Weekend Reading
Long reads for Congressional opening weekend
“Gary Johnson was clearing clay with a digger at the Oxfordshire quarry where he works when he hit an unexpected bump in the limestone surface. ‘I thought, it’s just an abnormality in the ground,’ he said. ‘But then it got to another, three metres along, and it was hump again, and then it went another three metres, hump again.’ What Johnson had discovered was part of an enormous dinosaur trackway dating to nearly 166 (million) years ago, when the quarry was a warm, shallow lagoon crisscrossed by the huge creatures … Researchers have now unearthed about 200 large footprints at the site, making this the biggest dinosaur trackway ever found in Britain. The tracks are thought to have been made by two types of dinosaur: the herbivorous cetiosaurus, a sauropod that walked on four legs, and the smaller carnivorous megalosaurus. So far, five separate trackways have been found stretching up to 150 metres in length, and experts from the universities of Oxford and Birmingham believe they could extend much further as only part of the quarry has been excavated. ‘This is one of the most impressive track sites I’ve ever seen, in terms of scale, in terms of size of the tracks,’ Prof Kirsty Edgar, a micropalaeontologist from the University of Birmingham, told the BBC. ‘You can step back in time and get an idea of what it would have been like, these massive creatures just roaming around, going about their own business.’ After Johnson’s initial discovery, a team of more than 100 scientists, students and volunteers joined an excavation of the site last summer, which will feature on the BBC series Digging for Britain next week. As well as making plaster casts of the prints, the project recorded 20,000 photographs and built detailed 3D models of the site using aerial drones. The trackways connect to discoveries made in the area in 1997, where limestone quarrying revealed more than 40 sets of footprints. One area of the site even reveals where the paths of a cetiosaurus and megalosaurus crossed, with the sauropod having got there first. The front edge of its large, round footprint is slightly squashed down by the three-toed megalosaurus walking on top of it. Dr Duncan Murdock from the University of Oxford said: ‘Knowing that this one individual dinosaur walked across this surface and left exactly that print is so exhilarating. You can sort of imagine it making its way through, pulling its legs out of the mud as it was going.’” (Esther Addley and Geneva Abdul/The Guardian)
“The conspiracy of silence around Biden’s age-related decline does not rise to the level of the cognoscenti’s embrace of the Iraq War — it did not lead to the deaths of thousands of American troops and many more Iraqi civilians—but it does, in its enforcement of a remarkably foolhardy groupthink, demand its own kind of reckoning. And it’s not at all apparent such a reckoning will ever come. As trust in the media plummets and the Democratic Party itself limps into a murky future, once again locked out of power in Washington, probing questions must be asked of how, for years on end, so many influential people insisted Biden was capable of not only campaigning again but governing for another four years. Last month, The Wall Street Journal extensively documented how Biden’s inner circle limited contact with other administration officials, politicians, donors, and journalists, privately acknowledging the elderly Biden could not perform the duties of a conventional president. At events, aides often repeated instructions to Biden, telling him where to enter or exit a stage. As early as his first year in the White House, aides were canceling meetings when Biden seemed ‘off.’ ‘He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,’ a former aide recalled a National Security official saying, according to the Journal. Meetings, the newspaper reported, were started later in the day because Biden seemed to struggle early in the morning. Most members of Congress, meanwhile, couldn’t talk to Biden at all. Staff locked him away. The implication was that the president simply wasn’t able to sustain complex, one-on-one interactions … (Peter Baker’s) report in the Times on Biden’s diminishment reflects the retroactive consensus: Of course Biden could never really run again or theoretically govern the nation until he was 86. Except virtually every Democrat and left-leaning pundit insisted otherwise until the June debate between Biden and Trump, and much of the media was glad to portray age-related concerns as a right-wing disinformation operation.” (Ross Barkan/The Intelligencer)
“African countries face a range of challenges and opportunities over the next 12 months, from the impact of Donald Trump’s upcoming presidency on global trade to expected investments by China and Gulf nations. Semafor Africa asked key thought leaders for their predictions on what lies ahead in 2025 … (Zainab Usman, director of the Africa Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC.): ‘African countries face a range of challenges and opportunities over the next 12 months, from the impact of Donald Trump’s upcoming presidency on global trade to expected investments by China and Gulf nations. Semafor Africa asked key thought leaders for their predictions on what lies ahead in 2025’ … (Cameron Hudson, analyst Center for Strategic and Intelligence Studies, Washington DC): ‘The areas that stand out for me will be where President Trump will look to make his mark in Africa in 2025 include Somaliland’s possible recognition: This will come with a movement of some US forces out of Djibouti and some aid suspension to Mogadishu. Then there’s the renewed focus for a ceasefire in Sudan: This will be a byproduct of an elite deal among Middle East leaders from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and UAE to revive the Abraham Accords. Finally, I expect a standoff with South Africa. Pretoria is likely to be made an example of for its pro-China, pro-Russia, and anti-Israel positions.’” (Yinka Adegoke, Alexis Akwagyiram, and Samuel Getachew/semafor)
“There has been a long-running debate over the identities of the occupants of the 4th-century BCE Macedonian royal tombs at Vergina, in northern Greece. This is a unique case in Greek archaeology of tombs that may be associated with important historical figures. Ancient Aegae was the first capital of Macedonia. It is situated at today’s town of Vergina (Andronikos 1984). Vergina became a famous UNESCO World Heritage Site as it contained the tombs of Alexander the Great’s father (Philip II), son (Alexander IV) and half-brother (Arrhidaeus Philip III). These people represent the last members of the Argead dynasty of Macedonia. Their tombs, called Royal Tombs I, II and III, were covered by the Great Tumulus at Vergina. They were excavated between 1977 and 1978 under the direction of Manolis Andronikos, professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. These finds consisted of two monumental vaulted chambers (Tombs II and III) and a smaller and less impressive cist tomb (Tomb I). Tomb I had been looted; Tombs II and III were intact and contained an astoundingly rich array of burial goods … Andronikos immediately identified the occupant of Tomb II as King Philip II (died 336 BCE), the father of Alexander the Great. This view has been supported by his students and successors, among others, and has now become the traditional position known as the Philip II/Tomb II hypothesis (Andronikos 1984) …Shortly after the excavation, however, an alternate hypothesis emerged: that Tomb II belongs to Philip III Arrhidaeus (died 317 BCE), Alexander's much less impressive brother, and that Philip II was buried in the looted Tomb I. Most scholars agree that Tomb III belongs to Alexander IV, the teenage son of Alexander the Great, but strenuous debate over the other two tombs continues unabated.” (Antonis Bartsiokas, Juan Luis Arsuaga and Nicholas Brandmeir/Journal of Archaeological Science)
“Last May, the Israeli government—invoking new emergency powers allowing it to act against foreign broadcasters that it perceives as endangering national security—temporarily banned Al Jazeera, the influential network that broadcasts in both Arabic and English, from operating inside Israeli territory and dispatched agents to raid its offices in a hotel in Jerusalem, where they confiscated equipment. Israeli officials accused Al Jazeera of being a mouthpiece for Hamas—the militant group that controls Gaza and attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing well over a thousand people—and of inciting further violence. The Israeli ban ‘may have come to many as a disappointment,’ Ayodeji Rotinwa wrote for CJR at the time, but ‘it should not have been a surprise’; as the academic Amit Schejter noted to Rotinwa, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has ‘no respect for freedom of the press.’ A few months later, Israeli soldiers also raided Al Jazeera’s offices in Ramallah, in the West Bank, again issuing a temporary shutdown order and confiscating equipment. A witness told CNN at the time that the soldiers breached the building’s entrance using explosives. This week, Al Jazeera broadcast a video showing law enforcement officials entering a hotel room in Ramallah and handing one of its journalists a letter ordering a ban on its operations. This time, though, the officials weren’t from the Israeli government but from the Palestinian Authority, or PA—the body, dominated by the political party Fatah, that administers parts of the West Bank (but not Gaza, where Hamas defeated Fatah in the 2000s, then forced it out). As the New York Times notes, there has long been ‘bad blood’ between Fatah and Al Jazeera, with the former seeing the latter as pro-Hamas; nor—according to Noga Tarnopolsky, the Jerusalem correspondent for France 24—is there any love lost between Fatah and Qatar, the country that funds Al Jazeera. (Tarnopolsky even suggested that the Fatah-controlled PA might have moved against Al Jazeera to ‘put itself on the right side’ of the incoming Trump administration in the US.) The PA characterized its decision to ban Al Jazeera from operating under its jurisdiction as temporary, suggesting that it would be reversed when the broadcaster comes into compliance with regulations that it is supposedly breaching. But officials also accused it of trying to ‘provoke strife and interfere in Palestinian internal affairs,’ by disseminating ‘misleading reports’ and ‘inciting materials.’” (Jon Allsop/CJR)
“So, after a man drove a truck into French Quarter revelers, killing 15 and injuring dozens, Trump was blaming the attack on ‘criminals coming in,’ because of course, no American has ever been known to commit mass murder. ‘When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,’ Trump posted on Truth Social hours after the New Year's Eve attack. ‘The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. … The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!’ Even after law enforcement revealed that the driver of the truck was an American citizen who was born in Texas, and reporters started to turn up his long military record, MAGA Daddy clung to nativism. The fact that the unhinged former Army staff sergeant was carrying an ISIS flag and had converted to Islam at some point was all he and his fans needed to blame open borders, and paint federal law enforcement as weak and, of course, devoted to the single ludicrous goal of destroying Trump himself.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“When the public pays attention to the congressional ‘show,’ we're missing important news about the actual workings of government, former congressman Tom Malinowski argued in this worthwhile thread. He pointed to the provision in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act capping out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs at $2,000 a year for Medicare enrollees. The cap ‘finally kicked in’ on January 1, and ‘I'm sure many of my former constituents will feel the difference,’ Malinowski, a Democrat from New Jersey, wrote. ‘But will they know this happened now because specific politicians, including Joe Biden, made and kept a promise over 2 years ago, that democracy actually worked in this case?’ Malinowski noted that CNN covered the news this week, but argued that the wider media world failed to inform people about the cap taking effect. ‘Social media amplified news today is focused on conflict and drama’ – like the speaker vote – while ‘information about a good thing government did is muted. Joe Rogan and the new podcasts don't care. Local news is dying.’” (Brian Stelter/Reliable Sources)
“There’s a reason why even streamers like Netflix now want a piece of the live sports action. It’s what rules our viewing habits, as witnessed by Variety‘s annual list of the year’s 100 most-watched primetime telecasts. A full 75 out of those 100 slots went to sports (up from 56 last year), thanks to 45 NFL games (the same as last year), 19 Paris Summer Olympics installments and both the NBA Finals (four out of five games) and a big World Series. The World Series didn’t make the list last year, but in 2024 it was back with all five games — thanks to the major market Los Angeles Dodgers/New York Yankees matchup. Meanwhile, here’s a first: The NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship didn’t make the top 100 telecasts lists, but the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship did. (Both of those games were simulcast, but this chart looks only at individual networks, so those numbers would ultimately be higher — 18.87 million for the women’s final and 14.82 for the men’s final.) The election year made two appearances in the chart, starting with the Sept. 10 Presidential Debate held by ABC. That 20.3 million number was for the Alphabet net alone; the debate was simulcast by multiple networks and actually drew an estimated audience of 67.1 million viewers — which would make it the No. 2 telecast of the year, behind only the Super Bowl. With sports taking up the lion’s share of the list, there wasn’t much room for regular primetime fare this year.” (Michael Schneider/Variety)
“Matt Flegenheimer: In February 2001, at a moment when, as White would say later, nobody was taking (the UFC) seriously, Donald Trump took them seriously. Sabrina Tavernise: So, in this grand love story of Dana White and Donald Trump, this fight in Atlantic City is really the meet cute moment. Matt Flegenheimer: This is the moment. And, obviously, White was grateful to be hosted by Trump, to have this sort of legitimacy that came with having a major fight night at a Trump venue at that time. With that said, this is not an overnight success, by any stretch. They’re losing money. It’s not taking off in any kind of rocket ship way. But you can see some sort of early signs that Trump and White understand each other. Trump invites one of the fighters onto the ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ for a season. And reality TV really plays a substantial role in the UFC’s arc … Matt Flegenheimer: So, in 2008, Trump announces, he’s investing in his own rival mixed martial arts enterprise. And he’s trying to harness some of the energy that the UFC is clearly channeling. But his group is not long for this world. And his operation collapses pretty quickly. But it’s really a testament to the Trump-White friendship. The two of them are not necessarily the type to take kindly to business threats in their respective fields. And they stay on very good terms here. And, in 2011, the UFC signs a big TV contract. Trump sees an article about it, takes it, writes a message on it, and sends it to White, saying, congratulations. I always knew you were going to do it. Sabrina Tavernise: Like, he’s a proud mom or something. Matt Flegenheimer: And it’s both a compliment and self-regarding about his own instincts, that Trump — Trump saw it coming. Sabrina Tavernise: Yeah, he spotted it, too. Matt Flegenheimer: They spotted it together. Sabrina Tavernise: OK, so, clearly, these two have a lot in common. They’re businessmen. They both have this reality TV thing. They both see the potential in this very violent sport.” (The Daily)
“(Hawk Tuah Girl, Haliey Welch) has thrown the first pitch at a New York Mets game, sung with the country star Zach Bryan, racked up millions of followers on social media, and attended the Mike Tyson–Jake Paul fight. She launched an online store (the URL: 16minutes.life), the Talk Tuah pod (where she has interviewed such people as Mark Cuban and Wiz Khalifa), and on December 4, a Solana-denominated crypto ‘memecoin’ called $HAWK (which she described to Fortune magazine as ‘not just a cash grab’ and ‘a good way to interact with my fans’). That last venture, it will probably not shock you to find out, was not, in fact, a good way for Welch to interact with her fans. Nor was the process particularly cool or futuristic. The memecoin was mostly just reminiscent of timeless, dopey ol’ pump-and-dump schemes, in which a few insiders hype up a penny stock, then abscond with the profits while everyone else takes home nothing but shame and junk faxes. $HAWK briefly took flight after its debut. And for a moment there, the number of tokens in the market multiplied by the most recent transaction price equaled a market cap of nearly half a billion dollars. But then, just as fast, $HAWK was down, down, down, most of the way to gone, picked clean by opportunists who were well-positioned to strike. The entire rigmarole felt … actually kind of familiar in 2024, a year that was already lousy with rando crypto projects originating from the ‘famous’ and anonymous alike. Caitlyn Jenner, Iggy Azalea, and Andrew Tate all launched self-referential celebcoins this year. Lionel Messi lent his name to some digital duds. Human beings invested real funds into speculative and sometimes even lucrative e-tokens named for frogs, hippos, and squirrels. Hackers joined in on the fun, infiltrating well-known social media accounts (Sydney Sweeney! McDonald’s!) to help launch their weird little memecoin scams.” (Katie Baker/The Ringer)
“Washington’s think-tank industry, which sets the terms of debate for so much of American policymaking, is floating on a sea of foreign-government and Pentagon-contractor dollars. That’s the conclusion of a brand-new report out this morning and shared with me by a pair of scholars at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank that officially eschews foreign-government money — and delights in tweaking the Beltway foreign-affairs establishment. Among other things, the paper says that the top 50 think tanks took in some $110 million over the past five years from foreign governments and related entities, including nearly $17 million from the United Arab Emirates, the largest single foreign donor. Leading Pentagon contractors, meanwhile, kicked in nearly $35 million over the same period. The Atlantic Council and the Brookings Institution topped the list of foreign-government beneficiaries, taking in nearly $21 million and over $17 million, respectively. All in all, 54 different governments contributed to the industry, a list largely made up of pro-western democracies but also including fantastically wealthy authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Most disturbingly, the report makes clear that the numbers it cites may only be partial: Unlike traditional PACs or registered foreign agents, think tanks don’t have to disclose where their money comes from. Researching the study, co-authors Ben Freeman and Nick Cleveland-Stout told me, meant poring through the organizations’ annual reports in hopes that information would be voluntarily shared. ‘More than a third of the top foreign policy think tanks in the US don’t disclose any donor information,’ said Freeman. The category encompasses 18 of the 50 biggest think tanks, including highly-regarded Beltway stalwarts like the American Enterprise Institute or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. ‘We really have no clue whatsoever who is funding them. We call these organizations dark money think tanks.’ That particular loaded term — lifted from the secretive political groups legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — is no accident.” (Michael Scaeffer/Politico)