A survey at UNC finds its professors are open to all sorts of views, but that a worrying large number of students are not.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to lunch with a prominent journalist who wanted to ask me about Wikipedia. I had been general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation for a few years during a time when the online encyclopedia had really taken off in growth and funding. The journalist was curious how Wikipedia remains so information-rich and useful when the rest of the internet (in his view) is filled with divisive, corrosive misinformation.
This is what serious protest art looks like, in it for the long haul.
Headline should be "DNC made Iowa a sacrificial lamb"?
By Isaac Stanley-Becker from Des Moines @ WashingtonPost.com, Feb. 15
[....] By the end of the week, an effort was underway to place blame squarely on the state party [....]
But a detailed review by The Post found that the chaotic events of Feb. 3 were years in the making, and that the responsibility extends beyond the local party leaders who have borne the brunt of the criticism.
Rather, the turmoil in Iowa reflected a systemic failure in which Democratic officials eager to avoid repeating the disastrous campaign of 2016 — marred by Russian hacks of party emails and allegations that the nominating process had been tilted against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — oversaw changes that triggered a whole new crisis [....]
Biden's advisers clearly believe that addressing the fallacies of Trump's affect on unemployment is a major part of winning an election against him. I think they're right. It's where many swing votes are: not wanting to jinx the low unemployment rate.
Amid turmoil in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, the attorney general has also sent outside prosecutors to review other politically sensitive cases.
By Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman & Matt Apuzzo @ NYTimes.com, Feb. 14
WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned an outside prosecutor to scrutinize the criminal case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T.Flynn, according to people familiar with the matter.The review is highly unusual and could trigger more accusations of political interference by top Justice Department officials into the work of career prosecutors.
Mr. Barr has also installed a handful of outside prosecutors to broadly review the handling of other politically sensitive national-security cases in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, the people said. The team includes at least one prosecutor from the office of the United States attorney in St. Louis, Jeff Jensen, who is handling the Flynn matter, as well as prosecutors from the office of the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen.
Over the past two weeks, the outside prosecutors have begun grilling line prosecutors in the Washington office about various cases — some public, some not — including investigative steps, prosecutorial actions and why they took them, according to the people. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations [....]
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells @ NewYorker.com, Feb. 14
[....] The thorough policies that were unveiled each week were developed by a large, talented, connected policy staff. If rival candidates felt sidelined (and many of them did) by the relentlessly positive press Warren seemed to receive from roughly April until October of last year, then they ought to have considered how impressive the human machine behind Warren seemed. Voters fall for candidates. Reporters fall for campaigns.
Warren spent on people rather than ads. Her campaign had a high burn rate, everyone warned. What made her rivals jealous were her organizers—the phalanx of young people, many of them women, who clustered along the sides of her events, looking intent, and who then spread out into the precincts to carry (and, in truth, embody) Warren’s confidence that talent, expertise, and commitment could excise corruption and remove Donald Trump from power. Young staffers on liberal political campaigns often display the slightly censorious cheerfulness of a resident-hall adviser, but the Warren organizers possessed a hawkeyed attention to detail and the essential American energy of malaria eradicators. “The operation has been the envy of all her rivals for months,” Gabriel Debenedetti wrote in New York, in January. Recently, an endorser of a rival campaign asked the Washington Post’s Holly Bailey, “It’s, like, where did they find these kids?”
This fall, as Warren made some obvious strategic errors—overestimating the enthusiasm for transformative economic policy among her base of professionals and relying too narrowly on an activist ethos to win the support of voters of color—her campaign harbored the hope that its army of talent would carry it. But in Iowa last week, and then in the New Hampshire primary, this Tuesday, it became obvious that it couldn’t. At the critical debate last Friday night, Warren receded. “Having seen how amazing the Warren operation was for a year, it’s just depressing to see them panicking now,” an aide to a rival campaign told me at a New Hampshire event on Monday [....]
By Masha Gessen @ NewYorker.com, Feb. 12
By now, you may have heard that some queer people think that Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a current contender for the Democratic Presidential nomination, is not gay enough. Unless you are immersed in this conversation with other queer people, you may have thought, “That’s ridiculous.” I am here to explain.
The notion that some of us think Buttigieg is not gay enough has an identifiable relationship to the facts, which are that, for the purposes of this discussion, people who grew up queer in this country fall into two distinct categories of experience [....]
Despite Italy’s troubles with racism, African-American women are traveling to the country for love, and finding it.
By Tariro Mzezwa @ NYTimes.com/Style, Feb. 14
[....] In recent years, Italy has become known for widely publicized episodes of racism against African migrants or dark-skinned people perceived as migrants, and even racial abuse toward Italy’s own black soccer players. It may be surprising that there is a steady stream of black women who travel to Italy in search of amore.
Perhaps less surprising is that, amid the new crop of travel companies catering to black travelers and black women, in particular, there’s a growing group of tour providers, blogs, Instagram accounts and Facebook groups that encourage black women to travel to Italy to find love. Unlike traditional tour operators, companies like Black Girl Travel and Venus Affect provide dating advice and assistance finding a romantic partner, along with sightseeing.
Online, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr posts show photos of black women with Italian men or black women with white men in Italy; Facebook groups and YouTube videos contain lengthy discussions about Italian men loving black women. Many of the posts are tagged with the word “swirl,” a popular term describing a black person and a white person in a relationship [....]
The jury found Avenatti guilty of extorting Nike and of defrauding his client in an effort to make millions of dollars.
By Kate Briquelet @ DailyBeast.com, Feb. 14
Michael Avenatti was convicted Friday of extorting Nike, and of defrauding his client in a bid to reap millions from the sneaker giant—an extraordinary fall from grace for the brash lawyer who shot to fame representing porn star Stormy Daniels in a civil case against President Donald Trump.
There was no trace of Avenatti’s trademark cockiness as he stared straight ahead at the jury box in Manhattan Federal Court, seeming to steel himself for bad news as the verdict was read.
The jury found Avenatti guilty on all three counts: extortion, wire fraud, and transmission of interstate communications with intent to extort. He faces more than 25 years in prison when he’s sentenced June 17 [....]
[....] His lawyers said he would appeal. Avenatti still faces two other pending criminal cases in New York and California, in which he’s charged with stealing money from several of his clients—including Daniels, who claims he swiped $300,000 from her book advance [....]
