This Week’s Roundup: Hast Thou Considered the Emu?

The semester comes in, the semester goes out… you can’t explain it. You can’t explain it, folks. Except with the concept of time, clocks, paper, schedules, PDFs, Weberian rationality, and so forth. It’s getting to be that time of the year when those of the academic persuasion are ripped from their cozy perches in the Ivory Tower, where they while away the Summer days writing essays like “America Is Bad” and “Why an Out-of-Work Romanian Wheelwright Deserves Your Hard-Earned Tax Dollars,” to go back to the dark, satanic mill where they have to teach the young and old alike. To the teachers of the world, we salute you. And to the people who are on leave or sabbatical, fuck you, you suck, we hate you.

(We really love you, though.)

Not much in the news this week. People are still dying of starvation and dysentery in Yemen while America’s BFF Saudi Arabia strangles the life out of a desperate and defenseless people. Rohingya people are still being sold into sex slavery. And poor people everywhere are still poor, as it turns out.

That’s not news, of course, compared to the in-depth study of Michael Cohen’s Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper that the New York Times published in a hard-hitting expose on Monday. Indeed, two sitting Congressmen have been indicted; the sitting president’s campaign manager was convicted of multiple felonies; and his own attorney confessed to committing crimes at the direction of the big boy in the White House himself. So, you know, normal stuff.

Trump, characteristically, showed his superior leadership style and management acumen by saying his two long-time employees, Cohen and Omarosa, were, respectively, a terrible lawyer and a dumb bitch.

If you’re interested in something not completely inane and soul-crushing, we have these juicy morsels of actual real things that are happening in the world and written and talked about by smart people for you to explore. Check out this week’s roundup of the very best of the very worst.