Weekend Reading
Long reads for a late summer weekend
“As we look at history, it’s easy for us to see the men—white men, except for Obama—who moved history forward. We’ve never seen a Black woman do it. She’s Kennedy in 1960, and then some: ‘We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world. And on behalf of our children and grandchildren, and all those who sacrificed so dearly for our freedom and liberty, we must be worthy of this moment. It is now our turn to do what generations before us have done. Guided by optimism and faith, to fight for this country we love.’ If that isn’t Kennedyesque rhetoric, I don’t know what is. Like a lot of people, I wasn’t much of a Harris fan in 2019–2020. I wasn’t surprised to see her candidacy fizzle. I thought she was a logical political choice by Joe Biden for vice president, but then I thought—like a lot of people—that she was politically maladroit in her first year or so as veep. I stopped paying attention. Most people did. But it now seems obvious that while we stopped paying attention, she was working, thinking, learning, getting better, figuring it out. And so this woman who burst upon us four weeks ago was a completely different person than the one most of us had fixed in our minds.So now she heads into battle against Donald Trump. No one that I can see feels that a Black woman can’t beat that white man. No one. It’s not a factor. And this is potentially the secret to this candidacy: Her identity is manifestly clear to everyone to whom it is important, while to everyone to whom it doesn’t really matter, well … it doesn’t matter. Think about how hard it is for a Black woman to pull that off, while running for president.” (Michael Tomasky/TNR)
“Sixty-six million years ago, an enormous asteroid collided with Earth, contributing to a mass extinction event that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs. Now, scientists suggest they’ve tracked down the origin of this celestial agent of destruction.An analysis of metal isotopes scattered from the impact suggests the asteroid traveled from the outer solar system, beyond Jupiter, researchers report Thursday in the journal Science. The authors also looked at five other asteroid impacts and found they were created by space rocks that formed in the inner solar system. ‘I find these results very convincing,’ Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, who did not contribute to the findings, tells Scientific American’s Lee Billings. ‘They dovetail nicely with lots of other evidence.’ ‘The paper presents a fantastic set of isotope analyses,’ David Kring, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute who originally linked the impact crater to the mass extinction event and was not involved in the new research, says to Live Science’s Sharmila Kuthunur. ‘You need to understand the origin of objects like this if you’re going to properly assess future hazards.’ Earth has experienced five mass extinctions in its history, including one around 250 million years ago called the ‘Great Dying,’ when all but about 5 percent of life on Earth went extinct. The most recent event is the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. The asteroid at fault, known as the Chicxulub impactor, is thought to have been between 6 and 12 miles wide—but due to its high velocity, it formed a crater more than 90 miles across. It was traveling at a speed of 15.5 miles per second and had power equal to 10,000 times the world’s nuclear arsenal, according to NASA. It struck the Earth on the Yucatán Peninsula in present-day Mexico, at what is now called the Chicxulub crater. After the asteroid hit, around 80 percent of all animal species went extinct. The impact would have shot unfathomable quantities of soot and vapor into the atmosphere, shrouding the world below and triggering a widespread die-off. ‘This impact totally changed the picture of our planet and caused the emergence of mammalian life,’ Mario Fischer-Gödde, lead author of the new study and a geochemist at the University of Cologne in Germany, tells Scientific American. Additionally, the impact released metals that settled onto the ground across the planet and are now preserved in a layer of rock that marks when the impact took place.” (Will Sullivan/Smithsonian)
“It was there, staring us in the face all week at the Democratic convention…but it came home for me when Pete Buttigieg—and boy, is he good—talked about the fraught normality of him and his husband, Chasten, trying to feed the three-year old twins mac and cheese with the phone ringing and all hell breaking loose. The sheer everyday normality of that would have been impossible a generation ago. Their marriage is quotidian now. In the grand sweep of human history, there has never been a movement for tolerance and dignity that achieved its goals so quickly—and its goal was only that: normality. All week we saw eloquent, brilliant members of the black middle class—a disproportionate number of the speakers, but boy can they preach—speaking about the progress they’ve made, the things they achieved. I had a rooting interest, as regular Sanity Clause readers know, in the success of Governor Wes Moore of Maryland, an old friend—and he was fabulous. But there were so many others, none of them begging for special treatment or favors; all of them touting their accomplishments, the challenges they overcame—and saying, we’re not going to give them up now: we’re not going back. This was the message delivered by Shamala Harris, Kamala’s immigrant mother: No excuses. When you get knocked down (by racist bullies, one assumes), you get back up and push through. Normality. All they want was to be treated like everyone else, even if they had disabilities, like Tim Walz’s son Gus—whose pure joy at seeing his father up there, That’s my dad! was the emotional exclamation point on the week.” (Joe Klein/Sanity Clause)
“The warm waters along the Gulf Coast are part of what draws people to the region and its many beaches. But there is such a thing as too warm — and the Gulf of Mexico has reached that point. Take a look at the chart ..(above). It shows how much heat there is in the ocean over time for the Gulf. The red line is 2024 and the blue line is the average over the last decade. The Gulf is now the hottest it’s been in the modern record, according to Brian McNoldy, a climatologist at the University of Miami, who produced the chart. Taking a dip would feel like a bath: The average temperature of the surface is close to 90 degrees, according to recent measures of sea surface temperature. ‘This is out of bounds from the kinds of variability that we’ve seen in [at least] the last 75 years or so,’ Ben Kirtman, director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, a joint initiative of the University of Miami and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told Vox. ‘That can be scary stuff.’” (Benji Jones/Vox)
“It was Tuesday afternoon at the United Center in Chicago, a few hours before back-to-back Obamas issued their impassioned calls to arms, and the famously sensible explanatory journalist Ezra Klein, who characteristically keeps his passions in check, didn’t have the right credentials to get into the arena. The Secret Service didn’t recognize the New York Times’ star ‘Opinion’ writer and podcaster, who has had a bit of a glow-up lately with a salt-and-pepper beard and David Beckham–esque haircut, but eventually after we met up he was able to figure out how to get in to where he belonged. This is, after all, as much his convention as any journalist’s this time around, since its high-energy optimism turned on the fact that President Joe Biden no longer was leading the ticket. And, starting early this year, Klein platformed that Establishment desire, leading the coup-drumbeat. It worked so well that Klein, 40, who has been an influential journalist for over half his life, is ready to come out from behind his computer, emerge from his podcast studio, and step into the spotlight. He tells me this is actually the first convention he’s attended since the Obama years. After spending his 20s writing lengthy blog posts on economics, he’s now become a tattooed middle-aged Brooklyn dad in Bonobos and sand-colored Air Force 1’s who goes to Burning Man, where he’s headed next week.” (Charlotte Klein/NYM)
“As coups d’etat have swept West Africa and may expand into the Great Lakes Region and East Africa, U.S. policy responses have struggled. Economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation by the West have proven insufficient to reverse the power takeovers. With U.S. foreign policy focused primarily on great power competition with China and Russia and motivated by a strong desire to extricate the United States from internal conflicts, the United States does not have the will to reverse the coups militarily. Washington will thus increasingly face tough dilemmas of upholding its democratic commitments while losing strategic and economic access or accommodating in some ways to authoritarian governments. Only once the current tilt toward authoritarianism proves itself unable to deliver better security and governance will the United States have a strong capacity to encourage democratic reforms in countries that have fallen into authoritarian hands. But Washington can and should do more to prevent coups before they happen, and even in the authoritarian regimes, it should seek to strengthen democratic forces and moderate power abuses. From Mali in 2020 to Niger and Gabon in 2023, overthrows of power have been driven predominantly by internal issues, including poor civilian control over the military. The internal governance and institutional deficiencies have often taken place amidst unabating jihadi militancy despite U.S. and other Western military assistance. Moreover, across Africa, citizens have been deeply frustrated with the lack of economic opportunities, high unemployment, and poor public services, all compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as decades-long corruption, nepotism, and parochialism. The cry that one can’t eat elections or democracy has become common across the continent. And in various African countries, democracy has merely consisted of (troubled) elections overlaying poor governance. The coups in West Africa, however, also reflect the current zeitgeist and precedent—a global tilt toward rightist politics and the ability of West Africa’s putschists to get away with the coups.” (Vanda Felbab-Brown/Brookings)
“At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, the Harris-Walz campaign manager and the granddaughter of the labor leader Cesar Chavez, made the case for electing Kamala Harris to fellow-Latinos. As an attorney general and a senator from California, Chávez Rodríguez said, Harris fought for the Latino community. As Vice-President, she helped create five million jobs for Latinos alone, promote business growth, and lower the cost of prescription drugs. As President, Chávez Rodríguez said, Harris will lower the cost of rent and housing, help increase access to health care, and invest in public education and in institutions that serve Latino communities. Latinos ‘are critical to our pathway to victory,’ she continued. ‘We know that we cannot leave anything on the table when it comes to engaging and turning out our Latino voters.’ For more than a decade, Democrats have claimed that Latinos are key to electoral victories, but even when they’ve won they’ve been frustrated, first, by persistent low Latino turnout and, more recently, by Latinos moving toward the Republican Party. Barack Obama hit high-water marks for Latino support in 2008 (sixty-seven per cent) and 2012 (seventy-one per cent). Joe Biden won fifty-nine per cent of the Latino vote in 2020, but this year that support was on a precipitous decline, and it looked as if he could be on a path to winning Latinos by just single digits. Now, however, according to a memo from Equis Research, ‘the very early polling on a Harris-Trump election suggests a reset in the fight over Latino voters.’ According to its most recent swing-state polling, Harris’s candidacy has brought Latino Democratic support closer to what it was in 2020. Democrats are now hoping, as they have in election cycles past, to take one step further—to activate Latinos who haven’t previously voted to decisively win the election.” (Geraldo Cadava/TNY)
“On the Ukraine-Russia border — CBS News met the troops of Ukraine's 117th Territorial Defense Brigade in the eastern Sumy region as they prepared for another trip to the front line. Their mission is to support Ukraine's military operations inside Russia's Kursk region. The forces were preparing another drone for a one-way mission — its deadly payload: a grenade attached with cable ties. The simple weapon cost only about $400 to assemble, but it would soon be hunting multimillion-dollar targets. Private Igor piloted the drone on a test run, but on real missions he can watch someone's final moments on his small screen, and he admitted that it can feel personal. ‘It's emotional,’ he told CBS News. ‘But I understand that we chose the right path.’ Drones have played a major part in the war — for both sides — since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The small, unmanned aircraft now play a vital role in Ukraine's surprise offensive, as troops seize ground inside Russia's western Kursk region. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said the incursion is part of a new Ukrainian tactic aimed at creating a buffer zone inside Russia to prevent attacks on Ukraine, and even to turn the tide in the war as his troops struggle to hold the line elsewhere on the long front. Russia claimed Friday, for the second time this week, that Ukraine had tried to hit Kursk's nuclear power station with a drone attack, decrying what it called ‘nuclear terrorism.’ The Russian Ministry of Defense said it shot down three drones headed for the plant.” (Ian Lee and Steve Berriman/CBS News)
“We’ve been here before. But it’s never felt like this. In 2016, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be the presidential nominee for a major party in American history. I was there. It was a moment. Thursday night, Kamala Harris became the first Black and South Asian woman to be the presidential nominee for a major party in American history. I was there. It was life-changing. ‘It’s not that it’s a Black woman, it’s that it’s this particular Black woman,’ Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett told EBONY. ‘It is someone that I hope ultimately, when the story is written, I’m able to say that she was one of my closest confidants and mentors. Even at this point, she’s a mentor of mine. 'As a Black woman who knows that she is a real one that takes her time and invests in others, it means the world to me,’ Crockett explained about the woman she deeply cares for. ‘She deserves it, and I’m going to fight every single day. I would run through a wall to make sure that she becomes the next President of the United States.’ In my career, I’ve covered the 2016 Democratic National Convention, a Super Bowl, a college football playoff national championship game and numerous NCAA Tournament basketball games. I have been in countless arenas and stadiums built to hold the masses. None were as ‘filled to capacity’ as the United Center was on Thursday night. It wasn’t about the attendance. It was about every person in the United Center making sure ‘they were in that number.’That’s the power of Kamala Harris. That’s the power of Black women.” (Carron J. Phillips/Ebony)
“As Democrats gathered for the 2024 Democratic National Convention, (Nancy Pelosi) was widely considered the most powerful woman in politics – with the exception of the newly minted Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. Pelosi is now, and has always been, more orchestrator than organizer. She helped facilitate President Biden’s exit from the race, which was earthshaking to some and a long time coming to others. The last time a president decided not to seek a second term was more than 55 years ago, when Lyndon Baines Johnson shocked the country – and most of his staff – with the announcement that he wouldn’t run again. After Pelosi made it clear that she was not exactly begging Biden to stay, his days were apparently numbered. ‘She is as brilliant as Steve Jobs; she’s as brilliant as Jeff Bezos,’ says Stacy Kerr, who was a senior adviser to Pelosi from 2002 to 2011. ‘Her domain is politics, and she’s created a new benchmark.’ Even as chair of the host committee for the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Pelosi was already exercising ‘the art of power,’ the phrase that became the title of her recently released book. (The title shades The Art of the Deal, by her nemesis, former President Donald Trump.) The committee raised $3 million to help finance that convention, and Pelosi oversaw 10,000 volunteers. Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale in a landslide victory that year, but the convention itself was a triumph. She and Diane Feinstein, who was mayor of San Francisco at the time, worked to convince wary Democrats that the city was safe amid the AIDS epidemic, which was just beginning to get attention. It was a launching point for each of their groundbreaking careers.” (Kate Anderson Brower/VF)
“As viewers speculate and families continue to hunt for answers, it’s interesting to wonder if any of the Unsolved Mysteries have been solved. The show, whose fourth season debuted on Netflix on August 2, 2024, has captivated audiences worldwide with its deep dives into some truly perplexing murders, disappearances, and paranormal phenomena.As viewers speculate and families continue to hunt for answers, it’s interesting to wonder if any of the Unsolved Mysteries have been solved. The show, whose fourth season debuted on Netflix on August 2, 2024, has captivated audiences worldwide with its deep dives into some truly perplexing murders, disappearances, and paranormal phenomena. Netflix’s iteration of the true crime show is in its third season, but the original imagining aired from 1987 until 2002. The first iteration was hosted by Robert Stack then a newer version, from 2008 to 2010, was hosted by Dennis Farina. There are over 233 episodes to binge with more than 1,300 mysteries profiled during that time. The show did and still does encourage viewers to send in any information or tips they might have in connection to the crimes and mysteries depicted in the series. With that being said … If you take into account the original series, quite a substantial amount of them have. More than 260 cases, in fact. According to the Unsolved Mysteries website, ‘Of the more than 1,300 mysteries profiled in over 230 episodes, half the cases featuring wanted fugitives have been solved, more than 100 families have been reunited with lost loved ones, and seven individuals who were wrongly convicted of crimes, have been exonerated and released,’ they said. ‘Cases involving missing persons, missing heirs, murder, fraud, and amnesia have also been solved following UM broadcasts. That adds up to over 260 solved cases.’” (Sophie Hasnson/StyleCaster)