Links 26/4/18

Politics: 

More about the Gibsonian combination of cutting edge technology in an authoritarian polity willing to use it to its advantage: China is developing a "Social Credit System" that assigns a rating to each of its citizens. 

"It includes everything from rankings calculated by online payment providers to scores doled out by neighborhoods or companies. High-flyers receive perks such as discounts on heating bills and favorable bank loans, while bad debtors cannot buy high-speed train or plane tickets." 

Foreign Policy: Life Inside China�s Social Credit Laboratory, April 3, 2018

This is possible in a country where companies like SenseTime provide both surveillance and social media companies with its facial recognition software. 

Elsewhere, Peter Thiel's Palantir provides some of the massive data it collects and mines to law enforcement - and things could get worse in the future: 

As Palantir tries to court corporate customers as a more conventional software company, fewer forward-deployed engineers will mean fewer human decisions. Sensitive questions, such as how deeply to pry into people�s lives, will be answered increasingly by artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms. The small team of Privacy and Civil Liberties engineers could find themselves even less influential, as the urge for omnipotence among clients overwhelms any self-imposed restraints. 

Bloomberg: Palantir Knows Everything About You, April 19, 2018

Pop Culture: 

Amazon will be adapting William Gibson's The Peripheral into a television series (attached to the project are Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, who've worked with similar subject matter in Person of Interest and Westworld). 

An essay about how East Asian narratives differ from Western narratives with regards to content and style. 

Not really sure yet how I feel about this essay about how the rise of algorithms to provide us with suggestions for future purchases affect our relationship to style and taste (and if we should just surrender both to AIs and free up space for loftier goals), but there are some interesting ideas here. 

Roxane Gay interviews Michelle Dean about Sharp. 

Links 3/4/18

Politics:

�Surveillance capitalism� was the term coined in 2015 by Harvard academic Shoshanna Zuboff to describe this large-scale surveillance and modification of human behaviour for profit. It involves predictive analysis of big datasets describing the lives and behaviours of tens or hundreds of millions of people, allowing correlations and patterns to be identified, information about individuals inferred, and future behaviour to be predicted. Attempts are then made to influence this behaviour through personalised and dynamic targeted advertising. This is refined by testing numerous variations of adverts on different demographics to see what works best. Every time you use the internet you are likely the unwitting subject of dozens of experiments trying to figure out how to most effectively extract money from you. 

openDemocracy: The problem isn�t just Cambridge Analytica or Facebook � it�s �surveillance capitalism�, March 20, 2018

We�ve also become aware of �dark profiles�: people who don�t have Facebook accounts, but, because of their presence in others� contact lists (and in this newly revealed communications metadata) fully describe their own social networks of connections, simply because everyone else is on Facebook and connected to them, outlining a missing individual in a very distinct shadow.

Even non-compliance does not leave you outside Facebook.  

Meanjin: The Last Days of Facebook?, March 26, 2018

After the revelation about how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to target specific voters in the 2016 Presidential election and the Brexit campaign in the UK (here's an explanation of how that worked), Facebook has once again come under scrutiny for the amount of data it collects and sells (and to add to the horror, here's everything that google collects about its users). 

To put any argument about not needing data privacy if you're not doing anything wrong, here's a story that might put that thought into perspective - China's ability to combine advanced technology and surveillance in a polity that doesn't need to justify breaching the privacy of its citizens. 

The powerful silence at the March for Our Lives.

After the first death of a pedestrian hit by an autonomous vehicle in autonomous mode, more questions about the future of the technology and the regulatory environment it operates in, but Waymo, a ride-hailing service, is investing heavily in a fleet of Jaguar-built autonomous vehicles that will be ready to operate by 2020. 

Pop Culture: 

A beautiful and very personal essay about moving to Korea as a Korean-American.

A new biography about Indigenous rights campaigner Mary Montgomerie Bennett.

For the release of his short story collection The Merry Spinster, here are three interviews with Daniel Mallory Ortberg (about breakfast, putting out a book while transitioning, and with Nicole Chung).

Neil Gaiman and N.K. Jemisin discuss writing and representation for Lithub.  

An insight into the archives of Octavia Butler. 

"Gilead is within you" - The Handmaid's Tale will be back for a second season on April 25th. Westworld will be back on April 22nd. 

Always and never at home

Instead they�ve produced a metastasizing cancer by quickening gentrification, eroding the complex fabric of neighborhoods to the status of mere way stations, and advancing a homogenizing tide of bleach wood and incandescent bulbs. Their project aims to remake real estate and its occupants in the face of capital in the �liquid modern� era: frictionless, highly mobile, always and never at home. What a lively waltz! Such a project merrily plunges into the city as a radical, top-down �solution��which is to say, the gussying-up of a preexisting �solution� (roommates) for a select bunch, a meager Band-Aid for a problem with deep roots in decades of housing policy, disintegrating incomes, and the financialization of real estate. Such muck and mire�the displaced bodies and theft of neglected but occupied residences�vaporizes in a snap! Turns out rethinking housing from the ground up was awfully simple. 

The Baffler: The Tragedy of the Commons, March 1, 2018

Ursula K. Le Guin

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

Time and time again, Le Guin surpassed my expectations of what a writer and a person can be. She was not only good, but consistently good. Her emphasis on storytelling and the act of listening evidences an ability to see perspectives beyond her own, a lack of self-imposition on other cultures and other people�s stories. I always found an implied advocacy for activism in her words: �Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don�t so much respond as join in�become part of the action.� 

WIRED, January 23, 2018 

A Random Links 25/1/18

Politics: 

It represents the lengths Australia has gone to in order to cover up its colonial crimes. The country promotes a devastating amnesia about the mass slaughter of Aboriginal nations in order to escape accountability � not just for the thousands of lost black lives, but for the stolen land that Australia was built upon.
This is what Australia Day is ultimately about: resisting accountability. And it is not a coincidence � it is deliberate. Australia Day is not about "mateship" or a "fair go". It is not a celebration of the "lucky country". It is a tool used by a perpetrator of violence to undermine calls for justice. 

Buzzfeed: To Celebrate Australia Day Is To Celebrate Violence, January 22, 2018

Pop Culture: 

In this year 2018, let's celebrate that Portlandia will soon end, that Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl will be developed into an HBO series, and that Sleater-Kinney are back in the studio. (and also, what does this mean?)

And else? The loss of the Hairpin and the Awl, this film seems like it will be a lot. And in most exciting news, Daniel Kaluuya has very well-deservedly beaten all other Skins alumni to the Academy Awards punch. 

Links 9/12/17

Politics: 

So many things, so horrifyingly hard to keep up with things. 

But first of, here's Sean Kelly on Marriage Equality becoming law in Australia: 

But while it is easy to become distracted by disillusionment, we shouldn�t always succumb. All of the above is about disenchantment with politics as it is practised in Canberra � and as we head into summer and away from this brutal parliamentary year, we should, briefly at least, try to give our focus in its entirety to the great change that occurred this week in Australia. It is a wonderful change, one that has already brought � and will continue to bring � joy to millions, and the various political frustrations of this week are, in comparison, nothing at all. 

The Monthly: Remember This Moment, December 8, 2017

It's a victory that should remain untarnished by the way it was won: the wrongness of the idea that a majority should get to vote on the civil rights of a minority, a campaign of hatred by the no side, protagonists claiming the victory for themselves and patting their own shoulders when all they did was try and appease the homophobic elements in their own party. Malcolm Turnbull doesn't get to claim this as his own - it's all of ours, and not because, but in spite of the current Australian government (and it is not the final hurdle, and anyone who thinks so only reveals their deliberately limited and privileged conception of what this community is). 

And none of this should distract from what is happening on Manus. After the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court found the detention centres to be unconstitutional, instead of finding a solution for the people trapped there, Australia left them to their own devices in an increasingly hostile climate. 

It�s important to understand that willful negligence has always been a central philosophy in Australia�s offshore detention regime. The nation has outsourced its responsibilities and pitted one marginalised group against another. It is a former coloniser of Papua New Guinea, has weaponised much needed aid, has pressured the PNG government with directions straight from Australian immigration and border force personnel, and failed to deliver many logistical upgrades that they promised Manusians. After over four years of indefinite detention, it�s obvious that the regime�s underlying ideology is an act of neocolonialism.
From the beginning, Australia has stoked the fires between both the local Manusian people and the men unlawfully detained on the island. The refugees have become a symbol of outside meddling, intrusion and danger. And while some locals have tried to assist the men, there have been numerous incidences of violence and tension between the two groups. 

Meanjin: Human Rights and Political Wrongs, November 23, 2017

Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist, has documented the situation on Manus for the Guardian. 

Yemen's former dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh was killed by former Houthi allies that he only recently broke with in the now three-year old civil war which is a proxy of the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. A Saudi-led alliance has been fighting Houthi rebels in the country but has failed to make a military breakthrough.

Meanwhile, in the never-ending horror show that is United States politics - I think this year has felt so incomprehensible because as much as all these revelations come together in an emerging story about corruption and incompetence, none of it seems to go anywhere. Every single new revelation on its own feels like it would have ended any previous presidency, and yet, all of these scandals disappear into a black void. It's "party before country", but on a much more massive scale: an entire political party well-aware of how much of its political future is now linked to a ticking time bomb of an administration. 

In Alabama, Republicans are backing Roy Moore, who is facing sexual assault allegations against minors. 

In Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential elections, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to "telling four lies to the FBI" - and the fact that these are relatively minor charges was widely interpreted as a sign that Flynn had started to cooperate with the investigation. Statements by Donald Trump regarding Flynn's contact with the Russian ambassador are contradicted by Flynn's admission. One of the prosecutors working for Mueller stated that a "a very senior member of the transition team" directed Flynn to make contact with the Russian ambassador. Another revelation is the fact that the transition team seems to have actively undermined US foreign policy. 

Pop Culture: 

TIME magazine decided to make the #MeToo movement the Person of the Year, and Donald Trump, who recently boasted he was invited for a photo shoot, is named in the accompanying article as an example of the misogyny that this movement is exposing with every new revelation of sexual misconduct and abuse. The conversation isn't just about the men who have profited from industries that are built on skewed power differentials and male privilege, but also about the very culture that has collaborated and been complicit in allowing these men to thrive regardless of the countless allegations that were, more or less, public knowledge years before 2017 (how long have the rumours about Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer been around?). How come this misplaced reverence for cultural figures like Woody Allen and Roman Polanski still outweighs any consideration for the damage they have done? 

Anyway, here's Maureen Ryan talking about her favourite television this year. "We can either get to the root of the interlocking problems arising from the rampant abuse of power, and we can make sure that promising creative people are not driven out by predators, toxic bullies and harassers."

Links 22/10/17

Politics: 

I have not mentioned the Austrian Parliamentary elections, mainly because this is no longer my home and I spent enough years struggling with that particular misery, but for the record, it looks like the People's Party will once again govern the country - which I believe makes it 29.01 out of 30.10 years of my life, in a stunning display of how to successfully never be held accountable for your own actions. It also looks like the Freedom Party will make a return to the governing coalition after the crash and burn of 2000-2007. 

All of this is insane: 

�I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it�s a situation of trying to contain him,� Corker said, adding later that most GOP lawmakers �understand the volatility that we�re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.� 

The Washington Post: Inside the �adult day-care center�: How aides try to control and coerce Trump, October 16, 2017

All of the personal stories emerging concerning Harvey Weinstein's frequent assaults on women are horrifying to read, as are all the other reports of other high profile figures abusing their positions of power (like Bj�rk's about Lars von Trier).  

Pop Culture: 

Music - a long portrait of techno culture in Detroit (and gentrification) at Roads & Kingdoms. 

& new Jessie Ware and Carla dal Forno.

Halt and Catch Fire, perhaps the best television show this year, ended magnificently after turning itself inside out, and refocusing entirely after its first season (after realising that two of its minor characters were the most interesting people on the show, and should be at its moral and emotional centre). 

Some book recommendations: Annalee Newitz' Autonomous, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife, Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere. 

Runaways will premier on November 21st and here is a final trailer (also highly recommended, Rainbow Rowell's writing for the returned comics). 

Links 28/09/17

Politics:

An often overlooked aspect in midst of stories about refugees coming to Europe is the fact that LGBTQI* refugees sometimes require protection from other refugees and staff at reception centres: "But in reality asylum authorities are often unable to effectively protect those fleeing such persecution from further harm."

The Cincinatti Enquirer traces the horrifying effects of the opiate crisis in the community through one week. 

In light of a US President lashing out at the national sport and athletes speaking up against institutional racism, here's a historic summary of how dissent became treason during WW1 (or, as S-K put it on Combat Rock, "Dissent�s not treason, but they talk like it�s the same"). 

And more: Charlotte Rankine on Charlottesville, Ta-Nehisi Coates on how President Trump is negating President Obama's legacy.  

An investigation into how obesity has replaced hunger in Brazil, and the massive stake that multi-national junk-food companies have in people having no alternative to eating poorly. 

I'm very fascinated by the idea of working out the trolley problem when it comes to self-driving cars (like, would you purchase a car that was programmed to kill you in case it caused the least harm?) - how do you program ethics, and do you trust a machine to make the choice of who to kill? How do you assign specific value to people's lives and teach that to a machine? Endlessly fascinating.

This is a by-the-way thought, but the fact that Sean Spicer was "ironically" invited to the Emmys is such a good demonstration of the evil that pop culture can do - reclaiming people who were instrumental in spreading toxic ideologies after they were fired because in someone's head it looks like an act of rebellion to pose them that way after. There really is a very dangerous way in which irony always just plays into the hands of the powerful and how repressive tolerance just helps to entrench power even more. 

Pop Culture: 

So many things have happened: Halt and Catch Fire is ending it glorious run with a beautiful season that circles around the broken friendship between Donna and Cameron (and somewhere in there is the conclusion that innovation only happens when these two work together, because their individual projects remain stunted without each other's input). Also, it's set in the 90s, and so far has played early PJ Harvey and name-dropped both Heavens to Betsy and Bratmobile. 

Star Trek Discovery (recapped by Mallory Ortberg at Vulture) has begun, and I have many feelings about it - it's a complete switch to previous series, which were centered around a crew, as it looks like this season will focus on the individual experiences of Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), a human who was raised by Vulcans (arguing beautifully that her emotions inform her logic), navigating the politics of the Federation and Starfleet. There are many reasons (among them, so many good faces) why I am excited about Star Trek for the first time since DS9 ended. 

While Transparent has a new season out, I want to highly, highly recommend Tig Notaro's One Mississippi. 

Also, a new season of Broad City (with a stellar first episode that pays hommage to Sliding Doors), and both Swerve and Twenty are two excellent webseries to follow. 

(and more, because I haven't been around much: Wynonna Earp had an outstanding second season that was perhaps the greatest antithesis to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all the shit that went down with Joss Whedon being revealed as a misogynist hiding behind a feminist facade, The Bold Type took every single cliche you could think of when it comes to three women working for a driven, ambituous boss running a fashion magazine and completely turned them upside-down, becoming a show about mutual support and unrelenting, unconditional friendship

Two great essays on David Lynch in the wake of the third season of Twin Peaks being different from what everyone wanted and therefore peak Lynch: on his humanity and worldview based on empathy, which is often overlooked, and avoiding falling into following a simple interpretation of his masterpiece Mulholland Drive. 

Books: Mallory Ortberg has published a collection of short stories titled The Merry Spinster, Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death will be turned into a television series by HBO, N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, the first part of the now-finished multiple Hugo-award winning Broken Earth series, will be adapted for television as well (and I'm excited to find out who will be cast as Damaya/Syenite/Essun). Runaways is finally back and written by Rainbow Rowell. Excited about Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, and this interview by Annabelle Sicari with Jenny Zheng (Sour Hearts): 

It�s not what people want out of immigrant stories, because they�re not really about a repressed woman, the woman who can�t emote or be angry. I wasn�t fitting in. So I doubled down. �I�ll be more disgusting, more gross, never write a novel, I�m going to make all my protagonists Chinese American girls because you said they limited me, so I will write every single kind of story and always use the exact same protagonist.� 

A list of various films that I am looking forward to: 

With some casting reservations (slightly buffered by the fact that Mackenzie Davis was obviously always meant to be in Blade Runner), Blade Runner 2049, Annihilation by Alex Garland, based on a novel by Jeff VanderMeer (Tessa Thompson and Gina Rodriguez co-star with Oscar Isaac and Natalie Portman), Thelma by Joachim Trier (Oslo, 31 August).

And music: new The National, War on Drugs and Gang of Youths in same few weeks, and a new track by Burial.

In Australia (or at least in Adelaide), I've gotten by very well by just saying No Worries all the time, to everyone, in any situation, but I feel very sorry for anyone who has to explain to Boomers what No Problem means. 

Links 20/6/17 compact edition

Politics: 

This long profile of Chelsea Manning is moving and an important read.

The Grenfell tragedy is a political tragedy.  

A summary of the crisis unfolding between Qatar and its neighbours.

A summary of all the other things apart from Russian connections that are worth investigating when it comes to Donald Trump (for example, fake charities and breaking the law a lot). 

What are the implications of Donald Trump blocking people on his twitter account?

Yet those who fear that our society had ceased to care about language might take comfort in the committee�s strenuous attempt to parse what Trump meant by two seemingly simple words: �I hope.� 

The New York Review of Books: Words Still Matter, June 13, 2017

A conversation between Naomi Klein and Michelle Alexander, hosted by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. 

It's also the case that throughout history, every time there has been even the appearance of racial progress, there has been a severe backlash -- as Van Jones termed it, a "whitelash." This happened over and over again throughout our history. After the Civil War, we saw that backlash that helped to birth convict leasing. After Reconstruction, we saw white "Redemption" and the backlash that undid Reconstruction, and we saw the birth of Jim Crow laws. And following the formal dismantling of the old Jim Crow by a courageous civil rights, human rights, Black freedom struggle movement, we saw a backlash yet again that manifested itself as a "get tough" and "law and order" movement that helped to birth mass incarceration in the United States. And so, in many respects, Trump's election was yet another backlash against the perception of racial progress. 

Truthout: "People Were Resisting Before Trump": Michelle Alexander, Naomi Klein and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in Conversation, June 18, 2017

Pop Culture: 

Nina Simone in Liberia.

Motherboard profiles Mallory Ortberg: "Ortberg concludes that she wants to be useful. Then again, "I feel like I have said 'useful' a thousand times," she adds, folding one leg under the other."

Vulture has a long interview with Jordan Gavaris of Orphan Black.

Revisiting Jenny Holzer's most powerful works.

Links 2/6/17

Politics: 

Donald Trump is withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement - here's Brookings on what it means, the reaction by former President Obama - "The nations that remain in the Paris agreement will be the nations that reap the benefits in jobs and industries created.", a theory as good as any by Noah Smith about why the Republicans oppose any kind of action on climate change in spite of the fact that a majority of voters supports the climate deal, and an astonishing reaction by US cities to commit to the Paris Accord regardless of what their Federal Government is doing. 

Rebecca Solnit, beautifully, on Donald Trump - 

"A man who wished to become the most powerful man in the world, and by happenstance and intervention and a series of disasters was granted his wish. Surely he must have imagined that more power meant more flattery, a grander image, a greater hall of mirrors reflecting back his magnificence. But he misunderstood power and prominence. This man had bullied friends and acquaintances, wives and servants, and he bullied facts and truths, insistent that he was more than they were, than it is, that it too must yield to his will. It did not, but the people he bullied pretended that it did. Or perhaps it was that he was a salesman, throwing out one pitch after another, abandoning each one as soon as it left his mouth. A hungry ghost always wants the next thing, not the last thing." 

Lit Hub: The Loneliness of Donald Trump, May 30, 2017

A report by Data Society on misinformation and manipulation online, particularly how it pertains to right-wing radicalisation online (in short, maybe one of the most important things to read these days, considering how emboldended and dangerous right-wing terrorists are) - "The far-right exploits young men�s rebellion and dislike of �political correctness� to spread white supremacist thought, Islamophobia, and misogyny through irony and knowledge of internet culture." Full report here. 

And here's some information on the dark history of Portland, and a historical context to the horrifying attacks. 

Matt Taibbi eulogises Roger Ailes, founder of FOX news, who shaped the US newscape and the right-wing into what it is today: 

"And when Ailes died this morning, he left behind an America perfectly in his image, frightened out of its mind and pouring its money hand over fist into television companies, who are gleefully selling the unraveling of our political system as an entertainment product.
The extent to which we hate and fear each other now � that's not any one person's fault. But no one person was more at fault than Roger Ailes. He never had a soul to sell, so he sold ours. It may take 50 years or a century for us to recover. Even dictators rarely have that kind of impact. Enjoy the next life, you monster." 

Rolling Stone: Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever, May 18, 2017

In Australia, where treaties between the Indigineous communities and the settlers were never signed, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are asking for sovereignty instead of merely symbolic constitutional recognition. Here is the original statement. Here is the historical context. And a beautiful essay about what it means to have stories told about you but not being allowed to tell your own stories, in Meanjin.

Migrating from Central America is becoming increasingly precarious. 

Pop Culture: 

Sad news all around - WGN has cancelled Underground, which has proven to be one of the best current television shows in its second season (allegedly because the network was purchased by conservatives who are "changing the direction"), and Netflix literally waited until the first day of Pride month to give Sense8 (which oscillated wildly, as it did in its first season, between joyful and profoundly problematic) the boot. Both didn't have anything close to a resolution at the end of their respective second seasons, so lets hope someone gives them a second life in a different network/shape and form. 

Not only has the ever-elusive Runaways tv series been cast, the original cast will also make a return after an endless hiatus in comic book form. IT'S BEEN ONE THOUSAND YEARS.  

Ghost World is receiving a director-approved remastered Criterion edition, so Atlantic looks back on it. 

Aeon on our obsession with humanity's fragility and disaster narratives. 

An interview with John Waters, with many very good quotes: 

Well, now you should be like Valerie Solanas when she told women to get jobs and unwork until you get caught, and then get another job and unwork, which means you go and you act normal but you fuck up every single thing you can while you work there. This is a good time in the Trump White House to get somebody in there to unwork. 

Lenny: John Waters: I Love Women Who Hate Men and Hate Men Who Hate Women, May 26, 2017

Links 25/5/17

Politics: 

This is just one of many stories that would have very likely ended any previous presidency, and yet. Last week, the Washington Post reported that President Trump had disclosed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister, putting both an asset embedded with ISIS and the intelligence sharing relationship between the US and other countries at stake. 

Robert Mueller, former FBI-director, has been selected as special counsel in the Russia investigation. This Politico article outlines the connection between James Comey and Mueller (and one of those stories that feel like they will be turned into a movie in the coming years): 

President Trump impulsively fired Comey in the hope that it would shut down the Russia investigation; one week later, though, he finds himself facing not just one esteemed former FBI director but two: the first a wronged martyr for the bureau, and the second a legendary investigator without a hint of politics. 

What unfolds ahead will be territory all too familiar to both Comey and Mueller�the field of play where they have made their careers and risen to the highest levels of government�yet the way that a Washington scandal takes on a life of its own amid independent investigations and looming prosecutions is deeply unfamiliar to Trump and many associates around him. Few in Washington know this landscape better than Comey, who as deputy attorney general appointed his friend Patrick Fitzgerald as special prosecutor to lead the leak investigation surrounding Valerie Plame, a case that ultimately led to the dethroning of Cheney�s top aide, Scooter Libby.

Politico: What Donald Trump Needs to Know About Bob Mueller and Jim Comey, May 18, 2017

And this is a very detailled look into how the FBI handled the first and second Clinton email investigation, and looks at Comey's actions with regards to the emails and the issue of Russian interference in the election. 

Some of the most withering criticism of Comey focused on his refusal, before the election, to disclose the FBI�s investigation into the possibility of collusion between the Russian government and Trump associates � even as he spoke at length about Clinton�s emails. In late March, quoting two anonymous sources, Newsweek reported that Comey had actually wanted to talk about the Russian political meddling, through a personal, bylined newspaper column, but the White House had blocked him from doing so. People familiar with the matter told me that the Obama administration had wanted to respond in a more direct way, through an official finding. That came on Oct. 7, through a statement about Russian hacking from the secretary of Homeland Security and the director of National Intelligence. Comey declined to be included on the statement, telling administration officials that he believed it was too close to the election. 

ProPublica: The Problems With the FBI�s Email Investigation Went Well Beyond Comey, May 11, 2017

A summary of the Trump administration's strategy in Syria, specifically a criticism of the decision to rely on the YPG, the military arm of a Syrian Kurdish party, to seize Raqqa. 

The Global Seed Vault on Svalbard - meant to be a failsafe against man-made destruction - is under threat from climate change. 

Taiwan is the first Asian country to legalise marriage equality.

The struggle of influence between Russia and China in Central Asia: 

China�s expansion into Central Asia over the past decade was primarily driven by economic opportunism rather than by diplomatic strategy�by the promise of oil, gas and new markets for Chinese goods. But Xi Jinping�s vision of a Silk Road Economic Belt marks a diplomatic step-change: China is now actively seeking to increase its clout over its western borders. In time, it is logical that China�s deepening economic presence will translate into greater political leverage, whether Russia likes it or not. This will surely test the China�Russia relationship, which Beijing�s ambassador in Moscow claims is now �as close as lips and teeth��a phrase once used by Chairman Mao to describe China�s relationship with North Korea. 

Zed: It�s the Euroasian Economic Union, Stupid, February 7, 2017

This is a small but relevant story about how Cloudflare, an internet company that provides services to right-wing extremist websites, disclosed information (including email addresses) about people complaining about these sites to the people behind Stormfront, The Daily Stormer etc. 

Pop Culture: 

Star Trek Discovery, which will be set about 10 years before TOS (we will never get an answer about Captain Sisko in the wormhole, will we) and features amongst others Michelle Yeoh, Sonequa Martin-Green and Rekha Sharma. 

Missy Elliott's work doesn't deny death, or poverty, or bad times, but it pushes for recovery. In her most recent single, "I'm Better (feat. Lamb)," which was released in January, the chorus circles around and gets repeated with a robotic flow: "I'm better, I'm better, I'm better /?It's another day, another chance?/?I wake up, I wanna dance?/?So as long as I got my friends /...I'm better, I'm better, I'm better." This is not a boast from her to her fans; it is a mantra to them from her, even if there is a self-help quality to it. What matters more is that it feels determined, and that is what her fans depend on her to provide�the good news. 

Elle: Her Eyes Were Watching the Stars: How Missy Elliott Became an Icon, May 15, 2017

Katie and Allison Crutchtfield of Waxahatchee cover Sleater-Kinney's Modern Girl. 

On the road with Warpaint. 

A reading list inspired by PJ Harvey's Let England Shake. 

Links 12/5/17

Politics: 

South Korea (and South Korea's President) are growing more concerned about American politics than North Korean ones. 

Watch out for gerrymandering now that the director of the US Census Bureau has stepped back. 

Masha Gessen on Russia's mafia state: 

Autocratic power requires the degradation of moral authority because moral authority is the only thing you can�t buy and you can�t come by through your title. You earn it, or you don�t. And what makes it even more confusing is that you can�t set out to earn more moral authority. It�s almost an externality of consistent and very long-term moral behavior. And that�s why it�s such a threat to autocratic power. It wields power through instruments that are inaccessible to autocrats. Moral authority can�t be bought, captured, or declared. 

World Policy Journal: Stay Outraged. A Conversation with Masha Gessen, May 2017

A few ways in which Russia is struggling.

What does it mean to have a European Identity? How does having spent time in other European countries affect people's conception of a European Identity? (as mentioned previously, I've thought a whole lot about this since living in a country with no borders to other countries). 

Some incredible highlights from a talk that poet Claudia Rankine gave at BAM. 

There�s a phrase called �moral injury.� Does anybody know that phrase, moral injury? It�s a phrase they use for the military, and it�s when a soldier goes into war, goes into battle�and the things that they�re forced to do, the things that they�re forced to see, don�t line up with who they are as human beings. And so they experience a break in themselves. That�s what�s called the moral injury: their moral idea of how they are in the world has been broken, and they�ve become broken because of it. I almost wish that we didn�t have the capacity to stave that off, as citizens. That it didn�t have to be that we went to a war zone to get there. That we could understand as human beings that certain things should not be acceptable. That they don�t line up with us as human beings. Not as women, or white people, or black people, or Asian people, or Hispanics, or whatever�as human beings. And that when we are confronted with that, at that moment, does he have a birth certificate for example, at that moment, not this moment, that moment, that we would have understood that that was a moral injury. 

Literary Hub: Claudia Rankine: "I Think We Need to Be Frightened", May 11, 2017

Pop Culture: 

Is the Gig economy working? This article traces the gig economy in a very interesting way, from niche to niche.

Longreads on Locol's argument that a good cup of coffee shouldn't cost more than $1.

I loved this article about writing about Chinese food as a Chinese writer: "In a weird turn of events, people were making money and becoming famous for eating the things I had grown up with and had been bullied for."

Links 20/4/17

Politics: 

On the double-bind of claiming moral superiority for bombing Syria but also turning away Syrian refugees. And Lawfare on the difficulty of justifying intervention morally when they can't be justified legally: 

Here lies the problem with these types of moral-based use of force decisions: they are inherently subjective and, consequently, easily abused. For example, why is there an obligation to stop the use of chemical weapons in Syria but not to stop the daily atrocities committed in North Korean work camps? When does the moral responsibility that justified an intervention end? Why do certain states have a moral imperative to act while others do not? This lack of clarity empowers states to make these determinations unilaterally and results in divergent views on the appropriate use of force. Even more dangerously, this ambiguity allows a state with nationalistic goals to act with aggression under the pretext of a moral obligation. 

Lawfare: The Problem of Morally Justifying the United States Strike in Syria, April 11, 2017

Russia isn't going to break with Assad: "Assad�s survival has become the measure of Putin�s influence.", but Russia is trying to figure out what President Trump's doctrine is (which may be hard to do).

Iran's role in Syria.

This is an odd connection to make - between Sean Spicer's comment that Hitler didn't use chemical weapons against his own people (therey playing right into the heinous part of Nazi ideology where Jewish people, and people with differing political opinions, and gay men, weren't truly German) - but gay men are being imprisoned, tortured and killed in Chechnya, and one of the reactions to deny this on part of the Chechnyan authorities was to say that �if there were any gay people in the region, they would have been dealt with by their own relatives.� In short, this is how the logic works: Chechnyan's aren't gay, so no gay people are being imprisoned, tortured and killed. It also made me think of what Jacob Clifton has written about The Handmaid's Tale - how it is about what happens when someone claims someone else's body as theirs (and this idea doesn't just apply to imprisoning, torturing and killing, it's the same with denying reproductive healthcare to women, and arguing that LGBTQI people shouldn't be allowed to get married).

Human rights after Hitler. 

In a time where there's a lot of focus placed on North Korea, here's an investigation into the idea that North Korea's provocations are the actions of a rational actor and why that may be. 

After a short conversation with the Chinese President, President Trump changed his view of the complexicty of North Korea situation (and also committed a light diplomatic plunder when he claimed that Korea had been "actually part of China").

The guy who founded The shady Armed Security Firm Formerly Known As Blackwater is helping China to build a modern Silk Road. 

I really enjoyed reading this long article about how difficult it would be legally to undo all of the environmental protection progress that was made during the Obama presidency.

A profile of Kirsten Gillibrand and what Democratic opposition may look like in the next four years. 

Pop Culture: 

A couple of months ago I reposted an article about Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi's attempt to reinvent fast food (as a reaction to the fact that fast food is often the only choice in economically deprived neighbourhoods). This is a status report of how they're going with Locol (I particularly enjoyed this for a very honest portrayal of a near-failure, and that the article doesn't glance over the fact that Patterson is an outsider with a lot of privilege).

How to trick people into saving money.

In addition to the shows I mentioned last time, Line of Duty is having a pretty good fourth season (shh, I'm rooting for Roz in this one), Pretty Little Liars is back for the second half of its final season, and Better Call Saul is slow-burning in its fantastic way again.