“In some political ways, Israel resembles the United States in miniature. It’s almost perfectly split between a coalition of secular leftists and moderates and religious conservative nationalists. The center-left coalition is broadly committed to democracy and civil rights, while the Netanyahu-led Likud has worked overtime to consolidate permanent power at the expense of Palestinians, women, LGBTQ people, Arab Israelis, and secular Jews. For most of the past 20 years, Bibi Netanyahu’s party has controlled the Israeli government and has encouraged settlers to absorb Palestinian land. The result is that there is no longer any conceivable path to a two-state solution.” (Brynn Tannehill
/TNR)
"Beware the strongman leader who fears jail. Donald Trump is running for president in part because he sees a return to the White House as a literal get-out-of-jail-free card: reinstalled in the Oval Office, he would be able to pardon himself for the mounting pile of serious federal crimes for which he is indicted. His legal strategy is his political strategy. But the exemplar of the phenomenon is the man who was Trumpian before Trump: the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. It is Netanyahu – and the war he is currently waging against his own country – whom all those who care about the wider future of democracy should be watching.” (Jonathan Freedland/The Guardian)
“In one picture a smiling Prigozhin, dressed casually in a white polo shirt and jeans, is shown shaking hands with a senior aide to President Touadéra of the Central African Republic (CAR), whose regime is propped up by Wagner fighters. The date of the image is not known but it was posted on Facebook on Thursday by Dmitry Sytyi, a senior Wagner figure in CAR who has been sanctioned by the UK, EU and US for his links to Prigozhin.” (Jane Flanagan and Marc Bennetts/The Times)
“Tax data obtained by ProPublica provides a glimpse of what congressional investigators would find if (Harlan) Crow were to open his books to them. Crow’s voyages with Thomas, the data shows, contributed to a nice side benefit: They helped reduce Crow’s tax bill. The rich, as we’ve reported, often deduct millions of dollars from their taxes related to buying and operating their jets and yachts. Crow followed that formula through a company that purported to charter his superyacht. But a closer examination of how Crow used the yacht raises questions about his compliance with the tax code, experts said. Despite Crow's representations to the IRS, ProPublica reporters could find no evidence that his yacht company was actually a profit-seeking business, as the law requires. ‘Based on what information is available, this has the look of a textbook billionaire tax scam,’ said Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore.” (Paul Kiel/ProPublica)
“In the decade since the party first entered the German political scene, it has won seats in the Bundestag and in state-level parliaments across the country—but, in large part due to long-standing taboos against collaborating with the far right, it had never won any executive governing positions.” (Emily Schultheis/FP)
“In April 2014, (Larry) Summers sent (Jeffrey) Epstein an e-mail seeking ‘small scale philanthropy advice’ regarding his wife, Elisa New, a professor of English at Harvard. ‘My life will be better if i raise $1m for Lisa,’ he wrote. ‘Mostly it will go to make a pbs series and for teacher training. Ideas?’” (Michael Manning/The Nation)
"In The World Is Flat, published in 2005, Thomas Friedman argued that global trade and finance, presided over by international institutions – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO – were making the planet not only richer but less hierarchical and unequal. This was a pumped-up version of the Enlightenment theory of doux commerce, which held that growing trade, founded on mutually beneficial contracts and the rule of law, would provide opportunity and riches for all, and eventually consign wars, empires and great-power politics to the past. The belief that market-led development strategies would benefit everybody underpins the Washington Consensus, a set of ten policy points drawn up at the end of the Cold War, and dictates decisions at the World Economic Forum at Davos.” (David Priestland/LRB)
“Having survived a childhood marked by abuse at the hands of her mother, Sinéad O’Connor found her voice at a Catholic girls’ reform school, where a nun bought her a guitar and a book of Bob Dylan songs. She wanted to become a protest singer in the vein of Dylan, John Lennon, and Bob Marley, but there was no lane for that in an industry that prized young women for their looks more than their music.” (Allyson McCabe/Vulture)
“Soldiers from the presidential guard, led by Colonel Amadou Abdramane, announced a coup on state TV late on Wednesday. They said Mohamed Bazoum, who was elected as president two years ago in the country’s first democratic transition of power, had been removed from office. The soldiers also said the constitution had been dissolved, the country’s borders were closed and all institutions were suspended.” ( Alexis Akwagyiram/semafor)
“With (Kevin) Spacey legally exonerated, is his claim that producers are now lining up to cast him true? And if so, what type of projects? Indeed, the main discussion from commentators after Spacey walked free from Southwark Crown Court on July 26 — almost six years since he was subjected to arguably the most dramatic cancellation of any actor in the wake of the #MeToo era — was whether he could rebuild his leading man status and pick up where he left off in 2017. According to multiple sources, the answer is no — at least nothing resembling the lauded Hollywood career he once had.” (Alex Ritman/THR)
“Across the country, hotels have become a familiar scene of sex-trafficking crimes. According to the 2018 Polaris Survivor Survey, more than sixty per cent of sex-trafficking victims said that they were forced to sell sex from hotels. Of approximately three thousand criminal sex-trafficking cases that have been prosecuted by the federal government, forty-six per cent included allegations that commercial sex had taken place at a hotel, according to data provided by the Human Trafficking Institute. ‘We focus not enough on how human trafficking intersects with the legitimate economy,’ Louise Shelley, the director of George Mason University’s Terrorism, Transnational Crime, and Corruption Center, told me. ‘This is one of the key points in the supply chain where it does.’” (Bernice Yeung/TNY)
“In the Funan-era archaeological site in southern Vietnam called ‘Óc Eo’, researchers recovered grinding slabs as well as mortars and pestles that resemble early South Asian stone tools used for curry preparation … These included turmeric, ginger, fingerroot, sand ginger, galangal, clove, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Researchers said the new findings represent some of the earliest evidence for the use of many of these spices, and for curry-making, in southeast Asia. ‘We suggest that South Asian migrants or visitors introduced this culinary tradition into Southeast Asia during the period of early trade contact via the Indian Ocean, commencing about 2000 years ago,’ scientists wrote.” (Vishwam Sankaran/The Guardian)
“Suicide continues to be a leading cause of death in the United States. In fact, it’s the 12th-leading cause of death among all ages. We had been seeing suicide rates rise from about 2000, up until around the COVID era. There was a small dip in rates during those COVID years, which was great, but unfortunately we’ve now seen rates increase again. In 2021, there were 48,000 suicide deaths in the U.S., which is about one every 11 minutes.” (The Conversation)
“Members of the Writers Guild of America are striking for most of the same reasons they have gone on strike about once a decade since the 1940s. The studios and production companies are paying astronomical compensation to executives (half a billion dollars to the head of Warner Bros.; over $200 million to the CEO of Netflix over the last five years, according to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times), even while they’re cutting jobs and demanding writers and most people involved in making TV and movies work harder, and more unpredictably, for less money. Perhaps that’s why actors with the SAG-AFTRA union went on strike themselves on July 13, over many of the same issues as the writers.” (Catherine L. Fisk/TAP)
“Barbie did not begin as a doll but as a kind of page-filler. In the summer of 1952, the German publisher Axel Springer was poised to print a new newspaper—a conservative tabloid based on the British gossip rags angling to compete with the great new medium of the age: television. But just as the first edition hit the presses, Springer and his staff faced a problem. Amid the pasting of pictures and inverted pyramids, the editors had ignored a narrow chasm on the broadsheet that was too small for a photo, but too large to leave blank. Springer needed something to fill the space, so he turned, at the last minute, to a cartoonist acquaintance. What he got was ‘Lilli’—a thin, blonde, and slightly austere woman who looked like a caricature of Marlene Dietrich. Lilli, in the original sketch, was visiting a psychic. The caption read: ‘Do you know the address of a tall, beautiful, rich man?’” (Tarpley Hitt/ The Nation)
“Ba used to drive up on the weekends from Flushing to help with unpacking inventory. After Ba died, Yin helped with the store, and now that Yin was gone too, Uncle was left with me. Every now and then, I caught him giving me a dispirited frown, like a gambler making do with a secondhand good-luck charm. The store, sandwiched between a massage parlor and a dentist’s office, was dingy and dim-lit, big enough for just one person behind the counter. Most afternoons, that person was me—Uncle had meetings in the city and didn’t come back until late.” (Joy Guo)
“With the Yale degree and the success of Hillbilly Elegy, he got status: glitzy friends, a beautiful and accomplished wife, widespread demand for his appearance and endorsement. More than status, he won celebrity, becoming a totem of the forgotten and abandoned people in whose likenesses — refashioned into exploitative grotesques — he trafficked. He got money, going to work in the fascist wing of Silicon Valley for Peter Thiel, making millions, and then becoming a vulturous financier in his own right. The venture capital firm he started, Narya (named after some Tolkien bullshit in the Thiel house style), invests in companies that aim to monetize Catholic prayer, obstruct environmentally conscious equities trading, further militarize outer space, and consolidate agricultural production, squeezing out the country’s remaining small farmers.” (Gabriel Winant)
“Widely discredited around the world, conversion therapy - which aims to change someone's sexual orientation - is still legal in India, just as it is in the UK. It can involve the use of medication, treatments like electric shock therapy and even violence. Practising it is considered “medical misconduct” in India after a ruling by the Indian Medical Commission in 2022, the industry’s regulatory body. It wrote to all the State Medical Councils empowering them to take disciplinary action against any medical practitioners who undertake it. In some cases, they could lose their licences. Posing as a gay woman enquiring about whether I could change my sexuality, I arrive at Dr Jain's office. The waiting room walls are lined with framed pictures of him with various dignitaries and awards. Inside, the blinds are drawn and a security camera nestles in the corner. Above his desk hangs an imposing metal sculpture of seven horses pulling the sun.” (Cordelia Lynch)
“Although it may seem like a modern problem, it’s only been about a century since U.S. colleges and universities began factoring family relationships and other criteria like extracurricular activities, interviews, and standardized test scores into their admissions decisions. These policies, it turns out, are rooted in anti-Semitic attitudes that aimed to keep Jewish students out of elite schools.” (Erin Blakemore/National Geographic)
Hi Ron! Love reading your newsletter. I have one as well, https://nichelle.substack.com/p/newsletter.nichellestephens.com/p/nichelle-newsletter-f77?r=5xct&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web