How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/general-mark-milley-trump-coup/675375/

A plain reading of the record shows that in the chaotic period before and after the 2020 election, Milley did as much as, or more than, any other American to defend the constitutional order, to prevent the military from being deployed against the American people, and to forestall the eruption of wars with America’s nuclear-armed adversaries. Along the way, Milley deflected Trump’s exhortations to have the U.S. military ignore, and even on occasion commit, war crimes. Milley and other military officers deserve praise for protecting democracy, but their actions should also cause deep unease. In the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a president’s behavior, not the generals. Civilians provide direction, funding, and oversight; the military then follows lawful orders.

Emily Wilson on 5 crucial decisions she made in her ‘Iliad’ translation

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/09/20/emily-wilson-iliad-translation-terms/

The challenges of producing a new metrical verse translation of a viscerally emotional, richly varied ancient epic poem go far beyond any individual word. An epic is an ultramarathon, not a sprint. An English word that seems promising in itself may not work for the register of the text as a whole, or may feel implausible in the mouth of a particular character, or may be metrically impossible with the rest of the line, or may awkwardly clash with other elements of a passage. The words must create a grand harmonic music together. And yet the whole experience of an epic is composed out of thousands of individual verbal choices. Here are just a few of the words I wrestled with in creating my translation of “The Iliad.”

Why people go the "word of mouth" route

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/16nji9k/the_man_who_raped_me_was_charged_with_the_highest/k1emkfv/

I am in the same boat. He now teaches swimming classes to kids after he raped me when I was 14 (he was ~40).

Police said there was not enough proof and it would ruin his life. I also got a threat of him sueing me for putting dirt on his name (idk the english word).

I gave up because they made it very clear that I had no chance. I go the word of mouth route now. Hard to prove the source for that.

MEMORIAL DAY

 https://michaelbarnicle.substack.com/p/memorial-day

Three weeks later my grandmother, Hannah Fitzgerald Barnicle, sat on the stoop of our house accompanied by her parish priest and a Western Union employee. She held a telegram from the War Department notifying her that Lt. Gerald J. Barnicle was missing in action. In late July she received another telegram notifying her that her youngest son had been killed in action.

Hannah Fitzgerald Barnicle, born and raised in Cork, Ireland, emigrated to the United States in 1916. She died in 1961 at 84. She witnessed two world wars, suffered through a depression, lost twin daughters aged one, her husband in 1936, her oldest son Francis in 1941, went to Mass every day of her life and always, till the day she died, held out the futile hope - a dream really - that Gerald would return home some day.

For her, every day was Memorial Day because the root of the word is memory. Like so many other parents touched with the grief, the shock, the tears and toll of burying a child she never got over his loss and never lived another day without thinking about her brave boy.

Email Exchange Between Steve Jobs and an Apple Customer

https://book.stevejobsarchive.com/

From: [ ____ ]

To: Steve Jobs

Subject: ipod malfunctioning

Date: July 27, 2005, 11:16 p.m.

Hi, my name is [ ____ ], and my father has an ipod. recently (1-2 days ago), he was charging his ipod and then, the next morning, when he checked it, it wouldn’t turn on, he checked the hold button but it wasn’t it, so, he realized that the ipod had just “died”.

We live in venezuela and want to know where can we fix the ipod. I think its still on warranty, because, we bought it around 11 months ago, so we would like to know what to do, if theres any store autorized by apple here in Caracas-Venezuela, so we can take the ipod and check it to see whats wrong and if you guys can fix it. well thanks for the help.

[ ____ ]

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

From: Steve Jobs

To: [ ____ ]

Subject: Re: ipod malfunctioning

Date: July 28, 2005, 7:19 a.m.

Please “reset” the ipod by holding down the center button and the Menu button at the same time for at least 5 seconds. This should work.

Steve

The Tyranny of the Marginal User

https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user

This isn’t just dating apps. Nearly all popular consumer software has been trending towards minimal user agency, infinitely scrolling feeds, and garbage content. Even that crown jewel of the Internet, Google Search itself, has decayed to the point of being unusable for complicated queries. Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software remains frozen in time. Like old Victorian mansions in San Francisco they stand, shielded by a quirk of fate from the winds of capital, reminders of a more humane age.

How is it possible that software gets worse, not better, over time, despite billions of dollars of R&D and rapid progress in tooling and AI? What evil force, more powerful than Innovation and Progress, is at work here?

In my six years at Google, I got to observe this force up close, relentlessly killing features users loved and eroding the last vestiges of creativity and agency from our products. I know this force well, and I hate it, but I do not yet know how to fight it. I call this force the Tyranny of the Marginal User.

The Woman on the Line

https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/09/overdose-drugs-fentanyl-opioid-never-use-alone.html

Every day, the calls come. She can tell quickly who might die.

My Brief Career as a Paid Pro-Paxton Propagandist

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/paid-paxton-influencers-impeachment/

I asked Woolley a question that had been bothering me. Why was I paid? I assumed it was a computer churning out checks without examining the content of posts, since my tweets weren’t offering an effusively pro-Paxton message. Did I dupe Influenceable? Not at all, Woolley replied. My tweets—and others—created engagement around the Paxton impeachment trial, in turn teaching the social media site algorithm that this was an issue users were interested in. In turn, my posts increased the likelihood that Twitter (or X, as it’s now known) would promote Paxton-related tweets. That would allow other paid posts that more effusively proclaimed Paxton’s innocence to spread further and wider. “The secret sauce on social media is getting things to go viral,” Woolley said. “Otherwise you’re just speaking into the ether. And so you’re contributing to allowing posts to not just go into the ether.”

Ezra Klein on the right of a certain form of conservatism

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-pippa-norris.html?showTranscript=1

....when I look at the time frame we’re talking about, this post 2010 period, the thing that immediately comes to mind for me is the iPhone, the rise of social media, increased competitiveness in the broader media. And I think this is important because there is the question of the ways the culture and society are changing, but none of us have access to the entire society or culture, and most people aren’t sitting around reading polls about other people’s opinions about cultural issues.

So there’s this question of how do you end up feeling, like what leads somebody in a rural area of Wisconsin to feel like everything is different now. And it seems to me, in a lot of places, all around the world, at the same time, you have this rise in algorithmic media in highly engagement oriented media that is constantly confronting people with, usually, stories charged around identity, in many cases, at least, that really give, I think, often an outsized view of how quickly society is changing, but nevertheless are a very, very big part of a very rapid set of changing views, a sense of what you can and can’t say, because people are now yelling at you in the comments section of your own Facebook posts.

Something I felt was a little bit under theorized in the book is this dimension of the changes in media. 2010 is right around then with the rise of smartphones, is a signal event. And in my experience of it, it’s a signal event that tends to lead to people being confronted a lot more with whatever they fear most about the country they live in. And so the fact that would lead to a rise in these populist authoritarian figures seems pretty logical to me.

How a Sexual Assault in a School Bathroom Became a Political Weapon

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/magazine/loudoun-county-bathroom-sexual-assault.html

The particulars of Smith’s daughter’s case — an attacker in a skirt, a girls’ bathroom — posed an obvious threat to the new policy. And so, critics charged, school officials buried it, and because they buried it, more harm was done. When it all came to light months later, this theory of the case would galvanize a local conservative parents’-rights movement, help swing a governor’s race and rattle the politics of gender in America far beyond Virginia.

This was one version of the story of Loudoun County. But as prosecutors took up the matter over the next two years, a different story began to take shape — one that is told here based on court records and testimony, as well as months of interviews with participants in the events at the heart of the scandal, in some cases discussing them on the record for the first time, and hundreds of pages of documents obtained through public-records requests. This evidence presents a much more complicated picture of what happened, in Loudoun County and beyond, in a period of escalating culture wars that have consumed the same communities and institutions that the combatants insist they want to save.

A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-singham-china-propaganda.html

Witnesses said the fight, in November 2021, started when men aligned with the event’s organizers, including a group called No Cold War, attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.

On the surface, No Cold War is a loose collective run mostly by American and British activists who say the West’s rhetoric against China has distracted from issues like climate change and racial injustice.

In fact, a New York Times investigation found, it is part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda. At the center is a charismatic American millionaire, Neville Roy Singham, who is known as a socialist benefactor of far-left causes.

Why Is Narendra Modi So Popular? Tune In to Find Out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/world/asia/india-modi-radio-mann-ki-baat.html

In his decade as prime minister, Mr. Modi has done away with traditional methods of information-sharing for the country’s top elected official. He has never held a full-fledged news conference; he dominates Parliament so thoroughly, with a large majority and a quick trigger to dismiss legislative sessions, that he speaks only when he wants.

Mr. Modi sets the agenda not just by choosing what to elevate — but equally by deciding what to keep a distance from, and what to let his lieutenants and digital army do for him.

He has stayed mostly mum, on the radio and elsewhere, as his right-wing supporters have increasingly turned to vigilante violence in enforcing their idea of Hindu supremacy, human rights organizations say. Mosques and churches have been attacked, interfaith couples have been dragged out of trains, and mobs have lynched Muslim men accused of transporting the meat of cows, which many Hindus see as holy.

The result is an environment of persistent combustibility in a nation with more than 200 million people who belong to religious minorities — many feeling alienated, humiliated or directionless.

Man, It’s a Hot One: The Oral History of Santana and Rob Thomas’ ‘Smooth’

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/santana-rob-thomas-smooth-oral-history-841189/

How Carlos Santana scored his first hit in decades with help from Matchbox Twenty's frontman — and how it almost didn't happen. The making of the unlikely 1999 smash

Care for an old wounded soldier

https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryStories/comments/14uxaci/intensive_care/

Dad was a WW2 paratrooper with the independent 509th. His nickname in the unit was Magnet because he was always getting shot. He had 4 Purple Hearts among his other awards.

In the end, near the town of Sadzot in December of 1944 dad was grievously wounded in the chest, face, throat and arms. After some battle field surgery he was evaced to a series of hospitals with each one triaging him as unlikely to survive.

He eventually got out of hospital in 1948 with 100% disability, married a Navy nurse and built a modest life and a large family.

It was in the 60's that dad's war wounds began to complicate his life and he was scheduled to go to Pittsburgh to a general hospital for major surgery which we were told he would likely not survive.

Dad's case came to the attention of Dr P, ( a Greek name which is unspellable and unpronounceable) the Chief of Surgery at the hospital and Dr P decided to perform the operation himself. It turned out that Dr P had been a battalion surgeon in WW2 with the 29th Infantry Division from D Day to Germany.

As my mom and my sister were both nurses, we got first rate information from the staff.

The story told was that as Dr P approached the table to begin the operation, the Chief Resident, who was assisting, tried to lighten the mood. He looked down at Dad on the table, noting the mass of scar tissue and wound marks on him and said; "This guy looks like he's already had an autopsy. I think we have the wrong patient."

Dr. P stopped moving, looked up and said; "The men who did this surgery were being shot at while they operated on him.... You're fired. Get out of my hospital"

Dr P performed the surgery and gave dad another 22 years. When he came out of the theatre he came straight to mom and said "He's fine. He will stay with us for as long as he needs to. There will be no fees, charges or bills. Here is my home number, call me any time if you have the slightest issue."

As a young teenager, I was in awe. There was perspiration on Dr. P's face and perhaps a hint of mist in his eyes. I think he may have lost enough soldiers in his career and wasn't losing any more.

After he departed, one of the senior nurses spoke to mum, "We've never seen him like this. He said that if any of the patient's vital signs change, he wants to be notified immediately." Consequently,, dad received excellent care as the staff were terrified that something would go wrong on their shift.

In 1975, dad pinned his Airborne wings on me at Fryer Drop Zone. I still have them.

Noah Rothman on the indictment

The @NRO editors’ view is that Jack Smith’s latest Trump indictment is an overreach that seeks to “criminalize protected political speech” and undermine the rule of law.

I dissent from our editorial.

"January 6 Was a Crime" https://t.co/aKQE6BmYQ5

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) August 2, 2023

/u/flyingkumot on love

https://www.reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/14ydf8f/whose_abuelita_is_this/

Met an elderly hispanic lady at a bus stop in Albuquerque. We went back and forth in Spanish for a bit (I’m a white guy so she was pleasantly surprised) and she told me about her travel plans to go to her son’s wedding–a real cute story involving him and his high school sweetheart finding each other after a long time being broken up.

I had recently been dumped, and said something a bit mopey like “I wish I could find love like that someday.”

She smiled, shook her head and said “Chico, love like that isn’t just found. It’s built. How many perfect, decorated temples do you think my ancestors stumbled across in Tikal or Tenochtitlan? No. They found a good, level spot, maybe some water nearby, and said ‘Here. We can build something here.’ Look for a clearing in the forest, young man. Not a hidden city.”

That one will stick with me for years.

How to Blow Up a Timeline

https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2023/7/6/how-to-blow-up-a-timeline

One of his key insights is what I think of as his theory of group inertia. Groups are hard to form in the first place. Think of how many random Discord communities you were invited into the past few years and how many are still active. “Organization for collective action takes a good deal of time to emerge” observes Olson.

However, inertia works both before and after product-market fit. Once a group has formed, it tends to persist even after the collective good it came together to provide is no longer needed.

The same is true of social networks. As anyone who has tried to start one knows, it’s not easy to jump-start a social graph. But if you manage by some miracle to conjure one from the void, and if you provide that group with a reasonable set of ways for everyone to hang out, network effects can keep the party going long after last call. The group inertia that is your enemy before you’ve coalesced a community is your friend after it’s formed. Anyone who’s ever hosted a party and provided booze knows it’s often hard to get the last stragglers to leave. We are a social species.

Why the Champions of Affirmative Action Had to Leave Asian Americans Behind

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-the-champions-of-affirmative-action-had-to-leave-asian-americans-behind

Affirmative action, in my view, was doomed from that moment forward because it had been stripped of its moral force. It is one thing to argue that slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, and centuries of theft demand an educational system that factors in the effects of those atrocities. If that principle were to express itself in, say, a Black student who was descended from slaves and had grown up in poverty in an American inner city receiving a bump on his application when compared with a rich private-school kid from the suburbs, so be it. But that is not, in fact, how affirmative action usually plays out at élite schools. Most reporting on the subject—including my own, as well as a story in the Harvard Crimson—shows that descendants of slaves are relatively underrepresented among Black students at Harvard, compared with students from upwardly mobile Black immigrant families. It is easy and perhaps virtuous to defend the reparative version of affirmative action; it is harder to defend the system as it has actually been used

I Teach at an Elite College. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gaming of Admissions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/opinion/college-admissions-affirmative-action.html

Many prestigious institutions have themselves racially gamified the admissions process, finding ways to maximize diversity without making dents in their endowments. For example, some colleges and universities boost diversity statistics on the cheap by accepting minority students who can pay full freight. And even purportedly need-blind institutions seem to have a remarkable track record of recruiting minority students who don’t need financial aid. (By some estimates, over 70 percent of Harvard’s Black, Latino and Native American students have college-educated parents with incomes above the national median.)

ROBERT A. CARO ON THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY

https://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/caro/desktopnew.html

Every time a youth from a poor family gets to go to college because of one of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, and thus to escape from a life in the ghetto, and every time a black man or woman is able to walk into a voting booth and cast a vote because of one of Lyndon Johnson's Voting Rights Acts, that is a more significant example of political power. And so, unfortunately, is the fact of a young man dying a needless death in a useless war in Vietnam. In order to demonstrate and illuminate political power through a biography of a single individual, the biography has to be of the right individual. I selected Robert Moses because in The Power Broker what I was aiming at was to show how urban political power worked in America in the middle of the twentieth century--how power worked not just in New York, but in all our great cities; to show what was the true essence of urban political power, not the trappings but the heart, the raw, naked essence of such power. I selected Moses because he was never elected to anything. But for forty-four years he exercised more power in New York City and New York State than any official who was elected--more than any mayor, more than any governor. Therefore, I felt, if I could show what Moses' power consisted of, and how he got it and how he wielded it, I would be showing the true essence of urban political power. Since no one else ever wielded such power, Moses was the ideal subject.