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Un-block Learn moreCommenter Tall Dave writes:
Anyways, I'm tired of hearing tax cuts "cause" deficits, as though ever-increasing spending was some sort of natural law we have no control over.
To which Rob Lyman replied:
It's not a natural law, but it is just as inevitable as a Greek tragedy. I mean, Oedipus didn't have to sleep with his mother, he just got a "Strengthening Our Communities by Strengthening Our Families" grant from HHS to do it.
A woman living in the Canadian Rockies is the only visible transgender person in a remote region.
Yet even some conservatives who’ve had the billionaire lie to their faces trust his pledge to nominate originalist judges to the Supreme Court.
In February 2015, Hugh Hewitt secured a promise from Donald Trump. Before even hearing the details, do you have a guess as to whether his promise was kept or broken?
This week, Hewitt is trying to persuade his fellow conservatives that, if elected, Trump will nominate originalists to the Supreme Court. The conservatives are skeptical.
To persuade them, Hewitt has published a column asserting that Trump will too nominate originalists, like the ones on a list Trump submitted under pressure from the conservative movement, citing a transcript from their most recent radio interview together. “There you have it,” Hewitt writes. “If Donald Trump departs from his list of future Supreme Court nominees, Donald Trump has authorized Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans to block that nominee and enforce the list.”
Jared Leto’s turn in Suicide Squad is the latest reminder that the technique has become more about ego and marketing than good performances.
Of all the stories surfacing about the new DC Comics film Suicide Squad—from the dismal reviews to the box-office reports—the most disconcerting are the ones that detail how Jared Leto got into his role as the Joker. Leto was reportedly so committed to the part that he gifted the cast and crew with a litany of horrible items: used condoms, a dead pig, a live rat. To get into the character’s twisted mindset, he also watched footage of brutal crimes online. “The Joker is incredibly comfortable with acts of violence,” he told Rolling Stone. “I was watching real violence, consuming that. There’s a lot you can learn from seeing it.”
Watching Leto tell one disturbing tale after another makes one thing abundantly clear: Method acting is over. Not the technique itself, which has fueled many of cinema’s greatest performances and can be a useful way of approaching difficult roles. But Leto’s stories show how going to great lengths to inhabit a character is now as much a marketing tool as it is an actual technique—one used to lend an air of legitimacy, verisimilitude, and importance to a performance no matter its quality. Leto’s Joker is the latest evidence that the prestige of method acting has dimmed—thanks to the technique’s overuse by those seeking award-season glory or a reputation boost, as well as its history of being shaped by destructive ideas of masculinity.
The presidential candidate has resurrected divisive GOP campaign tactics that target and alienate minorities.
Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee hired three new staffers to assist with African American outreach. They will have their work cut out for them. Donald Trump’s average level of black support from four recent national polls is 2 percent, and a July NBC/Wall Street Journal battleground poll showed Trump getting exactly 0 percent support among African American voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And the candidate is not helping his own cause. He has demonstrated a steady penchant for resurrecting racially divisive campaign tactics of the past, tactics that simultaneously ignored black voters and used race as a wedge to attract disgruntled white voters in the South.
These cynical methods are precisely what the leaders of the Party of Lincoln have spent the last decade trying to bury. Speaking before the NAACP national convention in July 2005, Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ken Mehlman acknowledged the party’s “Southern Strategy” and directly apologized: “I am here as Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.” In 2010, Michael Steele—the first black head of the RNC—admitted in a talk with students at DePaul University that Republicans had given minorities little reason to vote for them: “For the last 40-plus years we had a Southern Strategy that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.” Following Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat, RNC chair Reince Priebus presided over what came to be known as “the autopsy report,” which laid out a roadmap for Republican candidates, emphasizing that future electoral success depended on reaching out to ethnic minorities and young people.
The Democratic nominee released her 2015 returns, knowing full well Donald Trump isn’t willing to reveal his.
Hillary Clinton’s release of her latest tax return is an act of political provocation. The Clintons have unveiled their tax documents before—their returns back to 1977 are public—so Friday’s disclosure of the 2015 numbers wasn’t particularly novel. But the campaign’s timing is deliberate: Donald Trump, who refuses to release his own returns, is having an especially bad couple of weeks on the campaign trail, giving the Clinton camp an opportunity to apply more pressure at a vulnerable moment.
Clinton’s intentions were clear in the campaign’s release Friday: Her team posted the documents on the campaign’s website with a title hitting Trump (“Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine release tax returns while Donald Trump defies decades-old tradition of disclosure”) and posted a video quoting conservatives pushing Trump to disclose his returns. “For the last 30 or 40 years, every candidate for president has released their tax returns, and I think Donald Trump should as well,” Senate majority leader and Trump endorser Mitch McConnell says in a clip. It also quotes Trump himself, from a 2012 interview about former candidate Mitt Romney’s returns: “If you didn’t see the tax returns, you would think there is almost, like, something wrong. What’s wrong?” The “something wrong” with Trump’s own returns could be anything, his critics allege: that he doesn’t make that much money; that he hasn’t donated much to charity, despite his claims of generosity; that his businesses could link him with unsavory actors, though CNN recently debunked a claim his returns could reveal ties to Russian oligarchs; or that he hasn’t paid very much in taxes at all—something he’s hinted at in the past.
This fantastic nonfiction from 2015 is still worth discovering and pondering today.
Each year, I keep a running list of exceptional nonfiction that I encounter as I publish The Best of Journalism, an email newsletter that I curate weekly for its subscribers. This is my annual attempt to bring some of those stories to a wider audience. I could not read or note every worthy article that was published last calendar year and I haven't included any paywalled articles or anything published at The Atlantic. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention and engagement. I hope it provides fodder for summer reading and inspiration for future writing. And thanks to all of the editors and journalists who made these gems possible.
The Art of Storytelling
TEXAS MONTHLY / Just Desserts by Katy Vine
The history of science has been distorted by a longstanding conviction that correct theories about nature are always the most elegant ones.
Imagine you’re a scientist with a set of results that are equally well predicted by two different theories. Which theory do you choose?
This, it’s often said, is just where you need a hypothetical tool fashioned by the 14th-century English Franciscan friar William of Ockham, one of the most important thinkers of the Middle Ages. Called Ockam’s razor (more commonly spelled Occam’s razor), it advises you to seek the more economical solution: In layman’s terms, the simplest explanation is usually the best one.
Occam’s razor is often stated as an injunction not to make more assumptions than you absolutely need. What William actually wrote (in his Summa Logicae, 1323) is close enough, and has a pleasing economy of its own: “It is futile to do with more what can be done with fewer.”
The candidate's new economic adviser is not above trashing her team to get ahead.
Ha! I guess Donald Trump showed the haters. When the Republican nominee announced his stable of economic advisers on August 5, he was promptly criticized for failing to include any women. This would be a boneheaded play for any presidential contender. For a guy whose popularity among women is slightly lower than that of a urinary tract infection, the situation could not stand. So on Thursday, Trump rolled out another batch of advisers, heavy on the ladies. Et voila! Problem solved.
Except. In his scramble to get some estrogen into the mix, Trump signed on Betsy McCaughey. A former lieutenant governor of New York, McCaughey (pronounced “McCoy”) is a veteran fixture among the conservative think-tank set. For decades, her specialty has been fighting against health-care reform—Hillarycare in the 1990s and Obamacare more recently. (She is the author of the book, Beating Obamacare.)
Narcissism, disagreeableness, grandiosity—a psychologist investigates how Trump’s extraordinary personality might shape his possible presidency.
In 2006, Donald Trump made plans to purchase the Menie Estate, near Aberdeen, Scotland, aiming to convert the dunes and grassland into a luxury golf resort. He and the estate’s owner, Tom Griffin, sat down to discuss the transaction at the Cock & Bull restaurant. Griffin recalls that Trump was a hard-nosed negotiator, reluctant to give in on even the tiniest details. But, as Michael D’Antonio writes in his recent biography of Trump, Never Enough, Griffin’s most vivid recollection of the evening pertains to the theatrics. It was as if the golden-haired guest sitting across the table were an actor playing a part on the London stage.
“It was Donald Trump playing Donald Trump,” Griffin observed. There was something unreal about it.
Breaking with Republican orthodoxy, a right-leaning think tank has proposed new federal benefits for the working poor when they take time off to care for a newborn or manage an illness.
As Democratic calls for universal paid family-leave benefits have grown louder in recent years, Republican politicians and lawmakers have slowly joined in with modest proposals of their own. Donald Trump is proposing a tax deduction for child care, while GOP-backed bills in Congress would provide tax credits to employers who offer paid leave or allow employees to accrue time off instead of income for working overtime.
But now a Republican-backed research group is going significantly beyond those plans and suggesting the kind of solution conservatives have rejected for years: a new entitlement program for the working poor.
The proposal from the American Action Forum, set for release on Monday, would establish a paid-leave benefit providing up to $3,500 over 12 weeks to workers with an annual income below $28,000. The structure of the benefit is modeled on the Earned Income Tax Credit, the 40-year-old program that supplements the paychecks of low-income Americans on a sliding scale and which has drawn support from both Republicans and Democrats.
In a StoryCorps animation, Patrick Haggerty remembers the remarkable advice he got from his dairy farmer dad.
From a moral standpoint, it makes the world worse.
A documentary explores the promise and perils of the un-indexed internet—a space for hidden revolutions, drugs, terrorism, and child pornography.
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