Donald Trump Wants to Build a Seawall to Protect His Golf Course from Climate Change →

Seth Weintraub, writing for Electrek:

As far as presidential candidates are concerned, it’s hard to find one with scarier implications for the planet than Donald Trump. As Politico points out, the presumptive Republican Presidential Candidate has called global warming “a total hoax,” “BS” and “pseudoscience.”

But that’s just the candidate trying to win the Republican endorsement for president. As a businessman with properties on the coasts, Trump takes a decidedly different tack.

As far as galling hypocrisy goes, this is par for the course (pun intended) for the presumptive Republican nominee for president. But the bigger takeaway here is that, for better and for worse, this is the circumstance under which climate change will inevitably come to be dealt with.

When it starts affecting the business interests of rich white men.

Unearthing the Secrets of New York’s Mass Graves →

Nina Bernstein, writing for The New York Times:

New York is unique among American cities in the way it disposes of the dead it considers unclaimed: interment on a lonely island, off-limits to the public, by a crew of inmates. Buried by the score in wide, deep pits, the Hart Island dead seem to vanish — and so does any explanation for how they came to be there.

To reclaim their stories from erasure is to confront the unnoticed heartbreak inherent in a great metropolis, in the striving and missed chances of so many lives gone by. Bad childhoods, bad choices or just bad luck — the chronic calamities of the human condition figure in many of these narratives. Here are the harshest consequences of mental illness, addiction or families scattered or distracted by their own misfortunes.

But if Hart Island hides individual tragedies, it also obscures systemic failings, ones that stack the odds against people too poor, too old or too isolated to defend themselves. In the face of an end-of-life industry that can drain the resources of the most prudent, these people are especially vulnerable.

Indeed, this graveyard of last resort hides wrongdoing by some of the very individuals and institutions charged with protecting New Yorkers, including court-appointed guardians and nursing homes. And at a time when many still fear a potter’s field as the ultimate indignity, the secrecy that shrouds Hart Island’s dead also veils the city’s haphazard treatment of their remains.

These cases are among hundreds unearthed through an investigation by The New York Times that draws on a database of people buried on the island since 1980. The records make it possible for the first time to trace the lives of the dead, revealing the many paths that led New Yorkers to a common grave.

Matched with other public records, including guardianship proceedings, court dockets and hundreds of pages of unclaimed cadaver records obtained from the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner under the state’s Freedom of Information Law, the database becomes a road map to unlocking Hart Island’s secrets.

When I got my tattoo of a basic map of the Bronx, I made sure to include Hart Island.

Sanders's Campaign Manager Previews an Undemocratic Strategy for the Dem. Primary →

Ezra Klein, writing for Vox:

First, Sanders blasted New York's primary for being closed to independents. "Today, 3 million people in the state of New York who are independents have lost their right to vote in the Democratic or Republican primary," Bernie Sanders said. "That’s wrong."

But later that same night, Sanders's campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, went on MSNBC and said that the campaign's plan is to win the election by persuading superdelegates to dump Hillary Clinton.

This isn't the first time the Sanders campaign has previewed this strategy. They began talking about it in March, arguing that if they could finish the primaries strong, then even if they trailed Clinton in delegates, they could use their strong poll numbers, tremendous small-donors fundraising, and general momentum to persuade superdelegates to switch sides and hand them the nomination.

Despicable. On so many levels. First, the idea that New York Independents didn't know that they couldn't vote in the Democratic primary is bullshit, plain and simple. I've known that since I was twelve. You want to say that it's unfair, or arcane, or whatever, that's fine, but to act as though this is the first election that this is the case, or worse, that somehow it is indicative of some strawman establishment pulling dirty tricks to throw the election for Hillary, is just idiotic and indicative of a desire not to be an active part of the democratic process, but just to burn shit down (pun intended).

On top of that, the inference of voter disenfranchisement from Bernie Sanders, of all people, is rich. Just, like, ignore-the-children-who-want-breakfast-and-post-about-this-because-you're-so-pissed rich. This is a candidate who has show that he can only win in states that hold caucuses rather than primaries, mostly because of how disenfranchising and limiting the caucus process is.

And to hear talk of superdelegates—the same superdelegates that Bernie Sanders supporters were frothing at the mouth over a couple of months ago!—being used to overturn the will of the popular vote (I don't actually see it that way, but you understand my point)—it's laughable. It really is.

I, like many liberals, understand and am in agreement with many of Bernie Sanders' policies from a theoretical perspective. But in watching eight years of President Obama, I've also learned a lot about what it takes to overcome the obstructionism of the Republican Party. I've been planning on proudly voting for Hillary Clinton for some time now. I'll do so in less than a week. But as the days go by, and the insults and the hypocrisy mounts, I'm also voting against Bernie Sanders.

Donald Trump, American Preacher →

Jeff Sharlet, writing for The New York Times Magazine:

The ethos of the prosperity gospel is the key to Trump’s power to persuade people that his victories can be theirs — that the greatness of Trump is the means of making America great again. All that is ugly within it, the violence and the hate, is part of an expression of the sense of lack Trumpism both feeds and assuages. It is sorrow, a mourning of the chance that never was or won’t be. The left responds with redemption, the promise of justice; Trump sells revenge, “hitting back 10 times as hard.” But that’s just the drama, the conflict before the resolution, the sales pitch for which Trumpism is the solution: greatness, the truths all prosperity-gospel preachers embody for those who believe.

Trump knows his followers want what he has, and that what Trump has, that for which the plane and the gold and all the “green,” too, are merely symbols, is freedom from want. Trump does not want; Trump is. “Is Trump strong?” Trump asks rhetorically. Those constrained by ordinary manners hear in the question evidence of insecurity. His admirers hear rejoicing. Why not take pleasure in power? It feels good to be strong. It is, for the believers, those whom Trump calls “my people,” a blessing.

I've read, and posted, a lot of great writing about Donald Trump's presidential run. This one might be my favorite. I think it gets the closest, in the clearest language, to understanding just what is going on here. To what is fueling all of this.

The Assad Files →

Ben Taub, writing for The New Yorker:

Mazen al-Hamada’s name soon appeared on an arrest list in Deir Ezzor. Two of his brothers were also wanted, as was one of his brothers-in-law. One day in March, 2012, a doctor asked Hamada if he would smuggle baby formula to a woman in Darayya, a rebellious suburb of Damascus. He and his nephews gathered fifty-five packages of formula, hid them under their clothes, and travelled to meet her at a café. As soon as Hamada handed over the bags, security agents handcuffed him and his nephews, pulled their shirts over their heads, and shoved them into an S.U.V. “I had no idea where we were going,” Hamada said. “The whole way, they were telling us, ‘We’re going to execute you.’

After they were stripped to their underwear, beaten, and thrown in a holding cell, about twelve feet square, with some forty other detainees, they learned that they were in the Air Force-intelligence branch at al-Mezzeh Military Airport, one of the most notorious detention facilities in the country.

Two weeks later, the prisoners were put in a small hangar, a little more than forty feet long and twenty feet wide. A hundred and seventy people were packed inside, their arms wrapped around their legs, chins on their knees. “You’re rotting,” Hamada told me. “There’s no air, there’s no sunlight. Your nails are really long, because you can’t cut them. So when you scratch yourself you tear your skin off.” The prisoners weren’t able to wash themselves or to change their underwear. The sores of scabies and other skin ailments covered their bodies. Throughout the country, detainees routinely drank water out of toilets and died from starvation, suffocation, and disease. “People went crazy,” Hamada said. “People would lose their memories, people would lose their minds.” Eventually, he was transferred to a solitary-confinement cell, which he shared with ten people.

It'll take you a little bit to read this piece, but it is extraordinary reporting about a harrowing, important story. This is why I always chuckle when politicians reduce conflicts to: oh, we just need to go in there and bomb the hell out of them! This is just one story in how many millions of the stories that can be told about the crisis in Syria, just one country.

The Minecraft Generation →

Clive Thompson, writing for The New York Times Magazine:

Since its release seven years ago, Minecraft has become a global sensation, captivating a generation of children. There are over 100 million registered players, and it’s now the third-best-­selling video game in history, after Tetris and Wii Sports. In 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft — and Mojang, the Swedish game studio behind it — for $2.5 billion.

There have been blockbuster games before, of course. But as Jordan’s experience suggests — and as parents peering over their children’s shoulders sense — Minecraft is a different sort of phenomenon.

For one thing, it doesn’t really feel like a game. It’s more like a destination, a technical tool, a cultural scene, or all three put together: a place where kids engineer complex machines, shoot videos of their escapades that they post on YouTube, make art and set up servers, online versions of the game where they can hang out with friends. It’s a world of trial and error and constant discovery, stuffed with byzantine secrets, obscure text commands and hidden recipes. And it runs completely counter to most modern computing trends. Where companies like Apple and Microsoft and Google want our computers to be easy to manipulate — designing point-and-click interfaces under the assumption that it’s best to conceal from the average user how the computer works — Minecraft encourages kids to get under the hood, break things, fix them and turn mooshrooms into random-­number generators. It invites them to tinker.

In this way, Minecraft culture is a throwback to the heady early days of the digital age. In the late ’70s and ’80s, the arrival of personal computers like the Commodore 64 gave rise to the first generation of kids fluent in computation. They learned to program in Basic, to write software that they swapped excitedly with their peers. It was a playful renaissance that eerily parallels the embrace of Minecraft by today’s youth. As Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor of media studies at Georgia Tech, puts it, Minecraft may well be this generation’s personal computer.

I'm skeptical of anything that claims to summate an entire generation in one word, but the ubiquity of Minecraft is impossible to ignore. Then again, I taught digital natives introductory college writing in the past three years and I had to begin every semester with the same lesson—a tutorial on how to use Microsoft Word to do the very advanced things I'd be asking for, like including page numbers and double spacing. It's funny how digital natives never seem to be the ones using that moniker.

Is Domestic Life the Enemy of Creative Work? →

Kim Brooks, writing for New York Magazine:

As I aged, married, inched closer to the world of domesticity, I’d feel reassured whenever I learned that one of the contemporary writers I admired also had a family she hadn’t abused or abandoned (at least to anyone’s knowledge). Why should it be so hard to walk this line, now that domestic burdens were distributed more evenly between men and women, now that parenthood had been stripped by machine and innovation of much of its drudgery and transformed into something more elevated and imaginative? Surely, I thought, there was no reason in the 21st century that a person like myself couldn’t be a great wife, a great mother, and also the sort of obsessive, depressive, distracted writer whose persona I’d always romanticized.

I was so confident in this conviction, in fact, that it took me almost a decade to admit to myself that I was wrong.

As per the norm (these days), this piece's conclusion isn't nearly as drastic as it's open would have you believe. That being said, the answer to the title's question is obvious—of course it is.

Nothing has impacted my ability to find time to write (or lack of time to write) like having children. As I type this, an episode of Magic School Bus is blaring in the background, competing with a baby wailing in the other room and a three year-old chomping on fruit snacks. It's not quite the environment I imagined back in grad school.

But, the life I was leading in grad school? That wasn't going to produce much in the long run, either.

At the end of the day, domestic life is only the enemy of creative work if you refuse to change how you approach your creative work. And the good news is that there is no better way to learn about adapting to change than to have a couple of kids.

More Stuff That Don DeLillo Wrote About 20 Years Ago Comes True →

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Alan Taylor, writing for The Atlantic:

The Borrando la Frontera, or Erasing the Border, project took place on April 9 in Baja California, Sonora, and Ciudad Juarez, as members of the cultural organization Border/Arte “removed” parts of the U.S.-Mexico border fence in three places by painting large sections sky blue, allowing the fence to visually blend into the background. The artist Ana Teresa Fernández says the project is an effort to symbolically erase a long-standing physical barrier that separates families and causes widespread misery.

Operation Trump: Inside the Most Unorthodox Campaign in Political History →

Gabriel Sherman, writing for New York Magazine:

A guard outside Trump’s executive suite waved a wand over me before opening the locked doors. Trump stood and shook my hand, wearing his usual uniform: crisp navy suit and bright-red tie. Not surprisingly, given the state of the race — this was a few days after Trump trounced Marco Rubio in Florida — his mood was good, boastful even. “So much for the face of the Republican Party—that’s the end of that!” he said of Rubio. “He was going to be president. By the way, Jeb Bush was going to be president. Walker was going to be president. They were all going to be president, except for the fact I got in their way!”

Trump turned to Hicks. “How many states have I won?”

“Twenty,” she said.

“So I’ve won 20. Cruz has won five. And I see Cruz on television last night saying, ‘I have proven I can beat Donald Trump!’ He didn’t say I beat him 20 times! It’s why I call him Lyin’ Ted!” (Cruz had actually won eight states by this point.)

I asked him about the lines that have become his signature. In most other campaigns there are speechwriters (and pollsters) for this. But there is clearly no team of comedy writers squirreled away downstairs.

“I’m the writer,” Trump said. “Let me start with Little Marco. He just looked like Little Marco to me. And it’s not Little. It’s Liddle. L-I-D-D-L-E. And it’s not L-Y-I-N-G Ted Cruz. It’s L-Y-I-N apostrophe. Ted’s a liar, so that was easy.”

All his utterances are, by his account, spontaneous. “It’s much easier to read a speech, obviously,” he said. “I speak from the brain and from the heart in combination, hopefully in equal combination.”

Just a fascinating piece of reporting. I'm shocked that the author was allowed this kind of access. Reading it is like watching those uncut videos where it takes a pride of lions 45 minutes to run down a sickly antelope.

Except in this case, I'm not sure who is playing which role.

O.J.: Made in America (Trailer) →

The hype for this 7.5 hour documentary couldn't be more insane.

And if this trailer is any indication, it is deserved.