18 photos of smiling Victorians, including one smiling dog. www.buzzfeed.com
Disinformation & The Murder Of Seth Rich: Journalist Michael Issikoff describes how Fox News, the Republicans, the Trump campaign, Russians, WikiLeaks, Sean Hannity, Steve Bannon, Newt Gingrich, Roger Stone, and other bad guys promoted the lie that Seth Rich was murdered by the Clintons. [Fresh Air] www.npr.org
The Dinosaur Explosion: Since the 1990s there has been a massive unprecedented increase in the number of dinosaur discoveries. [Science Vs] gimletmedia.com
Man up: Masculinity in American history: Beards became fashionable for men in the 19th Century – elaborate, coiffured whiskers – as more and more men took desk jobs and the country feared feminization. www.backstoryradio.org
Remembering Toni Morrison: Fresh Air interviews from 1987, 1992 and 2015. www.npr.org
Journalist Masha Green fled Russia, returned for 20 years, and then fled again. She has “dedicated her career to writing and reporting about Russian society from both within and outside her native country.”
“Masha joined Tyler [Cowen] in New York City to answer his many questions about Russia: why was Soviet mathematics so good? What was it like meeting with Putin? Why are Russian friendships so intense? Are Russian women as strong as the stereotype suggests — and why do they all have the same few names? Is Russia more hostile to LGBT rights than other autocracies? Why did Garry Kasparov fail to make a dent in Russian politics? What did The Americans get right that Chernobyl missed? And what’s a good place to eat Russian food in Manhattan?”
[Conversations With Tyler] medium.com
Visiting dead relatives on Google Street View. [Jessie Schiewe] www.okwhatever.org People find solace seeing dead loved ones returned to life by Google Street View. The resurrection is even more bittersweet because the photos show the deceased mowing the lawn and doing other quotidian everyday activities
America's other 'special relationship' remains worth preserving. [Kevin D. Williamson] www.nationalreview.com There’s no case to be made that America benefits by destroying Israel.
Is Philanthropy Good? Billionaire philanthropists promote private profits and political agendas over public good. [Maria Bustillos] popula.com
Are there any other angry Canadians or is Alanis Morissette it?
— de la soulless (@delasoulless) August 17, 2019
she asked me to brush her hair but now she's mad that the toothpaste won't come out
— dirt bike mike (@02dirtbikemike) July 27, 2019
Christ would you look at the time pic.twitter.com
— Rob (@MrRAnderson78) August 16, 2019
New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino writes about how social media shapes identity, public discourse and political engagement, particularly for millennials like herself. She talks about growing up in a Houston megachurch, her devastating year in the Peace Corps, and how religion led her to MDMA. Her new book of essays is “Trick Mirror.” Also: Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the use of the word “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun. [Fresh Air] www.npr.org
On Beeing: Beekeeping today is big agribusiness, with bees used more to fertilize crop fields than for creating honey. Beekeeping is ancient; 8,000-year-old cave paintings show people gathering wild honey. But the bee population is threatened. 99percentinvisible.org
Back to Tumblr
Now that Automattic, which owns WordPress, is buying Tumblr, I’m going to move my linkblogging and microblogging there. I’ve got confidence that Tumblr has a future now.
Find me at mitchwagner.tumblr.com. Go ahead and bookmark that page now; these posts are already being mirrored there and have been for a long time.
The last microblog post here goes up late this week. After that, I’ll save this blog for bigger updates.
You can also find me microblogging at:
- Facebook group: Things Mitch Wagner Saw. Most of the action on my microblogging happens there. I’m not thrilled about that but neither can I resist the gravitational field.
- micro.blog/mitchwagner
- @mitchwagner on Twitter
- mastodon.social/@mitchwagner. Not sure how long I’ll stick with that.
- Daily email newsletter
19th century young people wooed each other over the telegraph, encountering similar situations to users of dating apps today, nearly 150 years later. [The Secret History of the Future] slate.com
Trump’s 'Invasion' Was a Corporate Recruitment Drive www.theatlantic.com
Trump's so-called immigrant “invasion” is a response to decades of recruitment by big agribusiness, who see immigrants – legal and illegal – as a workforce they can easily exploit. The owners of these businesses are Trump donors, so of course they escape prosecution.
Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser, writing at The Atlantic:
No top executive of a major meatpacking company has been arrested for violating immigration, worker-safety, food-safety, antitrust, or environmental laws. The adjectives shameful and disgraceful don’t approach the reality of what is now taking place.
Over the years, I’ve spent time with countless farmworkers and meatpacking workers who entered the United States without proper documentation. Almost all of them were hardworking and deeply religious. They had taken enormous risks and suffered great hardships on behalf of their families. Today workers like them are the bedrock of our food system. And they are now being scapegoated, hunted down, and terrorized at the direction of a president who inherited about $400 million from his father, watches television all day, and employs undocumented immigrants at his golf resorts.
The Black Panthers became one of the first groups in the US to claim gun ownership as a Constitutional right in the 1960s, opposed by conservative groups, who favored gun control. [Backstory] audioboom.com
Here’s the new way I’m going to conclude phone interviews from now on: “Please provide the spelling of your name and contact information. Lets not have a conversation now about whether the PR person will send it to me by email, let’s just do it.”
Podcast: SES Networks Takes ONAP Sky-High www.lightreading.com SES Networks is leveraging ONAP to automate management of its network of 70 data networking satellites, and let its customers seamlessly integrate into their own terrestrial networks. I talked with CEO JP Hemingway on the Light Reading podcast.
I saw this fellow enjoying the sun at Lake Murray