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Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 11:30
Happy New Year Hippos! Dispatch from Cincinnati: Stop what you’re doing right now and look at these stinking cute pictures of Fritz, the baby brother of the celebrated Cincinnati Zoo hippopotamus Fiona, stealing the show with his toothy grin. “Fritz showing us his smile… and new teeth coming in!” the zoo tweeted this week. Fritz, who was born Aug. 3, did appear to be smiling as he propelled himself around the 70,000-gallon pool at Hippo Cove. Twitter users couldn’t get enough of Fritz’s broad smile. “I’d lay my life on the line for Fritz,” one user tweeted. “Not to be dramatic,” another user said, “but I would die for Fritz,” Fritz, who weighed 330 pounds at a recent weigh-in, is a bouncing baby boy in the most literal sense. Hippos don’t swim, exactly, but use their powerful legs to propel themselves through water. They spend a lot of time bouncing off the walls and bottoms of pools, according to a piece in The Atlantic written when Fiona was just a wee thing. And tiny she was at birth. Born six weeks prematurely on Jan.
Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 10:00
Dave Weigel’s take on the best achievements in campaigning is one of the more interesting year-end pieces I’ve read. He spends all his time on the trail and I suspect he knows what he’s talking about: Best U.S. Senate campaign: John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Did he get an assist when Donald Trump lifted Mehmet Oz to win the GOP primary? Obviously. Did a decade-plus of ad campaigns, TED Talks, and media profiles of the 6’8’’ mayor of a left-for-dead town help him? Yes, but that wasn’t luck, and he’d already run for Senate and lost before, in 2016. This year’s Fetterman campaign excelled at everything, convincing Democratic primary voters that a candidate Republicans would call “socialist” was electable, then pummeling Oz while its own candidate recovered from a stroke. The best Fetterman gimmicks — like his constant Twitter trolling of Oz, largely for his living until recently in New Jersey — probably wouldn’t work for other candidates, which was the point.
Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 08:30
2022 was another banner year A look back at the annual body count: From the 19 children and two teachers killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, to the five people murdered at Club Q in Colorado Springs, countless lives have been impacted by mass shootings in the United States this year. There is no official FBI definition of a mass shooting, so definitions vary from group to group. This means that there is no official number of mass shootings that occurred in 2022. However, the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as a shooting in which there are four or more people shot or killed — not including the shooter — recorded 641 mass shootings in 2022 as of Dec. 28. The online archive reported 690 mass shootings in 2021, the highest year on record. This means that 2022, with at least 641 mass shootings, had the second highest number of mass shootings in a year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Some other lists put it at the highest year on record. Either way, it’s a disgrace.
Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 07:44
Preparation time 35-40 minutesCooking time 30-35 minutesServes 6 What to prepare:2 lbs. beef fillet7 ozs. Mushrooms7 ozs. Chicken livers2 lbs. puff pastry1 eggOilSalt, pepper (For best results for this dish, follow directions carefully).Sauté meat on all sides, in a pan, for 2 minutes. Rinse the mushrooms, and chop into thin pieces. Chop the liver finely. […]
Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 07:00
Too bad nobody paid attention New York is one of the few metro areas that still has a number of different big newspapers but even so it was a small local weekly that had the George Santos story long before the election. Nobody picked it up: Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate. The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later. The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters. “Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S.
Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 07:00
Precisely why is complicated, but it is the case that Republicans/conservatives are always The Main Characters of the story of politics as told by political journalists. One example of this is how they all flocked to cover the annual CPAC conference year after year, documenting activities and gossip of even extremely minor characters in the conservative world. Though of course this helped to promote these people, helping to make the conservative movement a Grifter's Paradise for years.

Like we know what Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro have for lunch every day, but not, um, I dunno, there's no precise equivalent on The Left for the reasons in the paragraph above, but I don't know what David Dayen usually eats.
Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 06:57
Keith Hart, a renowned and influential economic anthropologist: “Western civilization represents itself as an economy these days. The TV news bombards us with the ephemeral movements of stock prices, exchange rates, and the latest unemployment figures. Elections are fought and lost on a government’s economic record. International diplomacy is mainly about trade and banking. The […]
Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 05:41

Our most-read article of the 2022.

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Originally published January 5, 2022.

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Dear Parents,

Hope you had a wonderful, relaxing break with family and friends. We’re delighted to welcome you back to school as we celebrate a return to normalcy. We want to assure you that schools are open, safe, and operating completely as usual. However, we did want to alert you to some policy changes to ensure a robust learning environment for all!

Your child’s classroom will have no teachers. Understandably, many of our educators have been reluctant to return to school, with COVID cases and hospitalizations reaching an all-time high and emergency rooms on the brink of collapse.

Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 05:30
Not me When the 2020 presidential campaign was lurching into gear three years ago, former Vice President Joe Biden had led in the polls for months. Still, everyone kind of assumed he was a placeholder, a former office-holder with high name recognition whose campaign would nevertheless go the way of his two previous presidential bids, meaning nowhere. He was dull as dishwater compared to many of the others vying for the nomination, and nobody had ever really considered him presidential timber. As the campaign took off, other candidates were winning in the early states even as Biden still led in national polls. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg looked like the major contenders after Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, states where Biden did poorly. Then he pulled off a sweeping victory in South Carolina and shortly thereafter the race was effectively over. He went on to win the rest of the primaries handily. America was reeling during the traumatic first year of the pandemic and there was a sense that Democrats were happy to have the race settled so they could concentrate on taking down Donald Trump, which was considered Job One by every faction of the Democratic coalition.
Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 05:30
He just stole all the money.
Before his FTX cryptocurrency empire collapsed, many of Sam Bankman-Fried’s public statements indicated that he made decisions “as though he had no risk aversion,” according to Victor Haghani, the founder and chief investment officer of Elm Partners Management and a co-founder of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund.
This is the "effective altruism (his deeply held personal beliefs) led him to make these bets because the future is just so gosh darn important" argument, which was always ridiculous but should've been erased after it became clear he (allegedly) STOLE ALL THE MONEY.