Weekend Reading
What fresh hell is this? #Corruption #Incompetence
“Prisons are American tourist attractions, and criminals who become fugitives or inmates our outlaw heroes—Al Capone, Alcatraz, Charles Manson, Sing Sing, Angola, Luigi Mangione, O. J. Simpson, Diddy, né Sean Combs. A collective underdog fetish means that the image of a civilian outwitting, outrunning, or confronting ‘the man’ is enough to negate his trespasses. Maybe achieving the apotheosis of success in the United States requires becoming a convict, being threatened with or facing real incarceration and exile, doing time, paying dues, and making a grand comeback. … And whose apprentice or protégé had he been? His father, Melvin Combs, was an informant killed in a drug deal gone wrong when Diddy was just two years old. His mentor and rumored lover was Clive Davis, who used his own label, Arista, to help fund Bad Boy Records after Diddy dropped out of Howard University. Half-open secrets make it easier to control artists in a genre built in part by submissive, neurotic men imitating masculinity as seen in the Mafia, secret societies, and global cabals. Hip-hop’s aspirational energy can thus be channeled into hubris that leads to self-sabotage. And were the mainstream emcees who enacted that sabotage just a bunch of closeted or otherwise compromised men inventing a culture of violence and misogyny to deflect from their shame? Do men who love women kick them through hotel hallways, or is that the behavior of men who resent the fact that they have to pretend to love what they merely envy, that they do not get to be feminine and beautiful in that way themselves? This is the lifestyle we’ve been selling to one another back and forth, one that can squirm out of accountability for itself at every turn, just like the men installed to run it. ‘If I ruled the world, I’d free all my sons,’ a 1996 Nas hook sung by Lauryn Hill promises, ominously. His peers who pretend to rule the world free no one.” (Harmony Holiday/The Paris Review)
“Some of the most sensitive areas of Vladimir Putin’s private life — and how they are intertwined with Russia’s political history — are reported in a new book by two of Russia’s best investigative journalists, Roman Badanin and Mikhail Rubin. The book, called ‘The Tsar In Propria Persona’ (Latin for ‘The Tsar Himself’), contrasts the official image of the Russian president, now in his 26th year in power, as a leading defender of traditional values against Western decadence with the reality of his private life — where extramarital affairs, nepotism, and connections to organized crime reign. ‘It is Putin’s behavior away from the cameras that speaks much more about his real worldview than speeches,’ Badanin said in an interview with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. ‘Putin’s private life, to put it simply, is many times more important than his public life’ … In 1970s Leningrad, Putin, then in his 20s, was an awkward young man who found a guiding voice in his judo coach, Leonid Usvyatsov, a career criminal who witnesses found by Proekt recall had a penchant for violence. It was from Usvyatsov, Badanin and Rubin write, that Putin likely found his ‘appetite for risk and belief in [in the use of] force.’ As they report, Usvyatsov may have even used his connections to help Putin get into the highly competitive Leningrad University’s Law Faculty — a reach for a student who had finished school with a focus on natural sciences. Putin fell under Usvyatsov’s influence between the latter’s two prison sentences before he was finally killed in a gangland shooting in 1994. Usvyatsov’s headstone reads: ‘At last I have died, but the mafia lives forever.’” (Thomas Rowley/ICIJ)
“On 1 September 1991, a large private yacht cruised towards the Statue of Liberty. It was a clear, breezy evening, and from the upper deck of the Spirit of New York, a golden sunset could be seen glinting off the Manhattan skyline. Downstairs, a party was in flow. Scores of teenage girls in evening dresses and miniskirts, some as young as 14, danced under disco lights. It could have been a high school prom, were it not for the crowd of older men surrounding them. As the evening wore on, some of the men – many old enough to be the girls’ fathers, or even grandfathers – joined them on the dancefloor, pressing themselves against the girls. One balding man in a suit wrapped his arms around two young models, leering into a film camera that was documenting the evening: ‘Can you get some beautiful women around me, please?’ The party aboard the Spirit of New York was one of several events that Donald Trump, then 45, attended with a group of 58 aspiring young models that September. They had travelled from around the world to compete in Elite’s Look of the Year competition, an annual event that had been running since 1983 and was already credited with launching the careers of Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen and Stephanie Seymour. At stake was a life-changing prize: a $150,000 contract with the world’s then leading modelling agency, Elite Model Management, run by John Casablancas. Trump was closely involved in Casablancas’s competition. In 1991, he was a headline sponsor, throwing open the Plaza, his lavish, chateau-style hotel overlooking Central Park, transforming it into the main venue and accommodating the young models. He was also one of its 10 judges. In 1992, Trump hosted the competition again. On a similarly golden evening in early September that year, another group of contestants boarded the Spirit of New York, chartered for another Elite cruise. One of the girls on the boat was Shawna Lee, then a 14-year-old from a small town outside Toronto. She recalls how the contestants were encouraged to parade downstairs, one by one, and dance for Trump, Casablancas and others.” (The Guardian)
“Ruthless lawyers abusing the American legal system for purposes of political manipulation and private gain are a hallmark of Trump’s career. So, of course, he could find men to engineer the probably illegal move of Ghislaine Maxwell – the woman who holds ‘the key’ to the Epstein story, per no less a source than implicated Epstein pal Alan Dershowitz – to a luxury minimum security prison. Remember that the Trump White House reportedly thinks the ‘birthday book’ that the Wall Street Journal got its hands on came from Maxwell’s side. We may never know for sure, but if she has stashed her ‘keys’ with anyone, now, when Trump’s feet are to the fire and she wants a pardon, would be the time to rattle them at him. Enter the cleanup crew. The plumbers of Epsteingate. Start with Timothy C. Parlatore, the lawyer who handled Trump’s classified documents case in Florida. Just two months after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and seized a hoard of purloined documents, Parlatore hired Epstein’s lifelong attorney, Darren Indyke, into his firm. Parlatore never had to win the documents case. The feds and Jack Smith had Trump dead to rights, but a Trump-appointed lackey of a federal judge slow-walked and then killed the case in time for last year’s election. Parlatore next sailed to DC on his client’s coattails, savagely defending Pete Hegseth during his nomination fight and threatening the California Republican who accused him of roofie rape in a police report with legal action if she spoke out during the hearings. He is now at the Pentagon, one of Defense Secretary Hegseth’s top advisors. Such a relationship in the Before Times was considered a conflict of interest since he is also Hegseth’s personal attorney. Now, of course, conflicts are the way we do bidness.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“On the national level: We are living not simply with public corruption and cruelty unprecedented in my lifetime. We’re also being propelled face-first into chaos at a speed matched only during times of actual war. Seven days ago, in a post ‘The Powers That Were,’ I laid out why American institutions have become the crucial front in determining the country’s future. I argued that our governing ‘rules’ and antiquated¹ checks-and-balances system have revealed their vulnerability, in the face of united, amoral interests who cared only about power itself. In the single mid-summer week since then we’ve had many decades’ worth of terrible institutional news.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has begun its shutdown. For longer than most Americans have been alive, the CPB has been an institutional center of American civic information. Under its auspices both PBS and NPR developed and flourished. Now all three are under DOGE/MAGA assault.
The director of the Voice of America, the institutional heart of America’s public face to the world, was officially fired, by former right-wing TV personality Kari Lake.
The director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, was abruptly fired by former right-wing TV personality Donald Trump. The BLS had been the institutional center of non-partisan, reliable, warts-and-all data about the largest economy in the world. Thus it had been an institutional bulwark of the credibility of the US economy and US markets as a whole. Gone, and very hard to re-create.” (James Fallows/Breaking the News)
“Lucy, 44, had just turned the corner onto her block northeast of Richmond last month when she spotted a white van in front of her home. Her chest tightened. She came to the U.S. when she was just 17, from Campeche, Mexico, to help babysit her older brother’s daughter. After her first daughter was born, she spent months living on the street. Eventually, Lucy found her footing, working 16-hour days, in hotels and restaurants, and cleaning homes and warehouses, often taking overnight shifts, while raising two daughters and a son. But why was that van there? Had ICE come for her? Should she keep driving? It was mid-July, weeks after masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained people across Los Angeles, sparking furious clashes with protesters. Hundreds of miles north in the Bay Area, Lucy and many other immigrants — documented or otherwise — watched anxiously, wondering if the federal government would set its sights on them. ICE has confined most of its activity to Southern California, but it entered Richmond recently, targeting people who allegedly weren’t following federal supervision requirements while their immigration cases were decided. The van Lucy saw turned out to be innocuous. But her reaction to it was emblematic in this East Bay city, where nearly half of the 115,000 residents are Latino and a third are foreign-born. The Chronicle spent five recent days in Richmond, interviewing residents like Lucy as well as business owners, politicians, activists and immigration attorneys. The city was so on edge over President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort that many people were essentially hiding, the newspaper found. Lucy now avoids many of the grocery stores and shops in Richmond that she loved to frequent: Las Montañas, La Loma, and the flea market on the outskirts of town where a recent visit by Contra Costa sheriff’s deputies looking for an assault suspect led customers to scatter thinking it was an ICE raid.” (St. John Barned Smith/SFChronicle)
“After sustained pressure from Catholic Church leaders and laypeople alike, priests have finally been allowed to celebrate Mass inside the ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ detention camp in Florida. Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami confirmed that the first Catholic liturgy was offered for detainees this week after a month-long standoff. ‘I am pleased that our request to provide for the pastoral care of the detainees has been accommodated,’ Wenski announced, adding that regular Masses will continue from now on. This breakthrough followed several weeks in which migrants at the Everglades camp were denied all access to clergy or sacraments. Some even had their Bibles confiscated by guards who told them, ‘Here there is no right to religion,’ one detainee reported. Wenski slammed such conditions as an ‘intentional effort to dehumanize’ the migrants and stressed that allowing Mass would help restore their dignity. The eventual victory is largely thanks to a united Catholic campaign. Archbishop Wenski literally took to the highway with the Knights of Columbus biker ministry to press for access. On July 20, he and about two dozen Knights on Bikes rode to the camp gates and prayed the rosary after being denied entry. Wenski pointedly noted that officials ‘built that place in less than a week’ but kept clergy waiting weeks for access. The dramatic biker rally drew widespread attention and ramped up pressure on authorities to relent.” (Christopher Hale/LettersfromLeo)
“It hardly does justice to call Hannah Cairo, age seventeen, a prodigy. As a girl growing up in the Bahamas, she was homeschooled and took many classes online. She developed an early aptitude for math; by the age of eleven, Cairo had mastered calculus. A few years later, she was taking graduate-level classes at the University of California, Berkeley. One of those courses—in Fourier restriction theory—provided her a special challenge, to prove or disprove ‘a forty-year-old mystery about how functions behave, called the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture.’ Cairo labored on the problem and determined it to be false, stunning mathematicians more than twice her age who had spent years trying to prove the opposite. It’s heady, complex stuff, but Kevin Hartnett’s profile of Cairo in Quanta Magazine is sympathetic to the teen while showing the challenges she has faced not just in her academic career but in her personal life: ‘I didn’t have many social experiences, so I still had to learn how to interact with other humans,’ Cairo told him. Hartnett also manages to explain the math behind Cairo’s calculations in a way that a layman can (if they try hard enough) understand. And should you find his description too simple, the abstract for Cairo’s paper will provide the challenge you desire: ‘We derive a family of Lp estimates of the X-Ray transform of positive measures in ℝd, which we use to construct a logR-loss counterexample to the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture for every C2 hypersurface in ℝd that does not lie in a hyperplane. In particular, multilinear restriction estimates at the endpoint cannot be sharpened directly by the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture.’” (Bill Grueskin/CJR)
“It’s exciting when an animal escapes from the zoo. A monkey breaks free from its cage, ridding itself of restriction with nothing but freedom ahead. In a way, we are animals in a zoo biding our time until we can finally break free. Indeed. For WaPo’s Department of Data, Bonnie Berkowitz, Artur Galocha, and Andrew Van Dam reminisce over the animal escapes since 1990, based on data catalogued by Born Free USA.”
“The history of stateness also curated important symbols of civilizational achievements (imperial conquests, culture of literacy, state religion, elite formation, monumental architecture, etc) that made the most likely successful invaders (Britain and France) to view the state as an equal of sorts, albeit one that was unusual given its geographical location (over five centuries of stories of King Prester John helped). Simply put, Ethiopia was different. Robert Napier’s troops successfully marched all the way to Magdala with minimal losses and then promptly left — the British didn’t consider occupying Ethiopia as important for securing Nile waters. Plus they had Egypt, Sudan, and Aden to secure logistical links to India. On their part, the French were content with securing Djibouti as a stop on the way to Indochina (especially after the Fashoda incident stopped eastward expansion of the French empire). Most importantly, stateness allowed Ethiopia to not lag too far behind (relative to European and other Red Sea states) with regard to both military technology and diplomatic relations. Due to its centuries of contact with the outside world, the Ethiopian state had the know-how to import modern firearms and military organizational structures (including advisers) and deploy them in battle against both domestic and foreign enemies. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church served as a conduit for alliances with Christian Europe. And after Islam swept through northeast Africa and the wider Red Sea region, Ethiopia styled itself as a Christian outpost surrounded by a sea of ‘pagans’ and Muslims (the Sudanese, Egyptians, Turks, and Horn Sultanates). Centuries of embassies in Christian Europe also enabled the curation of knowledge regarding how to manage the geopolitical dance in Horn between the Ottomans (including the Khedivate of Egypt), Britain, France, Sudan’s Mahdist State, and Italy. Though not decisive to outcomes, Ethiopia also got lucky with geography (the role of geography in Ethiopia’s ability to avoid foreign domination is hotly debated). To be clear, geography wasn’t destiny. But on numerous occasions it granted Ethiopians important tactical advantages. Having the core of the state up in the northern highlands meant that invading armies — whether by land or from the sea — had to traverse (mostly) sparsely populated lowlands before scaling the high mountains.” (Ken Opalo/TheAfricanistPerspective)
“OpenAI has begun rolling out GPT-5, the latest iteration of its flagship language model, to all ChatGPT users. The company’s CEO Sam Altman called GPT-5 ‘a significant step along the path to AGI’ during a press briefing on Wednesday. While he stopped short of claiming the model reaches artificial general intelligence, Altman noted the latest release is ‘clearly a model that is generally intelligent.’ He added that GPT-5 still lacks key traits that would make it reach AGI, a notably loose term that is defined in OpenAI’s charter as ‘a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.’ For example, the model still lacks the ability to learn continuously after deployment. OpenAI claims GPT-5 is smarter, faster, more useful, and more accurate, with a lower hallucination rate than previous models. In characteristically lofty terms, Altman likened the leap from GPT-4 to GPT-5 to the iPhone’s shift from pixelated to a Retina display. ‘GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD level expert,’ Altman said. “ (Kylie Robinson/WIRED)
“In the realm of global geopolitics, it’s hard to get a warmer welcome than Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave Donald Trump back in February 2020. More than 100,000 Indians — many wearing white hats emblazoned with ‘Namaste, Trump’ — packed into a cricket stadium in Gujarat, Modi’s home state in western India. They roared as he greeted Trump along with his wife Melania, daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner. Trump’s visit showed ‘the sweetness and intimacy which are the identity of a unified family,’ Modi declared. Trump in turn called Modi a ‘true friend’ and India ‘one of the most amazing nations.’ His 27-minute speech had almost 60 breaks for applause … Modi embraced Trump at least three times during the hourlong event. As they shook hands a final time, a Rolling Stones anthem filled the stadium: ‘You can’t, always get, what you waaaant….’More than five years later, the Trump-Modi relationship is deteriorating at spectacular speed. With tensions already brewing over trade and Modi’s refusal to credit Trump for helping to broker a ceasefire with Pakistan, the US president is now taking aim at India for its purchases of Russian oil — part of his effort to pressure Vladimir Putin into reaching a truce with Ukraine. In a series of social-media posts that shocked officials in New Delhi, Trump declared: ‘I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care.’ He then announced a 50% tariff on Indian goods, among the highest in the world. ‘They don’t care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine,’ Trump said. Taken together, Trump took just a few days to upend more than a decade of careful US diplomacy courting India as a regional counterweight against China. In doing so, he’s handing a strategic and moral victory to Chinese President Xi Jinping.” (Daniel Ten Kate/Bloomberg Business)
“The red-state audience that Hollywood is chasing isn’t a monolith, and there’s an experimental energy in the crop of shows catering to this newly prized demographic … I watched every episode of the ‘Roseanne’ revival and its matriarch-free spinoff, ‘The Conners,’ which ABC commissioned explicitly to represent more blue-collar families. And Taylor Sheridan, whose ranching drama ‘Yellowstone’ is now a multibillion-dollar franchise, seems to have mastered the art of crossover appeal. The showrunner has flaunted his distaste for mainstream Hollywood, and the feeling may be mutual: this summer, his six ongoing series were once again snubbed by the Emmys. But his latest project, ‘Landman,’ demonstrates better than most how conservative shows might be a damn good time even for a liberal viewer. The drama, which streams on Paramount+, follows the sixty-year-old Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton), a fixer at an oil company in West Texas. Tommy, who distrusts the news and has no patience for the government, describes himself as ‘a divorced alcoholic with five hundred thousand in debt.’ But that wealth of experience has made him the sage of the Patch, the site of his company’s rigs and of rampant drug-cartel activity. The show’s rural setting and its lopsided gender dynamics stand out in a TV landscape where ‘quality’ programming has calcified into a fatal sameness. HBO and the like are chockablock with wealthy families mired in dysfunction, well-heeled white women harboring secrets, and the world falling apart in artful tableaux. (Inkoo Yang/The New Yorker)