Weekend Reading
What fresh hell is this? #Incompetence #Corruption
“For many years now, I have been one among many arguing that D.C. should become a state. The arguments are obvious: As the District’s license plates sarcastically point out (‘Taxation Without Representation,’ they note), there are about 700,000 American citizens living there who have no representation in Congress. That is an outrageous violation of the principles that underlay the founding of this country. American citizens should have representation in their own government. (The same is true of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.) D.C. statehood would also reduce the partisan bias of the Senate. On its face, the Senate is a ludicrously unfair institution that grants unjustifiable overrepresentation to randomly depopulated states—Wyoming residents count about 70 times as much as Californians—but for much of American history that was counterbalanced by small states not having a reliable partisan bias. That is no longer true: The median Senate seat is slanted about three points to the GOP, and for much of recent history Republicans have controlled the chamber despite losing the majority of votes for senators. Two more reliable Democratic senators would reduce that structural unfairness. There is a more practical factor, however, that is arguably most important of all. States possess wide powers over their own budgets and laws, and enjoy certain restrictions on presidential powers to federalize their National Guard troops. Federalizing police is not allowed at all. D.C. statehood would also reduce the partisan bias of the Senate. On its face, the Senate is a ludicrously unfair institution that grants unjustifiable overrepresentation to randomly depopulated states—Wyoming residents count about 70 times as much as Californians—but for much of American history that was counterbalanced by small states not having a reliable partisan bias. That is no longer true: The median Senate seat is slanted about three points to the GOP, and for much of recent history Republicans have controlled the chamber despite losing the majority of votes for senators. Two more reliable Democratic senators would reduce that structural unfairness. There is a more practical factor, however, that is arguably most important of all. States possess wide powers over their own budgets and laws, and enjoy certain restrictions on presidential powers to federalize their National Guard troops. Federalizing police is not allowed at all.” (Ryan Cooper/TAP)
“Brushing off demands for a ceasefire as a condition for talks, Putin instead proposed a comprehensive solution in which Russia would stop fighting and freeze battle lines if Ukraine turned over all the territory in its Donetsk and Luhansk regions that remains in Kyiv’s hands. Trump appeared to accept that an immediate ceasefire was not on the cards and dropped talk of punitive measures, but his reaction to the rest of Putin’s proffer was unclear. Seemingly to balance the proposed land grab, Trump and Witkoff said over the weekend following the summit that they had shared the notion of ‘Article 5-style’ security guarantees for Ukraine from several countries, failing to define what that would mean. They said Putin was on board with this idea. But with the Kremlin declining to confirm as much (it later suggested that it wanted an arrangement in which Russia would enjoy veto power over other states acting on their guarantees to Ukraine), and given the confusing and incomplete information dribbling out, it was difficult to understand the full implications or seriousness of the Anchorage proposals. Nor did much become clearer when, three days after the Anchorage summit, Zelenskyy and seven of Europe’s most prominent leaders travelled to the White House to meet with Trump. The U.S. president allayed some of their worst fears, at least temporarily, by not pressing Zelenskyy to immediately accept Putin’s demands and withdraw from all of Donetsk and Luhansk. The U.S. also reiterated its pre-Anchorage position that there should be a meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin, crowned by a trilateral summit with Trump, though here, too, there was no sign that the Kremlin had agreed. Yet even if the combined impact of the Anchorage and Washington meetings was somewhere between minimally damaging and net neutral, diplomacy is going to have to meet a higher bar if it is to stand any chance of bringing about a durable peace between Russia and Ukraine.” (Oleg Ignatov and Lucian Kim/Crisis Group)
“While women in a border-town nail salon chatted in Spanish about a local economy the owner called worse than the pandemic, client Iris Martinez hung her head and hid her face. Then, she admitted whom she voted for in the last election: President Trump. ‘I thought he would help the economy—he’s a businessman,’ she said. ‘I regret it.’ Martinez was among thousands of South Texas Hispanics who last year, after a lifetime of voting mostly Democratic, swung their votes to Trump, and the GOP is betting the shift is permanent. At Trump’s instruction, Republican members of the Texas Legislature are moving forward on an unusual mid-decade redistricting effort to add five more GOP Texas congressional seats, four of which are majority Hispanic. The strategy hinges on newly-red voters continuing to vote Republican, especially in the Rio Grande Valley. But there are signs Hispanic voters in Texas and nationally are souring on Trump, which makes the party’s redistricting strategy a risk ahead of the consequential midterm elections. The rightward shift in the region, which began in 2020, came largely in response to economic factors, especially the cost of food and goods. Now, voters say they are feeling the pinch of those things more than ever.” (Elizabeth Findell/WSJ)
“For some Millennial girls, it really wasn’t pretty to be pretty. No one knows this better than Amanda Knox, the blue-eyed ‘angel face’ at the center of an internationally notorious murder case alleging that she stabbed her roommate Meredith Kercher to death the night after Halloween, possibly in some witchy occult game. The salacious charges and her photogenic mien brought out the worst aspects of media culture in three nations, and instigated the first – but definitely not the last – mass internet swarming by surly couch potatoes engaged in DIY conspiracy-solving. The first two episodes in an eight part series, ‘The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,’ premiere tomorrow, August 20, on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. The series stars Grace Van Patten as Knox, opening with a montage of Knox’s life – from broken home and personal ‘quirks’ in Seattle through her move to the medieval alleys, piazzas, dungeon-like courtroom and finally jail of Perugia. Knox executive-produced the show with another woman whose public persona was hijacked by a bloodless but sex-drenched global scandal, Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky’s affair with Bill Clinton – she was an intern, he the President – led to his impeachment, and her own lifelong rebrand as a 19-year old nympho flashing a thong at the leader of the Free World. Lewinsky, 52, is more Gen X than Millennial, but her story was one of the formative political events of the 2000s – as Knox, 38, was coming of age. Both women were in their early 20s watching helplessly (Knox from inside a prison in Italy, Lewinsky hiding from paparazzi in Washington) as they were branded into cliches of insatiable young female whoredom.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“Between an abandoned market and a rusty, decades-old electrical substation in a rundown part of Liverpool sit two buildings with a shiny coat of white paint behind a high-security fence. This ordinary-looking site is considered ‘critical national infrastructure’ because of what’s inside: two 95-ton cylinders with rotors turning 1,500 times per minute. It’s called a synchronous compensator, and it’s northwest England’s best hope of avoiding blackouts. The UK’s grid operator pays a Norwegian power company to keep the rotors running at a fixed speed. And the service it provides is so valuable to the grid that the company, Statkraft, has nabbed orders to build four more of these around the country. ‘If Spain had enough of these machines, the countrywide blackout could have been avoided,’ says Guy Nicholson, head of zero-carbon grid solutions at Statkraft, while giving a tour of the facility. He’s referring to the April afternoon when Spain’s electrical network came to a screeching halt and the whole Iberian Peninsula went dark for nearly a full day — the worst outage in Europe’s modern history. Solar farm outages had destabilized Spain’s grid, and there weren’t enough gas plants online to provide stability. Synchronous compensators could have kept clean power flowing at the right frequency and voltage, avoiding the blackout. But continental Spain doesn't have any. About every two weeks, the Liverpool grid experiences major faults like the one Spain suffered. Statkraft’s spinning machine is set up to react in less than a second. It can absorb excess power, if there’s too much, or inject power into the grid, if there’s too little. The result is a stable grid and no front-page headlines. Yet the UK is an exception. In a rush to add vast amounts of cheap renewables to their power systems, countries haven’t been as quick to create regulations to help stabilize the grid and cut the risk of blackouts. This lack of investment in stabilization can’t continue. Electricity's importance in the energy system is growing, with demand for power rising faster than for any other form of energy. At the same time, many world leaders have been forced to reckon with rising costs and climate goals. Solar power is a solution to all those problems.” (Akshat Rathi and Laura Millan/Bloomberg)
“Critics of the MAHA movement, and of wellness culture writ large, often compare it to a cult, and this kind of rhetoric suggests why. The leader should not be criticized; a vast conspiracy threatens the movement; triumph is ongoing, even if the movement’s crusade against dangerous pesticides and heavy metals in the soil and drinking water has culminated in the election of a President who apparently loves all that stuff. The ‘MAHA moms,’ who helped return Trump to the White House and lifted Kennedy into a Cabinet position, see a kind of messianic power in the Secretary—for some of them, he is, quite literally, their faith healer. ‘If Kennedy is able to do what he wants to do as the head of the H.H.S., we won’t even need health care,’ Zen Honeycutt, the founder of the nonprofit Moms Across America, said in December. ‘I’m saying we won’t be going to the doctor’s because we won’t be sick.’ In recent weeks, however, the MAHA flock has experienced rapidly intensifying cognitive dissonance. On a recent episode of the podcast ‘Why Should I Trust You?,’ Honeycutt, discussing the rollbacks on regulations concerning pesticides and heavy metals, said, ‘I’m horrified as a mother who is working constantly to try to reduce the toxic exposure to my children and to the children all across the country.’ On another podcast, ‘Culture Apothecary,’ its host, Alex Clark, an influencer who is affiliated with the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA, asked, ‘Did President Trump just hand legal immunity to pesticide companies?’ She was referring to Republican-backed legislation, currently pending in the House, that would shield pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits; Clark’s guest, the clean-farming advocate Kelly Ryerson, called the bill ‘the most enormous slap in the face to MAHA.’ It was probably not the last.” (Jessica Winter/The New Yorker)
“Recent advances in East African archaeology reveal advanced civilizations that established international trade relationships and developed powerful and practical technologies during the most recent 11,700 years — the Holocene Epoch — as Chapurukha M. Kusimba, an archaeologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa, describes in the 2024 Annual Review of Anthropology … I’d like to start with a question you raised in your review: Whose past is East African archaeology about? Kusimba: East Africa is homeland to all of us. I’ve sometimes joked with Kenyan politicians that any human being entering Kenya should not have to present a passport, because they’re actually coming home. I think when many of us think about East Africa, we think about the seminal work of anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey on human origins, and the discovery of the hominin Lucy. But what do we know about the rise of civilization among modern humans, Homo sapiens, in Africa? Kusimba: The human origins question has been settled, but we know precious little about the emergence of civilization in Africa. Most Holocene archaeologists define civilization, in part, in terms of settling down in one place, which happened elsewhere starting around 6,000 years ago. But I think in Africa, that model creates a major problem because Africa is so huge, and population numbers remained low, so it was very difficult to have a critical mass of people to congregate together. So you can’t find many places in Africa that you can compare with, for example, the Near East. That doesn’t necessarily mean settlements didn’t exist. But the jury’s still out, because we don’t have the kind of intensified site research that’s been carried out in other places. And it’s very difficult to conduct surveys, say, under the dunes of the Sahara Desert. That desert would have been much more habitable during the humid ‘Green Savannah’ period 14,500 to 5,000 years ago, but it’s just impossible to find sites under those massive sand dunes.” (Amber Dance/Knowable magazine)
“Listing the best movies of a given decade has become something of an IndieWire tradition over the last few years, starting with the countdown we put together for our ’90s Week extravaganza in 2022, continuing with the ’80s the following year, and… then abruptly jumping forward in time to the ’00s the year after that. The problem wasn’t that we don’t love ’70s cinema — the problem was that we love ’70s cinema way too much. And way too much of it. The prospect of putting together a top 100 list that still didn’t have room for the likes of ‘M*A*S*H,’ ‘Brewster McCloud,’ ‘The Long Goodbye,’ or ‘California Split’ seemed deeply perverse, and that’s just accounting for the work of a single filmmaker. No ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’? No ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’? No ‘House,’ ‘Holy Mountain,’ or ‘Half a Loaf of Kung Fu’!? It’s hard to even see the point of trying, and some of you might find it that much harder after parsing the movies that ultimately made the cut now that we’ve finally decided to wrap our hands around one of the most vital — and turbulent — decades the movies have known thus far. Born from the chaos of the 1960s and screaming headlong into a future that still seemed to be up for grabs (even as fears, optimistically dubbed ‘paranoid,’ began to deepen about the powers that really hold this planet in their grip), the films of the ’70s reflect a world that was trying to make sense of its own violent potential. It was a time of ecstatic creativity that saw the emergence of New Hollywood, blaxploitation, and a blockbuster culture that was more compelled by greatness than opening weekend grosses; that saw American cinema look up to the stars with one eye and back down towards its own past with the other. It was also a time of profound reckoning, as established giants like Med Hondo, Nagisa Ōshima, and Pier Paolo Pasolini confronted the rot of history with a clarity and fearlessness that has seldom been seen since. And perhaps more than anything else, it was a time of cocaine. Just incredible amounts of cocaine. In a decade whose movies were so vast and varied, cocaine might be the only thing that many of the ones on this list ultimately have in common. Cocaine and Al Pacino.” (IndieWIRE)
“When the Onion’s new owners acquired the satirical publication a year ago, they bet on a dying breed: print subscribers. It is working. Filled with spoof ads and satirical headlines that often take swings at the news of the day, the Onion has more than 53,000 subscribers paying as much as $9 a month. The publication has a new deal to sell its papers at Barnes & Noble, and is expecting about $6 million in revenue this year—up from less than $2 million in early 2024. The Onion isn’t profitable, but Chief Executive Ben Collins aims to turn a profit next year. ‘People like getting something in the mail that’s not f—ing awful,’ he said. The publication’s results show that old-fashioned media products can find a niche despite changing reader habits and an unforgiving digital landscape.” (Alexandra Bruell/WSJ)
“The Trump administration ranks among the most intrusive in American history, driving the tentacles of the federal government deep into the nation’s economy, culture and legal system. Economically, the administration is dictating corporate behavior through tariffs, subsidies and the punishment of disfavored industries and companies, while rewarding allies with tax breaks and deregulation. And that’s all before the government takes its cut. Culturally, Trump is seeking to redefine the boundaries of public discourse: pressuring universities, elevating grievance politics and reshaping federal agencies to reflect ideological loyalty rather than expertise or experience. Within the legal system, the administration is aggressively reshaping the federal judiciary, asserting executive power over independent institutions and using the Justice Department for political ends. Taken together, these interventions reveal a presidency determined to expand executive reach into virtually every sphere of national life. ‘No peacetime president has remotely approached the Trump administration’s campaign to control the conduct of all the major institutions that comprise American civil society as well as its governments,’ Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote to me by email.” (Thomas B. Edsall/NYT)
“This night was all about being young and being fun, just like The Free Press fashions itself. With such a glut of Gen-Z staffers, (Gen-Z reporter Maya) Sulkin said, ‘my new editor is going to be a Labubu.’ ‘We are all part of the mission,’ Sulkin informed the crowd. ‘Most importantly, just meet each other, your future ex-boyfriend, husband, non-ethical, non-monogamous…person is in the room tonight. These are really the best New York has to offer.’ What, exactly is this mission? Per a set of posters wheatpasted up around New York last month, The Free Press stands for all proud Americans, from ‘techno optimists’ to ‘reactionary homesteaders.’ My impression of the mission after spending a night at this party landed somewhere between lots of buzzwords, restoring liberalism, and making America great again. One of the first people I met on my big night out was a sweet, overeager Cornell communications student who took the train down to the city to catch a glimpse of, or maybe even meet, Bari’s Gen-Z staffers, most of whom have taken to becoming influencers of a sort, livestreaming themselves recording podcasts and reading news summaries on the Free Press Instagram account. I met the friendly daughter of a landlord, who clarified to me that she doesn’t just work for her father. A young writer for the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet said she feels constrained by her publication’s voice, but that she would be thrilled to work for The Free Press. If nothing else, that career pivot would get her more clicks.” (Sophie Hurwitz/The Nation)
“Earlier this month, the Chinese aerospace company Geespace said it sent 11 satellites into orbit. The satellites went up in Geespace’s fourth rocket launch since 2022, bringing its total ‘IoT constellation’ from 30 to 41 satellites. By the end of this year, it has ambitions to deploy 72 satellites, which will provide global data coverage ‘excluding only the polar regions,’ according to a press release. Like any other satellite firm, Geespace has relationships with several telecommunications companies, spread out over more than 20 countries, to provide high-speed internet and other connectivity services. Earlier this year, it signed new agreements with Moroccan, Malaysian, and Saudi Arabian firms. But Geespace is also owned by the parent company of Geely, the second-best-selling carmaker in China, which also sells vehicles across five continents. Which means the rocket launch, and the in-development low-Earth-orbit constellation, also has a mobility bent. Geespace says the satellites will provide support for advanced driver-assistance systems in cars and commercial vehicles, ‘significantly improving travel safety and convenience.’ (The company left open the possibility of supporting other vehicles’ systems too.) This makes Geely the only global automaker with its own dedicated satellite internet constellation and a public plan to integrate that connectivity into its advanced driving tech. At a time when most global automakers are struggling through concurrent crises—a rocky transition to electric vehicles; confused and confusing approaches to software; questions around the future of autonomy; global economic upheaval and trade reorientations; and the rise of Chinese auto manufacturers—the Chinese automaker’s space play demonstrates a veritable long-term, international strategy.” (Aarian Marshall/WIRED)
“I don’t give the tiniest damn what Gavin Newsom’s ‘positioning,’ or ‘2028 game plan,’ or ‘opportunism,’ or anything similar might be. If you’re revving up a column or news-analysis on this point, please stop. If you’re getting ready to sound savvy about it on a talk show, please don’t. I think Newsom has been an effective governor of the nation’s most important state. But let’s say you differ, and don’t like him or his past policies. They’re not what matters now. Rather than handicapping the 2028 candidate-field1, let’s focus on what it will take to get that far as a functioning democracy. Which is what Newsom and his fellow governors JB Priztker of Illinois and Kathy Hochul of New York have been most prominently doing, to keep Republicans from outright stealing control of Congress. Which is what Trump asked Republicans in Texas to do, and they complied. Is it ‘inconsistent’ for Democrats to embrace gerrymandering, when their party has long denounced it? Of course. And is it particularly galling coming from California, which has long led the way with non-partisan redistricting commissions? Yes. Will it be especially difficult in the very states that have previously made the strongest anti-gerrymandering moves? Yes again. But is it necessary? Yes. Completely. Historically. Urgently.” (James Fallows/Breaking The News)