Newsletter 1.8.19

Hi all! 

We hope you had a great holiday and New Year. We're back tomorrow with new episodes. Here's this fortnight's newsletter, we hope you enjoy. 

-- Florence, Adam, Nima, and Sophia

The Year of the Old Boys - Lili Loofbourow, Slate

While nothing new in this country, the gentle of the Old Boys Club did seem to come to the front of the American consciousness. An insidious exploration of the Club, it’s many traits, and complimentary trope of the Large Adult Son.

I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America. - Lauren Hough, The Huffington Post 

A longform reflection on labor, gender, and class, with a cameo from a certain former vice president.

On Boys, Frogs, And The Weekly Standard - Jim Lobe, LobeLog

The Weekly Standard’s legacy of conservative demagoguery will live on in the policy it helped inform, in large part through the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century.

The 10 Most Appalling Articles in the Weekly Standard’s Short and Dreadful Life - Jon Schwarz, The Intercept

Friend of the show Jon Schwarz rounds up some of the worst clips from The Weekly Standard, so we can rejoice that there’s one fewer evil thing in the world.

2018: The Year In Ideas: A Review Of Ideas - Alex Pareene, The Huffington Post

Ten short satirical essays by Alex Pareene, told through the lens of some of our favorite thinkers, including Kevin Williamson, Bari Weiss, and Senator Ben Sasse. A palette cleanser...of sorts.

Who Gets to be Serious? - Clio Chang, Jezebel 

A few days into the new session of Congress and Ocasio-Cortez is already in the spotlight, this time for an interview with Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, in which Cooper raises doubts about the plausibility of various progressive positions. Such doubts, of course, are never raised on issues of military intervention, cuts to social services, and other centrist/right issues in the mainstream media. 

Black women punished for self-defense must be freed from their cages - Mariame Kaba, The Guardian

Kaba traces the legacy of Black women having “no selves to defend” in the United States, from the case of an enslaved woman named Celia to Marissa Alexander to Cyntoia Brown.

PAYGO is Based on a Fallacy - Pavlina R. Tcherneva, In These Times

PAYGO is a bill that requires all new government spending to be matched with increased revenue, which prioritizes a “balanced budget” over things like "providing healthcare to the sick” and “feeding people”.

Caging Kids is an American Tradition - Ethan Brown, The Appeal

The terrifying stories of child detention at the USA-Mexico Border have caused outrage, but such conditions are not exceptional in American history. There are currently nearly 60,000 kids in juvenile and adult jails in prisons, where they suffer trauma from family separation, isolation, and abuse.

New St. Louis County Prosecutor Fires Some Staff - Jim Salter, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Upon assuming his new position as St. Louis County Prosecutor, former Ferguson Councilman Wesley Bell fired assistant prosecutor Kathi Alizadeh who presented evidence to the grand jury in the trial of Darren Wilson, the police officer who murdered Michael Brown in 2014. Bell also announced that he would no longer prosecute marijuana possession cases.

Where the news is drying up -- and where it’s not - Jonathan Thompson, High Country News

A series of infographics presenting a geographic analysis of news media distribution across the American West.

Jailing the Wrong Man: Mug Shot Searches Persist in New York, Despite Serious Risks - Joseph Goldstein, The New York Times

Police departments in many major cities of done away with the technique of “open-ended mugshot searches,” but detectives in New York City maintain the practice, ruining countless lives in the process.

WaPo, USA Today, NBC Go Full Breitbart on ‘Prisoners Eating Steak’ Non-Story - Adam Johnson, FAIR

Four major publications publish the same racist non-story in 72 hours, clearly fed to them by federal prison guard union PR reps.