Vox:

The video went viral almost immediately — but not because of UT pride. References to the “creepy” sound of all these women chanting, the doors to the sorority house serving as some kind of portal to hell, and the inherently basic nature of all those white women in a room together, having the audacity to bond and say words at the same time, ran rampant across the internet.

The original tweet was quickly deleted, but it wasn’t long before the media picked up the meme. Over the next several days, several major news outlets covered the Alpha Delta Pi video. New York magazine called the video “deranged,” insisting, “Their screams will haunt you, but not as much as their wiggling fingers, their manic chants, and the disembodied arms clapping in the background.”

But as anyone who’s lived on a major university campus in the fall can probably tell you, all sororities have chants. This house cheerleading is a basic, routinized component of sorority recruitment, and learning the chant is an easy way to bond with potential sorority sisters. In the annals of sorority house chants, the Alpha Delta Pi one is easy to learn and good to use in a recruitment video, to teach any potential recruit the chant before they show up to the event. And the way the chant plays out, with a sorority “door stack” behind those grandly opening doors, is a longstanding tradition among sorority houses:

Was it just this particular video that rubbed the internet the wrong way? Of course not. As sororities have moved online, incidents involving the public shaming of sorority girls have increased. Here’s a brief look at the many ways sororities and their members have taken heat on the internet.

A great takedown of the insufferable Bob Lefsetz from Nick Heer at Pixel Envy:

The gist of Lefsetz’s piece is that the exclusive-to-Apple Music release of “Blonde” is, somehow, the canary in the coal mine of the music industry. That its exclusivity is, somehow, a symptom of a music industry that doesn’t know how to build a fanbase and is, instead, spitting in the face of everyone from committed fans to casual listeners.

But, for some reason, Lefsetz is only angered now by the release of Frank Ocean’s record on Apple’s platforms.

Jacob S. Hacker, writing for Vox:

Since the early 2000s, I had been calling for letting the public sector compete with private insurers to sign up people younger than 65: not “Medicare for all,” a dream of the left for decades, but “Medicare for more,” a public insurance plan for working-age people that could compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to push back against drugmakers, medical device manufacturers, hospital systems, and other health care providers.

I’ve long been a proponet of the public option and this article does a great job of laying out the argument why.

Variety:

Instead of basking in the success, the makers of “Sausage Party” are finding themselves embroiled in a controversy that’s being fueled by anonymous comments on a series of blogs and news outlets. The formula used to deliver the film on time and on budget is now drawing unwanted attention, as animators who worked on the film in Canada are complaining they did not get overtime pay or the screen credits they deserved.

Ugh.

The New York Times:

As President Obama pointed out in a news conference last week, where he called charges of electoral rigging “ridiculous,” states and cities set up voting systems, not the federal government. That’s true, and it means the voting machine landscape is a patchwork of different systems, which makes the election hard to manipulate in a coordinated way.

But it’s still a bleak landscape.

Over the years, the team at Princeton, cooperating with other researchers, has managed to disable and tamper with many direct recording electronic systems that use touch-screen computers without a verifiable paper trail.