Damn I love this piece on Armand Hammer. It goes a long way toward revivifying Hammer and, more importantly, reminds us just how gullible and/or compromised most legacy media remains.
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Peter Savodnik
@petersavodnik
ex-NY, -DC, -Colombo, -Moscow
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I remember an earthquake drill circa 1984 (this was California), and the bell ringing, and the teacher saying, Okay kids, do your thing, and then at recess, over a cigarette, her chortling and saying, Never saved anyone from the h-bomb, not gonna help when the big one strikes.
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Huh. @cornellbelcher says on @MTP that as a Gen Xer he remembers hiding under his desk in school because of nuke/Cold War drills. I never heard of that happening in the 80s. 50s and 60s? Sure.
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The MIT survey found a majority students believe that it is acceptable to shout down or block speakers who hold opposing views. It captures the downstream impact primary, middle, and high school educations treating speech as harmful...
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“The Republican base has turned on the vax. The vax has been coded lib. It’s basically the Latinx of healthcare.”
For anyone who missed TGIF and is looking for cocktail party fodder
From the inimitable
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Moscow is equipping its fighter jets, submarines and soldiers with the help of Chinese companies, customs data shows
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We need an essay about the Foucault problem, how decades of mandatory Foucault reading somehow made academics dumber than ever about power, obsessed with Fox, Nixon, and Reconstruction, while big business stymies even the most modest democratic initiatives by our government.
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"The state's new diversity, equity, and inclusion guru Kevin E. Hooks said that the women who came forward to say they were forced to have sex w/Weinstein were willfully choosing to trade sex for job opportunities in the film industry." c/o
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"But with critical race theory, the black officers didn’t actually kill anyone. Whiteness did — by infesting their brains and souls, like the fungally-challenged people in 'The Last of Us.'"
c/o the incomparable
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Who is her target demo here?
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Omg 
AOC just threw a temper tantrum on the House Floor, slamming her notebook on the podium as she finished speaking.
"This is about targeting women of color in the United States of America."
AOC just threw a temper tantrum on the House Floor, slamming her notebook on the podium as she finished speaking.
"This is about targeting women of color in the United States of America."
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Her speech *is* protected.
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A student wrote 'F**k Israel' on a piece of trash. NYU investigated the incident and accused the student of alleged vandalism and antisemitism.
Now, legal advocates say that her speech is protected under the school's code of conduct.
jta.org/2023/02/01/ny/
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No.
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Should Russian writers buried one or two centuries ago should pay the price for today’s war crimes? econ.st/3Ds9zRR
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Actually that's exactly what it means.
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Just because you have a piece of paper saying that you’re an American doesn’t mean that you have equal claim to this country as those who can trace their ancestry on this land back to before the government that gave you that paper.
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Somehow people who call themselves feminists are offended by this.
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My goodness Julie Bindell definitely has Nicola Sturgeon’s number
Go Julie
#WomenWontWheesht
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In the absence of racialized cartoons that portray cops as Klansmen, the conversation necessarily shifts to important questions that reporters have traditionally focused on: the who, what, where, etc. Facts.
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The coverage of the #TyreNichols tragedy is telling: It's precisely because his killers do not neatly align with the caricature that the reporting has been pretty solid and not full of self-righteous hyperventilating.
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This sort of conflation of statement and author is in keeping with legacy media's uneven coverage of violent crime, which apparently matters more if it's committed by a criminal who fits the narrative.
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People sometimes ask why I often get less flak for tweeting something similar to what has gotten another person dogpiled. There are of course many reasons but one is that Asian men aren't really perceived as relevant enough in the western context to be either loved or hated.
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"They hate their own rotting democracies so much, they cannot accept that other places are worse. Call a democracy tyranny and you won’t recognize tyranny when it hands you a check."
A lovely, searing take on our celebrity-hypocrites c/o
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In which talks with about the Holocaust and America, then and now.
#InternationalHolocaustRemembranceDay
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The photo here makes it look like this guy is going in for a colonoscopy but no he's just happy he gets to die.
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BREAKING: BuzzFeed will use ChatGPT to create content instead of writers
The stock is up 92% today
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UPDATE: "Writing French people, French citizens, etc., is good."
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We deleted an earlier tweet because of an inappropriate reference to French people. We did not intend to offend.
Writing French people, French citizens, etc., is good. But "the" terms for any people can sound dehumanizing and imply a monolith rather than diverse individuals.
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25 years ago I met #DavidCrosby on Martha's Vineyard, and I asked him to name the greatest musicians of his generation, and he said, "100 years from now, they're only going to remember The Beatles, maybe The Stones."
"What about Elvis?" I said.
"Maybe," he said. "Maaaaaybe."
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I got one for you: zero of my one hundred students had heard of Depeche Mode today. Zero.
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Had the pleasure of talking to internet historian Katherine Dee ( - she deleted her Twitter account) about the strange corners of the internet she's explored and how she manages to predict coming trends in our culture. #WalkInsWelcome
youtube.com/watch?v=K2cysR
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New filing from FTX investigators has the political organizations of Sam Bankman-Fried's mom, Barbara, and brother, Gabe, in the crosshairs.
FTX wants information from Mind the Gap and Guarding Against Pandemics.
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"Today, the boyish girl is in danger of being told she was 'born in the wrong body,' and whisked off to a gender clinic to begin the journey from puberty blockers to breast removal to reproductive surgery and, ultimately, infertility." -
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While biking to work this morning, was very nearly run off the road and jammed against a parked truck by a driver whose peripheral vision was impeded by the face mask he was wearing while driving alone in the car.
Can never be too safe, right?
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Your Monday reads: for , for , for , for , for , for , for , and many others.
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“I never feel optimistic about the future. I don’t even think about it any more. I just read novels. I answer my emails. I keep The Food Network on.”
I talked with about Gen X, serial killers and his new novel, The Shards.
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“I just didn’t see it that way. We didn’t feel that we were being victimized.” Yep. Sharp relatable piece on by
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Tell me you have no idea how to run a business without telling me you have no idea how to run a business.
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Google: 12000
Microsoft: 10000
Amazon: 18000
Meta: 11000
Twitter: 4000
Salesforce: 8000
200,000+ laid off in tech since the beginning of 2022. And for no reason other than "everyone else is doing it".
Tech workers need a union.
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"Fake news" and "disinformation" are basically the right wing and left wing terms describing the same thing. Both can be a very convenient tool for dismissing an argument or piece of information without actually engaging with the substance of it.
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“'Congratulations! You’ve increased the black murder rate. You’re giving blacks worse policing through this transfer of cops—and doing it smugly in the name of racial justice.'”
An important and troubling dispatch from
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DeSantis has a very Seinfeld-ish whiny New Yorker affect and tone that subtly covers his flank against populist reactionary framing
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Twitter folks, especially Afghan friends and observers, can you help me geolocate this video? Anyone have any idea where it was taken and when? twitter.com/AWCSWO/status/
This Tweet is unavailable.
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John Kerry at the World Economic Forum:
A 'select group of human beings' have a plan for 'saving the planet' and it is almost 'extra terrestrial.'
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