An invisible consensus evaporates The Bears, one of Adrian Belew’s bands, play a joyous set of guitar-driven songs that stick with you. Reading Jedediah Britton-Purdy’s offering in The Atlantic immediately evoked one of their most memorable: “Trust.” The Duke Law School professor considers the breakdown in mutual trust fueling what feels like a breakdown in the democratic spirit that birthed this country, powered its resolve to form a more perfect union, and held it together, more or less, since its founding: In 2019, 73 percent of those under 30 agreed that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” and almost as many said, “Most people would take advantage of you if they got the chance.” Trust in government has taken an even greater hit. In 1964, 77 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time. In 2022, that number was 22 percent, and it has been languishing in that neighborhood since 2010. In 1973, amid riots, domestic terrorism, the Watergate scandal, and clashes over the Vietnam War, majorities trusted Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court.
Reading
Chicago humorist Mark Peters is obsessed with reading, writing, hearing, telling—and now, writing about—jokes. In each essay, he looks at a perfect joke by a master of the form.
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Jack Kirby created thousands of comic book characters, from the X-Men to the Fantastic Four to the Dingbats of Danger Street. But which one was the funniest?
(If you’re not familiar with Jack Kirby, imagine everything you think Stan Lee created, plus a lot more creating, plus killing Nazis. And smoking cigars. That’s Jack Kirby.)
Since Kirby composed every character and page extra-large and mega-bombastic, plenty of them have an element of humor.
Dear Mr. White,
It is with an uneasy mixture of consternation and lust that we received, via Instagram, your latest thirst trap. We see that you have finally assumed the mantle of Calvin Klein Underwear Boy, and while we love this for you, we are compelled to say that you’ve done enough. You may have, in fact, done too much.
We appreciate the work that’s gone into creating your perfect six- (eight? Five-thousand?!?)-pack abs. Your shoulders look hewn from the same Carrara marble that Carmy’s ancestors used to build temples. That pelvic line is a perfect road map to [REDACTED]. But, sir, this level of hotness has scrambled our GPS, and we are frankly terrified to explore your highways and side streets, even within the cozy confines of our private fantasy life.
If the Labour Leader does not embrace media reform now, he never will – and the entire country will be far worse off as a result, writes Brian Cathcart
As the first police investigation into the gang-rape of a girl's VR avatar is launched, Patsy Stevenson asks what is being done to protect women and girls in the virtual world.
The MVC team travels to space, where no one can hear you scream… due to workplace endangerment.
A quantitative analysis shows major newspapers skewed their coverage toward Israeli narratives in the first six weeks of the assault on Gaza.
The post Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows appeared first on The Intercept.
- by Shayla Love
- by Ayşe Zarakol
Four chapters remain. We are a little over $1,200 from our final reward of the fundraiser ,an article on the Middle Ages Academic crisis (overproduction and collapse.) Chapters to come include:
8. Interaction ritual (how daily life creates identification and personality)
9.The Ritual Masters (How rituals create different types and classes of people)
10. The Ideologues (How identity is tied into story, ideology and meaning)
11. Reign of the Ideologues (How ideology is used to create civilizations and the payoffs for ideologues)
Chapter 7: The Ritual
Humanity’s first invention was either simple stone tools or rituals.
My money is on rituals.
The most expedient population and data generation model to adopt is one in which the population is regarded as a realization of an infinite super population. This setup is the standard perspective in mathematical statistics, in which random variables are assumed to exist with fixed moments for an uncountable and unspecified universe of events … […]
Weeks before Alaska Airlines’ terrifying debacle, one of the aircraft’s manufacturers was accused of systematically ignoring safety problems.
It’s no longer about Jesus and the Bible There’s quite a bit of good writing about Christian Nationalism these days largely because we’re spending a tiresome amount of time in Iowa which is the heartbeat of white conservative evangelicalism. This one (gift link) from the NY Times is quite good. And this one from Benjamin Wallace Wells in the New Yorker is really excellent. They both report that today’s evangelical GOP evangelicals are different than they used to be. Wells interviews a number of Iowa pastors and politicians and they’re all interesting. But this one really struck me: One evening, I drove from Des Moines to Council Bluffs, on Iowa’s far-western edge and just a few miles from Omaha, to meet Joseph Hall, another pastor who had delivered the opening prayer at a recent Trump rally. Hall is forty-six years old, a military veteran who grew up in South Carolina and still has a strong Southern accent. His church looked like it was prospering. It got several hundred parishioners on Sundays, he said, and many of his sermons were online.
Yes, that happened this month in Italy. And yes, they are wearing black shirts. Italian opposition leaders have called on Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government to ban neofascist groups after a chilling video emerged of hundreds of men making fascist salutes during an event in Rome. The crowd was gathered outside the former headquarters of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neofascist party founded after the second world war which eventually morphed into Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party. The annual gathering, on Via Acca Larentia in the east of the city on Sunday, commemorates the 46th anniversary of the killing of three militants from the now defunct party’s youth wing. In the video, which was widely shared online, the men are standing in rows making the stiff-armed salute and shouting “present” three times. A militant then shouts “For all fallen comrades!” – a typical rallying cry of neofascists. This sort of thing is ostensibly illegal in Italy. But it’s apparently hard to prove.
Back in 2015, I covered the Trump escalator moment with a mix of horror and amusement. But unlike the smug press corps I took Trump seriously anyway. I quoted Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin, (lately #MeToo accused whose career is pretty much defunct) saying it too: I wrote at the time: What is it they say about a stopped clock? Well, even Mark Halperin is right twice a day. The Villagers in general may not be able to see it — but for reasons about which we can’t even speculate, Mark Halperin is on to something when it comes to Donald Trump. I could never stand Halperin and I probably still can’t. But since he was right about that I figure I might as well pay attention to what he’s saying about Trump now. He’s always seemed to have some insight into the weird phenomenon. JV Last at the Bulwark links to Halperin discussing Trump and Biden in the wake of this last weekend of campaign rhetoric from both candidates: It is a crude way to measure both perception and reality, but perhaps the most telling way to view the time between now Election Day is this: Can Biden win enough news cycles to overcome Trump’s current lead?