear and Donald Trump’s promises of retribution, harassment and targeting of journalists, opponents and critics. It will get much icier in the months ahead until what the American people are fed over federally-licensed airwaves is a news version of farina — bland, sanitized and NICE. During the weeks ahead there will be major revelations about multiple news organizations and decisions by celebrated senior editors at famous news brands over spiked stories — killed because of fear over offending some of the country’s most powerful and extreme political interests. Being nice to Trump is the expectation of the Trump regime. They will enforce it through threat, bluster and abuses of power. Who gets to referee the nice line? Where is it? Who defines it? It’s not Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee. They are gone, and in their place atop a pile of wealth, are some of the softest humans there have ever been that have deluded themselves into thinking that they are wise and strong because they have all the material things that can be had. The peevish and frightened billionaire news ownership class is as terrified of losing a dollar as some morning show hosts are of losing access to power.” (Steve Schmidt)
“President-elect Trump has assembled an administration of unprecedented, mind-boggling wealth — smashing his own first-term record by billions of dollars … Besides Trump, Musk and his fellow Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Vivek Ramaswamy, at least 11 billionaires will be serving key roles in the administration.” (Zachary Basu/Axios)
“A study by Kiros Berhane, a biostatistician at Columbia University, found that more than 100,000 women in Tigray may have been raped by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers and their allies. ‘When they raped them, they told them that they came to destroy their wombs so that Tigrayan women will not give birth to Tigrayan children,’ Yirgalem Gebretsadkan, who heads the research center on gender-based violence for the Tigray government’s Commission of Inquiry on Tigray Genocide, told me. More than 80 percent of the women who reported being raped told the commission they had been gang-raped. Eritrean soldiers who were H.I.V.-positive were ordered to rape H.I.V.-negative women. Boys and men were raped, too. Some 600,000 people have been killed in the conflict and millions more have been displaced from their homes. Both sides agreed to stop fighting in 2022. As part of the peace deal, the Tigray Defense Forces were required to surrender their arms and send 270,000 fighters to makeshift rehabilitation camps, which were supposed to help reintegrate them into society. But those forces have said they will not fully disarm until Eritrean forces withdraw. Two years on, Abiy has yet to ask them to leave parts of western Tigray, an indication, perhaps, that he does not trust Tigrayan leadership to keep the peace. During most of the war, the federal government didn’t allow foreign journalists to enter Tigray. Afterward, the world seems mostly to have forgotten about what happened there. But earlier this year, the photographer Malin Fezehai and I, together with an Ethiopian guide and translator, visited Tigray to witness a crisis that never really ended.” (Alexis Okeowo/NYT)
“Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s pick to direct the Federal Bureau of Intelligence, has never served in the FBI. But he has hosted Steve Bannon’s podcast. Patel is a contributor at Real America’s Voice, the right-wing news network that produces Bannon’s show War Room, and has long appeared as a guest on the show. After top Trump adviser Bannon was imprisoned for four months earlier this year — on charges of contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with a January 6 Committee subpoena — Patel stepped up to serve as an occasional guest host. To try and understand Patel better, I listened to every episode and clip tagged with ‘Kash Patel’ on the War Room website — and a few others that Bannon’s team missed. The overwhelming impression is that Patel is a man whose entire worldview revolves around paranoid conspiracy theories — specifically, conspiracies against both America and Trump, which for him are one and the same. It’s a specific kind of obsession that reminds me of the FBI’s first director: J. Edgar Hoover, a man who infamously abused his power to persecute political enemies … In one episode, he called on the Republican majority in Congress to unilaterally arrest Garland — invoking an obscure legal doctrine called ‘inherent contempt’ that has never been used in this fashion in the entirety of American history. In another, he outlined a plan for a MAGA blitz of American institutions focused on getting loyalists into high office. It is hard to tell whether Patel genuinely believes this stuff or is merely performing for Bannon’s audience.” (Zack Beauchamp/Vox)
“I was born in 1982, in the heart of Reagan country. When you’re that age (0) nobody’s in a hurry to tell you that the country’s undergoing a realignment … But over the next 25 years the din changed slowly, until the Obama era, when (with the help of another global economic emergency) common assumptions inverted. Barack Obama didn’t enact another New Deal (not all crises are equal, etc.) but his presidency marked the moment, in my mind, when the politics of government and taxes and their relationship to ‘freedom’ flipped. Democrats felt most sure-footed when fiscal issues arose. They became generally unashamed to talk about government as a force for good—to create a fairer playing field for the collective, and to ‘free’ individuals from uncertainty and privation. It was Republicans who’d hide from or dissemble over questions about taxes. Donald Trump’s second presidency will likely test whether those politics—social-contract politics—are still potent enough to change political alignments. I say “likely,” because Trump is too dishonest to take at his word, and narcissistic enough to abandon any objective for the greater purpose of self-glorification. If the Republican agenda vis-a-vis the safety net creates too much drag, he’ll change policy on a dime and then proclaim himself ‘the father of Obamacare,’ or whatever. But taking Republicans literally, and watching Trump build a government, the incoming administration really does seem to want to establish a new Gilded Age. To shed Reagan-era pretenses of top-down prosperity and just loot the place.” (Brian Beutler/OffMessage)
“South Korea’s governing party chief expressed support Friday for suspending the constitutional powers of President Yoon Suk Yeol for imposing martial law this week, in a bombshell reversal that makes Yoon’s impeachment more likely. Opposition parties are pushing for a parliamentary vote on Yoon’s impeachment on Saturday, calling his short-lived martial law declaration an ‘unconstitutional, illegal rebellion or coup.’ But they need support from some members of the president’s People Power Party to get the two-thirds majority required to pass the impeachment motion. The turmoil resulting from Yoon’s nighttime martial law decree has frozen South Korean politics and caused worry among neighbors, including fellow democracy Japan, and Seoul’s top ally, the United States, as one of the strongest democracies in Asia faces a political crisis that could unseat its leader. During a party meeting, PPP leader Han Dong-hun stressed the need to suspend Yoon’s presidential duties and power swiftly, saying he poses a ‘significant risk of extreme actions, like reattempting to impose martial law, which could potentially put the Republic of Korea and its citizens in great danger.’ Han said he had received intelligence that Yoon had ordered the country’s defense counterintelligence commander to arrest and detain unspecified key politicians based on accusations of ‘anti-state activities’ when martial law was in force.” ( Hyung-Jin Kim and Kim Tong-Hyung/AP)
“American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—A new analysis* of stable isotope data gathered from the only known representative of the ancient Paleoindian Clovis culture – an 18-month-old boy referred to as Anzick-1, who lived roughly 12,800 years ago in what is now Montana – has shown that his mother subsisted on a diet heavy in mammoth meat. Elk, bison, and a now-extinct genus of camel (Camelops) together ranked a distant second, with little evidence for smaller animals or plants contributing dietary protein. Moreover, the child’s isotopic ‘fingerprint’ (inherited directly from his mother, as he was likely still breastfeeding) most closely resembles that of the extinct scimitar cat (Homotherium serum), known to be a mammoth specialist. James Chatters and colleagues suggest that their results lend substantial support to a long-debated hypothesis that the Western Clovis people were accomplished hunters, specializing in mammoth and other large animals – and not generalist foragers, as suggested by a competing hypothesis. ‘Our results provide direct evidence for Western Clovis diets at ~12,800 cal yr B.P.,’ the authors write, noting that their analysis also comports with prior zooarchaeological evidence, including strong representation of mammoth remains across known Clovis faunal assemblages … ‘Our findings are consistent with the Clovis megafaunal specialist model, using sophisticated technology and high residential mobility to subsist on the highest ranked prey, an adaptation allowing them to rapidly expand across the Americas south of the Pleistocene ice sheets…’” (Mathew Wright/Popular Archaeology)