“Black people have seen this America before. We have endured throughout history’s progress and regress, watching the arc of justice bend with the changing winds. Until we reckon with our fellow citizens’ capacity — even hunger — for injustice, we will fail to meet, understand and survive this political moment … Again, Black people are not surprised. Far too many well-meaning white Americans have been what I like to call ally ostriches, believing in progress while burying their heads in the sand when discussions around the past become uncomfortable. Or newer Americans, perhaps the children of immigrants of recent decades, who don’t see what business it is of theirs what violence slave owners or Jim Crow enforcers visited on their fellow citizens or the legacy of it. And now some of them are seeing people who look like them summarily deported. How did this happen? Every day I hear that question, spoken by these ostriches but also, increasingly, by those who blithely voted for Mr. Trump, thinking he didn’t intend to actually do those things he said he would do, or who just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Black woman or who feel some version of disbelief. As if the America of chattel slavery, of Native American expulsion and attempted extermination, of reckless imperial expansion, of Jim Crow, of internment camps has not been echoed by authoritarian regimes across the globe. I find myself reminding those who are surprised by this moment that my still very spry mother attended legally mandated segregated schools her entire life.” (Christina Greer/NYT)
“When I caught up with Elizabeth Warren, the senior Democratic senator from Massachusetts, by telephone on Wednesday evening, it seemed like she didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. Hours earlier, Donald Trump had caved to pressure from the financial markets and announced, via social media, a ninety-day pause on many of his tariffs. On Wall Street, stocks shot up. Later in the afternoon, Warren, who sits on the Senate finance and banking committees, had spoken from the floor of the upper chamber, where she demanded an independent investigation into whether Trump had manipulated the markets to benefit Wall Street donors. (Anybody who had known about the policy pivot in advance could have made a fortune buying stocks or stock futures.) But while, in her floor speech, Warren had bristled with righteous anger at the idea of Trump, or anyone else at the White House, tipping off rich friends, during our conversation she couldn’t stop herself from chortling at the Administration’s claim that the President’s reversal had been the product of an artful negotiation strategy. ‘No serious person believes that, and I can’t even find an unserious person who believes it,’ she joked. ‘The tariffs are on; the tariffs are off. The tariffs are on; the tariffs are off. Donald Trump is playing the biggest game of Red Light Green Light since ‘Squid Game.’ ” (John Cassidy/TNY)
“If you logged on to X or Bluesky this past week, you were likely swept up in the onslaught of posts about Trump’s reciprocal tariffs and the plunging stock market. And, if you follow the tech industry as closely as I do, you probably also noticed who wasn’t posting about the tariffs: many of the same tech founders and CEOs who flanked Trump on Inauguration Day in January. Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Mark Zuckerberg have kept mum on the topic of tariffs (although both Pichai and Zuckerberg have continued posting about AI). Meanwhile, Elon Musk—well, we’ll get to that. The silence was deafening, considering that the ‘magnificent seven’ collectively lost trillions of dollars in market value following Trump’s tariff announcement last week. But there’s a cold logic behind these tech leaders holding their tongues in public—particularly for those who sell hardware. The US has become a highly volatile nation where the whims of the president must be taken into consideration before using any political chip or making a public statement, especially in an environment where that statement could be irrelevant an hour later. ‘The sand doesn’t stop shifting long enough to make a cogent statement,’ one top communications executive, who has worked closely with two Big Tech CEOs, tells me. Tech CEOs aren’t actually staying silent. They’re simply lobbying behind the scenes on their own behalf. Niki Christoff, a Washington, DC, political strategist and former aide to Senator John McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign, says most of the strategizing around trade rules—and conversations with Trump’s staff—are happening through back channels right now. ‘There’s a lot of personal dialing and trying to get deals done,’ she claims. During Trump’s first term, Cook carefully cultivated a direct relationship with the president in order to lobby him on issues like trade and immigration. I have a hard time imagining Cook isn’t using that direct line now. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, who did not attend the inauguration ceremony, reportedly went to a $1-million-a-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago last week. Shortly afterward, the White House walked back plans to implement export controls on some chips that Nvidia sells to China. Private back channels allow each tech leader to lobby for specific tariff exemptions.” (Lauren Goode/WIRED)
“Trump has ‘crossed a new line’ by ordering the Justice Department to investigate specific critics of his, the NYT's Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Michael S. Schmidt write in this new story. Their headline: ‘Trump Escalates Use of Official Power to Intimidate and Punish His Perceived Foes.’ >> On MSNBC last night, Rachel Maddow said this is ‘one of the red lines we have been expecting him to cross, and here it is.’ Trump's pursuit of his proverbial enemies list is inextricably linked to the media; for example, one of this week's targets, Miles Taylor, is an author... Some student journalists are ‘retracting their names from published articles amid intensifying repression by the Trump administration targeting students perceived to be associated with the pro-Palestinian movement,’ The Guardian's Anvee Bhutani reports. Some writers are asking for past articles to be deleted from the web altogether, due to fears of ‘legal repercussions, online harassment and professional consequences.’ A collection of national student media groups sent out guidance to papers about the unsettling matter last week.” (Brian Stelter/Reliable Sources)
“On the morning they were arrested for allegedly burning bodies as part of a series of Mafia murders, Marie-Josée Viau and Guy Dion had already finished breakfast and packed their daughter off to elementary school. A hand-drawn Mother’s Day card hung on the fridge next to family photographs. Viau, 44, didn’t have to go to her shift at the roadside poutine restaurant until later that day, so she tried baking something new: blueberry phyllo puffs. The pastries were still on the stove top when police arrived at 9:56 a.m. on October 16, 2019 … Before being taken away in an unmarked cruiser, a visibly shaking Viau requested a moment to switch outfits. She also wanted to know what would happen to their daughter when she got home from school. Officers informed her that childcare procedures were already under way. Outside the front window, the fall foliage had started changing color. The couple’s lawn, shrouded in dead leaves, was cordoned off with police tape. One maple tree stood out from the others, so red and orange that it seemed covered in flames. The mayor of Saint-Jude told reporters that he fell off his chair when he learned that two seemingly upstanding locals had been accused of such nightmarish undertakings: ‘It shows you never really know people you think you know.’ Like real-life characters from Fargo, Viau and Dion had gotten all mixed up with killers for hire. What prosecutors wanted to know was: Were the husband and wife merely rubes who’d been duped into participating in the gruesome homicides—or had they cooperated knowingly and willingly? Seeking teeth, bone fragments, and other traces of the victims, investigators started combing through their yard, their garage, and the quiet stream across the street.” (Adam Leith Gallner/Vanity Fair)
“I started out covering politics in the nation’s heartland: Springfield, Illinois. I was schooled under that smaller Capitol dome, not far from where Lincoln once practiced law, in the varieties of democratic compromise and the inexorable pull of public corruption. Almost all the governors of the state of Illinois during my years there ultimately wore the prison stripes – including, most recently, the man with the great hair, Rod Blagojevich … The governors of Illinois went to prison one after another because the justice system – in most cases, the dreaded feds – had eyes on them as they grifted and grafted. I’m pretty sure they all would have liked to say the law was ‘weaponized’ against them. But juries of their peers found the facts at odds with that assessment – including in the corruption case against Blagojevich, AKA Blago, that Trump erased with a pardon a few months ago. The pardon of felonious Blago, like almost everything felon Trump does, was, first of all, a thumbing of the nose at the people who uphold norms and the structure of the law. For a man who claims to love cops and offshore slave prisons for the (never even charged with a crime) ‘alien enemies’ among us, and who can’t wait to invoke the Insurrection Act to sic the military on dissidents, he sure hates the law. MAGA voters empowered this man to wreak his vengeance, and he is peculiarly fit for the task.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“Most of us think of Social Security as a program for retirees. But it also pays benefits to children—including those whose parents have died or become disabled. That money is supposed to be used to support the children while they’re growing up, or provide a nest egg when they turn eighteen. But for Pennsylvania kids in foster care, counties often take the money without telling the kids or their advocates. Spotlight PA reporters Julie Christie and Steve Volk dug through records and found that at least 1,300 children have had their benefits used this way, amounting to more than $15 million. Many of those counties couldn’t account for how the funds had been used, or prove that it actually benefited the kids who needed it. The most egregious appears to be Philadelphia, where officials ‘could not show how many children it collects money for or how it spends those funds.’” (Bill Gruskin/CJR)
“The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner is famous in people-who-read circles for his ability to get maloevent and/or stupid people in leadership to humiliate themselves in his interviews. Lucky for him, the right provides an endless supply of people who are egotistic as they are ignorant, meaning he will never go without subjects who don't bother to learn this history before agreeing to go on the record with him. The latest deserving victim is Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who went from denouncing Donald Trump as a ‘predator’ in 2016 to being one of Trump's loudest Christian right defenders. Chotiner drew Mohler, a supposed follower of Jesus Christ, to admit he now condemns empathy. Mohler sneered that empathy is ‘an artificial virtue,’ calling empathy ‘destructive and manipulative.’ ‘Empathy means never having to say no,’ Mohler insisted, attacking the straw-iest of strawmen. Much was made in the media, for good reason, of billionaire Elon Musk's crusade against empathy, an emotion he describes as ‘suicidal’ and the ‘fundamental weakness of Western civilization.’ Musk is an atheist, but in this attitude, he is increasingly joined by the Christian right, as Julia Carrie Wong documented at the Guardian this week. A growing chorus of evangelical leaders has taken to calling empathy ‘sinful,’ ‘toxic,’ and ‘satanic.’ Right-wing Catholics are going there, too, with Vice President JD Vance rejecting Jesus's exhortations to love your neighbor and welcome the stranger, drawing a rebuke from the Pope.” (Amanda Marcotte/Salon)
“Mr. Trump’s advisers have already begun making their public case, arguing that Denmark has been a poor custodian of the island, that only the United States can protect it from encroachment by Russia and China, and that America will help Greenlanders ‘get rich,’ as Mr. Trump has put it. The Trump administration is also reminding Greenland that the United States has defended it before. Last month, Mr. Trump posted a slick 90-second video on social media celebrating the ‘blood and bravery’ of U.S. troops who took positions on the island during World War II to prevent a feared Nazi invasion after Germany occupied Denmark. Although Denmark hoped that American forces would leave after the war, they never did, and the United States still maintains a military base there. The Trump administration is also studying financial incentives for Greenlanders, including the possibility of replacing the $600 million in subsidies that Denmark gives the island with an annual payment of about $10,000 per Greenlander. Some Trump officials believe those costs could be offset by new revenue from the extraction of Greenland’s natural resources, which include rare earth minerals, copper, gold, uranium and oil.” (Michael Crowley and Maggie Haberman/NYT)
“(Françoise )Sagan’s writing seems to mime the choreography of her darker impulses and lives on just as deathlessly as its author did. Her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, published in 1954, is a disturbing little speed read about the motherless seventeen-year-old Cécile, who holidays happily with her father, Raymond, in the South of France. Quickly, the story becomes a nasty chamber play—Cécile and her daddy have this total delicious connection until a stranger threatens to ruin her paradise—and directors from now both sides of the millennium have tried to commit the catastrophe to film. The first adaptation of the book, by Otto Preminger in 1958, stars peppy Jean Seberg as our tricksy prima donna; this May, the director and screenwriter Durga Chew-Bose reanimates her by way of the hypertelerotic Lily McInerny, whose gift for the languid, googly gaze might suggest something about the way this new film is concerned not with the way things move but with how things look. Tristesse is, to both Sagan’s and Chew-Bose’s credit, an eyeful. This is one of those French stories that lives for the sensuous and elemental—filled with the usual subatomic lustful vibrations of summer, the secret viciousness of young women, beautiful bikinis, buttered toasts. The camera watches dad and daughter pad around barefoot in their seaside rental alongside his sexy mistress Elsa—the coconut-scented bohème—until woman no. 3 in Chanel No. 5 arrives with her chilly-chic hauteur.” (Mina Tavakoli/The Paris Review)
“The International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Thursday began hearing Sudan’s case against the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which it accuses of being complicit in acts of genocide against the Masalit community in West Darfur by backing the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). … Sudan’s military Government is alleging that the UAE has been directly supporting the RSF and allied militias, which have embroiled in a brutal civil war with the national army since April 2023. The conflict has triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, claiming tens of thousands of lives and displacing over 12.4 million people – more than 3.3 million as refugees in neighbouring countries. Hunger has reached catastrophic levels, with famine declared in several regions, and disease outbreaks and the collapse of essential services have left millions, especially children at extreme risk. The case, formally titled Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in Sudan (Sudan v. United Arab Emirates), was initiated last month, when Sudan filed an application instituting proceedings against the UAE.” (Vibhu Mishra/UN News)
“With its eyes closed in eternal prayer, a 1.7-meter-tall statue of a Buddha was unearthed by the Korean Archaeology Institute of the Academy of Social Sciences and the National Authority for the Protection of Cultural Heritage at an archaeological site in Yakjon-ri, South Phyongan Province, North Korea. It is an early relic of the Goryeo (pronounced ‘Koryo’) dynasty, which rose in 918 A.D. and lasted until 1392. Also known as the Golden Age of Buddhism (or the Age of Enlightenment) in Korea, the Goryeo dynasty—which was a Buddhist state—saw the flourishing of religious art and architecture known as Bulsa, or ‘Buddhist Projects.’ Goryeo Korea was stricken by rainstorms over some periods and droughts during others, and those climate extremes are thought by many archaeologists and historians to have influenced kings to lead deeply religious lifestyles that then spread amongst the people. Rituals were carried out and prayers spoken to the heavens with the hope of a change in the climate, which might explain how artistic visions inspired by Buddhism became so popular … Carved into weathered stone is the face of the Buddha Amitābha, whose name translates to the Buddha of Boundless Light. Amitābha is a prominent figure in Pure Land Buddhism—a branch of Mahayana Buddhism in which believers pray to be reborn in a Pure Land, or a realm where they can study under a Buddha without earthly distractions. The Pure Land of the Buddha Amitābha is known as Sukhavati. Often depicted in Buddhist art, it is a paradise where demigods dwell, trees are always flowering, and lotus flowers bloom in pools where purified souls are reborn. Amitābha is often shown alongside two assistant bodhisattvas (beings on the path towards bodhi or Buddhahood) though this particular statue surfaced alone. Bodhisattvas have reached the highest level of enlightenment, but refrain from entering nirvana to save others from suffering, and are considered deities in Mahayana Buddhism.” (Elizabeth Rayne/Popular Mechanics)