Today’s Lineup

Today, I share articles about why we need to take seriously what Trump is promising for a second term, how America is killing its mothers through the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, why we should be concerned that Speaker Mike Johnson is an Article V Constitutional Convention advocate, how law enforcement agency abuse of A.I. is leading to wrongful arrests and convictions, the behind-the-scenes story of Brittney Griner’s release from Russia through a prisoner swap, the importance of Cold War pop culture, and award-winning landscape photographs.

#1

A Warning (Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic)

There was a time when it seemed impossible to imagine that Trump would once again be a candidate for president. That moment lasted from the night of January 6, 2021, until the afternoon of January 28, 2021, when the then-leader of the House Republican caucus, Kevin McCarthy, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and welcomed him back into the fold.

And so here we are. It is not a sure thing that Trump will win the Republican nomination again, but as I write this, he’s the prohibitive front-runner. Which is why we felt it necessary to share with our readers our collective understanding of what could take place in a second Trump term. I encourage you to read all of the articles in this special issue carefully (though perhaps not in one sitting, for reasons of mental hygiene). Our team of brilliant writers makes a convincingly dispositive case that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. The country survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I have complained in this space about how far too many reporters and media outlets have failed to take seriously the danger of a second Trump term to the future of our democracy. Trump’s rhetoric has taken an increasingly authoritarian and fascist turn in recent months. Pro-Trump think tanks have created transition plans to ensure there are no so-called “adults” left to push back against MAGA demands. So, I wanted to credit Jeffrey Goldberg and The Atlantic’s writing team for putting together a special issue examining what Trump 47 would mean. The issue covers the potential impact on our democracy, domestic policy, foreign policy, and culture. I encourage every person to take the time to read through these stories to see just what the stakes are as we enter another presidential election year. I hope it won’t be the last competitive one.

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#2

10 alarming things Trump has promised to do in a second term (Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby, Popular Information)

Here’s the truth: No one will know who the next president will be until November 5, 2024. Save yourself some time and ignore the chatter. 

Unlike a horse race, the outcome of the 2024 presidential election will impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and billions of people around the world.

The presidential election will likely be decided by people who, today, have not made up their minds about who to support in 2024. For many of these swing voters, their decision will hinge on their expectation of what Trump will do in a second term. Of course, we don’t know everything that will happen in a potential Trump second term. But Trump and his allies have made their intentions clear on a range of key issues.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Former President Trump and his supporters are doing us a favor by sharing their authoritarian plans before the election. As the recent election in Argentina demonstrates, out-of-office authoritarians often soft-peddle their real intentions until they take power. Whether it is how Trump refuses to deny his ambitions to be a dictator, sharing his plans to turn the Justice Department against his opponents, or announcing how he will suspend the nation’s refugee program and bar Muslims from entering the country, the former president is not being subtle. We need to take Trump seriously. These are not exaggerations. They are promises. We need to share them and take them seriously. This list from Legum and Crosby is a worthwhile place to start.

#3

Lines in the sand (Radley Balko, The Watch)

These last several months have made it clear that it’s time to draw some lines in the sand. So below, I’ve put together a list of questions that those of us concerned about the state of democracy in this country should pose to anyone who wields or seeks to wield power. These questions are clearly designed for people seeking political power, but it needn’t be limited to them. To be successful, a Trump authoritarian push would need support not just from politicians, but from advocacy groups, civic organizations, law enforcement, judges, clergy, non-political election officials, and others. So these questions could also be directed at people who lead lobbying groups or think tanks, editors of newspapers and magazines, TV producers, heads of civic organizations, and those who want to run law enforcement agencies.

Conceiving of and writing out these questions at times made me question my own sanity. Some are so dystopian that they seem hyperbolic, hysterical, or completely detached from reality. I suspect reading them will have the same effect. It’s hard to fathom that we’re living in a time when they’d need to be asked. Yet each of these questions is based on actual statements from Trump or one or more of his influential supporters.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Balko has done a great service by creating this list of questions to ask people who support Donald Trump’s candidacy to see if they agree with the authoritarian promises he has been making since beginning his campaign for a second term. It would be great if reporters would ask these questions of Trump and his surrogates. But, as Balko notes, we don’t have to rely solely on the media to get these questions on the agenda. Balko’s first question sets the tone: “A number of Trump supporters—including Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance—have argued that we need an “American Caesar,” a dictator who will dispense with the democratic norms that they believe is holding the country back. And they have suggested that Trump is the man for the job. Let’s set aside their historical ignorance about what Ceasar actually did and concede their view of Caesar as a benevolent populist dictator. Do you agree with them? Does America need a dictator?” It may be difficult to believe, but Balko’s questions continue for pages—and become ever more troubling. It’s time to get people on the record with their answers. 

#4

America is killing its mothers (Lyz Lenz, Men Yell at Me)

In Ohio, a woman is being charged with a felony after suffering from a miscarriage. Brittany Watts, a 33-year-old Black woman, had a miscarriage at week 22 of her pregnancy. The fetus came out through the birth canal and into the toilet. Despite medical evidence that the fetus was non-viable, prosecutors still pressed for the felony “abuse of a corpse” charge.

At the hearing, forensic pathologist Dr. George Sterbenz testified, “This fetus was going to be non-viable. It was going to be non-viable because she had premature ruptured membranes — her water had broken early — and the fetus was too young to be delivered.” Despite that evidence, assistant prosecutor for Warren County Lewis Guarnieri argued that because Watts left the fetus in the toilet she should be charged with felony abuse of a corpse. On November 2, a judge allowed that charge to move forward, saying, “There are better scholars than I am to determine the exact legal status of this fetus/corpse/body/birthing tissue/whatever it is.”

Watts is just one of many mothers fighting for their right to autonomy under a spate of new abortion restrictions.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Writers and reporters like Lenz and Abortion, Every Day’s Jessica Valenti have been warning about the dangers pregnant people face under the abortion bans Republican states have enacted since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Each week brings us new stories about how Republicans and forced-birth advocates are seeking to criminalize pregnancy outcomes. The prosecution of Brittany Watts also demonstrates how prosecutors will target lower-income people and people of color. As Lenz writes, “Recently, in a moment of frustration, I texted a friend who works in healthcare to ask, “Do women have to die for people to care about how bad it’s getting?” And my friend responded, “Women are already dying, but they’re the lives we are okay with overlooking.” Donald Trump and the Republican Party created this situation. A nationwide ban is coming if the Republicans win in 2024. It’s another reason we need to focus on this election’s stakes. 

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#5

Woman charged with child neglect for medical marijuana during pregnancy (Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day)

You’re going to love this. And by love, I mean absolutely hate: In Oklahoma, prosecutors have been arresting women they say used marijuana during their pregnancies—charging them with child neglect. One of those women is 27 year-old Brittany Gunsolus, who used edibles and topical creams during her pregnancy with a recommendation from her doctor. 

Gunsolus’ baby was born healthy, and child welfare workers found her home to be safe and loving—yet the district attorney of Comanche County decided to bring her up on felony child neglect charges. The Frontier reports that when Gunsolus’ lawyers pointed out that medical marijuana is the same as any other legal medication, the prosecutor responded that “Gunsolus broke the law because her unborn child did not have its own, separate state license to use medical marijuana.” Yes, really. 

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Is this an example of the “compassion” or “consensus” about abortion that certain Republican politicians are trying to make us believe? Only if we fall for the scam. Valenti does amazing work highlighting these stories before the national media finds them. Republicans have had an extreme position on abortion for decades now. I hope voters continue to hold them to account for the natural outcomes their forced-birth policies create. I also hope the Oklahoma courts exercise better discretion than some of their District Attorneys.

#6

Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution (Laura Jedeed, Politico Magazine)

As the interregnum without a speaker of the House came to an end last month, people from across the political spectrum came together, in a rare show of unity, to ask a single question: Who in the world is Mike Johnson? But amidst the general bewilderment, one group of conservative evangelicals with a radical cause immediately recognized the new speaker’s name.

For the last 10 years, the “Convention of States” movement has sought to remake the Constitution and force a tea party vision of the framers’ intent upon America. This group wants to wholesale rewrite wide swaths of the U.S. Constitution in one fell swoop. In the process, they hope to do away with regulatory agencies like the FDA and the CDC, virtually eliminate the federal government’s ability to borrow money, and empower state legislatures to override federal law.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I have shared my deep concerns about Governor Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) proposal to enact needed gun safety regulations using the Article V Constitutional Convention process. I didn’t know then that the House Republicans would replace Speaker Kevin McCarthy with a national leader of the conservative Convention of the States movement. While Newsom argues that it is possible to restrict an Article V Constitutional Convention to a single subject, I find the arguments of Constitutional scholars and organizations like Common Cause explaining why such restrictions won’t bind delegates compelling. After all, our nation has experience with such a dynamic—most delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention thought they were attending a Federal Convention to update the Articles of Confederation and not heading to Philadelphia to create a new system of government. Is an Article V Constitutional Convention more likely to lead to national gun safety laws or the gutting of the First and Fourteenth Amendments and a Balanced Budget Amendment? Conservatives and Christian Nationalists have been planning for an Article V Convention for decades. The risks of what could be lost are too high to take this chance. 

#7

Does A.I. Lead Police to Ignore Contradictory Evidence? (Eyal Press, The New Yorker)

Advocates of facial-recognition technology acknowledge that the quality of the algorithms varies greatly, but they contend that the best ones do not have such demographic imbalances. They also note that, among the millions of searches that have been conducted by police, only a few have been proved to lead to wrongful arrests. But how many people have been erroneously identified without the mistake being recognized? Nobody can say, in part because the technology is poorly regulated and the police’s use of it is often not shared with either the public or the accused. Last fall, a man named Randal Quran Reid was arrested for two acts of credit-card fraud in Louisiana that he did not commit. The warrant didn’t mention that a facial-recognition search had made him a suspect. Reid discovered this fact only after his lawyer heard an officer refer to him as a “positive match” for the thief. Reid was in jail for six days and his family spent thousands of dollars in legal fees before learning about the misidentification, which had resulted from a search done by a police department under contract with Clearview AI. So much for being “100% accurate.”

Law-enforcement officials argue that they aren’t obligated to disclose such information because, in theory at least, facial-recognition searches are being used only to generate leads for a fuller investigation, and do not alone serve as probable cause for making an arrest. Yet, in a striking number of the wrongful arrests that have been documented, the searches represented virtually the entire investigation. No other evidence seemed to link Randal Reid, who lives in Georgia, to the thefts in Louisiana, a state he had never even visited. No investigator from the Detroit police checked the location data on Robert Williams’s phone to verify whether he had been in the store on the day that he allegedly robbed it. The police did consult a security contractor, who reviewed surveillance video of the shoplifting incident and then chose Williams from a photo lineup of six people. But the security contractor had not been in the store when the incident occurred and had never seen Williams in person.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

It does not take much effort to find instances of the police misusing technology to put innocent people in jail. We should always be concerned about how bad processes can lead to false accusations and convictions. Artificial Intelligence has been shown to have significant biases against people of color. Plus, as the Innocence Project argues, it is one of the tools that can lead to an unconscious bias in identifying suspects because investigators seek to confirm the technology’s results and ignore conflicting evidence. Press’ article explores how the police use facial recognition technology as a shortcut without following the safeguards required to prevent these horrible mistakes. The stories Press shares of people falsely arrested because of the misuse of this technology and police misconduct are chilling. We need more protections urgently. 

#8

Getting Griner Out: The inside story of her arrest, detainment and release from Russia (T.J. Quinn, ESPN)

The next day — Dec. 8, 2022 — Bout and Griner met on an airport tarmac in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, each escorted by officials from the other’s country. For Bout, once described by the U.S. Justice Department as one of the most prolific arms dealers in the world, the swap ended 14 years in custody. For Griner, it meant the WNBA star would return home after being held nearly 10 months in Russia on drug charges. Her case spurred political and social outpourings, and unprecedented global attention to the cause of wrongful detainees.

During those 10 months, Griner and Bout knew little about the machinations that would lead to their eventual meeting, other than scant details shared by diplomatic officials and their own lawyers. The public heard even less.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

T.J. Quinn has written a comprehensive story describing the events and negotiations that led to the prisoner swap between the United States and Russia that freed WNBA and U.S. Women’s Basketball Team star Brittney Griner last year. He spoke to people—including several who worked closely with the Biden Administration—about the details of the start-and-stop negotiations. While Griner declined the chance to comment directly, we hear from her friends and supporters. Quinn also speaks to Victor Bout, the convicted arms dealer whom Russia demanded in exchange for Griner. We learn about the strategies Griner’s advocates used to involve the White House and the public in advocating for her release. It was not an easy job. This article is a long read, but it is one as compelling as many spy novels I’ve read.

#9

When Hollywood Put World War III on Television (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic)

In the end, we got through 1983 mostly by dumb luck. If you’d asked me back then as a young student whether I’d be around to talk about any of this 40 years later, I would have called the chances a coin toss.

But although we might feel safer, I wonder if Americans really understand that thousands of those weapons remain on station in the United States, Russia, and other nations, ready to launch in a matter of minutes. The Day After wasn’t the scariest nuclear-war film—that honor goes to the BBC’s Threads—but perhaps more Americans should take the time to watch it. It’s not exactly a holiday movie, but it’s a good reminder at Thanksgiving that we are fortunate for the changes over the past 40 years that allow us to give thanks in our homes instead of in shelters made from the remnants of our cities and towns—and to recommit to making sure that future generations don’t have to live with that same fear.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols retired as a U.S. Naval War College professor last year. In articles and tweets, he has shared how he taught a class about Cold War pop culture that I wish I could have observed. After all, as an Air Force child who lived on or adjacent to military bases from birth until 1996, I lived a bunch of it. Nichols wrote this newsletter to commemorate the 40th anniversary of one of the Cold War’s most important cultural moments: the night ABC aired The Day After. The movie dramatized a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States—and its aftermath. In this piece, Nichols provides the context for the extremely tense situation we faced when the television movie aired in 1983. Frankly, I think it is remarkable our species survived that year. Yuri Andropov had just taken over the Soviet Union after Leonid Brezhnev’s death in November 1982. As relations soured, U.S. President Ronald Reagan gave his “Evil Empire” speech in March 1983. The Soviet military shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in September. Later that month, Soviet Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov determined that the country’s early warning system was falsely reporting a massive United States nuclear launch and prevented a near-certain Soviet nuclear launch. On October 23, the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was attacked by a bomber, killing 241. The U.S. invaded Grenada on October 25. On November 7, the U.S. and NATO began an extensive war exercise, Able Archer. We subsequently learned how the Soviets believed the exercise was actually part of the preparations for a surprise attack thanks to the double agent Oleg Gordievsky’s efforts to warn his United Kingdom handlers. (Ben Macintyre’s book, The Spy and the Traitor, is an entertaining and informative review of Gordievsky’s career and how the United Kingdom helped him to escape after traitor Aldrich Ames exposed his identity to the Soviets.) The Day After aired on November 20. Yeah, it was a tense time. Nichols shares some other movies, like Threads, which are even more scary. (One viewing was enough for me.) I also want to send a shout-out to Countdown to Looking Glass, a movie that aired on HBO in October 1984. That movie is a dramatization, primarily through news reports, showing how a minor incident in the Persian Gulf could escalate into a nuclear confrontation based on a war game simulation. I watch it about once a year (it’s available on YouTube) because I am a mark for shows that dramatize the news. I worry quite a bit about the ramifications of having many active nuclear weapons online as the global political situation deteriorates. I hope my children don’t have to experience what we did during the Cold War, but the global rise of authoritarianism leaves me with rising apprehension. We have quite a bit of work to do.

The Closer

After all that, I’ll leave you with the encouragement to take a look at the winners of the 2023 Natural Landscape Photography Awards. Seeing what happens when talented people capture our planet’s natural beauty inspires me. I hope you will find it encouraging as well. 

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“History can be erased in ways other than by force of arms. It can be erased by accumulated myth. It can be erased by layer after layer of stony denial. And it can be erased by popular consensus, tacit or otherwise. But history erased is history weaponized, and it will have its day, one way or the other, until it is accorded the respect it is due.” (Charles P. Pierce, The Rough Beast Began Stirring Again)

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Today’s Lineup

The rise of threats to American democracy, Trump is warning us about his authoritarian plans, using impeachment to overturn elections, our Christian Nationalist Speaker of the House, Sir Keir Starmer is the Prime Minister in Waiting, abortion rights wins more elections, the history of fragile men stupidly refusing to support women’s sports, and a belated thank you to one of the people who helped the world survive the Cold War’s nuclear standoff.

#1

Threats to American Democracy Ahead of an Unprecedented Presidential Election (Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with the Brookings Institution)

Disturbingly, support for political violence has increased over the last two years. Today, nearly a quarter of Americans (23%) agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” up from 15% in 2021. PRRI has asked this question in eight separate surveys since March 2021. This is the first-time support for political violence has risen above 20% in the general population.

Fully one-third of Republicans (33%) today believe that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats. Those percentages have increased across the board since 2021, when 28% of Republicans, 13% of independents, and 7% of Democrats held this belief. Nearly one-third of white evangelical Protestants (31%) also believe patriots may have to resort to political violence to save the country, significantly higher than any other religious group.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The Public Religion Research Institute’s 14th Annual American Values Survey contains many disturbing findings about the state of our nation’s democratic experiment. The fear of political violence should be something our political leaders and reporters address daily. Democracy cannot survive if the public accepts that resolving conflicts with violence instead of ballots is okay. The survey’s results also reveal that 38 percent agreed with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.” Those who support this statement aren’t just supporters of former President Donald Trump—while 48 percent of Republicans agreed, so did 38 percent of independents and 29 percent of Democrats. I expected Republicans to feel this way, but three in ten Democrats? Democracies are fragile institutions. Once they fail, they can be gone for generations. These dynamics should be major stories going into the 2024 elections. They are a big part of what is at stake. 

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#2

Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term (Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Devlin Barrett, The Washington Post)

Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.

In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The scholar of authoritarianism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, has often cautioned, “Authoritarians always tell you what they are going to do as a kind of challenge and as a warning, and people don’t listen until it’s too late.” Here’s another example of the Trump party telling us how they plan to dismantle our democratic institutions should they win another term in the White House. The former president is many things, but subtle is not one of them. I hope we’ll listen. The survival of our nation’s experiment in democracy is on the line in 2024, and the Biden/Harris campaign should make this issue one of its priorities during the campaign (along with reproductive health care rights). These are the stakes. I hope we are clear about this fact.

#3

Impeachments and forced removals from office emerge as partisan weapons in the states (Gary Fields and Scott Bauer, The Associated Press)

Republicans in Wisconsin are threatening to impeach a recently elected state Supreme Court justice and raised the possibility of doing the same to the state’s election director.

A Georgia Republican called for impeaching the Fulton County prosecutor who brought racketeering charges against former President Donald Trump. Republicans in the Pennsylvania House have already impeached the top prosecutor in Philadelphia.

None of the targets met the bar traditionally set for impeachment — credible allegations of committing a crime while in office. Their offense: staking out positions legislative Republicans didn’t like.

As Republicans in Congress begin their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, the process is calling attention to the increasing use of impeachment in the states as a partisan political weapon rather than as a step of last resort for officeholders believed to have committed a serious offense.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The misuse of the impeachment power is another signal that far too many Republican leaders are unwilling to accept the outcome of elections they don’t win. We can add this to the list that includes denying the results of presidential elections, extreme partisan gerrymanders, attempts to keep abortion rights propositions off of ballots (or then trying to ignore the decision of voters), censures of legislators, and moves to strip Democratic statewide officers of powers before they take office. As How Democracies Die authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explain: “Democracy requires that parties know how to lose. Politicians who lose elections must be willing to accept defeat, go home, and get ready to play again the next day.” Far too many MAGA Republicans believe that only they have the right to rule. We are perilously close to becoming an illiberal democracy like Hungary—a nation that may hold elections, but ones where the outcome is not in doubt. 

#4

‘The Embodiment of White Christian Nationalism in a Tailored Suit’ (Thomas Edsall, The New York Times)

Robert Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, described [Speaker of the House Mike] Johnson in an email as “the embodiment of white Christian nationalism in a tailored suit.”

What is Christian nationalism? Christianity Today described it as the “belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a ‘Christian nation’ — not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future.”

Johnson’s election as speaker, Jones went on to say, “is one more confirmation that the Republican Party — a party that is 68 percent white and Christian in a country that is 42 percent white and Christian — has embraced its role as the party of white Christian nationalism.”

Jones argued that “while Johnson is more polished than other right-wing leaders of the G.O.P. who support this worldview, his record and previous public statements indicate that he’s a near textbook example of white Christian nationalism — the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The elevation of Mike Johnson to Speaker of the House is a victory for the Christian Nationalist coalition. He has told us to look to the bible for his worldview. He has conducted seminars promoting the historically inaccurate view that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. He promotes the policy views one would expect from an evangelical Christian: in favor of forced-birth policies, against LGBTQ rights, and opposed to no-fault divorce. Johnson was a key organizer of the legislative efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Greg Olear also outlines the evidence indicating that Johnson believes the Rapture is imminent. Johnson was elevated to Speaker so quickly that everyone is vetting him now rather than before he took over the gavel—and it is crucial that we understand what drives one of the nation’s most powerful elected officials.  

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#5

Keir Starmer’s Waiting Game (Alex Bilmes, Esquire)

The Right Honourable Sir Keir Starmer, Leader of the Labour Party and of His Majesty’s Opposition since 2020 and, according to all polls, Britain’s Prime Minister-in-waiting, is a solidly built 61-year-old white man with the purposeful stride and plausible manner of a senior manager. Which is, in a way, exactly what he is. If Starmer in person projects anything you might not catch in his not-always-scintillating media appearances, it’s an intense focus. He’s business-like. He’s competent. He’s on message. To his detractors, this is his curse: he’s too serious and insufficiently charismatic to be Prime Minister. To his boosters, it’s his gift: he is serious, as he should be in his position; he’s dignified, because that’s what’s required. He’s not just here for the photo op. He’s not interested in fame for its own sake. He’s here to fix things, to make a difference. (He’s also here for the photo op.)

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Alex Bilmes gives Sir Keir Starmer the interview and profile treatment as the United Kingdom prepares for a General Election that must be called by January 28, 2025. The Conservative Party has held power since 2010. The past 13 years have been eventful, to say the least: from Brexit and its debilitating impacts that have contributed to creating a political situation that resulted in the country seeing five Prime Ministers take office in six years. Starmer took over the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbin suffered a decisive loss to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Bilmes describes Starmer’s journey from observing his parents confront his mother’s illness, to being a defense attorney known for his pro nono human rights work, to becoming the Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service, to joining politics, becoming Labour Party Leader, and now being the favorite to become the next Prime Minister. I think it is essential to spend time trying to get to know the likely next government leader of one of our nation’s closest allies. It’s quite a life. Shame he roots for Arsenal, though.

#6

Fuck You, We Win (Jessica Valenti, Abortion Every Day)

I wish I was the kind of person who wins gracefully. Really, I do. But when you spend a year writing about raped children being denied care and women forced to carry doomed pregnancies to term, you tend to lose your magnanimity. 

So to every Republican politician who tried to keep voters from having a say on abortion, and to every anti-choice activist who worked to keep women under the government’s thumb: 

Fuck you, we win. 

I cannot begin to tell you the amount of joy it brought me to find out a little after midnight last night that Democrats gained control of the Virginia legislature. Because not only did it mean that abortion access would remain relatively safe in the state—but that the multi-million dollar bet anti-abortion groups made on their much-touted strategy failed spectacularly. Remember, it was just over a week ago that Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, said that Virginia is “the clearest bellwether going into 2024.” For the first time, I hope Miss Marjorie is right.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Yeah, I agree with this message and its tone given the circumstances. Voters thankfully continue to reject forced birth policies. Republicans, though, are not responding to these elections by moderating their position. Instead, as a part of their anti-democracy initiatives, they have announced their intention to ignore the results (for example, in Ohio). I may be repeating myself, but I think the idea is this important: restoring reproductive health rights—as part of a comprehensive message about the threats to our democracy—should be a Democratic priority during the 2024 campaign. 

#7

It’s not capitalism holding women’s sports back. It’s male fragility. (Lindsay Gibbs, Power Plays)

People like to make money, therefore, if there was money to be made off of women’s sports, they would be easily accessible on television and they’d receive a sizable chunk of media coverage and advertising revenue. That’s how it works, right? If something shows potential, then the capitalist market that guides our society will rabidly attempt to suck every dime of potential out of it. 

And yes, that often is how it works. With everything except for women’s sports.

In this article, we’ll look at how women’s sports have proved their commercial viability and promise time and time again over the past century; we’ll examine the ways that those invested in upholding our patriarchal system have worked to squash said promise, not stoke it; we’ll also talk about the real reason why women’s sports are being marginalized – fragile masculinity – and examine whether things are starting to change.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

We have over a century of evidence demonstrating a market for women’s sports in the United States and worldwide. Instead of embracing these opportunities, leaders have repeatedly undermined women’s leagues and teams. The United Kingdom (and other countries) banned women from playing soccer for a half-century despite (or because of) record-setting attendance at women’s matches. A commission led by First Lady Lou Hoover recommended banning girls from playing basketball. The NCAA has not sought a competitive rights fee for its Women’s Basketball Tournament rights. Gibbs goes into the extensive—and often disgusting—history of how authorities have undermined women’s sports. I agree there is hope that our society may have reached a turning point, though. I think a critical mass of the public and investors are recognizing the opportunities and now will provide these athletes with the investment and attention they deserve.

The Closer

Soviet submarine officer who averted nuclear war honoured with prize (Nicola Davis, The Guardian)

I’m a few days late to this anniversary, but I think it is important to honor the people who helped us survive the Cold War even if my publishing schedule doesn’t quite match the anniversary date.

We all owe a debt to Soviet naval officer Vasili Arkhipov, who single-handedly prevented a nuclear war from developing at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis on October 27, 1962.

Some like to claim that John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev had significant control over the situation as they worked to negotiate an end to that confrontation.

But that telling of history is far too neat. Real events were messier—and we are lucky they didn’t spin out of control. After all, what US intelligence didn’t know was that the Soviet submarines near Cuba had a 10-kiloton nuclear missile in their arsenals, and one submarine came very close to launch.

As The Guardian wrote about the incident when Arkhipov was posthumously awarded the Future of Life Award a few years ago:

“On 27 October 1962, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov was on board the Soviet submarine B-59 near Cuba when the US forces began dropping non-lethal depth charges. While the action was designed to encourage the Soviet submarines to surface, the crew of B-59 had been incommunicado and so were unaware of the intention. They thought they were witnessing the beginning of a third world war.

Trapped in the sweltering submarine – the air-conditioning was no longer working – the crew feared death. But, unknown to the US forces, they had a special weapon in their arsenal: a ten kilotonne nuclear torpedo. What’s more, the officers had permission to launch it without waiting for approval from Moscow.

Two of the vessel’s senior officers – including the captain, Valentin Savitsky – wanted to launch the missile. According to a report from the US National Security Archive, Savitsky exclaimed: “We’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all – we will not become the shame of the fleet.”

But there was an important caveat: all three senior officers on board had to agree to deploy the weapon. As a result, the situation in the control room played out very differently. Arkhipov refused to sanction the launch of the weapon and calmed the captain down. The torpedo was never fired.”

So, thank you, Vasili Arkhipov, for being one of the heroes of the nuclear age who prevented an unintentional nuclear armageddon.

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“History can be erased in ways other than by force of arms. It can be erased by accumulated myth. It can be erased by layer after layer of stony denial. And it can be erased by popular consensus, tacit or otherwise. But history erased is history weaponized, and it will have its day, one way or the other, until it is accorded the respect it is due.” (Charles P. Pierce, “The Rough Beast Began Stirring Again,” Esquire)

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. Send me things you’ve found interesting! You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

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Today’s Lineup

How billionaires are seeking to override our democratic institutions, why we should take Trump’s rantings seriously, Alexa claimed the 2020 elections were stolen, the cruelty of forced-birth advocates, reviewing how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter, the government is using facial recognition technology without safeguards, and Norwich City Football Club has an important message for all of us.

#1

Charles Koch’s audacious new $5 billion political scheme (Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria, Popular Information)

Billionaire Charles Koch, who will turn 88 on November 1, is funneling his wealth into two secretive organizations that can continue his right-wing political advocacy for years. Koch structured more than $5 billion in donations to exploit a loophole to allow him to avoid paying capital gains or gift taxes. It’s not surprising that Koch is familiar with the loophole — he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying to create it.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

While far too many reporters still treat Charles Koch as if he was serious about following through on that ludicrous 2020 Wall Street Journal profile (in which Koch claimed he was leaving partisanship behind), financial records demonstrate that he has continued his overwhelming support of conservative causes. Koch has donated $5 billion to two 501(c)(4) organizations, which, since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, have been able to engage directly in political campaigns without disclosing their donors. As Legum and Zekeria note, these loopholes have led the IRS to give up on enforcing limits on political donations. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbyists to save upwards of $2 billion in taxes proved a good investment for Koch. These donations will create another long-term political legacy for him. And these loopholes demonstrate how every billionaire’s existence is a policy failure in a country that claims to prioritize democracy because it gives people with no accountability far too much power over the country and world in which we live.  

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#2

We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority (by Andy Kroll, Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz, ProPublica)

The party guests who arrived on the evening of June 23, 2022, at the Tudor-style mansion on the coast of Maine were a special group in a special place enjoying a special time. The attendees included some two dozen federal and state judges — a gathering that required U.S. marshals with earpieces to stand watch while a Coast Guard boat idled in a nearby cove.

Caterers served guests Pol Roger reserve, Winston Churchill’s favorite Champagne, a fitting choice for a group of conservative legal luminaries who had much to celebrate. The Supreme Court’s most recent term had delivered a series of huge victories with the possibility of a crowning one still to come. The decadeslong campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade, which a leaked draft opinion had said was “egregiously wrong from the start,” could come to fruition within days, if not hours.

Over dinner courses paired with wines chosen by the former food and beverage director of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., the 70 or so attendees jockeyed for a word with the man who had done as much as anyone to make this moment possible: their host, Leonard Leo.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Yes, it would have been better for everyone if there had been a focus on Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society’s efforts with leading Republican politicians to remake the Supreme Court before it overturned Roe v. Wade. So, let’s not make that mistake again. Leo is continuing his efforts to reshape the U.S. judicial system by adding state Attorneys General and state judges to his remit. And as I have covered before, he now has $1.6 billion to spend from a single donor to allow him to pursue his Christian Nationalist dreams. This ProPublica story—and the related new podcast series co-produced with On the Media—explores how Leo has been the center of a conservative-financed effort to remake our nation’s courts. Leo and his backers learned from their disappointments as Republican-nominated Justices refused opportunities to overturn Roe v. Wade. In response, they created a pipeline to ensure the right people would be the Justices to hear a series of cases designed to ensure that a new conservative Supreme Court supermajority would not fail them again. 

#3

The Former President’s Rants Are Promises

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, is one of the historians who have warned us for years about how democracies fall into authoritarian and fascism. In response to Nikki Haley—and other leading Republicans—refusal to condemn Donald Trump’s threat to execute Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley earlier this month, Ben-Ghiat told HuffPost’s Lee Moran, “Authoritarians always tell you what they are going to do as a kind of challenge and as a warning, and people don’t listen until it’s too late.” We must take Donald Trump’s rants seriously, even if too many political reporters won’t—because the rants are promises. He’s warned us. These are the stakes in 2024.

#4

Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen (Cat Zakrzewski, The Washington Post)

Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Asked about fraud in the race — in which Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives.

The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing “an Alexa answers contributor.”

Multiple investigations into the 2020 election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election. Yet Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

We are not ready for how bad actors will use artificial intelligence and other tools in disinformation efforts to try to influence the 2024 elections worldwide. An Amazon spokesperson claims only a small number of users heard these lies. Does that make it okay it happened? The fact that people lie about the 2020 election results should not be a surprise. We should be alarmed that Alexa and other seemingly legitimate sources of information do not have strong protections in place to prevent the dissemination of these lies. How will they keep up next year when we see fake photos, audio clips, and stories constantly pushed out by accounts on X/Twitter and other online platforms?

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#5

Calculated Cruelty (Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day)

More than a year after Roe’s demise, Americans are still furious and Republicans are still losing at the polls—but the anti-abortion movement is full steam ahead. They’re thinking bigger than ever, cultural and political backlash be damned. 

In addition to maintaining and expanding their state bans, activists are pushing for federal legislation, working to restrict birth control, funneling money to extremist crisis pregnancy centers, and making plans to open a national network of ‘maternity homes’. That’s to say nothing of their cultural campaigns to redefine birth control and preemptively blame doctors for the inevitable increases in maternal and infant death. 

And while it’s hard to imagine anything crueler than the suffering we’ve already seen, the movement’s latest project may give all of their other efforts a run for their money. 

The activists that decimated abortion rights have quietly rolled out a new initiative to pressure and force American women to carry doomed pregnancies to term.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

One of the defining explanations for political developments in the Trump era was Adam Serwer’s observation that for Trump and his supporters, “the cruelty is the point.” The horrifying policies pushed by forced-birth supporters around the country highlight this observation. Jessica Valenti has been warning her Abortion, Every Day newsletter readers about the rise of policies designed to control and harm women and people who can become pregnant. The forced-birth activists are trying to keep women from having the information they need to make informed healthcare choices. We must be aware of these efforts to manipulate medical language to justify lying to pregnant people. We will hear more of them as forced-birth politicians seek to pass travel bans, enact contraception restrictions, and use misleading language to make voters think abortion bans are not real. 

#6

Join Me Over on BlueSky and Post

Elon Musk’s decisions have made Twitter/X unusable, as anyone trying to use the service to get accurate information about the Israel-Hamas War has learned. It is difficult to shift through all of the disinformation and fake accounts to find the news.

So, I have moved to BlueSky and Post to follow news and politics. Many of my favorite writers and political analysts have also moved to one or both of these Twitter alternatives. BlueSky is still invite-only, while Post is open to everyone.

I have a few BlueSky invitation codes I wanted to give the readers of this newsletter the first chance to use. Just go to this website and create an account by using one of the codes below. Each code can be used once, so if you get an error message, try another one. If all the codes are gone, email me at craigcheslog@substack.com, and I’ll send you an invite code directly as I get more of them.

• bsky-social-vleyd-lrlfr
• bsky-social-gz5ad-m32jx
• bsky-social-xe6ux-4ltvm
• bsky-social-hyg4i-vjec6
• bsky-social-ieloo-r6cj3

#7

Elon Musk, Innovator (Ed Zitron, Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At)

Most companies eventually fail. The only real variable is the speed in which they do so..

While the slow declines of Blackberry and Nokia (at least, as consumer brands) were agonizing to watch, both were a result of a lack of foresight and an outright failure to recognize the significance of the threat that Android and iPhone devices posed. While they made many extremely questionable decisions, both companies died because their CEO (or Co-CEOs) refused to change with the times. One could say the same of AOL, or Blockbuster, or Radioshack, or any number of businesses that were blindsided by somebody a little leaner and more aggressive, and ultimately atrophied. This is oftentimes how a company fails — not as a result of pure boneheaded decisionmaking, but through a lack of awareness of what the market needs and a lack of willingness (or ability) to provide it.

In many ways, this makes Elon Musk one of the most innovative minds of the 21st Century.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Speaking of Elon, Ed Zitron explains just how remarkable it is to see how quickly a CEO can destroy a company. Every major decision Musk has made since taking over Twitter has made it a worse place for anyone who isn’t an alt-right or facist activist.

Musk spent $44 billion to ruin a social media company and his reputation. Zitron gives us a blow-by-blow review.

#8

GAO Report Shows the Government Uses Face Recognition with No Accountability, Transparency, or Training (Beryl Lipton and Matthew Guariglia, Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Thousands of face recognition searches have been conducted by the federal agents without training or policies. In the period GAO studied, at least 63,000 searches had happened, but this number is a known undercount. A complete count of face recognition use is not possible. The number of federal agents with access to face recognition, the number of searches conducted, and the reasons for the searches does not exist, because some systems used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) don’t track these numbers. 

Our faces are unique and mostly permanent — people don’t usually just get a new one— and face recognition technology, particularly when used by law enforcement and government, puts into jeopardy many of our important rights. Privacy, free expression, information security, and social justice are all at risk. The technology facilitates covert mass surveillance of the places we frequent and the people we know. It can be used to make judgments about how we feel and behave. Mass adoption of face recognition means being able to track people automatically as they go about their day visiting doctors, lawyers, houses of worship, as well as friends and family. It also means that law enforcement could, for example, fly a drone over a protest against police violence and walk away with a list of everyone in attendance. Either instance would create a chilling effect wherein people would be hesitant to attend protests or visit certain friends or romantic partners knowing there would be a permanent record of it. 

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

We should only allow our government agencies to use facial recognition technology with significant safeguards in place. The Constitution’s protections should still apply when it comes to technology, especially technology that fails more often when used to (mis)identify people of color. Private companies are using this technology to punish critics. People have been falsely accused, arrested, and served time in jail because of mistakes made by facial recognition programs. We also should not be surprised how things can go wrong, given that an omnipotent surveillance state is a frequent plot in books, television shows, and movies. We have been warned. Now what?

The Closer

The social media team for the Norwich City Football Club, currently playing in the English Football League’s second-tier, produced this outstanding video for World Mental Health Day earlier this month. As the club noted, “At times, it can be obvious when someone is struggling to cope. But sometimes the signs are harder to spot. Check in on those around you.”

Yep. That’s worth doing every day. I hope you’ll watch this video.

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.” (Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die)

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. Send me things you’ve found interesting! You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Today’s Lineup

MAGA supporters are wishing for a Red Caesar to end American democracy in January 2025, how not to respond to a terror attack, AI-generated deep fakes in a Slovakian election raise warnings for future elections, the University of Pennsylvania owes Katalin Karikó an apology, remembering former Senator Dianne Feinstein’s moral clarity about torture, Republicans are trying to redefine abortion, and why we should be concerned that so many local elections officials have retired after facing conspiracy-fueled abuse.

#1

‘Red Caesarism’ is rightwing code – and some Republicans are listening (Jason Wilson, The Guardian)

In June, the rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end.

Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments now common on the antidemocratic right, that “transgenderism, anti-white racism, censorship, cronyism … are now the policies of an entire cosmopolitan class that includes much of the entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and government-sponsored corporations”.

In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.”

For the last three years, parts of the American right have advocated a theory called Caesarism as an authoritarian solution to the claimed collapse of the US republic in conference rooms, podcasts and the house organs of the extreme right, especially those associated with the Claremont Institute thinktank.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

As Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch explains, “If you’re not one of those dudes who thinks about Ancient Rome every day, let me translate. The alleged brain trust of an increasingly fascist MAGA movement wants an American dictatorship that would “suspend” democracy in January 2025 — just 15 months from now.” Yep. Sound the alarm klaxons. Whether we like it or not, these are the stakes of the next year’s election. Democracies are fragile institutions. MAGA leaders are not being subtle. Most Republican leaders (including the just-ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his likely successors) have already refused to acknowledge the winner of one presidential election. Several red states are no longer democracies after gerrymandering and other abuses of electoral institutions. Trump advisors are discussing dismantling the civil service and independent federal agencies. I hope President Biden will focus his re-election campaign’s messaging on defending our democracy, building on his speech last month at the McCain Center. The American experiment in democracy is on the line in 2024.

Things I Find Interesting is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

#2

How Not to Respond to a Terrorist Attack (Benjamin Wittes, Dog Shirt Daily)

I’m not, to be clear, always against war. And I accept that civilians sometimes get killed in warfare and, tragic as that is, it is an inherent part of the enterprise.

But the intentional targeting of civilians is always unacceptable. It is unacceptable when Russians do it Ukraine. Full stop.

It is unacceptable when Israeli settlers target Palestinian civilians with violence. Full stop.

And it is unacceptable when Palestinians, using thousands of rockets and hundreds of gunmen, indiscriminately kill hundreds of Israeli civilians. Full stop.

Beyond this rather banal insistence on the most basic premise of the law of armed conflict, I am not certain what the right way to respond to the horrific, murderous surprise attack launched last night from Gaza is.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I am horrified by the reports and pictures coming out of Israel in the wake of the attack by Hamas. Most of the analysis so far has been polarized finger-pointing with little value beyond the social media engagement it creates. We should be clear on a few principles. Civilians should never be targeted in an armed engagement. Civilians should never live in a state of fear over possible terror attacks. Civilians should never live in a state of siege. Wittes’ newsletter includes seven ways not to respond to what has happened, especially while dealing with imperfect information created by the fog of war. Alastair Campbell (the former communications director under Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair) and Rory Stewart (a former Conservative Member of Parliament and Government Minister until Boris Johnson revoked his party membership) had one of the most informative conversations I heard about what is happening in Israel and the events that led up to this horror in today’s emergency episode of their Rest is Politics podcast. While not a conversation for today, I believe Campbell and Stewart are correct to note that we will eventually need to consider the international community’s failures to focus on the Israel-Palestinian dispute even as the situation has obviously been deteriorating. 

#3

Slovakia’s Election Deepfakes Show AI Is a Danger to Democracy (Morgan Meaker, Wired)

Just two days before Slovakia’s elections, an audio recording was posted to Facebook. On it were two voices: allegedly, Michal Šimečka, who leads the liberal Progressive Slovakia party, and Monika Tódová from the daily newspaper Denník N. They appeared to be discussing how to rig the election, partly by buying votes from the country’s marginalized Roma minority.

Šimečka and Denník N immediately denounced the audio as fake. The fact-checking department of news agency AFP said the audio showed signs of being manipulated using AI. But the recording was posted during a 48-hour moratorium ahead of the polls opening, during which media outlets and politicians are supposed to stay silent. That meant, under Slovakia’s election rules, the post was difficult to widely debunk. And, because the post was audio, it exploited a loophole in Meta’s manipulated-media policy, which dictates only faked videos—where a person has been edited to say words they never said—go against its rules.

The election was a tight race between two frontrunners with opposing visions for Slovakia. On Sunday it was announced that the pro-NATO party, Progressive Slovakia, had lost to SMER, which campaigned to withdraw military support for its neighbor, Ukraine.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I am pessimistic about the ability of our political institutions and media outlets to manage the inevitable AI-generated faked audio messages and videos that will emerge during election campaigns next year—including in the United States, India, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. We see examples daily of how rapidly misinformation can spread online. We need to discuss these dynamics more so people are prepared to notice when a fake message appears. Will media outlets focus on debunking such claims? What can we expect from social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter? Are campaigns ready to respond? I am quite pessimistic.

#4

After Shunning Scientist, University of Pennsylvania Celebrates Her Nobel Prize (Gregory Zuckerman, The Wall Street Journal)

The University of Pennsylvania is basking in the glow of two researchers who this week were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for their pioneering work on messenger RNA.

Until recently, the school and its faculty largely disdained one of those scientists.

Penn demoted Katalin Karikó, shunting her to a lab on the outskirts of campus while cutting her pay. Karikó’s colleagues denigrated her mRNA research and some wouldn’t work with her, according to her and people at the school. Eventually, Karikó persuaded another Penn researcher, Drew Weissman, to work with her on modifying mRNA for vaccines and drugs, though most others at the school remained skeptical, pushing other approaches. 

Karikó hasn’t only proven her detractors wrong but also reached the pinnacle of science. Her research with Weissman helped lead to the mRNA vaccines that protected people worldwide during the Covid-19 pandemic and now shows promise for flu, cancer and other diseases.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Even for an Ivy League institution, the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated extravagant hubris by taking public credit for Karikó’s Nobel Prize even after demoting her in 1995 and stating that her work was “not of faculty quality.” Where’s the apology? The sorry for the misunderstanding? Our bad? We owe Karikó a debt for persevering in her research. Penn should note how badly she was treated earlier in her career. And I also recommend reading this 2021 Glamour magazine profile of Karikó: The Scientist Who Saved the World. 

#5

Let’s Not Forget Dianne Feinstein’s Moral Clarity on Torture (Jeff Stein, Spy Talk)

The debate over the use of torture in the post-9/11 era has been one of the most contentious and morally charged issues in American politics. At the center of this storm stood Senator Dianne Feinstein, a figure whose principled stand and unwavering commitment to transparency redefined the discourse surrounding CIA torture practices.

…

Lost in all the rightful distress about octogenarians in Congress (not to mention the White House) reignited by Feinstein’s passing, is her landmark work exposing the evils and inefficiencies of waterboarding, beatings and sleep deprivations employed under the CIA’s “enhanced interrogations” program. To this day, many of the CIA’s post-9/11 leaders and their boosters refuse to call it torture, even though we prosecuted Japanese officers as war criminals for using the exact same techniques on American prisoners.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I appreciated Jeff Stein’s focus on the late Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D-California) vital efforts to expose the CIA’s post-9/11 torture regime. It may have been her most important work in a historic—if complicated—career in public life. She had to fight the CIA and other elements of the Obama Administration to bring this report to the American people. It would have been easier for her to go along with the flow and minimize the torture regime. But Feinstein took the Congressional oversight role on this issue seriously. The Senator and her staff fought to expose what happened and to get our nation to learn from this moral failure. If you’d like to learn more, this Connie Bruck New Yorker article from June 2015 details what Feinstein and her team faced as they did this vital work. 

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it.

#6

Now Republicans Are Trying to Redefine Abortion Itself (Jessica Valenti, New York Times)

In the year since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the Republican Party has tested out constantly changing talking points and messages on abortion in an attempt to make its anti-abortion policies sound less extreme. Conservatives are even considering moving away from the term “pro-life,” fearing that voters have newly negative associations with the label.

With post-Roe outrage showing no sign of waning, strategists are pushing a new lexicon on abortion — medically, legally and culturally. Some Republicans have abandoned the term “ban” when speaking about anti-abortion legislation, for example. Now they’re pushing for a 15-week “standard” on abortion — which, to be clear, would be a ban. Americans overwhelmingly oppose strict abortion bans, so Republicans are moving away from the term.

Republicans hope that by changing the way Americans talk about abortion, it might help change the way they feel about abortion — which is, right now, very pro-choice.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Jessica Valenti, the author of the Abortion, Every Day newsletter, has been tracking how Republican politicians have tried to spin their unpopular efforts to ban abortion and other reproductive health procedures. We are already seeing some reporters and pundits adjust how they describe these abortion bans due to these efforts. We are witnessing Republican candidates in Virginia run ads falsely claiming they do not favor an abortion ban through these misleading techniques. We do not need to fall for it. We can also insist that reporters refuse to go along with these attempts to deceive the electorate. Valenti does an outstanding job of uncovering and tracking these issues in her must-read newsletter. 

#7

In some states, more than half of the local election officials have left since 2020 (Miles Parks, National Public Radio)

In some battleground states, more than half of the local election administrators will be new since the last presidential race, according to a new report from the democracy-focused advocacy group Issue One shared exclusively with NPR before its release.

“Local county clerk is not a glamorous job,” Daniels said. “We’re not paying people in local election administrative jobs enough to be the subject of public scrutiny, particularly when that public scrutiny is often misguided and misinformed.”

The Issue One report focused on 11 western states and found that the problem of voting official turnover is particularly acute in the region’s swing states, where conspiracies have flourished.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The loss of experienced election officials could lead to horrible outcomes in the 2024 elections. This turnover could result in mistakes that will be spun into election conspiracies by people unwilling to accept that their opponents can win an election. We have allowed these public servants to experience extreme criticism from people not acting in good faith. We should prepare for the inevitable efforts to steal close elections next year. I do not believe our institutions are prepared for what is coming.

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” — William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. Send me things you’ve found interesting! You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Things I Find Interesting is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Today’s Lineup

The U.S. Senate should have skipped this year’s August recess State Work Period, facial recognition technology leads to false arrests, Christians against the Sermon on the Mount, Republicans working to ban birth control, Vice President Harris’ comeback, the most influential people in Sacramento, and efforts to improve forensic laboratories.

#1

3 military branches without Senate-confirmed leaders for first time in history, Defense Secretary says (Eleanor Watson, CBS News)

The Navy on Monday joined the Army and Marine Corps in operating without Senate-confirmed military leaders because of Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s hold on top military nominations. 

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday in a ceremony Monday morning relinquished his office as required by statute, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti took over in an acting capacity. 

It’s the first time in the history of the Defense Department that three military services are without Senate-confirmed leaders, according to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. 

“This is unprecedented. It is unnecessary and it is unsafe. And this sweeping hold is undermining America’s military readiness,” Austin said in remarks at Monday’s ceremony.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama, even though he potentially doesn’t live there anymore) has placed a hold on all military nominations this year. He’s protesting a Pentagon policy that grants military members leave and travel cost reimbursements when they need to go to a different state to seek reproductive health care. The Senate traditionally handles confirming these nominations in bulk to save time, but that process requires the unanimous consent of all 100 Senators. Tuberville has been refusing to go along with this Senate norm. The delay negatively impacts military readiness and harms service members and their families, who cannot plan for their futures. Tuberville, however, cannot stop the Senate from going through the process of considering each nomination individually. After an inquiry from Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the Congressional Research Service estimated it would take 668 hours to confirm all these military nominations currently in the queue. (This CRS report explains the process required to overcome a hold.) So I’d like to know why the Senate is now on a five-week recess, I mean, State Work Period? Why didn’t the Democratic majority cancel this break to stay in session 12 hours a day, seven days a week, to address this backlog? It would have forced Tuberville and his Republican enablers to pay a price for this obstruction. It would give reporters a reason to cover this story every day. Would Republicans still be seen as the party of the military when it became clear that Tuberville didn’t care if anyone got a promotion (as he said yesterday)? Politics sometimes requires theatrics. The current Democratic leadership missed an opportunity to make an important political point and help military families get on with their lives. 

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#2

Eight Months Pregnant and Arrested After False Facial Recognition Match (Kashmir Hill, The New York Times)

Porcha Woodruff was getting her two daughters ready for school when six police officers showed up at her door in Detroit. They asked her to step outside because she was under arrest for robbery and carjacking.

“Are you kidding?” she recalled saying to the officers. Ms. Woodruff, 32, said she gestured at her stomach to indicate how ill-equipped she was to commit such a crime: She was eight months pregnant.

…

After being charged in court with robbery and carjacking, Ms. Woodruff was released that evening on a $100,000 personal bond. In an interview, she said she went straight to the hospital where she was diagnosed with dehydration and given two bags of intravenous fluids. A month later, the Wayne County prosecutor dismissed the case against her.

The ordeal started with an automated facial recognition search, according to an investigator’s report from the Detroit Police Department. Ms. Woodruff is the sixth person to report being falsely accused of a crime as a result of facial recognition technology used by police to match an unknown offender’s face to a photo in a database. All six people have been Black; Ms. Woodruff is the first woman to report it happening to her.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Why do we accept that prosecutors and police can use technology with demonstrated failure rates to arrest the wrong people? This is just the latest case where a facial technology vendor’s software made a false positive—and the police acted even though the person they were seeking could not have been the pregnant person they arrested. In this case, the prosecutor continues to defend the wrongful arrest warrant issued to Woodruff. We also should consider how faulty facial recognition technology can combine with flawed eyewitness processes to result in false arrests and convictions. (The California Innocence Project explains how eyewitness testimony can identify innocent people in this article.) Wrongful arrests and accusations take a toll on the people and families they impact, so we should demand better from our police and prosecutors. 

#3

He was a top church official who criticized Trump. He says Christianity is in crisis (Scott Detrow, Gabriel J. Sánchez, Sarah Handel, National Public Radio)

[Christianity Today Editor-in-Chief Russell] Moore spoke to All Things Considered’s Scott Detrow about what he thinks the path forward is for evangelicalism in America.

On why he thinks Christianity is in crisis:

It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — “turn the other cheek” — [and] to have someone come up after to say, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, “I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the response would not be, “I apologize.” The response would be, “Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.” And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Can one still be a Christian if they reject one of the core teachings of Jesus? Shouldn’t that require some reflection on the part of the religion’s leaders? Are evangelicals followers of Christ or radical conservative activists abusing a tax exemption? Moore has been raising these issues since his shock resignation as a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention in 2020. Is it surprising that people who see Jesus as subversive would continue to support Donald Trump despite everything? Should we be surprised that members of a group rejecting the Sermon on the Mount’s message would resort to violence and murder to achieve its political ends?

#4

The GOP’s Plan to Ban Birth Control (Part I) (Jessica Valenti, Abortion Every Day)

One of the primary ways Republicans think that they’ll get away with banning birth control is by lying about what birth control actually is. Specifically, they’re trying to redefine common types of contraception—like hormonal birth control and IUDs—as ‘abortifacients’. 

Redefining birth control as abortion not only makes it easier for lawmakers to prohibit contraception, it also gives them semantic cover: Conservatives never have to admit that they’re trying to ban birth control; they just claim they’re opposing abortion. 

Students for Life, for example, one of the country’s most powerful anti-abortion groups, classifies IUDs, emergency contraception and every single kind of hormonal birth control—from the pill to patches—as ‘abortifacients’. The only forms of birth control they believe aren’t abortions are sterilization, condoms and other barrier methods. 

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

For years pundits and supposedly moderate elected officials claimed that feminists and abortion rights supporters were exaggerating when they warned people about efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade. Yet they were sadly correct. So I hope we will take their warnings about ongoing efforts to restrict and ban contraception seriously. Jessica Valenti has been writing about Republican efforts to ban abortion and contraception since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in Abortion, Every Day. She exposes what forced birth advocates are trying to do around the country. We must not get caught by surprise again. 

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#5

With passionate case against MAGA, Harris comes into her own (Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post)

Vice President Harris has taken her share of lumps over the past 2½ years. No doubt, her gender and race increased scrutiny and raised the level of vitriol coming from right-wing media. Some of her difficulties reflected the challenges any vice president faces: namely, to be simultaneously impressive and invisible. Some of her difficulties can be attributed to her eagerness to take on thankless tasks (e.g., stemming the tide of migrants from Central America).

Her relatively short time on the national stage — in contrast to the president’s long political career — raised the question of where she would add value. But with time and increased confidence, she has more than demonstrated her worth and played a key role for the administration.

Even the hypercritical mainstream media has taken notice. “Kamala D. Harris Takes on a Forceful New Role in the 2024 Campaign,” the New York Times told us. Time magazine declared, “Kamala D. Harris Subtly Emerges as Powerful White House Asset,” and, recently, “Joe Biden Finally Gets It: Kamala D. Harris Is the Key to 2024.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The Biden-Harris team may have finally figured out how to put the Vice President into situations where she can do well. Given President Biden’s age, it is inevitable that Republicans and pundits would attack her as they question the president’s fitness for office. Until recently, I fear the White House was helping her critics by putting Harris into situations where she had little chance of succeeding. Things have changed over the past few months. As Rubin notes, Harris has been particularly effective in making the case against MAGA politicians and defending our democracy. She has also led in championing abortion and reproductive health care after the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The latter is essential given how uncomfortable (and therefore ineffective) President Biden is when discussing abortion rights.

#6

The Top 100 Turns 15 (Rich Ehisen, Capitol Weekly)

And with that thought in mind, welcome to the 15th edition of the Capitol Weekly Top 100 list.

Each Top 100 has its own unique challenges, and putting together this year’s list was no different. Because, let’s be real: this is a completely subjective process. There is no way we or anybody else can definitively say who the most influential hundred people are in the Capitol community. There is no quantitative way to make that judgement. Maybe we’re fools to even try, but color us foolish, because after all these years we’re still at it.

…

The result is a list we’re pretty happy with, though I know others might not be. I’m okay with that, because in addition to building a list that reasonably reflects a snapshot of the Capitol’s power dynamic at this point in time, I wanted to start an evolution in how we approach this project and to spark a healthy discussion about what it might look like in the future.

The foundation of that evolution has been developing for a while now. In recent years, the list has gradually become more diverse and dynamic, much like California itself. More than anything, we wanted this year’s effort to build on that foundation.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The Capitol Weekly’s annual list of the most influential people in Sacramento is always interesting to review to get a snapshot of what’s happening in California public policy and politics. It’s also an efficient way to learn about the people behind the scenes who have an impact on what happens here. I applaud the choice to add a focus on the chiefs of staff, policy experts, and consultants who may not get quoted in news stories but have a tremendous amount of influence on what policies make it—or die—in the legislature. This year’s list is also majority female for the first time. Everyone will have a different list, but this one is a great way to start the conversation.

#7

A Q&A with the visionary “nerd” who’s trying to make expert testimony more reliable (Radley Balko, The Watch)

Peter Stout runs the best crime lab in the country — or at least the most scientific one. After scandals rocked the Houston Police Department crime lab throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the city created a new lab that would be independently funded, would report to its own board (as opposed to, say, police or prosecutors), and would operate on a commitment to accuracy and scientific principles. Stout was brought on to head up the new project — called the Houston Forensic Science Center (HFSC) in 2015. In the years since, he has emerged as a pioneer of forensics reform. 

…

Stout is wonky. He has a corny, disarming sense of humor, and he wears his nerdiness like a science fair ribbon. His most important innovation — or at least the reform for which he’s best known — is implementing blind testing into the day-to-day routines of the analysts he oversees. While many crime labs and forensic disciplines have been resistant to rigorous proficiency testing, Stout not only embraces the idea, he’s revolutionizing it.

Most proficiency tests are given outside the lab. This means the analysts are aware they’re being tested. We know that people tend to change their behavior when they know they’re being evaluated. External tests also lack the pressure analysts often feel to plow through casework quickly, or the subtle, often subconscious bias that can prod them to produce results favorable to the party that ordered the analysis. In state labs, this is almost always police or prosecutors. All of this means that even the most well-designed proficiency tests probably aren’t all that accurate a measure of how crime lab analysts perform day to day.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Faulty forensic methods have been responsible for many wrongful convictions around the country. Balko’s interview with Peter Stout highlights a significant effort to demonstrate how systems reform and better scientific methods can prevent such mistakes. Making sure these labs deliver accurate results should be a national priority. The goal should be accuracy—not to help the prosecution get a conviction.

The Closer

Now this is a bat!

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“With contraception, legislators will start the same way they did with abortion: Banning certain types of care, passing parental consent laws, and stripping public funding so that patients on Medicaid lose access to the most effective contraceptives. And why shouldn’t they? It’s worked for them before.” (Christina Cauterucci)

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. Send me things you’ve found interesting! You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

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Today’s Lineup

Trump’s team keeps sharing their plans to remake the federal government, acknowledging the people who were living near the Trinity nuclear detonation, the growing surveillance threats impacting people seeking reproductive or gender-affirming health care, Paramount spikes a documentary about Governor Ron DeSantis’ work at Guantanamo, school board meetings become a flash point for anger and violence, a Constitutional Convention is a bad idea, another step closer for the Anthropocene, the Major Questions Doctrine, and addressing the high number of ACL injuries in women’s soccer.

#1

Trump is planning to ratchet up the authoritarianism in a second term (Jonathan M. Katz, The Racket)

We are in a position never imagined before in U.S. history: a former president — twice impeached, the perpetrator of a failed coup to overturn the election he lost, and facing a ballooning list of federal and state indictments — is again seeking the highest office in the land. And, barring something truly extraordinary (i.e., he dies), Donald Trump looks almost certain to nab his third straight GOP nomination. This is what happens when you have been deemed by a critical mass of the voting base “a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny,” as Robert O. Paxton wrote of a certain kind of political figure. Seeing as he will almost certainly be going up against an 81-year-old incumbent (same caveat as above) whose approval rating seems to permanently hover around 40 percent, the chances of a second Trump term can not be dismissed.

Given all of that, one of the potentially most important political stories of our era dropped this week in the New York Times. Its headline was “Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025.” Because it’s the Times covering a reactionary politician, the story, by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman, is an exercise in understatement…

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Donald Trump’s supporters are not hiding their plans for an authoritarian makeover of the federal government. We need to take seriously the revelations in the New York Times story Katz mentions. The story demonstrates how Trump’s current advisors have learned critical lessons from Trump’s chaotic transition and first term. They are telling the public how they plan to politicize vast swaths of the civil service, ensure the Justice Department responds to White House demands, and bring independent agencies under Trump’s direct control. As The Economist noted, “a professional corps of America First populists are dedicating themselves to ensuring that Trump Two will be disciplined and focused on getting things done.” They want to ensure there won’t be any “adults” in place to try to slow down or prevent Trump’s plans. What the Trump campaign and supporters are sharing makes the stakes of the next election clear—and these are just the plans they are willing to share in public. Defeating Trump is necessary to prevent our country from becoming an illiberal democracy where the executive ignores constitutional limits, individual rights are no longer protected, and the authoritarians manipulate future elections to ensure they stay in power. 

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#2

Survivors of America’s first atomic bomb test want their place in history (Kelsey Atherton, Popular Science)

Gilmore’s story is one of many collected by the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. The organization was founded in 2005 by residents Tina Cordova and the late Fred Tyler, with the express aim of compiling information about the impacts of the Trinity test on people in the area. Tularosa is a village in Southern New Mexico, about a three-hour drive south of Albuquerque or a 90-minute drive northeast from Las Cruces. The town sits next to the White Sands Missile Range, and, as the crow flies, is about 50 miles from the Trinity Site. The White Sands Range summary of the 2017 visit says the site was selected because of its remote location, though the page also notes that when locals asked about the explosion, the test “was covered up with the story of an explosion at an ammunition dump.”

“Trinity Site,” a pamphlet available for visitors to the location, notes that it was selected from one of eight possible locations in California, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado in part because the land was already under the control of the federal government as part of the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, established in 1942. (Later, the Army tested captured V-2 rockets at the range, and today it houses everything from missile testing to a DARPA-designed Air Force observatory.) “The secluded Jornada del Muerto was perfect as it provided isolation for secrecy and safety, but was still close to Los Alamos for easy commuting back and forth,” notes the pamphlet.

Cordova disputes that characterization. “We know from the census data that there were 40,000 people living in the four counties surrounding Trinity at the time of the test,” she said. “That’s not remote and uninhabited.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Before the release of the new movie Oppenheimer, Kelsey Atherton reminded his followers on BlueSky about this article he wrote about the world’s first victims of a nuclear explosion: the Tularosa Basin Downwinders. In his article, Atherton interviews people living in the area where the Trinity test happened. The people there were primarily left in the dark about the fallout that would impact their farms. It was not an uninhabited space. There was a surge in cancers. The federal government purchased cattle in the area to observe the impact of radiation exposure on them. Yet people in New Mexico have been excluded from a federal government compensation program for people exposed to the Cold War’s nuclear tests. This part of the dawn of the atomic age must be told and reckoned with. We must acknowledge that there were people there and that generations of people in New Mexico have lived with the health and economic consequences of the start of the atomic age.

#3

New Report Warns Of Growing Surveillance Threat For Abortions Or Gender-Affirming Care (Lil Kalish, HuffPost)

Patients seeking abortion or gender-affirming care out of state face increased threats of surveillance — and criminalization — from law enforcement and state officials, a new report shows.

For more than a year, abortion and privacy advocates have been sounding the alarm about how pregnant people could be tracked and prosecuted for seeking care after the Supreme Court upended federal abortion access with the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

…

The S.T.O.P. report found that officials today have many more data points to pull from in cross-state investigations, such as vehicle information from private car or rideshare apps, flight records or automatic license plate readers that can pull photos and time and date stamps of a car’s location. 

The report examined common forms of transportation and accommodation that people might use when crossing state lines, such as private car travel, air travel, or public transit like buses and trains. For accommodation, the types included hotels or staying in private homes. For each mode of travel or housing, the report investigated two key questions: How much of an information trail did it leave, and how vulnerable was it to profiling?

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Governments in red states will use all the tools available to punish the people who go to other states to get these necessary reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare services. As this new report from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project explains, “prosecutors and state officials can use countless surveillance tools, from automated license plate readers to street cameras, to identify and track those seeking, facilitating, or assisting out- of-state care.” It is quite clear we cannot trust technology companies to protect their users’ privacy. Since the federal government won’t take action, we need more from state governments in states that provide these healthcare services to out-of-state people. We must ensure that the people who need these services know the best ways to protect themselves from these invasions of their privacy. 

#4

How Paramount buried a Vice documentary on Ron DeSantis at Guantanamo Bay (Max Tani, Semafor)

Showtime slated “The Guantanamo Candidate,” a 30 minute-long episode of its Vice documentary series, for May 28.

The episode opens with a shot of the outside the US prison complex at the southern tip of Cuba, where Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis served as a lawyer from March 2006 to January 2007.

Vice reporters had secured on camera interviews with a former detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, and a guard at the prison, staff sergeant Joe Hickman. Both said they remembered seeing DeSantis at the prison during a controversial detainee hunger strike. The Vice crew traveled to Guantanamo Bay to attempt to try to speak to military staff, and made several attempts to ask DeSantis about the allegations directly, eventually confronting him at a press conference in Israel, according to a detailed description provided to Semafor.

But Showtime viewers who turned on their televisions May 28 never saw the episode.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign focuses on his service as a Navy attorney. So I think we should know more about what he did there—and whether he approved of the forced feeding of detainees and other potential war crimes. I previously mentioned this Guardian article by Julian Borger and Oliver Laughland that examined DeSantis’ Guantanamo work. Troubling is one word for what they found. Now we need to find out more about why a Paramount lobbyist raised concerns about this spiked episode. Did DeSantis’ campaign issue any threats? Was Paramount worried about getting the treatment DeSantis has leveled at Disney? 

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it.

#5

How School Board Meetings Became Flashpoints for Anger and Chaos Across the Country (Nicole Carr and Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)

Time and again over the last two years, parents and protesters have derailed school board meetings across the country. Once considered tame, even boring, the meetings have become polarized battlegrounds over COVID-19 safety measures, LGBTQ+ student rights, “obscene” library books and attempts to teach children about systemic racism in America.

On dozens of occasions, the tensions at the meetings have escalated into not just shouting matches and threats but also arrests and criminal charges.

ProPublica identified nearly 90 incidents in 30 states going back to the spring of 2021. (That’s when the majority of boards resumed gathering in-person after predominantly holding meetings virtually.) Our examination — the first wide-ranging analysis of school board unrest — found that at least 59 people were arrested or charged over an 18-month period, from May 2021 to November 2022. Prosecutors dismissed the vast majority of the cases, most of them involving charges of trespassing, resisting an officer or disrupting a public meeting. Almost all of the incidents were in suburban districts, and nearly every participant was white.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I’ve discussed how right-wing and MAGA activists have focused on school boards across the country over the past few years. I’ve mentioned the rise of the radical right-wing Moms for Liberty organization. We have watched parents seek to intimidate school board members with their actions at school board meetings. In California, where no Republican has won statewide office since November 2006, the state GOP announced its intention to focus on school board races to try to make gains. California’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond, was forced to leave a school board meeting last week in Chino Valley after the new school board president accused him of supporting policies that “pervert students.” The Chino Valley School Board’s action likely violated California’s open-meetings law. I cannot emphasize just how important school board elections—and other down-ballot races—are each election cycle.  

#6

Some Dems worry Newsom’s 28th Amendment plan could open a constitutional Pandora’s box (Shira Stein and Sophia Bollag, The San Francisco Chronicle)

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push to enact national gun control measures through an unprecedented constitutional convention has rankled some members of his own party who worry it could open a Pandora’s box of prospective changes to the U.S. Constitution.

Newsom’s proposed 28th Amendment would raise the federal age to buy a gun to 21, mandate background checks for firearms buyers, impose a waiting period for gun purchases and ban assault weapons. To do it, Newsom wants to call a constitutional convention on the subject, an untested mechanism that would be triggered if two-thirds of state legislatures call for one. There hasn’t been a constitutional convention since the Constitution was adopted in 1789, meaning it’s not clear how one would actually function if it were called in modern times.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I think Democrats in safe seats must take advantage of their positions to push for more liberal policies about controversial subjects. Such actions help open the Overton Window that includes what is politically acceptable for political debate at a certain time. Conservatives have taken initially unthinkable ideas and then transformed them into mainstream policies within the GOP. So while I agree with Newsom’s focus on gun safety, I am terrified of his suggestion to invoke an Article V Constitutional Convention. I remember just how close radical right-wing activists and their wealthy donors came to invoking an Article V Constitutional Convention just a few years ago. Former Senator Russ Feingold and legal scholar Peter Prindiville released a book in August 2022—only 11 months ago—called The Constitution in Jeopardy to warn people about what could happen. As Feingold told the New York Times in an article about the book’s release, “There are smart people and a few on the progressive side who are willing to roll the dice. For me, it is crazy to take the chance.” There are no rules for such a Convention outlined in the Constitution, so it is extremely risky to suggest that such an event could be restricted to one subject. We need to talk about gun safety. We need reforms. But I fear this is a dangerous way to frame this necessary conversation. 

#7

Scientists say they’ve found a site that marks a new chapter in Earth’s history (Katie Hunt, CNN)

Scientists have identified the geological site that they say best reflects a proposed new epoch called the Anthropocene — a major step toward changing the official timeline of Earth’s history.

The term Anthropocene, first proposed in 2000 to reflect how profoundly human activity has altered the world, has become a commonly used academic buzzword uniting different fields of study.

“When it’s 8 billion people all having an impact on the planet, there’s bound to be a repercussion,” said Colin Waters, an honorary professor at the Geography, Geology and the Environment School at the University of Leicester and chair of the Anthropocene Working Group.

“We’ve moved into this new Earth state and that should be defined by a new geological epoch,” Waters added.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

How much of an impact have humans had on our planet? We know it is large, but is it significant enough to be noticeable within Earth’s geological record? Geologists have divided the 4.5 billion history of the Earth into eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages to define the planet’s evolution. We currently live in the:

• Phanerozoic eon (which began 538.8 million years ago), 
• Cenozoic era (which began 66 million years ago with the asteroid impact that led to a mass extinction of the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all plant and animal species), 
• Quarternary period (which began 2.6 million years ago), 
• Holocene epoch (which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age), and
• Maghalayan age (which began 4,200 years ago).

There has been an active debate about whether the impact of humans has created a new epoch, the Anthropocene. A working group of geologists has identified a so-called “golden spike” at the bottom of a lake in the Toronto suburbs that demonstrates in the 1950s a clear distinction in the geologic record—including remnants of the radiation from nuclear weapons tests. The recommendation will now go to the International Commission on Stratigraphy and then the International Union of Geological Sciences for consideration and votes about whether to designate this new human-influenced epoch.

#8

How the Supreme Court put itself in charge of the executive branch (Ian Millhiser, Vox)

In the less than three years since President Joe Biden took office, the Supreme Court has effectively seized control over federal housing policy, decided which workers must be vaccinated against Covid-19, stripped the EPA of much of its power to fight climate change, and rewritten a federal law permitting the secretary of education to modify or forgive student loans.

In each of these decisions, the Court relied on something known as the “major questions doctrine,” which allows the Court to effectively veto any action by a federal agency that five justices deem to be too economically significant or too politically controversial.

This major questions doctrine, at least as it is understood by the Court’s current majority, emerged almost from thin air in the past several years. And it has been wielded almost exclusively by Republican-appointed justices to invalidate policies created by a Democratic administration. This doctrine is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. Nor is it mentioned in any federal statute. It appears to have been completely made up by justices who want to wield outsize control over federal policy.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Millheiser does an excellent job explaining the impact and implications of the Major Questions Doctrine. The 6-3 right-wing Supreme Court majority is using this new doctrine to restrict the policies Democratic Administrations can pursue. (This Court didn’t use it to object to the expansions of executive power under President Trump. Subtle.) It is a political tool the conservative Justices are using to control Democratic presidents and Congresses. We should be clear about this dynamic as we consider prioritizing pushing for reforms to restore the Constitutional checks and balances among the three branches of our federal government.

#9

Team ACL: The growing women’s soccer club that no player wants to join (Ella Brockway, The Washington Post)

Studies show female athletes are two to eight times as likely as male athletes to tear an ACL, one of the bands of tissue that connect the femur and tibia at the knee. Since 2021, at least 87 players from eight of the world’s top women’s soccer leagues have torn their ACLs. Some of the sport’s biggest stars — such as U.S. attacker Catarina Macario, Dutch star Vivianne Miedema and the English duo of Beth Mead and Leah Williamson — will miss the World Cup because of this injury.

This recent wave is not a statistical anomaly but further proof of an ongoing issue that has no simple solution. Addressing it, many in the sport say, requires a zoomed-out approach that begins at soccer’s lowest levels and peels back all the layers of a gendered problem, from the physiological to the environmental.

In a moment of global growth for women’s sports, the ACL crisis strikes at the heart of a broader challenge. How can the infrastructure of women’s sports not simply replicate what exists for men’s sports but be optimized for female athletes? At the top levels of women’s soccer, players argue, such resources have not yet been provided.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The 2023 Women’s World Cup kicked off last Thursday, and we have seen some exciting action. It is essential that the focus on the sport leads to more study and action to figure out why so many women’s soccer players injure their ACLs. While an ACL injury may not be as devastating as it would have been even ten years ago thanks to advances in medicine, it still leads to nearly a year of rehabilitation and no guarantee that a player will be able to reach their previous level of performance. It is well past time to provide the resources necessary to help make this sport safer. Fans should be able to see the best players on the pitch as often as possible.

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“That the human project since its birth, and human flourishing in general, seems to have played out at the expense of the rest of the natural world is one of the stark and unsettling discoveries of science.”—Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. Send me things you’ve found interesting! You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

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Today’s Lineup

The power of holding grudges against the United States Supreme Court, learning more about Leonard Leo, the New York Times ignores an important story, emphasizing how abortion ban exceptions are fake, examining wrongful convictions and police shootings, a member of the Exonerated Five wins a Democratic primary for New York City Council, an amazing profile of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, Megan Rapinoe’s impact, and preparing for the 2023 Women’s World Cup.

#1

The importance of staying angry at the Supreme Court (Ian Millhiser, Vox)

“It’s disturbing that two of the nine justices, who collectively have the final word on how to read the First Amendment, would even suggest that they should not be criticized. But it is not particularly surprising. Federal judges, who are not elected, must draw their legitimacy from the public perception that they are obedient to a legal text. Criticisms like the Kagan dissent Roberts responded so sharply to can refute that perception, and feed the rapidly growing disapproval of the Court.

Similarly, disparagement of the justices and their decisions is one of the most powerful weapons ordinary Americans can wield against the nation’s nine justices. Indeed, if there is one lesson to be drawn from this Court’s recently completed term, it is to never underestimate the power of holding a grudge against the Supreme Court.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

While the Supreme Court pleasantly surprised liberals with rulings prohibiting racial gerrymandering and preserving some of the Voting Rights Act’s results doctrine, Millhiser argues that we must not let these outlier decisions overshadow the damage the Court did. He explains how conservative grudges against Warren Court decisions fed the activists and donors who created a judge pipeline with the Federalist Society and doctrines like the made-up Major Questions Doctrine. It took decades of work, some luck, and extra-constitutional actions by the Senate to create this 6-3 conservative supermajority. We should remain angry about this Court’s decisions to reverse women’s right to reproductive health care, block the Biden student loan debt relief program, and create a new right for businesses to discriminate against the LGBTQ community. I also want to highlight the horrific decision in Jones v. Hendrix that will prevent people with credible claims of being legally innocent from having the ability to challenge their convictions. Justice Clarence Thomas’ 6-3 opinion will keep innocent people in prison under a technicality. This is cruel. I hope we hold grudges against these decisions long enough to win elections, reform the Court, and restore these rights. 

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#2

Leonard Leo: Man in the Middle: Part I and Part II (Greg Olear, Prevail)

From Part I

“Occupying the center of an intricate web of political, legal, religious, and business connections, Leonard Leo is the quintessential Man in the Middle, a veritable dark-money spider. Like a spider, he is patient, painstaking, relentless, and much more powerful that he appears. And like a spider, he prefers to stay hidden.”

…

From Part II

“As many legal scholars have pointed out, the internal logic of the Leonard Leo Court is functionally nonexistent. Nothing holds. It’s like you’re halfway through Succession, one of the White Walkers from Game of Thrones shows up, and Kendall Roy starts shooting lasers from his eyes. There is no rhyme or reason to these decisions. The Leonard Leo judges will dredge up some anti-witchcraft statute from medieval England, while ignoring the last 50 years of settled law in the here and now; “Starry Decisis” may as well be Sam Alito’s drag name. Automatic weapons have more rights than women. Corporations have more rights than gays and Lesbians. And Leonard Leo and his moneyed chums have more rights than anyone.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

One of the easiest ways to predict how the Supreme Court will decide a case is to figure out what outcome conservative legal activist Leonard Leo would want. In these two posts, Greg Olear explains Leo’s connections to Supreme Court Justices, federal judges, Federalist Society lawyers, media members, billionaire donors, politicians, and radical Catholic activists. It is an extensive network, and Leo has the opportunity to build upon it as he begins to distribute the proceeds from a more than one billion dollar political donation he recently received. Understanding Leo and his web of connections is essential to figuring out how we got here and what may be necessary to change course. I also recommend this episode of the Strict Scrutiny podcast featuring a conversation with Amanda Hollis-Brusky, who is the author of Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution and Separate But Faithful: The Christian Right’s Radical Struggle to Transform Law & Legal Culture. Leo is an important political figure. He shouldn’t be able to hide in the shadows. 

#3

Donald Trump inspired a man to go to Barack Obama’s house with guns and explosives. The New York Times ignored it. (Jamison Foser, Finding Gravity)

“And so the New York Times has never told its readers, among other things, that Taranto was apparently inspired by Trump — remember, Trump’s name never appeared in the June 30 article. The Times has never told its readers that Taranto went to Obama’s home after he saw a social media post from Trump containing Obama’s address — an obvious attempt to incite just such an action.

This is just the latest in a long line of examples of the Times downplaying Donald Trump’s years-long efforts to encourage his supporters to commit acts of political violence against his opponents. There are few more important ongoing stories in America than the former president and current presidential candidate using violence and the threat of violence as a means of regaining power. Yet the New York Times — a newspaper that published multiple pieces about Alan Dershowitz not getting invited to parties — clearly does not take this seriously. Does not give it the relentless, ongoing coverage it deserves.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

How is former President Donald Trump’s involvement in this story not a development worthy of coverage in the “paper of record?” As Foser explains, the New York Times story about Taranto’s arrest does not mention Trump and the paper has not published another story about the case. Thankfully CBS News and the Associated Press have noted the connection between Trump’s social media activity and Taranto’s activities. As the Associated Press story explains, “On the day of his June 29 arrest, prosecutors said, Taranto reposted a Truth Social post from Trump containing what Trump claimed was Obama’s home address. In a post on Telegram, Taranto wrote: “We got these losers surrounded! See you in hell, Podesta’s and Obama’s.” That’s a reference to John Podesta, the former chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Democratic presidential campaign.” Over the past few days, I have had several conversations with people who closely follow politics and yet were unaware of the Trump post in connection to this dangerous situation. But I can’t be surprised, given how little attention the New York Times has paid to the situation. I cannot fathom how this story isn’t worthy of more coverage. 

#4

Abortion Exceptions Don’t Exist (Jessica Valenti, Abortion Every Day)

“The only thing that Americans want more than broad access to abortion is access to abortion for sexual violence victims and those whose health and lives are in danger. The polling is downright astronomical—even in red states, even among Republicans. And so it makes sense that conservatives would focus on exceptions; they desperately need an abortion stance that’s popular.

Best of all for the GOP, exceptions aren’t real. They’re deliberately designed to be unusable. So when Republicans announce their support for so-called exceptions—loudly proclaiming that they’re willing to meet in the middle—they’re presenting a compromise that doesn’t actually exist. For them, it’s a win-win.

Inexplicably, Democrats have spent little time pointing out that exceptions aren’t real—even though they have all the proof they need. 

Since Roe was overturned, horror story after horror story has come out of states with ‘exceptions’ to their bans. A woman in Texas going septic, a Missouri woman with a doomed and deadly pregnancy, a 10 year-old rape victim in Ohio. All lived in states where their circumstances should have qualified them for abortions, yet none were able to access care. One woman in Louisiana even had a fetus with a fatal condition that was specifically listed in the state’s exceptions, yet had to leave her home state for an abortion.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Jessica Valenti continues her essential work describing what is happening across the country in Abortion, Every Day. It is crucial for people to understand the truth behind the talk about the so-called exceptions to the unpopular abortion bans that Republicans have been enacting in states they control. I share Valenti’s frustration that Democratic elected officials have not done more to explain why this “exceptions” debate is so misleading. As many doctors have explained, pregnancy is too complicated to legislate. That’s why women and their physicians should make these decisions. Making that possible nationwide will require explaining how these laws work and how they impact pregnant people needing medical care. 

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#5

Religious right gets blindsided by angry parents in a Southern California school district (Blake Jones, Politico)

“Three Southern California school board members backed by a far-right pastor narrowly won election last fall in campaigns fueled by pandemic rage.

Then they banned critical race theory and rejected social studies materials that included LGBTQ rights hero Harvey Milk.

Now, they’re fighting for their political lives.

After just six months in office, those officials face a recall effort on top of a civil rights investigation launched by the state’s Democratic-led education department. Students have held protests, and irate parents and teachers are swarming the board’s meetings, feeling that their town — the fast-growing, politically diverse suburb of Temecula in Riverside County — has become consumed by partisan warfare.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Those students are correct. This right-wing school board also has fired its popular superintendent and now faces the prospect of the state securing textbooks that meet the state’s instructional standards. The chaotic situation in Temecula demonstrates why it is vital for community members to pay attention to down-ballot races. We know right-wing activists are focused on them. As the Associated Press’ Ali Swenson explained after attending the recent Moms for Liberty Convention: “…Moms for Liberty, which has spent its first two years inflaming school board meetings with aggressive complaints about instruction on systemic racism and gender identity in the classroom, is developing a larger strategy to overhaul education infrastructure across the country.” This dynamic will be one of the biggest stories of the 2024 elections—and not just in red states and communities. These are also the kinds of elections Republicans can win in blue states. And it makes sense for Republicans here to focus on these down-ballot elections in California since the GOP has failed to win a statewide office here since Arnold Schwarzenegger was re-elected as governor and Steve Poizner was elected insurance commissioner in November 2006.

#6

What if we treated wrongful convictions and bad police shootings the way we treat plane crashes? (Radley Balko, The Watch)

“When the criminal justice system goes terribly wrong, it’s rarely the fault of a single bad actor. A wrongly conviction typically includes errors or malfeasance by police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and the courts, not to mention possible contributions from crime lab analysts and other expert witnesses. Even a bad shooting by a single police officer are usually the product of institutional failure. Was the officer trained properly? What was the officer’s personnel history? Should the officer have been fired for previous misconduct? Does the police department use an early warning system to flag potentially abusive or trigger-happy officers? If not, why not? If so, why wasn’t that officer flagged?

A sentinel event review, or SER, is an attempt to dig into and correct these institutional failures. The idea is to bring in all the relevant parties to get at the root of what caused an outcome that everyone agrees is unacceptable.

The inspiration for the idea comes from two fields outside of criminal justice: the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigations of plane and train crashes, and the morbidity and mortality (M&M) reports hospitals conduct after medical errors, such as amputating the wrong limb or administering the wrong medication.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Balko, an investigative journalist and author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, shares this conversation with Quattrone Center Executive Director John Hollway about what can be done to get the criminal justice system to embrace these kinds of reviews. We know how they can help correct systemic problems and allow for greater transparency in other high-pressure situations. I think our criminal justice system would benefit for wider adoption of this model.

#7

Going from prison to politics with Yusef Salaam: podcast and transcript (MSNBC’s Why Is This Happening? with Chris Hayes)

Yusef Salaam was just 15 years old in 1989 when he, along with four other Black and Latino teenagers, were wrongly accused of the brutal rape and assault of a 28-year-old white woman who was jogging in Central Park. Salaam was convicted at 16 and was incarcerated for seven years. The group, known as the Central Park Five, maintained their innocence and they were exonerated in 2002 only after a convicted murderer and serial rapist confessed to the crimes. Salaam, who has since become known as one of the Exonerated Central Park Five, has turned his pain into purpose as an activist, criminal justice reform advocate and motivational speaker. He is the author of “Better, Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice” and his story has been told in numerous films and books. Salaam, who is now 49, launched a political campaign earlier this year and recently won the Democratic primary for a New York City Council seat in Harlem. He joins WITHpod to discuss his trajectory, being “run over by the spike wheels of justice,” and why he got involved in politics.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

This podcast features an informative conversation between MSNBC Host Chris Hayes and Exonerated Five member Yusef Salaam. Salaam just won an upset victory for a Democratic nomination for a seat on the New York City Council. Hayes asks about Salaam’s childhood, the wrongful conviction, and why he decided to seek political office. And as Politico’s Janaki Chadha explains, Salaam’s primary victory over two well-known politicians also represents a shift in political power in Harlem.

#8

Bitter rivals. Beloved friends. Survivors. After 50 years, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova understand each other like no one else can. When cancer came, they knew where to turn. (Sally Jenkins, The Washington Post)

They have known each other for 50 years now, outlasting most marriages. Aside from blood kin, Navratilova points out, “I’ve known Chris longer than anybody else in my life, and so it is for her.” Lately, they have never been closer — a fact they refuse to cheapen with sentimentality. “It’s been up and down, the friendship,” Evert says. At the ages of 68 and 66, respectively, Evert and Navratilova have found themselves more intertwined than ever, by an unwelcome factor. You want to meet an opponent who draws you nearer in mutual understanding? Try having cancer at the same time.

“It was like, are you kidding me?” Evert says.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

This profile by Sally Jenkins is one of the best articles I’ve read this year. It shares a remarkable story about two of the best athletes of the 20th Century. Jenkins describes their rivalry—they met in 60 final matches and each won 18 major titles—and how it got in the way of their friendship until after they retired. We also learn how they supported each other when facing their recent cancer diagnoses. They share a remarkable history, and Jenkins was absolutely the right person to put all of it into context.

#9

The Megan Rapinoe Era Only Ends When We Stop Fighting Back (Dave Zirin, The Nation)

Megan Rapinoe, the most important US soccer player of the last 20 years, is retiring. The 38-year-old with a goal-scoring flair as striking as her kaleidoscopic coif announced that she will be saying goodbye after the 2023 World Cup. In telling the world now, Rapinoe has created the possibility of a dramatic sendoff, driving even more interest in what will be a rollicking tournament.

Rapinoe’s two-decade career is nearly peerless. Her 199 career games with the US national team, her 63 international goals—many of them scored in unbearably tense moments—will be remembered for as long as people take the pitch. Her 2019 was particularly epic. That year, she won the Ballon d’Or as the FIFA women’s player of the year, scored six goals at the World Cup, and won the Golden Boot as the tournament’s top scorer and the Golden Ball for top player.

But Rapinoe became widely known as far more than a soccer player in 2016 when she became the first white athlete to take a knee during the national anthem in solidarity with the protests against racism and police violence staged by Colin Kaepernick.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Dave Zirin did an outstanding job of revisiting interviews he has done with Rapinoe over the years to describe the impact she had on women’s soccer as a player and on our nation as an activist. She has been at the forefront of conversations about LGBTQ rights, anti-racism, trans inclusion, and equal pay for women athletes. She has been a consistent voice against injustices. Former President Trump targeted her for criticism even as she was leading the United States Women’s National Team to its fourth World Cup victory in 2019. I would love it if she could finish her international career by helping the United States Women’s National Team to become the first women’s or men’s team to win a third consecutive World Cup. The USWNT’s first game in the tournment’s group stage is against Vietnam on Friday, July 21, at 6 p.m. pacific time.

The Closer

Speaking of the 2023 Women’s World Cup, the event kicks off on Thursday, July 20. This year’s edition is being hosted by Australia and New Zealand. One of the best ways to get prepared is to read the new The Women’s Game newsletter from the Men in Blazers network. Meg Swanick, one of my favorite women’s soccer journalists, has been previewing each of the groups this week. She will provide daily updates on the action when the tournament starts. You can subscribe by clicking here.

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“No one can lie to you without your approval. The liar and the recipient participate in a fabric of mythmaking together. A lie does not have power by its utterance—its power lies in someone agreeing to believe the lie.” (Pamela Meyer, Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception)

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#1

FBI resisted opening probe into Trump’s role in Jan. 6 for more than a year (By Carol D. Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis, Washington Post)

“A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation.

A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace. Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him, The Post found.

In November 2022, after Trump announced he was again running for president, making him a potential 2024 rival to President Biden, Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to take over the investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

One of the traits about President Joe Biden I have most appreciated is his apparent understanding of the perilous state of our democracy. He clearly articulates how dangerous Trump and his supporters are to our democratic institutions. That he was the person best situated to defeat Trump was the underpinning of Biden’s 2020 campaign—and his current run for re-election. 

This dynamic is why I was so baffled when he nominated Merrick Garland to become Attorney General. Yes, the nation needed someone in that job who could restore the independence of the Department of Justice. It was a fun poke back at Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s machinations to prevent Garland from getting a hearing after President Obama nominated him for a position on the Supreme Court. 

But we also needed a leader at the Justice Department who would not flinch at the delicate task of addressing the Trumpian attempt to steal the 2020 election and then to foster the January 6, 2021, insurrection. After all, as the progressive political writer Doug Porter rightly explained, “A coup attempt that goes unpunished becomes a training exercise.”

This Washington Post story sadly explores how my fears apparently were not misplaced. Garland and his leadership team tried not to address the leaders of the coup attempt and focused on those on the ground. 

Ultimately, it was Trump’s decision to run for president that ended the Department of Justice’s slow walk of the investigation. That development led Garland to appoint Jack Smith as Special Counsel in November 2022. The fact that Smith has been able to move so quickly to secure grand jury indictments highlights for me what Garland and his team missed. 

That said, I agree with the points Charlie Pierce makes in his latest Esquire column about why Garland should stay in office: 

“Calls to fire Garland and other DOJ officials are simply stupid; decapitating the DOJ at this point would be disastrous. Smith seems to be advancing on every front, and Garland doesn’t seem to mind that at all. I wish the slow-walk hadn’t pushed us so close to the election season, but there’s nothing to do about that now and, anyway, the criminal culpability of an individual shouldn’t be hostage to political ambitions. Now that DOJ has righted itself, it should throttle up and get really busy.”

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#2

Fox News Worth Watching: An Hour with Hannity and Newsom (James Fallows, Breaking the News)

“As we were walking out at the end of our talk, Newsom mentioned that he was looking forward to a possible interview that Hannity had suggested, the details of which were still being worked out.

I thought but did not say, What??? 

Wasn’t this just walking into an opportunity to be talked over and yelled at? Didn’t he realize how California in general and its governor in particular were never-ending objects of snark and attack on Fox? Was this really a good idea—to engage in any way with the network that had just paid out $787 million for its knowing lies about Joe Biden’s election?

More precisely, he was right to take it on—given that he came in fully prepared. Prepared factually, rhetorically, and temperamentally, so that he ended up looking like the one who was having fun while Hannity blustered and stumbled and left Newsom looking like he was in control.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

We should not underestimate just how difficult it is to achieve what California Governor Gavin Newsom achieved during his interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Newsom dominated the conversation with facts, poise, and good humor. Fallows, a former presidential speechwriter, knows just how difficult it is for a politician to succeed under these circumstances. Fallows analyzes how Newsom was able to keep Hannity on the defensive. Newsom does not get enough credit for his policy knowledge, but he also demonstrated an engaging ability to discuss the facts with a cheerful temperament. Other Democratic and liberal leaders can learn a great deal from Newsom’s masterful performance.

#3

Don’t look away: The post-Dobbs attack on women’s health (Don Moynihan, Can We Still Govern?)

“To be sure, maternal health is an area where there is a lot of room for improvement. The US has staggeringly bad maternal mortality rates compared to other countries. But the actual consistent effect of the anti-abortion policies is to worsen women’s health. The post-Dobbs era will compel dangerous full term pregnancies where the life or the health of the mother is threatened, or the fetus is not viable. It will create maternal health deserts in large swathes of the country as medical providers exit, unwilling to accept being blocked from using their medical training to help patients. 

The mixture of post-Dobbs state laws and practices cumulatively represents a deprofessionalization of health care. By deprofessionalization, I mean a loss of the capacity of health providers to have autonomy over their actions, relying on professional medical norms and training. In more prosaic terms, this means the freedom of doctors and nurses to act according to the wishes and best interests of their patients.

We are seeing the state intervene in the doctor-patient relationship, restricting what doctors can say and do even when it clearly increases the health risks of patients. Such deprofessionalization is not unique to health providers in our current populist moment (see also education, or election administration). Fear and uncertainty serve as a central means to compel obedience to ambiguous laws.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Don Moynihan, the McCourt Chair of Public Policy at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, writes frequently about how government works and how it can do better. 

In this post, Moynihan turns his attention to how abortion bans damage the government functions that impact pregnant people and the doctors and nurses who want to help them. It is an outstanding summary of a rapidly deteriorating situation. 

Moynihan explains:

• Why doctors and nurses are leaving states with abortion bans; 
• How healthcare access is already noticeably deteriorating; and 
• Why the so-called exceptions in abortion bans are not genuine because medical professionals are unwilling to take the risk of facing the severe consequences of providing medical care that violates the vague language included in these laws. 

And while you are thinking about these issues, I encourage you to check out the latest edition of Jessica Valenti’s This Week in Abortion summary from her Abortion, Every Day Substack. There is so much happening across the country right now, and this is a great way to stay on top of developments.

#4

‘Pretty staggering’: Thousands of California police officers could be stripped of their badges under new law (Sophia Bollag, San Francisco Chronicle)

“California’s police standards commission is bracing to decertify or suspend 3,000 to 3,500 police officers each year for serious misconduct under a new state law, according to estimates from the commission.

The estimates suggest the police officers engaging in serious misconduct in any given year could represent a significant percentage of the roughly 90,000 officers working in California, although some may already be fired or retired by the time the commission moves to strip them of their certification.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

It is crucial to remove police officers guilty of serious misconduct from their positions of authority. It wasn’t until 2021 that California passed a law to create this process to strip police officers of their certification if they are found guilty of engaging in serious misconduct. The fact that up to four percent of police officers in the state could face such a hearing in the first year of the program demonstrates how overdue California is to take this issue seriously.

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#5

Well-funded Christian group behind US effort to roll back LGBTQ+ rights (Adam Gabbatt, The Guardian)

“With the US besieged by a rightwing culture war campaign that aims to strip away rights from LGBTQ+ people and others, blame tends to be focused on Republican politicians and conservative media figures.

But lurking behind efforts to roll back abortion rights, to demonize trans people, and to peel back the protections afforded to gay and queer Americans is a shadowy, well-funded rightwing legal organization, experts say.

Since it was formed in 1994, Alliance Defending Freedom has been at the center of a nationwide effort to limit the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people, all in the name of Christianity. The Southern Poverty Law Center has termed it an “anti-LGBTQ hate group” that has extended its tentacles into nearly every area of the culture wars.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is among the conservative leaders who have associated with the Alliance Defending Freedom since Trump’s rise to the presidency. The group is behind many of the manufactured cultural war legal disputes, including the 303 Creative web design company case about which the Supreme Court will soon issue a ruling. As The Guardian’s Abbott explains: 

“The plaintiff, 303 Creative, is a website design company. 303 Creative has never made wedding websites, but its owner, Lorie Smith, claims her first amendment rights are being impinged because, if she were to start making wedding websites, she would not want to make them for same-sex couples – which would violate Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws.”

I think we must understand the network of organizations fueling the manufactured culture war disputes that radical conservatives are using to change our country in their image. They have a huge head start.

#6

US Media Hype Yet Another Fake “ISIS” Plot, This Time Targeting a Teenager With History of Mental Problems (Adam Johnson, The Column)

“It’s one of the genuinely predictable facts of media criticism: See a headline about the FBI swooping in and “foiling” a terror plot, stopping terror financing, or thwarting a terror trip to Syria or Iraq, there’s a 99 percent chance there was no actual “terrorists” involved—but only an elaborate network of paid informants and undercover agents. And this isn’t just a number pulled out of thin air: According to one 2013 study by researcher Trevor Aaronson, less than one percent of “terror plots” foiled by the FBI are real plots, in the sense that they would have occurred whether the FBI was “monitoring” them or not.

Such is the case with a recent breaking news story, parroted last week with little-to-no criticism, involving an 18-year-old Massachusetts man allegedly attempting to send money to “ISIS” using gift cards. Fortunately, The Intercept’s Murtaza Hussain decided to do some actual reporting and followed up on the hysterical claims made by the FBI and found that the suspect had mental problems and was groomed by undercover FBI agents from the age of 16…”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The 18-year-old at the center of this story never spoke to an actual terrorist—just an undercover FBI agent who started interacting with him online when he was 16. Why are we still allowing FBI agents to entrap people in this way in 2023? Why do most media outlets take law enforcement claims at face value and uncritically share information from FBI press releases in their coverage despite what we’ve learned about similar situations? As Johnson writes:

“When the headlines of a particular genre of reporting fall apart 99 percent of the time, perhaps thinking adults working in newsrooms can stop, on cue, playing their predictable role as fear conduit—and instead try, from the outset, to question the official government narrative.”

#7

Apple Is Taking On Apples in a Truly Weird Trademark Battle (Gabriela Galindo, Wired)

“The Fruit Union Suisse is 111 years old. For most of its history, it has had as its symbol a red apple with a white cross—the Swiss national flag superimposed on one of its most common fruits. But the group, the oldest and largest fruit farmer’s organization in Switzerland, worries it might have to change its logo, because Apple, the tech giant, is trying to gain intellectual property rights over depictions of apples, the fruit.

“We have a hard time understanding this, because it’s not like they’re trying to protect their bitten apple,” Fruit Union Suisse director Jimmy Mariéthoz says, referring to the company’s iconic logo. “Their objective here is really to own the rights to an actual apple, which, for us, is something that is really almost universal … that should be free for everyone to use.”

While the case has left Swiss fruit growers puzzled, it’s part of a global trend. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s records, Apple has made similar requests to dozens of IP authorities around the world, with varying degrees of success. Authorities in Japan, Turkey, Israel, and Armenia have acquiesced. Apple’s quest to own the IP rights of something as generic as a fruit speaks to the dynamics of a flourishing global IP rights industry, which encourages companies to compete obsessively over trademarks they don’t really need.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Apple has a reputation as a “good” tech company that looks out for its customers’ privacy. I love their products. But Apple—and other major companies—deserve to be called out for this kind of abuse and overreach. The success of the iPhone doesn’t give the company the right to own the IP of a fruit.

#8

I just bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print, and I regret nothing (Benj Edwards, Ars Technica)

“These days, many of us live online, where machine-generated content has begun to pollute the Internet with misinformation and noise. At a time when it’s hard to know what information to trust, I felt delight when I recently learned that World Book still prints an up-to-date book encyclopedia in 2023. Although the term “encyclopedia” is now almost synonymous with Wikipedia, it’s refreshing to see such a sizable reference printed on paper. So I bought one, and I’ll tell you why.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I loved reviewing the World Book encyclopedia in the library as a kid. I would look up something for class and then get lost reviewing entries in the pages surrounding the item I was initially interested in. (I still get lost going down informational rabbit holes on the internet today, starting looking up one thing and then ending up on a deep dive about an unexpected subject.) I’m glad to learn it is still possible to do this with a printed book. 

#9

The Diplomat Is An Authoritarian Fantasy for Liberals (Noah Bertlatsky, Everything Is Horrible)

“Debora Cahn was a writer for The West Wing, and her Netflix show The Diplomat isn’t shy about its Democratic party sympathies. The aging, crusty, but basically honorable president William Rayburn (Michael McKean) is an obvious Biden analogue. His unnamed predecessor, often criticized for his failure to engage with global diplomacy, is just as obviously supposed to be Trump. The show celebrates career diplomats and civil servants, those untrustworthy deep staters that the GOP keeps villifying. It denigrates xenophobic Brexiters and right wing “compassionless conservatives.” There’s little question that the star, pragmatic, committed career foreign service officer Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) votes blue.

And yet, despite its clear liberal partisan bias, the show sets itself against voting with antidemocratic instincts that would do MAGA proud.

This isn’t that surprising; Hollywood has a long history of portraying democracy as an unsavory, and even unnecessary, barrier to virtue and good policy. But that hoary anti-populist boilerplate looks especially misguided post-J6 coup, as we face a full-blown authoritarian assault on the principles of self-governance. The supposedly progressive Diplomat inadvertently underlines the extent to which pulp tropes are incompatible with progressive principles—such as representative democracy.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I enjoyed binging The Diplomat with my girlfriend Stacey earlier this month. It is one of the kinds of shows or movies I enjoy the most. It may be unrealistic, but it gets just enough right about politics and espionage to be engaging and thought-provoking. And fun!

This is why despite being entertained, I wish I had considered these authoritarian dynamics enough until I read this piece. Yes, I would want someone like Kate Wyler to have positions of influence and power in our government. But this shouldn’t come at the expense of public opinion, political campaigns, or elections. We must not forget that part of being an effective political leader is doing the politics well.

I’m still looking forward to season two. That was quite a cliffhanger.  

The Closer

I’ve watched what this San Jose Earthquakes fan accomplished dozens of times.

I hope John Fisher actually came through and paid the prize. Yes, that nepo baby billionaire policy failure is the atrocious owner of the Earthquakes as well as the Athletics.

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“TK

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Today’s Lineup

AI’s impact on the 2024 election, the nightmare of being pregnant with complications in Texas, Nepo baby John Fisher, Pat Robertson’s legacy, Ron DeSantis and the history of cultural Marxism, former Navy Captain Crozier speaks about how he lost his career defending his sailors from COVID, U.S. spy agencies are buying our personal data, the history of the baseball cap, a proper €121,000 speeding fine, and how a four chord progression makes music great.

#1

AI’s Rapid Growth Threatens to Flood 2024 Campaigns With Fake Videos (Sabrina Siddiqui and Ryan Tracy, The Wall Street Journal)

“China invades Taiwan and migrants surge across the U.S.-Mexico border in a video depicting the aftermath of President Biden’s re-election. In a series of images, former President Donald Trump is pursued on foot and apprehended by uniformed police officers. Another photo shows the Pentagon engulfed in flames following an explosion.

The common denominator among these scenes? They are all fake. Rapidly evolving artificial intelligence is making it easier to generate sophisticated videos and images that can deceive viewers and spread misinformation, posing a major threat to political campaigns as 2024 contests get under way.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Given how inexpensive these new AI tools are to use, I think it is inevitable that we will see an explosion of fake videos and stories during the 2024 campaign. We’ve already seen a crude first use of the technology from the Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. How are campaigns and media outlets going to manage these developments? There is already a media literacy crisis, so can we teach voters and reporters how to identify potentially faked images and videos? Can AI also be used to expose and prevent fakes and disinformation? Can we prevent the United States from slipping further towards autocracy if voters are fooled by the misinformation AI tools can create? I’m not optimistic. 

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#2

An American Nightmare: Young, pregnant & living in Texas (Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day)

“Just a few hours later, the couple were sitting in front of a maternal fetal specialist in Austin delivering unthinkable news: Terry’s fetus had not developed at all above the neck—there was no head. It was a one-in-a-million abnormality, the specialist told them. And while the fetus obviously had no chance of survival, there was still heartbeat present. 

In Texas—which enacted a near-total abortion ban in 2021, and a total ban shortly after Roe v. Wade was overturned—that was a problem. 

Texas’ abortion law doesn’t have an exception for fetal abnormalities, not even lethal ones. The state requires women to carry pregnancies even when the fetus has no chance of survival, a cruelty that Republican legislators don’t like to talk about.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

We need to highlight the real-life consequences of the abortion bans Republicans have rushed to pass since the Supreme Court last year overturned the limited federal right to abortion. Valenti tells the story of a Texas couple who had a wanted pregnancy take a tragic turn. But the abortion ban also meant that Terry (a pseudonym) could not receive necessary medical care even though her life was at risk. The purposefully vague language in these laws means doctors are unsure how to help their patients legally. 

#3

Nepo Baby John Fisher Gets His Wish, Moves One Step Closer to Ripping A’s Away From Oakland (Molly Knight, The Long Game)

“Let’s say you’re lucky enough to be born to the two people who invented The Gap. You attend Phillips Exeter Academy and then Princeton. You use family connections to get jobs working as a fund raiser for Ronald Reagan, and then George H. W. Bush. You go to Stanford Business School and graduate with an MBA. You go to work for a real estate company that does business with mommy and daddy’s clothing giant, and that venture somehow flops.

You are worth literally billions of dollars that you did not earn, but you are 43 years old and bored, and you don’t want to go sit on a beach drinking Mai Tais for the rest of your life.

So, what do you do next?

Well, if you’re John Fisher, you buy a stake in your hometown-ish Oakland A’s in 2005, along with your pal Lew Wolff, and promise fans that after they endured the franchise’s cheapskate Moneyball Era, better days are ahead.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

[Narrator voice:] Better days were not ahead. John Fisher is one of the worst owners in Major League Baseball history. That’s quite an achievement since one has to be genuinely putrid to get on that list given who has owned baseball teams since the professionalization of the sport in the 1870s. I attended the Reverse Boycott game organized by Oakland A’s fans on Tuesday because they do not deserve what Fisher—and Owners Representative (don’t call him Commissioner because he’s proven he doesn’t care about the fans) Rob Manfred—have done to this fanbase as they’ve lied and schemed to facilitate the franchise’s impending move to Las Vegas. Fisher has done quite a bit to demonstrate why I believe every billionaire is a policy failure. No person should have this much power. The fact that baseball’s leaders have been complicit in this farce rather than taking steps to ensure Fisher would field a competitive team is the latest stain on the sport. 

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#4

How Pat Robertson Helped Create The Christian Nationalist Lawyer Brigade Reshaping American Life (Sarah Posner, Talking Points Memo)

“Christian Coalition and Christian Broadcasting Network founder Pat Robertson, who died [a week ago] Thursday at the age of 93, is best known for his failed foray into the 1988 GOP presidential primary, his training of evangelicals to be both successful candidates and reliable voters, and his decades-long highlight reel of homophobia, misogyny, racism, conspiracy theories, apocalyptic warnings, and pronouncements of God’s impending wrath on America for the sins of the left.

Less well understood, though, was Robertson’s significant contribution to the Christianization of the legal profession, and the development of a Christian nationalist legal brigade that has set its sights on ending the separation of church and state, abortion and LGBTQ rights.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Grasping Pat Robertson’s influence over the modern Republican Party is necessary to understanding the current state of our politics. Robertson’s takeover of what became the Regent University School of Law has produced Christian nationalist lawyers who have become judges, GOP politicians, and Republican presidential administration political appointees. Robertson also used his Christian Broadcasting Network—and the daily The 700 Club television program (which will never end)—to transform conservative politics over the past five decades. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent also does an outstanding job explaining Robertson’s impact in this interview with Rick Perlstein, who has done landmark work in a series of books about the rise of modern conservatism. 

#5

What Ron DeSantis and a Norwegian mass murderer have in common (Robert Mackey, The Racket)

“When Ron DeSantis finally took a question from a non-right-wing outlet earlier this month, NBC News’s Dasha Burns asked him to respond to criticisms that he uses the word “woke” so often that it has started to lose its meaning. DeSantis replied: “Look, we know what woke is, it’s a form of cultural Marxism.”

That answer puzzled many Americans who had never heard of “cultural Marxism,” but it chilled me. That’s because I remember where I was when I first heard of the far-right conspiracy theory that progressives who are committed to fighting discrimination based on race, sex, gender, religion or immigration status are engaged in a secret Marxist plot to undermine Western civilization.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I want Governor DeSantis to answer questions about how much of the history of the phrase “cultural marxism” he agrees with—because it’s not just a cute turn of phrase that Fox News likes to promote. Does he agree with its anti-semitic roots? How about how white supremacist Anders Behring Breivik used the term 628 times in a manifesto that outlined his motives for killing 77 people—mostly children—in his 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway? 

#6

Capt. Crozier is finally ready to talk about the COVID chaos that cost him his career (Joe Garofoli, The San Francisco Chronicle)

“Capt. Brett Crozier became the center of an international story in March 2020 after The Chronicle published his email begging top Navy brass to send more help as COVID-19 quickly spread among the 5,000 sailors on the nuclear aircraft carrier he commanded in the early, chaotic days of the pandemic. 

The leak and the turmoil that followed eventually cost Crozier — and Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly, who fired him — their jobs. Crozier, speaking publicly about the incident for the first time, said he would have done it again, even though he was on track to becoming an admiral.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Crozier paid a price for trying to take care of the sailors under his command. After all, his request for help was inconvenient to a Trump Administration trying to minimize the impact of the virus’ spread. Reporters have been trying to get Crozier to talk about his experience for years, and now we are hearing from him about the decisions he made in the early days of COVID as he discusses his new memoir. 

#7

U.S. Spy Agencies Buy Vast Quantities of Americans’ Personal Data, U.S. Says (Byron Tau and Dustin Volz, The Wall Street Journal)

“The vast amount of Americans’ personal data available for sale has provided a rich stream of intelligence for the U.S. government but created significant threats to privacy, according to a newly released report by the U.S.’s top spy agency.

Commercially available information, or CAI, has grown in such scale that it has begun to replicate the results of intrusive surveillance techniques once used on a more targeted and limited basis, the report found.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Congress needs to step up its oversight of these programs if the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government still matter. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) deserves credit for raising the issue and extracting a promise for the creation of this report from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines during her confirmation hearings. But now we need to see the legislative branch do its job to protect Americans from the use of this information. 

#8

The long, strange history of the baseball cap (Michael Clair, MLB.com)

“The baseball cap is a really great marketing tool,” Tom Shieber, senior curator for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, said. “I don’t think they realized it was a marketing tool for a long, long time. People get it now, right? I mean, entire businesses are based on it. Because it’s right there. It’s a billboard, right above your head, where people pay attention.”

But where did the cap come from and how did it get here? How did it become both the quintessential piece of a ballplayer’s uniform, as well as the go-to wardrobe accessory for stars, artists, and the common person? To answer that question, we need to go all the way back to the game’s very first organized team.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

It’s a rare day when I am not wearing a baseball cap. I mostly can be found with one of many versions of a Chicago Cubs cap (my favorite is a ’47 brand cap featuring a white bear logo the Cubs featured around 1914). But sometimes, I mix it up with baseball cap-style hats supporting Manchester United, the United States National Soccer Team, or Bowdoin College (whose mascot is a Polar Bear, so my favorite Cubs hat does double duty supporting both team and alma mater). So I enjoyed learning about the evolution of the baseball cap, starting with the New York Knickerbockers straw hats that appeared around 1849. 

#9

Finnish businessman hit with €121,000 speeding fine (Jon Henley, The Guardian)

“A multimillionaire businessman has been hit with one of the world’s highest speeding fines – €121,000 (£104,000) – for driving 30km/h (18.6mph) over the limit in Finland, where tickets are calculated as a percentage of the offender’s income.

…

As is common in the Nordic region, fines for traffic infringements in Finland are based on the severity of the offence and the offender’s income, which police can check instantly by connecting via their smartphones to a central taxpayer database.

Under the Finnish system, a “day fine” is calculated based on the offender’s daily disposable income, generally considered to be half their daily net income. The more a driver is over the limit, the greater the number of day fines they receive.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

In 1921, Finland became the first country to introduce a “Day Fine” system. I think it is a more equitable system than fixed fines. I’d like to see California and the United States adopt the concept. 

The Closer

Ed Sheeran was found not guilty of copying Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On writing his song Thinking Out Loud in a United States copyright case. As the BBC explained, “A musicologist for Sheeran’s defence told the court that the four-chord sequence in question was used in several songs before Gaye’s hit came out in 1973.”

People aware of the Australian comedy group Axis of Awesome’s 4-Chord  sketch were not surprised by the court’s decision. 

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“The rich know what historians know: every society in human history with levels of inequality like those in the United States today has descended into war, revolution, or plague. No exceptions. There are precisely zero historical precedents that don’t end in destruction.” (Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War)

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Today’s Lineup

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: why I would like the Democrats to fight back, a cheer to House Democrats for starting the discharge petition process for the national debt ceiling, the Biden Administration may finally try to help Vice President Kamala Harris improve her standing with voters, introducing the people who will lead Biden’s re-election campaign, Peter Thiel discovers Republicans care about the culture wars, Senator Patty Murray reaches a milestone, roadside drug tests are junk science, the first moon landing was much closer to ending in disaster than I had thought, there’s a cool graphic of a space elevator, figuring out the economics of Succession, and a New Jersey Little League has an innovative idea to address umpire abuse.

Leading Off

I participate every couple of weeks in a virtual coffee club with other members of the Lamorinda Democratic Club. I learn something every week—and the most valuable conversations expose my potential political and policy blind spots.

In our most recent gathering, I ended up expressing frustration about how Democratic leaders are still acting like both parties are following the norms to which we had become accustomed in the post-war period.

I wanted to know when Democrats were going to fight back against the anti-democratic efforts being demonstrated by the Republican Party leadership in Washington, D.C., and state capitals.

Why aren’t Democrats talking about the Republicans who supported election denial and the January 6 insurrection? Where was the political accountability? Why wasn’t this an issue in every interview and in every hearing?

Why isn’t every mention of investigating Hunter Biden met with a reply about a potential subpoena for Jared Kushner or Ivana Trump?

Why aren’t conversations about the corruption at the Supreme Court a reason to remind voters that the Senate Republicans had broken all of the norms to steal two seats?

Republicans demonstrate nearly every day that they are willing to break any norms to ensure ensure they have the power to implement an agenda unpopular with the American people.

Republican political leaders expelled Democratic legislators in Tennessee. In Montana, they suspended a legislator from being able to speak or even make an appearance on the legislative floor. Governors in Florida and Texas are discussing removing locally elected district attorneys if they use their prosecutorial discretion to avoid targeting pregnant people seeking abortion care. Republicans in several states are discussing raising the threshold for voters to pass a proposition—or to ban certain subjects from the ballot altogether.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are still allowing Republicans to block judges and justices using the blue slip tradition that requires both Senators from a nominee’s home state to consent to the confirmation process moving forward. The Senate Judiciary Committee refuses to use its subpoena power to require the Supreme Court Justices to explain their actions (and that situation is complicated by the lengthy absence of Senator Dianne Feinstein D-CA).

Things are not normal. I want to see more of a recognition of the realities of this political moment. It is not the job of reporters to raise this issues on their own, as much as some may wish they would. It is the job of Democrats to force the conversations about these dynamics through debate, events, and actions.

So I am happy that we are finally seeing some action on the national debt ceiling calamity. Earlier today we learned that my Member of Congress, Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA) had introduced a bill at the start of the session that now will be used to see if five Republicans will join the Democrats in forcing a vote on a clean debt ceiling increase through a discharge petition.

I don’t think this bill is going to pass any earlier than the deadline for a breach of the debt ceiling. But at least something now exists. Democrats can talk about it. Democrats can ask why so-called moderate Republicans won’t sign on to a clean increase to the national debt ceiling when the other alternative is the extreme House Republican bill.

The national debt ceiling situation is a dangerous one for our country, made worse because it is entirely unnecessary. Democrats should have eliminated it when they had the power to do so because they have seen how it was used to hold the nation hostage.

But at least the Democrats showed a bit of fight on this one issue today. I hope Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) can take some inspiration from the example.

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Quick Pitches

California

• Legislation seeking to address California’s housing crisis has created a split within organized labor.

  CalMatters’ Ben Christopher explains what the legislation is attempting to achieve and how the debate has led to a public disagreement within the State Building and Construction Trades Council: “Two affiliates of the trades council defected, throwing their weight behind a housing bill that the parent organization had been fighting for months. It’s a surprising and surprisingly public break that could help shift the political balance long defining California housing policy.  
  The bill in question would make permanent a 2017 state law that expedites affordable housing construction in many parts of the state. Under the reauthorization proposal, developers who make use of the law would be required to pay union-level wages — a standard that some in the building industry say still makes construction untenably expensive in many parts of the state. But it scraps a provision that mandates the hiring of union members for some projects.” (Ben Christopher, CalMatters)

• California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis (D) became the first candidate to announce that she is running for governor in 2026. By announcing early, Kounalakis is following the example set by current Governor Gavin Newsom when he announced his intention to seek the top job soon after beginning his second term as Lt. Governor. (Christopher Cadelago, Politico)
• Just a few hours after Kounalakis’ announcement, former State Controller Betty Yee (D) announced that she also intended to run for governor but didn’t intend to formally file until later this year. (Sophia Bollag, San Francisco Chronicle)

Politics

• The Biden Administration finally appears to have a plan to try to improve Vice President Kamala Harris’ political standing. It’s long overdue. (Alex Thompson, Axios)
• Here are the people President Biden has tasked with being the senior campaign staff for his re-election campaign, starting with Campaign Manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez. (Matt Berg, Politico)
• Several people who would have been plausible National Finance Chairs for the Biden re-election campaign are unavailable because they currently serve as U.S. Ambassadors. So how might Biden handle the situation—and might the national fundraising ambassador prove to be Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg? (Theodore Schleifer, Puck)
• Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who donated millions to back former President Donald Trump in 2016 and successful U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance (R-OH), is telling people that he plans to sit out the 2024 cycle. Apparently, Thiel has just discovered that GOP legislators are serious about focusing on fighting a culture war rather than tech innovation. This has been obvious for a couple of decades, so it’s great to see the tech elite catch up a bit to reality. (Anna Tong, Alexandra Ulmer, and Jeffrey Dastin, Reuters)
• U.S. Senate President Pro Tempore Patty Murray (D-WA) recently became the first woman to cast 10,000 floor votes in the United States Senate, joining a list including 32 men. (Jacob Knutson, Axios)
• Former prisoners at the Guantánamo prison camp have accused Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) of observing and covering up the torture of inmates when he was assigned as a navy lawyer there. (Julian Borger and Oliver Laughland, The Guardian)
• “A Nebraska state lawmaker and mother to a trans child is being formally investigated over a potential conflict of interest for opposing restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors, a move that several senators from both parties were quick to denounce.” Given our experience with such issues, I doubt that as many lawmakers will denounce the next effort to silence a colleague. (Grace Moon, The Washington Post)
• We are all quite fortunate that all Jack Douglas Teixeira attempted to do was leak classified documents. Some of his classmates thought he was dangerous enough to potentially be a school shooter.

  As Natalia Antonova writes: “Teixeira’s stupidity means we all got lucky. If he was smarter, this could have been much worse. He could’ve fled before he was apprehended. If he was crazier, this could have been much worse as well. He could’ve barricaded himself in with a bunch of hostages.” (Natalia Antonova, Natalia Mitigates The Apocalypse)

• Roadside drug tests often used to convict people have been found to indicate many false positives.

  “For years, these tests have had this unjustified scientific veneer,” said Des Walsh, founder of the Roadside Drug Test Innocence Alliance, which advocates for the use of more accurate testing technology. “Finally, we believe the tide is turning with this dawning awareness of the unacceptably high rate of false positives.”

  The National Registry of Exonerations records 131 instances of drug convictions being overturned after more accurate tests reviewed the evidence and found no illegal substances. Judges should not allow prosecutors to use this kind of junk science as a critical piece of evidence in their courtrooms or to make plea deals. (Ryan Gabrielson, ProPublica)

• Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito says he knows who leaked his draft opinion in the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, but he won’t share what he knows. He’s also angry that people question his judgment and the current Court majority’s authority. None of this should seem normal. (Jonathan Chait, New York Intelligencer)

Abortion, Contraception, and Reproductive Rights

• In Oklahoma, Jaci Stratton discovered that she had a molar pregnancy, where the fetus would not survive and the tissue had become cancerous. This put her life at risk. But the strict abortion bans meant doctors felt they could not legally act to help her.

  “They were very sincere; they weren’t trying to be mean,” Statton, 25, says. “They said, ‘The best we can tell you to do is sit in the parking lot, and if anything else happens, we will be ready to help you. But we cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack.’”

  They had to wait until she was crashing in front of them. That is a monstrous outcome. Stratton had to go to a different state to get the health care she needed. But this is an example of the real-life implications of the strict and confusing abortion bans Republican legislatures are passing. (Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR)

• So-called abortion ban exceptions may help Republican politicians in their efforts to hide their extremism from voters, but they won’t help women and pregnant people access needed reproductive health services. We should never forget that the exception laws are written to ensure they are almost impossible to use. (Carter Sherman, Vice)
• Ten states have relaxed child labor protections recently. A new proposed federal law would allow 16 and 17-year-olds to work dangerous jobs in the logging industry. This is one way to fill jobs while continuing to suppress wages. (Michael Sainato, The Guardian)

Science

• NASA launched Voyager 2 in 1977, but the spacecraft has continued to send back data even as it has reached interstellar space. While its power supply will eventually go out, scientists now have plans to use a small battery backup to extend its data-gathering lifetime. (Joshua Hawkins, BGR)
• “Doctors, scientists and researchers have built an artificial intelligence model that can accurately identify cancer in a development they say could speed up diagnosis of the disease and fast-track patients to treatment.” (Andrew Gregory, The Guardian)
• I didn’t realize until reading this story over the weekend just how close Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin came to being stranded on the moon. Thankfully Aldrin was able to use a felt tip pen to address a broken circuit breaker switch whose function was required for the two astronauts to lift off from the moon. (Lesley Kennedy, History)
• Neal Agarwal has created an animated simulation of using a space elevator to go from the Earth’s surface into space. You can explore Earth’s atmosphere, wildlife, and planes as you scroll up on your web browser. Space elevators are an actual idea scientists have suggested to transport people and materials to and from space. (Neal Agarwal, Neal.Fun)
• The penumbral lunar eclipse coming on May 5 won’t be visible in North America, but you can watch it online. “The last time a penumbral eclipse was visible from the contiguous U.S. was on Nov. 30. 2020, and the next time such an event will be visible from this region of the globe will be on March 25, 2024.” (Robert Lea, Space.com)

Technology

• A bipartisan group in Congress plans to introduce legislation to ensure any decision to launch nuclear weapons is made by a human—and not artificial intelligence. The law would reinforce current policy, but if there’s one thing we should have learned over the past few years, it’s that enacting or repealing laws to ensure policy outcomes is wiser than relying on policy or precedent. (Kadia Goba, Semafor)
• The Wall Street Journal’s technology columnist tested artificial intelligence-generated video and audio tools to see how they would do replicating her. She was able to fool members of her family and the voice-generated security features of her bank. (Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal)

Culture

• A new book from the late Georgia Tech History Professor Kristie Macrakis, Espionage: A Concise History, discusses the secret communication methods used by agents over the centuries. This book excerpt is a fun review of some of the ways agents have tried to send private messages since the ancient Greeks. (Kristie Macrakis, MIT Press Reader)
• Belgium customs authorities ordered that 2,352 cans of Miller High Life beer be emptied and crushed after the French committee for the protection of Champagne took issue with the beer’s “the Champagne of Beers” slogan. (Emma Bubola, The New York Times)
• The Financial Times tried to figure out the economics of the main plots we are seeing on Succession. While there are discrepancies, I was surprised by how well it all holds up. (Louis Ashworth, Financial Times)

Sports

• Major League Baseball has told the Atlanta baseball team to stop celebrating home runs using an oversized hat after complaints from New Era, the official on-field hat supplier to MLB. Wow, look at that quick action! But I do wonder when MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred will get around to dealing with that franchise’s offensive team name and its fans’ use of the tomahawk chop. (Joon Lee, ESPN)
  

• Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner held her first press conference since her release in a prisoner swap after serving 294 days in Russian prisons. She is preparing for her 10th WNBA season. (Cindy Boren, Washington Post)
  

• The Argentina Football Association, home to the defending Men’s World Cup Champions, is targeting the United States market for expansion, including building a national training facility in Miami. This will give Argentina one more national training facility in our nation than the United States Soccer Federation. (Felipe Cardenas, The Athletic)

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The Closer

A New Jersey Little League has come up with an innovative way to try to prevent parents and fans from abusing its umpires, as USA Today’s Steve Gardner reports:

“A new rule this season in the Deptford Township Little League requires spectators who seem to think they could do a better job than the volunteer umpires on the field to come out and prove it. 

Anyone in the stands who confronts an ump during a game must themselves umpire three games before they’re allowed back as a spectator.”

I hope we find out more about how this experiment goes.

Many sports leagues are now dealing with a shortage of referees and umpires. It is hard to convince people who are volunteers are low-paid to put up with the abuse some people wrongly think they have the right to share as a spectator.

A shortage of game officials now will lead to increased problems over time, as the potential pool of professional game officials is limited because so many people give up early in their careers or never even try.

I get frustrated at officials’ decisions. But I try not to react to any game official below a professional level—and abuse is never okay.

If we want high-level sports to work, we need umpires and referees who are competent and whom we can trust. We should be making it easier for more people to try.

Post-Game Comments

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Things I Find Interesting is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription.