This week was a banner one in Trumpian surrealism, as the big, wet president vowed that even if all the Fake Ass Friends betray him, Kim Jong Un while always open his ever-loving arms. And a vainglorious “mole” in the White House gave the chattering classes the injection of top-grade Saigon Blonde heroin that they have been jitterily jonesing for for months.
Meanwhile, an arch-Catholic fascist pat of Land-o-Lakes butter is cruising on his way to the Supreme Court, continuing his ceaseless quest to make transvaginal ultrasounds a human right. Mr. Kavanaugh was not completely undeterred, though. No, no one could stop Our Fair Haired Boy from Newark, NJ, Cory Booker, from doing his A Few Good Men bit, or Kindergarten Cop, or whatever.
Strange times indeed. Aretha Franklin, Burt Reynolds, and the Village Voice are gone. The labor movement teeters on the edge of final, total annihilation, yet a robust and restless generation of new organizers, from teachers to cab drivers to grad students, are fighting back, hard. A new world struggles to be born — and, fortunately, you will soon not be able to get an abortion.
Landmark ruling decriminalizes homosexual acts in India (CBS)
An epic round-up on The Labor Movement in 2018 (Metafilter)
The economy may be booming, but nearly half of Americans can’t make ends meet (LA Times)
Heartwarming: When This Subway Employee Had To Walk 20 Miles To Work Because He Couldn’t Afford A Car, The CEO Of Subway Drove Alongside Him To Cheer Him On (Clickhole)
How Michigan Became the Epicenter of the Modernist Experiment (NY Times Style)
The Rise of New York’s New Leisure Waterfront (Curbed)
The Materiality of Research: What Do We Write to Convey? (LSE Review of Books)
What About “The Breakfast Club”? (Molly Ringwald in the New Yorker)
Everything You Should Know About Anarchism (Teen Vogue continues to kill it)
PHOTOS: Aretha Franklin’s Soul Celebrated At Funeral (NPR)
Mitski Is the 21st Century’s Poet Laureate of Young Adulthood (NPR)
The Village Voice has been shut down (Vox)
The macabre world of mind-controlling parasites (Frontiers Blog)