On Friday’s edition of MSNBC’s “With All Due Respect,” two white guys had a spirited debate over a question that has America stumped: Were the comments Donald Trump made about Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s ethnicity racist? To be fair, it seemed like a conversation only one of them wanted to be having.
On Friday, President Obama announced grants of clemency to 42 prisoners serving sentences for non-violent drug offenses. Nearly half of the prisoners whose sentences the President commuted were serving life terms. Most of these prisoners are expected to be released on October 1, while others may have to wait until next June.
Today in Redding, Calif. Donald Trump rambled, as he does, about the tenor of his campaign. He was responding to the intense rioting between protestors and his supporters that took place in San Jose last night. In the middle of his nearly endless spiel, Trump began talking about an incident that happened in Tucson in March, in which protestors wearing white KKK hoods were beaten by a black member of the crowd.
Before a piece of journalism is published in a magazine or newspaper, it usually undergoes one or several rounds of edits, designed to make its arguments more forceful, its narrative more compelling, its language more unified, or its spelling and grammar more accurate. Occasionally, due to some small ignorance or misunderstanding about a writer’s meaning, an editor will make a change that has precisely the opposite of this clarifying effect. If you’ve read the headline on this post and know anything about the standard versus metric systems of measurement, you may already know where I’m going with this.
In a series of text messages obtained by Entertainment Tonight, Johnny Depp’s assistant seems to confirm allegations made by Depp’s estranged wife, Amber Heard, who has testified under oath that she suffered long-term abuse at the hands of the A-list actor. “When I told him he kicked you, he cried,” the assistant writes on one message. “It was disgusting. And he knows it.”
Friday morning. America’s online content manufacturers woke up, sucked down some iced coffee, trudged into our Manhattan offices, and sat down at our laptops. Not much going on, not much to write about. A long day ahead. Then, like the sun or a septuagenarian Vermonter breaking through the clouds, there appeared a wonderful story: Bernie Sanders might be parachuting into his rally in Cloverdale, California tonight.
At the only gay bar in the most sparsely populated independent country in the world, Zorig Alima tells me he’s a “penis shaman.” The proprietor of d.d/h.z says he can confidently predict men’s penis sizes and sexual predilections. He gives my companion a disputable “reading,” and dashes away to tend to friends and customers, explaining, “This place is like my living room.”
Screenwriter and director of the 2011 PBS film Woody Allen: A Documentary Robert B. Weide published a widely circulated Daily Beast piece “The Woody Allen Allegations: Not So Fast” in 2014. The piece was ostensibly interrogative though some interpreted it as dog whistling sympathy for Allen. In it, Weide responded to the outrage directed at Woody Allen’s lifetime achievement Golden Globe that year (including accusatory tweets by Allen’s ex Mia Farrow and son Ronan Farrow)—Weide had contributed to the honor by producing the clips reel of Allen’s work that preceded Diane Keaton’s acceptance speech. By mere days, the publishing of Weide’s piece preceded Allen’s daughter Dylan Farrow’s account of her abuse at Allen’s hands when she was seven years old, which ran on Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times blog as “An Open Letter From Dylan Farrow.”
Globally, inequality is falling. You may not have known that, because within countries, inequality is rising. We live in dangerous times. Why? We talked to the man who wrote the book on it.
Most of us have a vague sense that huge, multibillion-dollar companies have, like, systems in place to prevent them from making the sort of idiot mistakes that we, normal people, make. Not necessarily true!
