Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem →

Ezra Klein, writing for The New York Times:

To state the obvious: There was no good way to lose Afghanistan to the Taliban. A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one. Either way, there was no hope of an end to the war that didn’t reveal our decades of folly, no matter how deeply America’s belief in its own enduring innocence demanded one. That is the reckoning that lies beneath events that are still unfolding, and much of the cable news conversation is a frenzied, bipartisan effort to avoid it.

Any fan of The Wire is familiar with the Tommy Carcetti “Bowls of Shit” scene. Hope Biden’s got a spoon handy.

The Life and Death of Juan Sanabria, One of New York City’s First Coronavirus Victims →

Jonathan Blitzer, writing for The New Yorker:

At 860 Grand Concourse, a residential apartment building in the Bronx, the doorman’s post is just inside the front door, on a landing between two flights of stairs. One of them leads up to the offices of a dentist and a lawyer, who, along with several physicians, rent commercial space. The other goes down past two pairs of gold-painted columns and into the main lobby, where an elevator services seven floors with a hundred and eleven apartments. Tuesday through Saturday, between eight in the morning and five in the evening, tenants going down to or coming up from the lobby could expect a greeting from a trim, punctilious man with close-cropped hair. He wore a navy-blue uniform that hung loosely off his narrow shoulders. His name was Juan Sanabria.

I’ve got a weird fixation with doormen (those who know me well know that I’m sitting on a novel that features a doorman as one of the main characters) and this piece perfectly encapsulates how special they can be, not only to their friends and family, but to tenants in their orbit. I’ve read a lot of COVID pieces these past ten months; this is one of my favorites.

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.

The Papermaker

The look on this guy’s face as he describes his craft says it all. Artistry in its purest state.

/via Uncrate 

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.