Gary Noling, writing in The New York Times:
When my daughter, Carri Leigh Goodwin, joined the Marine Corps in July 2007, she was a shy, quiet 18-year-old who loved reading and writing poetry. She joined the Marines to make me proud — I’m a former Marine — and to her surprise, she turned out to be good with a gun.
She came home in February 2009 and was a ticking time bomb. The bomb went off after five days, when she died of acute alcohol poisoning on a freezing Ohio night.
The New York Times’ profile of swimmer Katie Ledecky is great:
Ledecky’s competitiveness is apparent at practices and in meets, even if it is expressed quietly. About 15 minutes before their events, swimmers gather in a “ready room” that usually consists of a few rows of chairs and a TV showing the races. Ledecky invariably sits in a kind of trance with her parka zipped up and her hood pulled over her head. The intensity she radiates causes even friends to keep their distance. “At practice, she’s a nice girl,” Anna Belousova, a 19-year-old Russian breaststroker who trains with Ledecky, told me. “At meets, I’m afraid to go near her.”
Barack Obama, writing for Glamour:
We need to keep changing the attitude that permits the routine harassment of women, whether they’re walking down the street or daring to go online. We need to keep changing the attitude that teaches men to feel threatened by the presence and success of women.
We need to keep changing the attitude that congratulates men for changing a diaper, stigmatizes full-time dads, and penalizes working mothers. We need to keep changing the attitude that values being confident, competitive, and ambitious in the workplace—unless you’re a woman. Then you’re being too bossy, and suddenly the very qualities you thought were necessary for success end up holding you back.
Ben Casselman, writing at Five Thirty Eight:
But Friday’s report suggests the recovery is beginning to reach some of the groups that have struggled most in recent years. The unemployment rate for workers without a high school diploma fell sharply to 6.3 percent in July, lower than it was when the recession began. (Their unemployment rate topped 15 percent in the recession.) For workers with only a high school diploma, the unemployment rate is down to 5 percent from more than 10 percent during the recession.
None of that is likely to stop Trump from talking about the weak economy — or from outright claiming the numbers are manipulated. And there is plenty of reason to worry about the path of the economy, starting with this week’s weak estimate of second-quarter economic growth. But the job market, at least, appears to be on firm footing.
Jeff Wise, writing at the New York Magazine:
[P]eople in Silicon Valley really think of themselves as world-changing, good people: “We know best because we’re so smart. And obviously we’re rich, so we know best.” So what you get is, if you write something that’s positive, they say, “Oooh, good journalism,” and if you write something tough, they’ll say, “Oh, that’s clickbait.” (That’s Trump’s favorite word now.) So if anything is even slightly critical they call it clickbait and they either get mad and deny access or they go right to Peter Thiel–ville, which is an appalling example of someone who clearly was wounded by press, doesn’t like that they wrote he was gay … and then pretended he was funding a lawsuit against Gawker for philanthropy. I don’t mind a good revenge plot, but I wish he would just say, “I don’t like that they did this to me and I’m getting back at them.” But his whole speech about how he’s helping humanity by putting this media company out of business is sort of the logical conclusion of people being very sensitive about things that are written about them.
A really interesting interview.
Todd VanDerWerff, writing at Vox:
After the first season of Parks and Recreation, series co-creator Michael Schur and his writers room had a problem. They felt like much of their show had come together surprisingly quickly — in just six episodes, no less — but it was clear from both critical and viewer response that their main character, Leslie Knope, wasn’t quite connecting, even as she was played by the enormously gifted and lovable Amy Poehler.
And:
Knope was largely read as a Hillary Clinton-esque character when the series debuted (as I wrote about here). Leslie even decorated her office with a photo of Clinton. And now, in 2016, around 18 months after Parks left the air, the Democratic Party is hoping it can make the exact same pivot Schur and his writers did.
This week’s main topic of Encore is focused on when we listen to music, and specifically: background music. Do we listen to music in the background while working? What about while doing other activities? What kind of music? What genres? Can we watch TV while working in the background? When do we listen to podcasts? And on top of that there’s talk about music’s role in our lives as we get older and grow up. What role does music have in our lives now? We also discuss some follow-up about last week’s Blink-182 episode, My Chemical Romance teasing things, Pokémon Go, and much more.
Also, we tease a special supporter bonus episode that is all about our “Top 3” pizza toppings and drinks. Supporters: that is now up in your awesome thread.
Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann, at Vox:
As scholars who had worked for more than four decades with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, we faced a ton of scorn from sitting Republican lawmakers and outside observers for making this argument — and denial from most of the mainstream media. For reporters, professional norms and concerns about accusations of partisan bias dictated that the parties be treated equally, whatever the underlying reality. The safe haven of false equivalence led the press to ignore one of the most consequential developments in contemporary American politics: the radicalization of the Republican Party.
One of my favorite things about the forums is watching talented and motivated people come together to make awesome things. Today I’m excited to feature the latest in the “member compilation” series that has been taking shape in our music forum — a tribute to Yellowcard. Below you’ll find a stream of the 16-track cover album dedicated to the band.
The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger.
Kate Conger, writing at TechCrunch:
However, sources say Reddit’s internal turmoil can be traced back to the company’s ongoing struggle to leave its antagonistic culture behind. Several employees fended off uncomfortable comments from users and management alike, sources claimed. “Management is terrible, a complete reflection of what the site is like,” one source said.
From The New Yorker:
On Monday, July 18th, the day that this magazine published my interview with Schwartz, and hours after Schwartz appeared on “Good Morning America” to voice his concerns about Trump’s “impulsive and self-centered” character, Jason D. Greenblatt, the general counsel and vice-president of the Trump Organization, issued a threatening cease-and-desist letter to Schwartz. (You can read the full letter at the bottom of this post.) In it, Greenblatt accuses Schwartz—who has likened his writing of the flattering book to putting “lipstick on a pig”—of making “defamatory statements” about the Republican nominee and claiming that he, not Trump, wrote the book, “thereby exposing” himself to “liability for damages and other tortious harm.”
Greenblatt demands that Schwartz send “a certified check made payable to Mr. Trump” for all of the royalties he had earned on the book, along with Schwartz’s half of the book’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar advance.
This is fucking insane. This is the Republican nomination for President and he is bat-shit.
Kashmir Hill, writing for Fusion, summarizes a study by Steven Hill, et. al.:
“In many online communities, it is the norm to redact names and other sensitive text from posted screen shots,” write the researchers, specifically citing Reddit. “Mosaicing and blurring have also been used for the redaction of high-profile government documents and celebrity social media.”
They should probably stop doing that. The UC-San Diego researchers found that they could use statistical models—”so-called hidden Markov models”—to generate the blurring or pixelation of lots of numbers, letters, and words, to the point that their software program could match a known redaction to an unknown redaction to figure out what it says. The biggest challenge is figuring out the font and size of the underlying text which the researchers need for their deciphering. They say it works better than a brute-force technique for deciphering pixelated images discussed by Dheera Venkatraman in 2007.
Jane Mayer, at the New Yorker:
“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”
If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”
The prospect of this man being President is downright terrifying.
Save The Lost Boys’s new album, Temptress, comes out today and we’ve got the video premiere for the new single “Nothing’s Real Outside.” Vocalist/guitarist Lee Weiss describes the song:
“Nothing’s Real Outside” is about the world coming to an end and what you would go through for the people you love most while trying to deal with all the chaos and uncertainty that surrounds you. As you realize society in crumbling around you and everyone has gone blind to what truly matters, you remain a steadfast example of hope.
You’ll find the video and the band’s upcoming tour dates below.
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