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Created
Tue, 06/02/2024 - 01:00
Leading horses to water again “Ya’ll got the secret sauce,” the neighboring congressional district chair said in a call after the 2014 midterm elections. Could I bottle it and send her counties a case? November 2014 was not as bad for Democrats as 2010, the REDMAP election in which Republicans flipped 20 state houses across the country. But 2014 wasn’t good either. Still, North Carolina was the only state across the South where Democrats picked up state legislative seats. We netted three, two in my county. Betsy wanted to know our secret. Listen. Political campaigns are not just contests of ideas. They are contests of skills. No matter how much people believe money, ideas and policies win them, at some point you have to play the game and put points on the scoreboard. Once polls close, we don’t count policies or ideologies. We count votes. State parties are like little armies. Each year, veterans retire, and new volunteers arrive. Parties run recruits through basic training. This is a precinct; here’s how you organize it. Here are our charter and bylaws.
Created
Tue, 06/02/2024 - 01:00

Mai Tran began catsitting in 2021 while Tran was on pandemic unemployment, often staying overnight in people’s homes. Tran has now cared for twenty-two cats and traveled to ten apartments all over New York City, observing the interior lives of cat owners and appeasing their neuroses. From home vet visits to black eyes to refugee cats, Chronicles of a Catsitter documents the most memorable days on the job.

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Roosevelt Island is the kind of place a man would take you on a Hinge date. Sandwiched between Queens and Manhattan in the East River, it is a little inconvenient to get to, a little bald-faced in its efforts to be distinctive, and, dare I say, a little bland. A poll of my born-and-raised New York friends reveals that most have never set foot on the island, and if they have, it was only once.

Created
Tue, 06/02/2024 - 00:00

Okay, so let’s start with the good part: the opening scene is perfect. Dad’s head is right above baby Liam’s head; they’re both perfectly centered, and they’re both looking directly at Grandma and Grandpa. It’s a clear and ideal way for us to meet these characters.

After that, though, it all got pretty confusing.

If I had to pinpoint where things went off the rails, it would be when Liam took the phone. At first, it seemed like Dad was very determined to make Liam give the phone back to him, so I figured we were in for a nice old-fashioned chase scene followed by a return to more logical camera shots. But then, after a few seconds, Dad just, like, gave up. And it didn’t seem like he had given up only on getting the phone back. It seemed like he had completely given up on getting Liam to ever listen to anything he had to say about anything. It felt existentially sad and made for a very jarring juxtaposition from the beginning of the call, when they were just talking to Grandma and Grandpa about Liam’s swimming lesson.

Created
Mon, 05/02/2024 - 11:30
You’ve read about how the Trump White House was basically a pill mill, dispensing uppers and downers like candy and even handing out fentanyl for reasons no one has been able to explain. Right. Perfectly normal. Look what’s been happening at Tesla, the company owned by the other Very Stable Genius, Elon Musk. The Wall Street Journal reports: Several current or former directors at Tesla and SpaceX attend parties with him, go on exotic vacations and hang out at Burning Man, the Nevada arts and music festival. Musk and these directors, including venture capitalists Gracias and Ira Ehrenpreis, tech mogul Larry Ellison, former media executive James Murdoch, as well as Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk, have invested tens of millions of dollars in each other’s companies—Ellison held billions of dollars in Tesla shares with about a 1.5% holding in 2022. Some also received career support and help from Elon Musk.
Created
Mon, 05/02/2024 - 10:00
Another right wing outrage-fad runs its course What if they held a book banning and nobody showed up? In Florida, where the right-wing Moms for Liberty group was born in response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates, the first Brevard County School Board meeting of the new year considered whether two bestselling novels – “The Kite Runner” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” – should be banned from schools. A lone Moms for Liberty supporter sat by herself at the January 23 meeting, where opponents of the book ban outnumbered her. Nearly 20 speakers voiced opposition to removing the novels from school libraries. One compared the book-banning effort to Nazi Germany. Another accused Moms for Liberty of waging war on teachers. No one spoke in favor of the ban. About three hours into the meeting, the board voted quickly to keep the two books on the shelves of high schools.
Created
Mon, 05/02/2024 - 09:32

What’s in your basement? Mine is full of things I’ve mostly forgotten about — tools I bought for projects I never completed, long abandoned sports equipment, furniture I planned on refinishing ages ago, and unused cans of paint I thought I wanted when someone was giving them away.  We’ve owned this house for nearly 12 years, since just weeks before our son was born. In all that time, I’ve regularly gone down there to do the laundry and store my things (which never seem to stop accumulating). And somehow, it went from being empty when we bought it to chock-a-block full today in a way that would make Marie Kondo’s perfect hair stand straight up.  One day recently, I noticed... Read more

Source: Cleaning Out the Basement of My Life appeared first on TomDispatch.com.