Now It Can Be Told: How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers →

Janny Scott, writing for The New York Times:

When it was clear that Mr. Ellsberg was leaving, Mr. Sheehan called home. “Come up,” he told his wife. “I need your help.” He told her to bring suitcases, large envelopes and all the cash in the house. She flew to Boston and checked into a hotel under a false name. Mr. Sheehan was in a motor inn, under yet another name.

From the Times bureau chief in Boston, he got the name of a copy shop that could handle thousands of pages. He asked the bureau chief to get him several hundred dollars in expense money for a secret project he declined to explain. When the bureau chief called the Times newsroom and reached the editors on duty that night, they declined the request. So he called the national editor at home.

“Give it to him,” the editor said, according to Mr. Sheehan. No questions asked.

Mr. Sheehan duplicated the apartment key in case he lost the original. Then he began copying the seven thousand pages — first in a real estate office where an acquaintance worked, then, with Ms. Sheehan’s help, in the suburban copy shop. He was ferrying piles of pages by taxi between the apartment and the copy shop, then to a locker in the Boston bus terminal and later to a locker at Logan airport.

When the machines in the copy shop crashed under the strain, the Sheehans relocated to a copy shop in Boston run by a Navy veteran. When the man noticed that the documents were classified, and became nervous, Ms. Sheehan, at the shop, called her husband at the apartment.

“Get down here,” he remembered her saying.

Finally, the backstory of one of the most important moments in journalism history.

Did the Coronavirus Escape From a Lab? (The Lab-Leak Hypothesis) →

Nicholson Baker, writing for New York:

I. Flask Monsters

What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed. Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically,” from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.

There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap — no written confession, no incriminating notebook, no official accident report. Certainty craves detail, and detail requires an investigation. It has been a full year, 80 million people have been infected, and, surprisingly, no public investigation has taken place. We still know very little about the origins of this disease.

Nevertheless, I think it’s worth offering some historical context for our yearlong medical nightmare.

This 12,500-word piece is, theoretically, speculative. But it is thorough, and thoughtful, and seeks to uncover “the truth” with no ulterior motive; it only exists to better understand how we wound up where we are right now—with over 372,000 dead Americans, and all applicable averages on the rise.

A Crescendo in the Symphony of Chaos →

Jelani Cobb, writing for The New Yorker:

Any hopes that the New Year might mark a sharp detour from the malaise of 2020 were dashed in a twelve-hour period between 2 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Wednesday, January 6th, when we saw—as we had throughout the year just concluded—glimpses of respite immediately offset by moments of great calamity. In that light, it makes sense to view the events of the day as a crescendo in the symphony of chaos that Donald Trump has been conducting for the past four years.

The Lost Cause rises again.

Trump Stuns Lawmakers With Seeming Embrace of Gun Control

Michael D. Shear, writing for The New York Times:

President Trump stunned Republicans on live television Wednesday by embracing gun control and urging a group of lawmakers at the White House to resurrect gun safety legislation that has been opposed for years by the powerful National Rifle Association and the vast majority of his party.

Let’s be really clear about something—the idea of taking weapons from people reported as and/or displaying clear signs of mental illness is only a radical idea if:

1. You’re a 2nd Amendment extremist.
2. You take the President at his word.

But this is how he works his magic. We’re now debating what is clearly a common sense action within a totally different framework, ‘OMFG, HE SAID WHAT?!,’ instead of just, ‘Well, obviously we’ll do that, but what about the truly radical ideas?’ It’s not even a matter of moving back the goal posts; it’s taking two football teams and the refs and telling them to play the game on a hockey rink.

This is the most dangerous consequence of the Trump presidency. It is also the true heart of the gun debate and the NRA’s power. I won’t even enter the debate under this premise, because doing so would be to help them redefine norms, and to give the NRA actual power. They are extremists by their very nature; their assumed truths don’t align with the assumed truths of the other 99% of the population. There is no debate possible with someone in that position.

I think I’m supposed to be somewhat elated by the churn of conservative Twitter and far-right blogs decrying the Betrayer-in-Chief, but even if I did take him at his word (I don’t), I’m not impressed or excited. A Christian Scientist who accepts medical care for a child with cancer isn’t suddenly an ally for stem cell research; it’s just a nut coming to their senses. This is no different.

Understanding The "Deep State!" Slur Trump and His Supporters Are Throwing Around →

Zack Beauchamp, writing for Vox:

The key point of comparison when it comes to spies interfering with democracy — the country for which the term “deep state” was actually coined — is Turkey. And experts on the country are deeply skeptical of the comparison.

“I think I speak for every scholar of Turkey, when I say, please, please do not apply language of ‘deep state’ to [the] US,” Howard Eissenstat, a professor of Middle East history at St. Lawrence University, tweeted.

To understand why Eissenstat feels so strongly about this, you need to look at what actually happened in Ankara.

The Glenn Greenwald tweet this article references sums up my feelings about this perfectly. You can’t pick and choose which leaks to like.

'The trick? Making sure his media diet included a healthy dose of praise.' →

Tara Palmeri, writing for Politico:

Staff members had one advantage as they aimed to manage candidate Trump’s media diet: He rarely reads anything online, instead preferring print newspapers — especially his go-to, The New York Times — and reading material his staff brought to his desk. Indeed, his media consumption habits were on full display during his roller-coaster news conference this past Thursday, when he continually remarked on what the media would write “tomorrow,” even as print outlets’ websites already had posted stories about his remarks.

The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

It can be (and in my opinion is) true that both:

1. All of the presidents before Trump were fed/insisted on/leaned towards favorable/unbalanced news coverage. The idea that any of them ate a diet of 100% balanced coverage is silly. I’m not even sure that such a thing exists and;

2. The level to which Trump has sunk is a new low re: a disconnect from “normal” people.

Coverage that acknowledges both 1 and 2 is the only way we’ll all make it through with our sanity and integrity intact.

The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S. →

Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, and Scott Shane, writing for The New York Times:

The D.N.C. immediately hired CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, to scan its computers, identify the intruders and build a new computer and telephone system from scratch. Within a day, CrowdStrike confirmed that the intrusion had originated in Russia, Mr. Sussmann said.

The work that such companies do is a computer version of old-fashioned crime scene investigation, with fingerprints, bullet casings and DNA swabs replaced by an electronic trail that can be just as incriminating. And just as police detectives learn to identify the telltale methods of a veteran burglar, so CrowdStrike investigators recognized the distinctive handiwork of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear.

Those are CrowdStrike’s nicknames for the two Russian hacking groups that the firm found at work inside the D.N.C. network. Cozy Bear — the group also known as the Dukes or A.P.T. 29, for “advanced persistent threat” — may or may not be associated with the F.S.B., the main successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., but it is widely believed to be a Russian government operation. It made its first appearance in 2014, said Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

It was Cozy Bear, CrowdStrike concluded, that first penetrated the D.N.C. in the summer of 2015, by sending spear-phishing emails to a long list of American government agencies, Washington nonprofits and government contractors. Whenever someone clicked on a phishing message, the Russians would enter the network, “exfiltrate” documents of interest and stockpile them for intelligence purposes.

“Once they got into the D.N.C., they found the data valuable and decided to continue the operation,” said Mr. Alperovitch, who was born in Russia and moved to the United States as a teenager.

Only in March 2016 did Fancy Bear show up — first penetrating the computers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and then jumping to the D.N.C., investigators believe. Fancy Bear, sometimes called A.P.T. 28 and believed to be directed by the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, is an older outfit, tracked by Western investigators for nearly a decade. It was Fancy Bear that got hold of Mr. Podesta’s email.

Attribution, as the skill of identifying a cyberattacker is known, is more art than science. It is often impossible to name an attacker with absolute certainty. But over time, by accumulating a reference library of hacking techniques and targets, it is possible to spot repeat offenders. Fancy Bear, for instance, has gone after military and political targets in Ukraine and Georgia, and at NATO installations.

That largely rules out cybercriminals and most countries, Mr. Alperovitch said. “There’s no plausible actor that has an interest in all those victims other than Russia,” he said. Another clue: The Russian hacking groups tended to be active during working hours in the Moscow time zone.

To their astonishment, Mr. Alperovitch said, CrowdStrike experts found signs that the two Russian hacking groups had not coordinated their attacks. Fancy Bear, apparently not knowing that Cozy Bear had been rummaging in D.N.C. files for months, took many of the same documents.

I’ve had this piece sitting in my to-read pile for a couple of weeks and I’m actually glad I wound up reading it after (some) sanctions were finally put in place in response to the cyberattacks. It’s a terrifying chain of events, obviously, and I’m not sure how more people aren’t concerned by it. The group that should hopefully learn the biggest lesson here is the GOP. While they benefitted this time, the next time it will be their turn on the chopping block.

My President Was Black →

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing for The Atlantic:

But if the president’s inability to cement his legacy in the form of Hillary Clinton proved the limits of his optimism, it also revealed the exceptional nature of his presidential victories. For eight years Barack Obama walked on ice and never fell. Nothing in that time suggested that straight talk on the facts of racism in American life would have given him surer footing.

This is a long piece—it’ll take you an hour and change to read it—but it is worth it. It’s a historical document, something that high school and college students will be assigned to read by their teachers in 50 years. It’s going to be an amazing event to watch President Obama and his legacy transform as the lens of history comes more into focus, and the day-to-day news cycle coverage fades away.

The Road from Saddam Hussein to Donald Trump →

John Cassidy, writing for The New Yorker:

It is hard to exaggerate the scale of the disaster that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair, Powell, et al. unleashed. Between 2003 and 2011, according to a 2015 study by a team of academic researchers from the United States, Canada, and Iraq, the war and its aftermath caused almost half a million deaths among Iraqis and people who fled the country. Not all these fatalities were the result of gunshots or explosions—they were also due to ingesting contaminated water, or conflict-related stress, or the fact that hospitals had been overburdened or destroyed. But they were still deaths that could have been avoided if the invasion hadn’t taken place, the researchers concluded.

That is just the toll on Iraq. Close to seven thousand members of the American military have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, in overthrowing Saddam and then failing to pacify Iraq, the U.S.-led coalition ended up destabilizing the entire region, with tragic consequences that are still playing out in Syria, Egypt, Libya, Turkey, and lots of other places. To be sure, the Iraq invasion didn’t create Islamic extremism or the Sunni-Shiite schism. However, as I noted in 2014, as isis cemented its grip on Mosul, the invasion “opened Pandora’s Box.” Which brings us back to Trump.

I link to this piece not because it’s interesting (it is), but because I want folks to read it, stop for a second, and then consider that it represents just one issue—one multi-faceted, complex, wide-ranging, issue—in a universe of issues that, come the end of January, Donald Trump will now be in charge of making the final decision on.

What a Lot of People Get Wrong About the Infamous 1994 McDonald's Hot Coffee Lawsuit

German Lopez, writing for Vox:

It’s treated as a classic example of judicial overreach and greed: A woman, driving in her car while holding McDonald’s coffee between her legs, spills some of the coffee on herself. Inflicted with some minor burns, she sues McDonald’s, as if she shouldn’t have known that coffee is hot and driving with it in your hand or legs is dangerous. And then she ultimately wins millions of dollars from the fast food chain — becoming rich due to a dumb mistake that was all on her.

Only this is all wrong.

Mind: blown. I can’t even begin to count how many times this lawsuit has been cited in my lifetime by friends and family as evidence of how frivolous lawsuits are/how stupid people can be/how unfair life is. All predicated on a lie.