The Prison-Commercial Complex →

Chandra Bozelko, writing for The New York Times:

Unless they’ve known someone who’s been incarcerated, most people don’t know that the corrections system has an entire commerce arm of its own. Everything an inmate can buy — phone calls, commissary, copays for substandard medical care, video visitation or the new email service — is purchased through a special account created by the prison or a private company.

Merely to add funds to an account, the family or friends of inmates must pay a service fee. I have an account myself with the prison phone giant Securus so that inmates I want to keep in touch with can call me. In February, I’d loaded my phone account without any fee. Then, a few weeks ago, I was charged $6.95 to add $5 of call time. So, the $11.95 that used to buy 49 minutes then purchased only 20.

On a day full of disturbing news, this article might have unsettled me the most. What a horrible way to treat people.

The End of Facts →

Jill Lepore, writing for The New Yorker:

A “fact” is, etymologically, an act or a deed. It came to mean something established as true only after the Church effectively abolished trial by ordeal in 1215, the year that King John pledged, in Magna Carta, “No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned . . . save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” In England, the abolition of trial by ordeal led to the adoption of trial by jury for criminal cases. This required a new doctrine of evidence and a new method of inquiry, and led to what the historian Barbara Shapiro has called “the culture of fact”: the idea that an observed or witnessed act or thing—the substance, the matter, of fact—is the basis of truth and the only kind of evidence that’s admissible not only in court but also in other realms where truth is arbitrated. Between the thirteenth century and the nineteenth, the fact spread from law outward to science, history, and journalism.

This piece made me think of a line in the Stephanie Vaughn short story Dog Heaven:

She believed, like the adults in my family, that a fact was something solid and useful, like a penknife you could put in your pocket in case of emergency.

There has never been more things that are true than at this point in time. It's a gift and a curse.

For Transgender New Yorkers, a Center of Their Own in the Bronx →

Winnie Hu, writing for The New York Times:

The Bronx Trans Collective, the new drop-in center near Yankee Stadium, will aim to bring together people who are often overlooked or disconnected even in New York City, which is considered to be the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement. The center will help transgender people get surgeries, hormone treatments, mental health counseling and assistance with legal name changes and job searches, among other services. It will also host regular support groups, youth counseling, meditation and yoga classes and cookouts on its back terrace.

It's pretty great to see this kind of support and acceptance happening in the Bronx.

“I’m old,” she quipped, “but I’m not cold.” →

Tara Bahrampour, writing for The Washington Post:

Leona Barnes doesn’t remember when, back around the close of World War I, she met Gladys Butler, Ruth Hammett and Bernice Underwood. Growing up in Southwest Washington, they were part of the landscape, in the same way that her house and her street and her church were.

As little girls, the four played jacks and jumped rope; later they shared gossip and danced the two-step and the Charleston. Two of them lived in the same house at one point, and three of them had babies the same year — 1933. But they could not have predicted that someday they would be poised to celebrate their 100th birthdays together.

Every day of the week should include a story like this.

America isn't dead yet.

/via Ruth Marcus

Who Sponsored the Hate? →

Jane Meyer, writing for The New Yorker:

The effort to attack Obama, not as a legitimate and democratically elected American political opponent but as an alien threat to the country’s survival, was very much in evidence at the Defending the American Dream Summit in Austin during the summer of 2010. Peggy Venable, who was then the director of the Texas branch of Americans for Prosperity, and who has been on the payroll of various Koch-run groups since 1994, presided over the summit. There the Texas branch gave out its Blogger of the Year award to a woman named Sibyl West, whose work described Obama as the “cokehead-in-chief” and as suffering from “demonic possession (aka schizophrenia, etc.).” The Republican donor class may now disown vile language, but six years ago they were honoring it with trophies.

On November 9th, 2016, when Republicans wake up to the looming prospect of a HRC presidency, they'll look in the bathroom mirror and wonder who is to blame. What's good for them is that they won't have to move from that spot to answer the question.

What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About ‘the Deal’ →

Adam Davidson, writing for The New York Times Magazine:

The centrality of the ‘‘deal’’ to Trump­onomics is especially strange when you consider how tangential that concept is, or at least should be, to a modern economy. In Microeconomics 101, deals are an afterthought: Transactions have the most socially optimal outcome when buyer and seller reach a mutually beneficial agreement. The very idea of a ‘‘good’’ deal for one party and a ‘‘bad’’ deal for another suggests a suboptimal outcome; an economy built on tough deal-making, with clear winners and losers, will always be a poorer one. Meanwhile, in macroeconomics — which covers the big, broad issues that a president typically worries about — the concept of the ‘‘deal’’ hardly exists at all. The key issues at play in a national or global economy (inflation, currency-exchange rates, unemployment, overall growth) are impossible to control through any sort of deal. They reflect underlying structural forces in an economy, like the level of education and skill of the population, the productivity of companies, the amount of government spending and the actions of the central bank.

I think it's important to fight Trump on intellectual grounds, the same as you'd push back against any other conventional candidate. To sink to his level of name-calling and fear-mongering is to allow him to win, even if he loses. This piece is just another example of why, without just copying and pasting a picture of him with a Hitler mustache, he is unfit to be President.

Dandekar Makes a Sandwich →

Armed with plenty of time on his hands, RK Dandekar, a curmudgeonly retiree with a picky palate, will stop at nothing to find just the right ingredients for the perfect sandwich. A heartfelt, offbeat tale about the perks of aging. Winner, Grand Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking, Indian Film Festival of LA.

There's just something about this short film. I couldn't bring myself to love it, but I couldn't stop watching it, either. By the end, I just wanted to know what other people think. For me, that's successful art.

/via Devour

'Everybody's gonna be very, very happy.' →

Eric Fershtman, writing for Soapbox DC, on Medium:

Well so, the point is, it’s this complexity that’s at the core of what Trump is suggesting: his plan to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN is to make America understandable again (whether it ever actually was is, of course, probably not even debatable: it wasn’t). Societal complexity is framed as an issue that needs resolution, and Trump’s suggestion to resolve the complexity-of-society-and-its-resulting-malfunctions is, in a neat tautological trick, to just make it simple again, duh!

I've linked to the data article, the misogyny article, the race article—now here's the sociology article.

'Women, you have to treat 'em like shit' →

Everybody's seen this ad, so I'm not breaking any news here. But I just want to point something out that I hope everyone realizes: the Super PAC that released this ad, Our Principles PAC, is a Republican Super PAC. The likely Republican nominee for president is being attacked by a Republican Super PAC.

/via Vox

The Very Hungry Caterpillar Who Then Came to Realize That Life Was Meaningless →

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/via Existential Comics