The Republicans Waged a 3-Decade War on Government. They Got Trump.

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.

The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump

The New Yorker:

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.

Reddit Is Still in Turmoil

Reddit

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.

Donald Trump Threatens the Ghostwriter of ‘The Art of the Deal’

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.

Pixellating Text Creates Identifiable Patterns

Technology

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.

Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All

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.

The Silence of the N.R.A.

Evan Osnos, writing for the New Yorker:

The N.R.A.’s explicit call for a more armed society reveals the lie behind its homage to “coexistence.” By directing rage against the government, by preventing politicians from heeding the overwhelming demands of their constituents for broader background checks, by endorsing Donald Trump’s plan for mass deportations and bans on Muslim immigration, the N.R.A. has assembled a volatile case against the idea of coexistence—and then disavows the result when it explodes.

A View From Nowhere

Jay Rosen:

In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.” Second, it’s a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.

I re-read this at least once a year.

Bill Simmons on His ESPN Ouster

Lacey Rose, writing For The Hollywood Reporter:

For the time being, Simmons has taken no other outside investment, using what insiders describe as seven-figure revenue generated primarily by sponsorship and branding deals to help fund The Ringer side of the enterprise. “I had all of these people who wanted to [invest,] famous f—ing people,” says Simmons. “But one of my goals was to have as few people in my life as possible who would be like, ‘Why are you doing that? What’s going on here?’ ” Looking ahead, he and Eric Weinberger, whom he recruited from the NFL Network to run the company, won’t rule out taking on additional investors.

Fascinating story.

How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War to Crush Google Plus

Facebook

Antonio García Martínez, writing for Vanity Fair:

Google Plus was Google finally taking note of Facebook and confronting the company head-on, rather than via cloak-and-dagger recruitment shenanigans and catty disses at tech conferences. It hit Facebook like a bomb. Zuck took it as an existential threat comparable to the Soviets’ placing nukes in Cuba in 1962. Google Plus was the great enemy’s sally into our own hemisphere, and it gripped Zuck like nothing else. He declared “Lockdown,” the first and only one during my time there. As was duly explained to the more recent employees, Lockdown was a state of war that dated to Facebook’s earliest days, when no one could leave the building while the company confronted some threat, either competitive or technical.

The Rise of Confirmshaming

Julianne Tveten, writing for Motherboard:

Much of the online marketing world, however, seeks to change this. Growing numbers of websites, from magazines to clothing stores, have adopted “exit-intent pop-ups,” rectangular modals that blanket a webpage, prompting a user to join a mailing list. Beyond their visual intrusiveness, these ads prey on the uncertain user, foregoing the neutral simplicity of a “yes/no” option in favor of charged, shame-inducing language.

If your website does this you’re an asshole.

Your Human Size Life

Dave Winer, writing on his blog:

In the early years of this blog I wrote a lot about the personal struggles of people who had attained financial independence only to find out that it revealed that money was not what was standing in the way of happiness. That’s contrary to the message of our society, which is this:

  • Until you’re rich, you’re miserable.
  • Once you’re rich, it’s all great!

The Future of Podcasting

Technology

Ben Thompson, writing for Stratechery:

I like driving, even if I end up sitting in traffic. I enjoy doing the laundry, and take my time folding shirts just so. I volunteer to wash the dishes. After all, each of these activities is an excuse to listen to more podcasts.

I’ve been listening to podcasts for over a decade now; I don’t remember exactly when I got started but it was around the time that Apple Took Podcasting Mainstream: that’s from the title of the press release announcing iTunes support for podcasts in 2005. Given that most podcasts were listened to on iPods (thus the name) that already synced with iTunes, Apple’s move dramatically simplified the distribution of podcasts: simply click a button in the music management app you already used, hook up the iPod as you already did, and voilà! New podcasts ready to be listened to in the car (via your cassette tape adaptor), while doing laundry, washing the dishes, etc. It was great!