Politics

Larry David does an absolutely wonderful job of skewering Bill Maher in this opinion piece in the NYT: My Dinner With Adolf.

But it wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation. He was quite inquisitive and asked me a lot of questions about myself. I told him I had just gone through a brutal breakup with my girlfriend because every time I went someplace without her, she was always insistent that I tell her everything I talked about. I can’t stand having to remember every detail of every conversation. Hitler said he could relate — he hated that, too. “What am I, a secretary?” 

If you're confused as to the context, this is from last week:

I've hated Maher for decades. This feckless horseshit is an excellent example of his dangerous stupidity.

Carole Cadwalladr’s recent Ted Talk, “This is a Digital Coup” is worth a listen. If you’re unfamiliar with Cadwalladr’s work, she’s one of the main reporters who broke the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook story (and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer for it) almost a decade ago. She was sued for her last Ted Talk, and is visibly nervous during this one, though the courts vindicated her.

Yale professor Timothy Snyder announced this week that he and his wife Marci Shore (also a Yale prof) are leaving America and moving to Canada to teach at the University of Toronto. This is significant because Snyder is an expert on tyranny. His book On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the Twentieth Century is a succinct and vital read on the subject. It was one of the best books I read while living in Vanuatu during Trump's first term. I highly recommend it.

The first "rule," Do Not Obey In Advance, is being broken by countless individuals and corporations under Trump's second term. Once you're aware of this pithy statement, you'll start to see it happening everywhere, and it's frightening.

Here's John Lithgow reading from the book:

Asterisk interviews David Skarbek (Professor of Political Economy at Brown) about Why We Have Prison Gangs.

After his wife and two of his children were killed in Gaza, Al Jazeera journalist Wael al-Dahdouh became famous around the world for his decision to keep reporting. But this was just the start of his heartbreaking journey

A long-read for this week: The Tragedy of Palestinian Journalist Wael al-Dahdouh by Nasrine Malik for The Guardian.

Apparently, I'm "more resilient to misinformation than 89% of the US population!"

Or so says The University of Cambridge's Misinformation Susceptibility Test. How about you? I did the 20-question test and it took me just a couple minutes.

In May, Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti wrote The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel (gift link). It's an excellent read.

If you prefer to learn by listening, today, the NYTimes podcast The Daily, did an interview with Bergman that breaks it all down into an easily-understood timeline. It is a great primer on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and I encourage you to listen to it.

If you're done with that and looking for more, check out The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917--2017 by Rashid Khalidi.