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I'm still thinking about propaganda in the Gaza war, but I'm not done thinking yet. Or, at least, not at a stopping point where a Daily Parker post would make sense. That said, Julia Ioffe sent this in the introduction to her semi-weekly column; unfortunately I can't link to it: The absolutely poisonous discourse around this war, though, has taken all of that to a whole other level. The rage, the screaming, and the disinformation, ahistoricity, the anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the propaganda—all of...

Let's start with combat-actor Jill Bearup explaining how the Netflix-ITV-BBC ban on corsets solves entirely the wrong problems: Meanwhile, in the modern world: The National Transportation Safety Board reported that an axle on the 23rd car of the train that derailed in East Palesine, Ohio, had a bearing temperature 140°C over normal—which is 30°C over "critical." The crew were trying to stop the train when the bearing failed. Perhaps if the train had fewer cars, or more crew, or the proper braking...

Just a couple of articles that caught my interest this morning: Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann warns us "the signal of climate change has emerged from the noise." The BBC examines the cost of hosting the Olympics, as The Economist wonders whether cities should bother hosting them. New Republic reviews a book by John Tresch about Edgar Allan Poe's—how does one say?—farcical and tragic misunderstanding of science. Eugene Williams finally got a monument yesterday, at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue...

I've just yesterday finished Charles Dickens' Hard Times, his shortest and possibly most-Dickensian novel. I'm still thinking about it, and I plan to discuss it with someone who has studied it in depth later this week. I have to say, though, for a 175-year-old novel, it has a lot of relevance for our situation today. It's by turns funny, enraging, and strange. On a few occasions I had to remind myself that Dickens himself invented a particular plot device that today has become cliché, which I also found...

Three reports of deaths today, two of them institutional. First, the one with the most relevance to me personally, one of the people most responsible for my sense of humor, died yesterday at 91: Norton Juster, the celebrated children’s author who has died at 91, stumbled into literature much as his most famous hero, Milo, stumbles into the marvelous world of wordplay and ad­ven­ture in the classic 1961 volume “The Phantom Tollbooth.” They were bored and entirely unsuspecting of the wonders that awaited...

Andrew Sullivan takes a step back and explains, carefully and quietly, the tyrant's mindset: [T]yranny is not, in its essence, about the authoritarian and administrative skills required to run a country effectively for a long time. Tyrants, after all, are often terrible at this. It is rather about a mindset, as the ancient philosophers understood, with obvious political consequences. It’s a pathology. It requires no expertise in anything other than itself. You need competence if you want to run an...

Stuff to read: White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany accidentally referenced the Armenian genocide, which would have been great if she had any clue why the Turkish embassy immediately demanded she apologize. Paul Krugman says that we lost the war on Covid-19 because of our leadership, not because of our culture. Crain's reports that Illinois had its best month ever in legal marijuana sales, and yes, they made a bad pun in their headline. NPR reports that phase transitions, the physics concept...

Mark Twain, 1905. In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent upon him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not. In Austria and some other countries this is not the case. There the state arranges a man’s...

Mark Twain, 1900 Fifty years ago, when I was a boy of fifteen and helping to inhabit a Missourian village on the banks of the Mississippi, I had a friend whose society was very dear to me because I was forbidden by my mother to partake of it. He was a gay and impudent and satirical and delightful young black man -a slave -who daily preached sermons from the top of his master's woodpile, with me for sole audience. He imitated the pulpit style of the several clergymen of the village, and did it well, and...

And now, Adult Storytime brings you Brenda's Beaver Needs a Barber:

As I try to understand why a 3rd-party API accepts one JSON document but not another, nearly-identical one, who could fault me for taking a short break? Feargus O'Sullivan explains in more detail why London wants Uber gone. Hypocrisy and absurdity collide as Franklin Graham literally demonizes the president's opponents. A man from rural California explains to Brits in the Independent why his neighbors support Trump. Continuing the Republican Party-as-farce stories, Columbia University Graduate School of...

Today actually had a lot of news, not all of which I've read yet: About 60,000 commuters couldn't get home tonight after Amtrak signaling at Union Station, Chicago, broke down. Writing for New Republic, Matt Ford calls Michael Cohen's testimony to Congress today "the art of the deal you can't refuse."  David Frum (among others) points out that for all the GOP's impugning of Cohen's character, no one actually refuted the facts of his testimony. The Economist's Gulliver column speculates that US carriers...

Brilliant essay in The Atlantic by Rosa Inocencio Smith: There’s an eerie symmetry between Donald Trump and The Great Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan, as if the villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel had been brought to life in a louder, gaudier guise for the 21st century. It’s not just their infamous carelessness, the smashing-up of things and creatures that propels Tom’s denouement and has seemed to many a Twitter user to be the animating force behind Trump’s policy and personnel decisions. The two men...

A few days ago I lined to a story in the New Yorker by Kristen Roupenian called "Cat Person." I enjoyed the story, and identified to some extent with both characters. My takeaway was that being 20 sucks, and some guys are dicks. Apparently the story got a lot more heated reactions than I imagined: The story has run the gamut of viral reactions – from the initial chorus of sharing "this story is important", "everyone should read this", "it's almost too real"; to the inevitable backlash (over the...