
What a week. America saw two great injustices visited on the undeserving among us: Mexican businessman Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was convicted in US federal court, despite obvious evidence that he was framed. (ToM will always be #FreeChapo for life.) And Bernie Sanders entered the 2020 presidential race, continuing a shameless career of villainy that began with putting cats in trees in the 1960s and eventually led to a vicious campaign of threats and intimidation against fans of the 1996 film First Wives Club. Good and right-thinking citizens everywhere have hoped and prayed that neither of these baleful events would come to pass. Yet here we are.
In the meantime, Trump gave the Prime Minister of Japan a wedgie until he agreed to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize. (For distinguished accomplishment in… liking Kim Jong Un’s Instagrams of visits to pork-processing facilities?) And NYC passed the nation’s first law protecting people against discrimination on the basis of hair — a measure that is much appreciated by this long-suffering, kinky-locked American in particular and, in all seriousness, a long overdue remedy for widely accepted racist bias in the workplace.
Also, The Lego Movie 2 came out — and, while not as unexpectedly delightful as the first film, it still held its own as a clever, funny, and warm meditation on childhood and creativity. “Wait… are you secretly hiding an un-dark past?”
Also too… Trump wants to give the Saudis nukes. Because… it’s dangerous for violent religious fanatics to have nuclear technology. Clearly, unilaterally giving Iran a nuke is the only rational solution here.
- Journalist Kashmir Hill’s important piece on the vast, invisible power of tech companies, particularly Amazon and its huge web services empire: Life Without the Tech Giants (Gizmodo)
- Can Bernie Sanders repeat his surprising success this time around? (Guardian)
- The trans, disabled model taking on a $2-trillion industry (CNN)
- Blacklisted historian Steven Salaita on his new job as a schoolbus driver: An Honest Living (his blog)
- New York City Passed a New Guidance on Black Hair to Stop Discrimination (The Takeaway)
- Elizabeth Warren To Unveil Major New Child Care Initiative (HuffPo)
- An op-ed surely to make historians of technology swoon: Opinion | The Joy of Standards (NYT)
- Trump says Japanese prime minister nominated him for Nobel Peace Prize (Politico)
- “Acknowledgments in Essay Form:” Briallen Hopper’s Hard to Love (Nursing Clio)
- A time of debt (Eurozine)
- GOPer says the death penalty is good because… Jesus: Original Argument (TPM)
- How Soviet Artists Imagined Communist Life in Space (Gizmodo)
- The Art Of The Kneel: How Trump’s Tactics Kept Shrinking His Wall (TPM)
- The Strange, Never-Ending Saga of MoviePass (The Ringer)
- ‘Venezuela’: Media’s One-Word Rebuttal to the Threat of Socialism (FAIR)