Surrogate Angels of Death. The minute you feel you have gotten to rock bottom, Trump shows up with an excavator, thumbs up and grin on his face. Imagine being made to pose with the very person who inspired your parents' murderer to drive across the state and execute them because they live in a town with brown people. But — remember that this baby couldn’t not have been in Melania’s hand without his family’s agreement. Trumpism is a cult.
Three Years of Misery inside Google. Nitasha Tiku takes us on a deep dive in into what happened at Google over the last three years: Damore’s manifesto, of course, but also the projects with China and the US government, as well as several examples of personal misconduct and harassment of women and trans folks. As an ex-Googler (I left in 2012), Tiku does a great job of capturing certain aspects of the company’s culture. Google thrives (thrived?) on an incredibly strong internal exchange of idea, all of which is predicated on confidentiality. The repeated leaks exposed employees to harassment from the alt-right — the internal trust didn’t just erode, it shattered. In the midst of this, the leadership was caught red-handed and helpless at the same time.
In God’s country. How backwards are the evangelicals ready to bend over to overturn Roe v. Wade? Trump is an all-out-for-money businessman, had three marriages, is credibly accused of rape by several women, separates families and calls people animals. This piece is not as inquisitive as I’d hoped — Bruenig is herself an outspoken Christian – but it does show that Trump can be divisive as far as the heart of the Bible belt. Though, as long as those people don’t actually get their high horses to steer away and vote him out, their doubts are no earthly use.
Please Allow Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times to Teach You About White Supremacy. A striking rebuttal to the assertion that middle America must be white, and that if it isn’t, then it isn’t America. Weisman, an editor for the presumably liberal New-York Times, deserves all the flak he’s getting for trying to dismiss the midwestern roots of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Whichever side of the political spectrum you identify with, white supremacy is precisely about dismissing the existence and role of non-whites in society.
“This Shithole Made Me”. One of the best decisions I’ve made in recent times was to disable all my work Slack notifications on mobile devices. 4 writers with a heavy presence on Twitter discuss how tight social media loops and the stream of notifications changed their habits and their brains. They also go into how they are trying to fix themselves by, e.g. reading paper books. Marie Kondo ought to do a show for folks whose life is getting lost in the mountain of digital crap they crave each day.
“The Art of Giving a Damn”. Last week, Beto O’Rourke said the words “shit” and “fuck” and it was recorded on camera. This has somehow grown into a story competing with the act of white supremacist domestic terrorism he was reacting to. America has always had a weird relationship with swear words: G-rated movies can show dozens of people being shot and killed but don’t you dare use any word that might hurt the audience’s sensitive ears. This is the same bend-over backwards logic that leads Walmart to (temporarily) remove video games from its shelves while it keeps selling guns. Megan Garber takes a historical lens at the use of profanity in politics and its role in conveying outrage.