Excellent Reads

After leaving The Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. His 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977, is reprinted below.

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On March 31, 2020, when the United States was on Covid-19 lockdown, The Atlantic published “Beyond Originalism,” a cerebral essay by the Harvard Law professor C. Adrian C. Vermeule ’90. The essay urges legal conservatives to abandon originalism, the dominant school of constitutional interpretation for the conservative legal movement, which posits that the Constitution should be understood according to the original intent of the Framers. Instead, Vermeule calls for “common good constitutionalism” — a new reading of the Constitution which promotes “legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive” that ultimately “encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.”

For months, militiamen on the perimeters of El Fasher have asked those few who managed to escape the besieged Sudanese city whether Mohamed Khamis Douda was still inside. They shared videos threatening to kill him, which, as they hoped, made their way to the activist.

From MR Online via this RSS feed

Compliance Week’s latest case study, “The Banks Behind the Epstein Enterprise,” tells an old story through a new lens. The report offers a deep dive into the anti-money laundering (AML) compliance failures—and alleged complicity—of JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank, the two banks that enabled the Epstein enterprise to flourish for decades.

There’s a long Western tradition of identifying beings as monsters. In many cases, it’s clear why: basilisks or dragons are monstrous, as are more humanoid forms like zombies, vampires and werewolves. Monsters are categorically different from garden-variety creatures and typically, but not necessarily, fictional and alarming. But telling stories about monsters isn’t simply a way of describing beings that are nothing like humans. It’s also how societies define and police who they think counts as fully human, through acts of what I call monster-making or monstrification.

[H]is whereabouts and actions in the months leading up to Mr. Thompson’s murder have largely remained a mystery. Some family and friends have said they were unable to reach him starting shortly after he returned from his backpacking trip to Asia, a trip that now appears to have been pivotal for him. [...] Interviews with fellow travelers and local residents, along with a review of Mr. Mangione’s writings and communications, suggest a shift from seeking human connection and community to isolating himself, and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how to make a statement about injustice.

https://archive.ph/U5Nnw

A Energy point of view to define physical limit of computation from mass.

An interesting read about a centuries-old mathematical exploration

Nowhere is safe After fleeing Chinese repression, Uyghurs Idris and Zeynure Hasan thought their family would be safe. But Beijing’s growing influence led to Idris’s arrest and a long battle to be reunited

Nelson: I wrote Shadow Network out of a sense of civic duty. I observed some trends in our national life that were anti-democratic and detrimental to our public welfare. I’m deeply concerned by the epidemic of gun violence in our schools, the growing disdain for science and fact-based reporting, and, gravest of all, the campaigns against climate science and environmental protections.

She was used to being isolated. She was one of only a few women in a fire department of about 100 employees, and even though she tried to fit in by sleeping at the firehouse two nights each week — even though she had won E.M.T. of the Year, passed all the fitness tests, registered as a Republican, collected guns and voted for Trump in 2016 — she was always defined by the ways she stood apart. A vegetarian. A bisexual. A single woman with dyed pink hair and facial piercings among a sea of mostly white, Christian, conservative men.

Ken Klippenstein is an independent investigative journalist and proprietor of Klip News. He’s published scoops on Luigi Mangione, leaks from the Trump administration, and lots of other important information you won’t find at the big news networks. He joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss how mainstream media has been captured by government sources, why national security reporting is uniquely broken, and his recent reporting on Trump’s new presidential directive, NSPM-7, a sweeping order that directs federal agencies to treat political dissent as a form of domestic terrorism.

https://archive.ph/fmfi6

https://archive.ph/pgNvi

https://archive.ph/slz9Y

Crossposted from https://lemmy.world/post/37288228

https://web.archive.org/web/20251009173830/https://reasonstobecheerful.world/paul-stamets-granddaddy-of-all-things-mushroom/

Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They’ve been a road map for the billionaire ever since.

Civility-theater liberalism is not enough, whether it’s the staged heat of campus showdowns or the cool civility of podcast tête-à-têtes. The duty is twofold: Design a forum that can carry facts, history, and counterargument into the room, and host it with someone who has done the homework to press, correct, and judge in real time. When a platform is given to arguments that narrow the circle of equal regard, pair the marquee guest with the scholar who can supply the record and with those who live with the downstream effects—the policies those arguments license and the resentments they cultivate. If the host can meet the standard, let them; if not, choose one who will—or don’t stage the show. If the format can’t do that, if it launders or airbrushes dehumanization, then don’t use it. If the platform can be rebuilt, rebuild it; if it can’t, retire it.

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A forest can walk across a landscape in the gut of a primate, traveling one defecation at a time.

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The title is a bit sensational, the article is not.

Shortly after US president Donald Trump hung up a call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin this spring, an obscure shortwave radio channel, broadcasting from a military base somewhere in Russia, sprang to life.

*The News & Observer*'s Luke DeCock gives a eulogy for the Carolina Mudcats, playing their final games this week after 35 years before they move to Wilson, North Carolina next year and become the Wilson Warbirds.

Archive link: http://archive.today/l70mo

Archived link http://archive.today/vI0P1

On Aug. 20, a New Orleans City Council committee will consider its latest version of a new facial recognition ordinance. If the ordinance is approved, Louisiana will become the first state in the nation with a citywide biometric surveillance network capable of tracking hundreds of thousands of residents in real time.

In her deficient, warped soul, it seems she lacked something that every woman must have: a morality that she valued more than male approval.