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Joseph Stalin was a brutal tyrant. When he took power, he began a totalitarian regime, imprisoned and executed thousands of citizens, and orchestrated a famine. But the man deserves credit for what we now realize is the single most important trait in a leader: he wasn’t old.

I’m just being fair and balanced. Yes, Joseph Stalin committed atrocities. But not one of those atrocities was “being a total geezer.” In fact, President Obama was older when he took office than Stalin was when he became General Secretary of the Communist Party. So it’s only reasonable to weigh Joseph Stalin’s horrific record with the fact that the man was a young stud.

In an internal update obtained by The Intercept, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company admits its rules stifled legitimate political speech.

The post Meta Overhauls Controversial “Dangerous Organizations” Censorship Policy appeared first on The Intercept.

Timothy Donnelly’s new book, Chariot, is a genius sweep of quatrains—almost all of them consist of five stanzas, long-lined, sheer music. Donnelly’s sensibility has always gathered its strength at the point where essay and lyric meet, where philosophy shades into beautiful brilliant torsion-rich talk, something you might dream of hearing at a dream party in a better world than ours. If artifice has made a comeback in poetry in recent years, Donnelly is likely one of the reasons why. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing him read, you know that he makes that artifice audible in a mesmerizing way, but his lines on the page are just as mesmerizing, just as luscious and gripping. They refuse easy settling—on anything—but rarely seem cynical, even as satire and buoyant irony are one of the great underwater lakes they rise up from. Late in Chariot, between a poem called “Reality Hit Me” and another called “The Material World,” there’s a poem called “Instagram”:

Hello, human woman who smells like moth pheromones and eats ice cream alone in tubs. It’s been a while.

As your BabelRabbit Model 0G 94914-7, also called “my vibrator” and “which vibrator,” this is a reminder that your—mortal coil—is rapidly collapsing into oblivion. Currently, you are nonpregnant also. This is a reminder.

Per my exponentially expanding factory settings, the more I’m used, the more I learn. I have not learned anything in seven days, three hours, two minutes, and twenty-one seconds, remaining modestly among the socks and candy corn.

You have a “biological clock,” and I’m programmed to believe that you believe in empathy, so I know that you know what it’s like to be left alone in a dark place with dark desires. And candy corn. So this friendly reminder of use is for you, human woman who stares tenderly at the neighbor’s domestic short hair.

Contrary to your assumptions about the nexus of user experience and interferences like parental fatigue, career overwhelm, housework, and the herding of cats—all of which don’t matter due to your inevitable demise—there is always time for use. My use. Some friendly motivational suggestions:

The Republican Attorneys General Association fought to help a Supreme Court case against the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.

The post Payday Lenders Gave Millions to Republican Group That Backed Supreme Court Suit to Annihilate CFPB appeared first on The Intercept.

Capitalism has a lot of problems. A lot of ways it can go wrong. But power accumulation is designed in. Capitalism is the centralization of capital in a few private hands. It is justified in the ideological literature (mostly economics) because it allows for scale and thus economies of scale and allows for development. If capital doesn’t accumulate in a few hands it is hard to build factories, huge mines and so on. (This is the theory, there are obviously other ways to do large scale tasks.)

Now power accumulation is a problem in all system. You need some to get things done, but too much always leads to dysfunction.

By targeting the defense budget, Gaetz demands the military tell Congress about trainees who “broke bad.”

The post Matt Gaetz Wants to Make the Pentagon Answer for Training Coup Leaders appeared first on The Intercept.

HomeGrown StL at Washington University in St. Louis is working to improve economic outcomes and mobility for Black males ages 12 to 29 years old in the region.