Trump, ever the canny master of the news cycle, somehow managed to get everyone talking about buying Greenland this week, mere days after his trusty brother-in-sex-crime Jeffrey Epstein [ahem] killed himself in a Manhattan correctional facility. The Rape Plane flies no more.
Epstein Derangement Disorder thereupon fell across the ToM editorial office, just like every other media outlet or Twitter account worth its salt. It is rare to see a news story reported where the official narrative is instantaneously disbelieved by almost everybody, from Right to Left. Soberer heads at NPR did their duty by coming on to the air to assure everyone that such talk was poppycock, tomfoolery, jibber-jabber, monkeyshines, and horseplay — all of which sounds fucking awesome, actually.
How a high-profile suspect hangs himself mere weeks after another failed suicide [cough] “attempt” went unexplained. Where did those guards go for several hours? What’s the deal with Tartaglione, the mobbed-up ex-cop and quadruple murderer-cum-frontyard-body-burier who was originally placed in Epstein’s cell and allegedly “roughed him up”? Why is there a temple on Eyes Wide Shut island? And what happened to Clay Tiffany?
Also… this:
The head-spinning Epstein saga is a reminder that, as Felix Biederman has said, nothing really changes — all the same things just get weirder and weirder. “President Donald Trump buys Greenland” is the sort of sentence that, once upon a time, Bertrand Russell might have used to show how a sentence can make sense but have no meaning. And yet here we are.
In the meantime, there are things that still make sense, like Bernie and Cardi B, and the Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Sandwich. In fact, the best thing we read this week is Irene Jiang’s mind-opening tour de force (we’re not kidding) “I Ate Chicken Sandwiches from 8 Fast Food Chains, and the Cheapest Was Also the Best.” (Spoiler alert: it’s not the homophobic one.)
A lot of great content here from our friends at Boston Review, Commune, Teen Vogue and more, curated by our Epstein-addled editors:
- ‘It Feels Like I’m Chosen to Do This.’ Inside the Record-Breaking Rise of Lil Nas X (TIME)
- Why Ricky Resigned (Latino USA)
- The Precarity of Black Motherhood (Boston Review)
- Bernie x Cardi B (YouTube)
- To the Daring the Future Belongs (Commune)
- Female Athletes Are Using Labor Tactics to Try to Get Equal Pay (Teen Vogue)
- How The Labor Movement’s Decline Could Be Reversed (TPM)
- Stacey Abrams’s Fight for a Fair Vote (New Yorker)
- The Perils of Professional Dress (The Walrus)
- Could WordPress + Tumblr create an alternative to Facebook? (CJR)
- The story of North Korea’s ‘Hotel of Doom’ (CNN)
- Brazil drug dealer dresses up as daughter in bungled jail escape (BBC)
- To the Daring the Future Belongs (Commune)
- Female Athletes Are Using Labor Tactics to Try to Get Equal Pay (Teen Vogue)
- How The Labor Movement’s Decline Could Be Reversed (TPM)
- The Perils of Professional Dress (The Walrus)
- Could WordPress + Tumblr create an alternative to Facebook? (CJR)
- The story of North Korea’s ‘Hotel of Doom’ (CNN)
- Candy Land Was Invented for Polio Wards (Atlantic)
- In Awesome Twist, GoFundMe Border Wall Spills Into Mexico (TPM)
- Epstein Associates Distance Selves by Insisting They Hadn’t Used His Child Sex Trafficking Ring in Years (Onion)
- This Irish teenager may have a solution for a plastic-free ocean (CNN)
- I’m a trans woman – here’s why algorithms scare me (Dazed)
- All Songs Rewind: The Worst Songs Of All Time? (All Songs Considered)