Linkspam #5

Top Links

How to Survive America’s Kill List by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone - an American citizen’s fight to escape assassination by the US executive branch:

The question before Collyer would challenge the most gifted legal mind. At issue is the fact that America, in the wake of 9/11, has become two countries.  One is a democracy, visible to the population and governed by the lofty laws and rules and constitutional principles we learned about in Schoolhouse Rock.  The second nation is an authoritarian state-within-a-state, governed exclusively by the executive branch. In this parallel world, all rights redound to a bureaucracy that may kill anyone it pleases at any time, restrained only by the inclinations of the executive.  Essentially, Kareem’s lawyers are appealing to the first America – Collyer’s courtroom – to force the second, secret America to hear him out.

Nobody seems to know what would happen if Kareem or Zaidan tried to come to court, another thing that makes this case uniquely bizarre. Would Kareem be allowed to walk in and take a seat at the plaintiff’s table? Would he be placed under arrest outside the courthouse? Stuffed in the trunk of a Crown Victoria at the airport?

America’s Uncivil Protests Are Straight Out of Latin America by Omar G. Encarnación at Foreign Policy:

Two central questions are raised by the arrival of the escrache on U.S. shores: Do they work, and are they any good for democracy? Based on the Latin American experience and that of Spain, where escraches became a massive political headache in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the answer to the first question is a resounding yes. The tactic can serve to raise societal awareness about moral wrongs; it can also promote solidarity across a variety of causes. Most important, however, it can lead to a change in policy and even transform politics. The answer to the second question is less clear: The escrache is an unambiguous assault on civility — but it’s also a telling sign that something is already very rotten in the body politic.

The Queer Art of Failing Better by Laurie Penny at the Baffler:

Give a man a makeover and you fix him for a day; teach a man that masculinity under late capitalism is a toxic pyramid scheme that is slowly killing him just like it’s killing the world, and you might just fix a sucking hole in the future.

In the age of Trump, can Mr. Rogers help us manage our anger? by David Dark at America Magazine:

As he nears the end of his testimony, he asks if he might recite a song whose title is the question of the hour (maybe every hour): “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” It is as if he has treated everyone present to a psychic blast of blessedness. Rogers pauses to note that the question was purloined from a child struggling with this very issue aloud. We each have the power to stop, stop, stop, Rogers instructs, as he gently strikes the table, when we have planned something, in word or action, that will go badly for ourselves and others. There is something deep within us—an inner resource, our intuition, our core—that can come to our aid when we need it most. Our feelings, we can access the realization at any moment, are mentionable and manageable. We can become what we are supposed to be.

Other Favorites

Science

A Pottery Barn rule for scientific journals by Sanjay Srivastava at his personal blog - “Once a journal has published a study, it becomes responsible for publishing direct replications of that study.”  Best paired with Reproducibility meets accountability: introducing the replications initiative at Royal Society Open Science.

The day when three NASA astronauts staged a strike in space by Michael Hiltzik at the LA Times

The Evolution of High-Speed Throwing by Neil Thomas Roach at their personal blog

MTurk vs. The Lab: Either Way We Need Big Samples by Joe Simmons at Data Colada - brb emailing this to every researcher I know

The Science Wars Redux by Michael Bérubé at Democracy - on the Sokal hoak, postermodernism, objectivity, multiplicity, and the way the right has appropriated leftist critique

After the methods crisis, the theory crisis by Tom Stafford at Mind Hacks - a recommendation of a list of recommendations ;)

Spoiled Science: How a seemingly innocent blog post led to serious doubts about Cornell’s famous food laboratory by Tom Bartlett at the Chronicle

Tech

The woman who taught internet strangers to actually care for one another by Claire Evans at Quartz - _“_Rather than deputized members of our own community, they are a precarious workforce on the front lines of digital trauma.” On digital community moderation and how it’s changed over the last thirty years.

ASLCore: stress/strain curve zoom levelsby Mel Chua - on the art and science of translating engineering terms into ASL

UTC is enough for everyone, right? by Zach Holman - a history of time and programming with time

Saving a non-profit six figures a year using Squarespace, Airtable and Glitch.com by Danilo Campos at Future Fluent

Kara Swisher interviews Mark Zuckerberg for ReCode

IP addresses & routing by Julia Evans at their personal blog

Out-of-the-Silicon-Valley-funding-box by Hallie Montoya Tansey at their personal blog

Reading postmortems by Dan Luu at their personal blog

CSS Utility Classes and Separation of Concerns by Adam Wathan at their personal blog - via Julia Evans

Careful with negative assertions by Ned Batchelder at his personal blog - included largely for Jonathan Hartley’s comment

On Testing by Bill Sempf at his personal blog - this is basically just a roundup of testing jokes made on Twitter but I love it

Politics

From Charleston to Pittsburgh, an Arc of Premeditated American Tragedy by Jelani Cobb at the New Yorker

Putting a Face (Mine) to the Risks Posed by GOP Games on Mueller Investigation by Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel

How Contemporary Antitrust Robs Workers of Power by Sandeep Vaheesan at Law and Political Economy

Sorry to Bother You by Liza Featherstone at The Baffler - participation in modern politics

The junk debt that tanked the economy? It’s back in a big way. by Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post - collateralized loan obligations are the new subprime mortages

‘Red’ America is an illusion. Postindustrial towns go for Democrats. and This is why Democrats lose in ‘rural’ postindustrial America by Jonathan Rodden in the Washington Post

John Roberts and the Second Redemption Court by Adam Serwer at the Atlantic

History

A two-part podcast on the only successful coup d’etat in American history by Stuff You Missed In History Class

Follow up: UNC’s Football Stadium: Memorial to the Leader of a White Supremacist Massacre by Craig Calcaterra at their personal blog

When It’s Too Late to Stop Fascism, According to Stefan Zweig by George Prochnik at the New Yorker - Zweig was an Austrian who fled Europe in 1941, so this is a reflection on the rise of Nazism in particular

A twitter thread by Kevin Kruse on how the Democrats and Republicans changed their positions on civil rights

What Civil Rights History Can Teach Kavanaugh’s Critics by Blair Kelly in the New York Times

Misc

Pyramid Scheme by Ilana Gershon at Allegra Lab - how organizational structure can facilitate abuse

David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words by Aaron Bady at the New Inquiry  - I have never read Debt but I’ve practically made a hobby of reading critiques and reviews.  I like this one a lot, although the best quote is too long for this linkspam.

Here, have a somewhat meandering but very interesting Twitter thread by Malka Older about charity, stigma and formal systems of aid.

Black Educators Share Their Thoughts on What Happens When White Women Cry in Schools by Kelli Seaton at Philly’s 7th Ward

White Women Aren’t Afraid of Black People. They Want Power. by Stacey Patton at Dame

Foreign Key by Sumana Harihareswara at their personal blog - in which racism causes people to hallucinate accents

Augmenting Long-term Memory by Michael Nielsen at Y Combinator Research - I have started using the tool, Anki, that Nielsen recommends in this post, and have no regrets thus far

How Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook

Women’s Anticipation of the Employment Effects of Motherhood: Evidence and Implications by Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

What is it like to be a man? by Phil Christman at Hedgehog Review - reflections on masculinity

Autism from the inside by Katherine May at Aeon

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins in conversation with Sarah McFarland Taylor and Diane Winston - I particularly liked Sarah McFarland Taylor’s section and her discussion of plausibility structures

What It Takes to Be a Trial Lawyer If You’re Not a Man by Lara Bazelon at the Atlantic

Three philosophical schools by siderea at her personal blog

Jacob Levy’s Liberalism of Tragedy by Adam Gurri at Liberal Currents