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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.

Forgiveness is colloquially linked with fading memory – but research is probing what it really means to let go of wrongdoing

- by Shayla Love

Read at Psyche

Before modern Europe existed there was a grand, interconnected political world, rich in scientific and artistic exchange

- by Ayşe Zarakol

Read at Aeon

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.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

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?

My senior year of high school, MTV produced a documentary called Once Upon a Prom that followed two students at my high school. I had started to dabble in media arts and was offered to work on the project and earn my very first industry-related resume line item as an intern for MTV Docs. This […]