The DNC Email Leak →

Timothy B. Lee, writing for Vox:

So far, journalists digging into the emails have not uncovered any smoking guns. Most of the emails showed routine campaign planning among senior DNC officials. But some of the emails have reopened a long-running debate about whether the DNC — which is supposed to be neutral during a primary campaign — was too favorable toward Hillary Clinton.

What a bunch of nonsense. This is politics, not a kombucha festival where there are no winners, just participation awards for all the contestants. “Scandals” like these are what give The Right firepower against liberals. Toughen up. As Rick Wilson put it on Twitter:

Said this previously; the DNC emails are typical party operations. Sorry if that's too shocking for y'all with delicate sensibilities.

Ivanka’s Weaponized Graciousness →

Emily Nussbaum, writing for The New Yorker:

Before Ivanka’s performance, her brother, Donald, Jr., predicted that his sister would succeed, because she “does the princess thing very well.” Her royalty is what makes her father’s royalty feel real. You’re not supposed to criticize someone’s daughter—and, if the press does, Trump will surely be able to score points by defending her. But this is the ugly truth: Ivanka has made a conscious choice to deodorize the stink of her father’s misogyny, to suggest that because he loves her that means he loves women—to erase the actual policies he supports.

I, like many, predicted that her speech would go over like gangbusters. And in one way, it did, simply because it stayed 100 miles away from the spittle-encrusted white absolutist anger that emanated from the rest of the RNC. But, somewhat reassuringly, people quickly saw through what she presented. Not many people outside of the Trump sphere of influence bought in, simply because what she said literally doesn’t match up with what her father, and certainly the Republican Party, have promised. If anything, it felt like it would be more at home at the Democratic convention. She’s either deceiving herself, or attempting to deceive us. Either way, it’s a bad look.

Who Are All These Trump Supporters? →

George Saunders, writing for The New Yorker:

Early in the evening, a protester about my age asked me, “Where’s your sheet?” Seeing my confusion, he regrouped. “If you’re a Trump supporter, I mean.” Later, I saw him again, shouting to the police that they were all “pigs.” Still smarting over his Klan crack, I asked how he could hold a sign claiming that hate doesn’t work while calling a group of people he didn’t know “pigs.” “They are pigs,” he said. “Every one of them.” His wife was murdered a few years ago, he added, and they did nothing about it.

So there you go. Welcome to America.

The night was sad. The center failed to hold. Did I blame the rioting kids? I did. Did I blame Trump? I did. This, Mr. Trump, I thought, is why we practice civility. This is why, before we say exactly what is on our minds, we run it past ourselves, to see if it makes sense, is true, is fair, has a flavor of kindness, and won’t hurt someone or make someone’s difficult life more difficult. Because there are, among us, in every political camp, limited, angry, violent, and/or damaged people, waiting for any excuse to throw off the tethers of restraint and get after it. After which it falls to the rest of us, right and left, to clean up the mess.

Another entry in the burgeoning Smart Liberals Publicly Trying To Understand How This Trump Thing Actually Happened genre, this time from one of my favorite authors. I read it in the dark, in bed, at 1 in the morning, and while I didn’t really come away with any answers (I just don’t think the answer is as simple as we need to speak more kindly to one another), I was left wondering where all this pent-up energy will go once November comes and Trump loses. Do these millions of disaffected Americans just fade into the backdrop again, waiting to bark and snarl again in another four years?

Inside the Bitter Last Days of Bernie's Revolution →

Edward-Isaac Dovere and Gabriel Debenedetti, writing for POLITICO:

Convinced as Sanders is that he’s realizing his lifelong dream of being the catalyst for remaking American politics—aides say he takes credit for a Harvard Kennedy School study in April showing young people getting more liberal, and he takes personal offense every time Clinton just dismisses the possibility of picking him as her running mate—his guiding principle under attack has basically boiled down to a feeling that multiple aides sum up as: “Screw me? No, screw you.”

Take the combative statement after the Nevada showdown.

“I don’t know who advised him that this was the right route to take, but we are now actively destroying what Bernie worked so hard to build over the last year just to pick up two fucking delegates in a state he lost,” rapid response director Mike Casca complained to Weaver in an internal campaign email obtained by POLITICO.

“Thank you for your views. I’ll relay them to the senator, as he is driving this train,” Weaver wrote back.

Yikes. It’s going to be hard for Bernie to continue to fight from underneath that bus he just got thrown under. And by his own people, no less.

It takes a strange, almost paradoxical mix of bravado and humility to run for president. Bernie has been drinking his own brew for a year now, even longer. It’s going to take him a couple of days to sober-up. I have faith that he will.

Radio Diaries no. 49: Majd’s Diary: Two Years in the Life of a Saudi Girl →

Radio Diaries:

Majd Abdulghani is a teenager living in Saudi Arabia, one of the most restrictive countries for women in the world. She wants to be a scientist. Her family wants to arrange her marriage. From the age of 19 to 21, Majd has been chronicling her life with a microphone, taking us inside a society where the voices of women are rarely heard. She records herself practicing karate, conducting experiments in a genetics lab, and fending off pressure to accept an arranged marriage. In her audio diary, Majd documents everything from arguments with her brother about how much she should cover herself in front of men, to late night thoughts about loneliness, arranged marriages, and the possibility of true love.

I’m not breaking any news by pointing out how awesome Radio Diaries is, but this episode is even more special than usual. In a time when some people want to build walls and close themselves off from the rest of the world, it becomes even more important to listen to something like this. To learn, to educate, to expand your mind, and to better understand what you don’t have experience with.

‘Which is to say, I decided to write a poem.’ →

Ocean Vuong, writing for The New Yorker:

Reading and writing, like any other crafts, come to the mind slowly, in pieces. But for me, as an E.S.L. student from a family of illiterate rice farmers, who saw reading as snobby, or worse, the experience of working through a book, even one as simple as “Where the Wild Things Are,” was akin to standing in quicksand, your loved ones corralled at its safe edges, their arms folded in suspicion and doubt as you sink.

The final sentence in this piece is the most perfect summation of writing that I’ve ever read.

The Outsized Life of Muhammad Ali →

David Remnick, writing for The New Yorker:

In his early career, when he declared his allegiance to Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, rid himself of his “slave name,” and lost his heavyweight title rather than fight in Vietnam, Ali was vilified as much as he was admired. Millions hated Ali; he threatened a sense of the racial order; he was, in his refusal to conform to any type, as destabilizing to many Americans as he was to the many heavyweights who could not understand why he would just not come to the center of the ring and fight like a real man. He was, for many years, a radical figure for many Americans. For years, many refused to call him by his new name. “I pity Clay and abhor what he represents,” the columnist Jimmy Cannon wrote. Even Red Smith, the most respected of all sports columnists, compared Ali to the “unwashed punks” who dared to march against the war. 

If you read one Muhammad Ali piece, make it this one.

Stanley Kubrick and The Simpsons →

I'm not a Simpsons guy, but I am a Kubrick guy, and this is awesome.

/via Devour

A Guy Trained a Machine To "Watch" Blade Runner. Then Things Got Seriously Sci-Fi.

Aja Romano, writing for Vox:

Just a routine example of copyright infringement, right? Not exactly. Warner Bros. had just made a fascinating mistake. Some of the Blade Runner footage — which Warner has since reinstated — wasn't actually Blade Runner footage. Or, rather, it was, but not in any form the world had ever seen.

Instead, it was part of a unique machine-learned encoding project, one that had attempted to reconstruct the classic Philip K. Dick android fable from a pile of disassembled data.

In other words: Warner had just DMCA'd an artificial reconstruction of a film about artificial intelligence being indistinguishable from humans, because it couldn't distinguish between the simulation and the real thing.

I don't understand—couldn't they have picked like, Home Alone? Why Blade Runner, of all the movies for this specific project? Oh, I see:

In other words, using Blade Runner had a deeply symbolic meaning relative to a project involving artificial recreation. "I felt like the first ever film remade by a neural network had to be Blade Runner," Broad told Vox.

Mark this one down in the event that it's the beginning of the end.

"I would take Elizabeth to see "Hamilton.'" →

Joe Posnanski:

The thing about seeing Hamilton RIGHT NOW at its peak moment is that even before it begins, the entire theater is filled with wonder. Every single person would rather be here than anywhere else in the world. As a sportswriter, I often feel that sort of energy at the biggest events, at the Masters or the Super Bowl or the Olympics, but it’s even more pronounced in this theater. People look at each other with the same wide-eyed expression: “Can you believe we’re here?”

And then the show begins, Aaron Burr on the stage, talking about that bastard orphan Hamilton, and within about two minutes you realize the thing makes Hamilton magical is this: It’s going to be even better than you had hoped.

If you're a parent, prepare yourself for this one. If you're a father of a daughter that is a lot like you, even more so.