You can impeach a president, but you can’t, alas, impeach the people. They voted for the kind of monarchy the American republic was designed, above all else, to resist; and they have gotten one.
— Can Donald Trump Be Impeached? - The New York Times
(Source: The New York Times)
Peele: “So, the premise I gave myself was….figure out how you make a movie where a black man kills a white family at the end of the movie and white people are going to be cheering with black people.”
(Source: hollywoodreporter.com)
“"Why am I going back to see this guy?“ she asked herself. "He’s on a roller coaster. This is stupid. I said, ‘I’m not falling for a guy living his life on a roller coaster.’"” Static - The ride that never stopped
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-static-the-ride-that-never-stoppe-2001sep27-story.html
“People ask Marcy how she can live with herself, throwing wildly extravagant events for wildly wealthy people, when so many in the world have so little. She explains to them that the cost is irrelevant for her clients.” How the Wildly Wealthy Get Married
https://www.racked.com/2017/6/7/15740564/luxury-weddings
Horseshoe crab blood is an irreplaceable medical marvel—and so biomedical companies are bleeding 500,000 every year. Can this creature that’s been around since the dinosaurs be saved?
(Source: popularmechanics.com)
What eventually happened we all know too well. Other countries started closing their doors and refusing to accept Jewish refugees. Despite hearing this story a hundred times, the version in Eichmann in Jerusalem was new to me. I had always thought of countries as closing their gates to a few prescient people trying to flee Nazi Germany on their own, or to a few stragglers who managed to escape. The truth is on a much greater scale: the Nazis were willing to let every single Jew in Europe leave, they even had entire bureaucracies trying to make it happen – and the rest of the world wouldn’t cooperate. The blood on the hands of the people who wouldn’t let them in is not just that of a few escapees, but the entire six million.
— Book Review: Eichmann In Jerusalem | Slate Star Codex
(Source: slatestarcodex.com)
“The tech industry has disrupted the public sphere and has shown neither the interest nor the ability to reconstruct it. No matter what Facebook might believe, there is no turnkey algorithmic solution that will ensure a perfect civic network.” Maybe the Internet Isn’t a Fantastic Tool for Democracy After All
http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/11/maybe-the-internet-isnt-a-tool-for-democracy-after-all.html
via Instapaper
Thousands of years of human breeding transformed wild species into the domesticated varieties we enjoy every year. Most of these foods were originally found in the Americas. Some of my favorite details:
- The original domesticated carrots were purple. Carrots were bred to be orange by Dutch farmers in the 17th century, and then used as a political symbol of the ruling family - the House of Orange.
- The ancestors of pumpkins were mainly eaten by mastodons and giant sloths - they were too bitter for smaller animals to stomach.
- Turkeys were bred to have white plumage so their skin would be more uniform in color.
Happy Thanksgiving!!
Get ready to chow down on some seriously engineered foods!
Stone says that both Ivanka and Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway resisted the idea. “Kellyanne hates my guts. And I hate her,” Stone told me. Conway strenuously denied being against raising the women issue. “It’s a sexist remark,” she told me. “I have been attacking the Clintons for 20 years. The idea that I wouldn’t tell a presidential candidate to shame and blame this woman — and say, ‘Yeah, let’s talk about jobs’ — is complete bullshit.”
— How Trump Decided to Make Clinton Accusers a Campaign Issue
(Source: New York Magazine)
Dr. Easterling said that those sorts of estimates were predicated on the idea that the climate was stable, a principle that has become outdated.
— Flooding in the South Looks a Lot Like Climate Change - The New York Times
(Source: The New York Times)
Tell him, Jesse, what times were like when we not separated by war. I am saying—tell him how things can be between men on this earth.
(Source: lettersofnote.com)
On Tuesday, hours before his explosive comment about “Second Amendment people” taking action if Mrs. Clinton is elected, his brain trust reassembled again at Trump Tower in a reprise of their stern meeting in June. They again urged Mr. Trump to adjust his tone and comportment. The top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, gave an unvarnished assessment, warning that Mr. Trump’s numbers would only move in one direction, absent a major change. Mr. Trump, people briefed on the meeting said, digested the advice and responded receptively. It was time, he agreed, to get on track.
— Inside the Failing Mission to Save Donald Trump From Himself - NYTimes.com
(Source: The New York Times)
Uber has also found people are more likely to pay for surge if their cell phone is almost out of battery. Your immediate question is probably: how the hell does Uber know how much battery my phone has?! Well the app uses that information to know when to go into power saving mode. Keith promises the company doesn’t use that information to set prices.
—
Keith Chen Is Uber’s Head Of Economics And Decides When Uber Surges Price : NPR
If they’re not doing this now, they will soon
(Source: NPR)
