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How to Disappear – Akiko Busch

by Myrna Posted on February 24, 2019

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How to Disappear

Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

Akiko Busch

Genre: Nature

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: February 12, 2019

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.


Vivid, surprising, and utterly timely, Akiko Busch's HOW TO DISAPPEAR explores the idea of invisibility in nature, art, and science, in search of a more joyful and peaceful way of living in today's increasingly surveilled and publicity-obsessed world In our increasingly networked and image-saturated lives, the notion of disappearing has never been both more enchanting and yet fanciful. Today, we are relentlessly encouraged, even conditioned, to reveal, share, and self-promote. The pressure to be public comes not just from our peers, but vast and pervasive technology companies, which want to profit from patterns in our behavior. A lifelong student and observer of the natural world, Busch sets out to explore her own uneasiness with this arrangement, and what she senses is a widespread desire for a less scrutinized way of life–for invisibility. Writing in rich painterly detail about her own life, her family, and some of the world's most exotic and remote places–from the Cayman Islands to Iceland–she savors the pleasures of being unseen. Discovering and dramatizing a wonderful range of ways of disappearing, from virtual reality goggles that trick the wearer into believing her body has disappeared and to the way Virginia Woolf's fictional Mrs. Dalloway feels a flickering of personhood as an older woman, Busch deliberates on subjects new and old with equal sensitivity and incisiveness. A unique and exhilarating accomplishment, HOW TO DISAPPEAR is a shimmering collage of poetry, cinema, memoir, myth, and much more, which overturns the dangerous modern assumption that somehow fame and visibility equate to success and happiness. Busch presents a field guide to invisibility, reacquainting us with the merits of the inconspicuousness, and finds genuine alternatives to the typical life of perpetual exposure. Accessing timeless truths in order to speak to our most urgent contemporary problems, she inspires us to develop a deeper appreciation for personal privacy in a vast and invasive world.

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How to Disappear – Akiko Busch

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Sex, Drugs, and Oysters: This Book Explains What It’s Really Like to Work at a Fancy Restaurant

by JerrellTorrez Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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It takes Tess, a 22-year-old waitress new to Manhattan, about three months to master the art of balancing three plates on one arm. It’s not long before a fine-dining restaurant kitchen becomes her whole world, and its crew of employees, her family. Tess quickly adapts to a life of cocaine-addled adventures in Sweetbitter, novelist Stephanie Danler’s coming-of-age story.

Danler drew detail from her own experience working as a back-waiter, bartender, and restaurant manager in New York City. In our latest episode of Bite, we talked to Danler about her career waiting tables while moonlighting as a writer, how restaurant staffs mirror families, and the fast life that often comes with a job in the service industry. We also talked about our favorite food-filled fiction.

Inspired by Danler, we polled Mother Jones staffers and readers for some of their favorite descriptions of food in novels. Here, in no particular order, are their responses. Enjoy, and leave your ideas in the comments.

1. High Bonnet: A Novel of Epicurean Adventures, by Idwal Jones, originally published 1945, a new edition available with a great intro by Anthony Bourdain. Balzac in cook’s whites—earnest young guy from the provinces goes to Paris with the intention of making it big as a chef, experiences mishaps, triumphs, etc. Great stuff on the inner workings of the kitchen model that still dominates the restaurant scene, even here in the United States: the “brigade” system, modeled after the military, characterized by strict hierarchy and division of labor—the intrigues, betrayals, hazings, unexpected acts of solidarity and kindness. And great food descriptions! Bourdain wrote that with a few tweaks, it could have been set in modern NYC. -Tom Philpott

2. Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Understood Betsy, with its wonderful descriptions of the meager meals Betsy had before she went to live in Vermont, and the hearty meals she had once she moved there, and of course the great descriptions of butter churning and the like. -Linda B.

3. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. This novel follows an elderly couple from the Midwest and their three adult children. One is a hipster chef in Philly, who experiences culinary triumphs and misadventures, and another is Chip, a disgraced academic who’s down on his luck. Franzen creates a hilarious scene when Chip attempts to buy food at a market on Grand Street in New York City (cleverly dubbed the “Nightmare of Consumption”) and realizes he can’t afford much of the fancy food items. -Tom Philpott
A sample: “Finally he abandoned the Italian idea altogether and fixed on the only other lunch he could think of–a salad of wild rice, avocado, and smoked turkey breast. The problem then was to find ripe avocados. He found ripe avocados that were the size of limes and cost $3.89 apiece. He stood holding five of them and considered what to do. He put them down and picked them up and put them down and couldn’t pull the trigger. He weathered a spasm of hatred of Denise for having guilted him into inviting his parents to lunch. He had the feeling that he’d never eaten anything in his life but wild-rice salad and tortellini, so blank was his culinary imagination.”

4. My first book, Island of a Thousand Mirrors. Lots of Sri Lankan food. I’ve had readers say it makes them want to cook it. -Nayomi Munaweera

5. The Hundred-Foot Journey, by Richard Morais. Only 100 feet separate a traditional French restaurant and a new Indian eatery across the street, but there is a world of cultural distance between the two. The novel, set in the foothills of the Alps, follows the son of the Indian restaurant’s owners, from his introduction to cooking as a boy in Mumbai to his education at the French restaurant and beyond. Steven Spielberg’s 2013 movie version starred Helen Mirren and Manish Dayal. -Jenny Luna
A sample: “This was a weekly ritual at the restaurant, a constant pushing of Bappu to improve the old recipes. It was like that. Do better. You can always do better. The offending item stood between them, a copper bowl of chicken. I reached over and dipped my fingers into the bowl, sucking in a piece of the crimson meat. The masala trickled down my throat, an oily paste of fine red chili, but softened by pinches of cardamom and cinnamon.”

6. If you read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books as an adult, as I just did (to my daughter), you realize it’s all about food. Probably because the Ingalls family was frequently hungry. Lots of cream. Salt pork. Beans. Corn porridge and corn bread. Butter. Wild game. Bear meat. Quail. Sugar on everything. The beginning of comfort food. -Moises V-M

7. In the memorable first scene of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, an ex-slave welcomes an old friend into her house with Southern biscuits. Meals play many different roles throughout this heart wrenching novel. -Kiera Butler

8. The description of making molasses snow candy in Little House on the Prairie blew my mind as a snowless southern Californian kid. It just seemed so fun. -Sarah Z.

9. All of the Yashim mysteries, by Jason Goodwin. (The Janissary Tree is the first one.) Cooking in Istanbul, with fresh ingredients. -Jan H.

10. The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan’s classic, heartfelt story of Chinese-American women coming together to tell stories over food and games of mahjong. -Jenny Luna

11. Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels. Lots of mouthwatering early 19th century shipboard meals: spotted dick pudding, toasted cheese, burgoo, hard tack with weevils. -Heine C.

12. Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies, by Laura Esquivel. This sensuous novel focuses on a young woman who is in love with her sister’s suitor. Because she can’t express her emotions, she instead unleashes them in her food—with powerful results. -Jenny Luna

13. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. So much camp coffee, so many tortillas. -Casey M.

14. The Epicure’s Lament, by Kate Christensen. A dying man plans on relishing his final days alone in his family’s mansion with copious amounts of food and whiskey—but his family members have other plans. -Jenny Luna

15. Sylvia Plath was interested in the shame most women associated with the sensual pleasure of eating. In The Bell Jar, she delves almost comically into how much Esther loves to eat compared to the other girls on her college internship. -Katie F.
A sample: “In New York we had so many free luncheons with people on the magazine and various visiting celebrities I developed the habit of running my eye down those huge handwritten menus, where a tiny sir dish of peas cost fifty or sixty cents, until I’d picked the richest, most expense dishes and ordered a string of them. We were always taken out on expense accounts, so I never felt guilty. I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef’s salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce…Under cover of the clinking of water goblets and silverware and bone china, I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. Then I picked up the chicken slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn’t ooze off and ate them.”

16. Dickens has amazing writing about food and not necessarily “good” food. I read Great Expectations years ago and I still describe it as “bolting” my food. -Tej S.

17. Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox. Not only does this novel dramatize the first stirrings of the gentrification wave that would decades later transform Brooklyn—it’s set mainly in Cobble Hill—it also beautifully depicts the late mid-century stirrings of foodie-ism that would later engulf US culture. -Tom Philpott
A sample: “Mrs. and Mrs. Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously. As he sat down, Otto regarded the straw basket which held slices of French bread, an earthenware casserole filled with sautéed chicken livers, peeled and sliced tomatoes on an oval willowware platter Sophie had found in a Brooklyn Heights antique shop, and risotto Milanese in a green ceramic bowl. A strong light, somewhat softened by the stained glass of a Tiffany shade, fell upon this repast.”

Other readers recommended John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure, Patricia Storace’s Book of Heaven, C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Joanne Harris’ Five Quarters of an Orange, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Joanne Marshall’s Chocolat, George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, the novels of Haruki Murakami, Brian Jacques’ Redwall books, the mysteries of Diane Mott Davidison, Enid Blyton’s books, Eli Brown’s Cinnamon and Gunpowder, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, Laurie Colwin’s Happy All the Time, Andy Weir’s The Martian, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, and from the iconoclasts among you, George Orwell’s 1984, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and, ahem, Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs.

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Sex, Drugs, and Oysters: This Book Explains What It’s Really Like to Work at a Fancy Restaurant

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James Comey Wasn’t a Partisan Hack. He Was Worse.

by FloreneGipson Posted on April 23, 2017

Mother Jones

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By coincidence, right after my Comey post yesterday morning the New York Times published a long tick-tock about how and why Comey did what he did. It doesn’t address the question of whether Comey tipped the election, it just provides an insider account of what was going through Comey’s head as he made decisions during campaign season.

It makes for depressing reading. The reporters conclude pretty strongly that Comey wasn’t motivated by any conscious partisan motives. But even if that’s true, there were pretty clearly partisan and personal influences at work. Apologies in advance for the length of this post, but putting all six of the following excerpts together in a single narrative is the only way to show what really happened. The story begins two years ago when the FBI opened its probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails:

On July 10, 2015, the F.B.I. opened a criminal investigation, code-named “Midyear,” into Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information….Everyone agreed that Mr. Comey should not reveal details about the Clinton investigation. But attorney general Loretta Lynch told him to be even more circumspect: Do not even call it an investigation, she said, according to three people who attended the meeting. Call it a “matter.”

….It was a by-the-book decision. But Mr. Comey and other F.B.I. officials regarded it as disingenuous in an investigation that was so widely known. And Mr. Comey was concerned that a Democratic attorney general was asking him to be misleading and line up his talking points with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, according to people who spoke with him afterward.

This seems to have been the starting point. Even when Justice Department officials were making straightforward, “by-the-book” decisions, Comey was paranoid that they were acting to protect a Democrat—something that obviously might invite Republican attack if he went along. This belief continued to grow, and led to much of what happened later, when the investigation was wrapping up:

Early last year, F.B.I. agents received a batch of hacked documents, and one caught their attention. The document, which has been described as both a memo and an email, was written by a Democratic operative who expressed confidence that Ms. Lynch would keep the Clinton investigation from going too far, according to several former officials familiar with the document.

Read one way, it was standard Washington political chatter. Read another way, it suggested that a political operative might have insight into Ms. Lynch’s thinking.

Normally, when the F.B.I. recommends closing a case, the Justice Department agrees and nobody says anything….The document complicated that calculation, according to officials. If Ms. Lynch announced that the case was closed, and Russia leaked the document, Mr. Comey believed it would raise doubts about the independence of the investigation.

This email wasn’t related to Lynch or her office in any way. It was just gossip from a third party. But instead of ignoring it, Comey worried that it might leak and hurt his own reputation. This also motivated his decision, when the investigation was over, to hold an unusual press conference which damaged Clinton seriously even though he cleared her of wrongdoing:

Standing in front of two American flags and two royal-blue F.B.I. flags, he read from a script….“Any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position” should have known better, Mr. Comey said. He called her “extremely careless.” The criticism was so blistering that it sounded as if he were recommending criminal charges. Only in the final two minutes did Mr. Comey say that “no charges are appropriate in this case.”

….By scolding Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Comey was speaking not only to voters but to his own agents. While they agreed that Mrs. Clinton should not face charges, many viewed her conduct as inexcusable. Mr. Comey’s remarks made clear that the F.B.I. did not approve.

Former agents and others close to Mr. Comey acknowledge that his reproach was also intended to insulate the F.B.I. from Republican criticism that it was too lenient toward a Democrat.

Again, Comey had failed to play it straight. Even though the decision to exonerate Clinton “was not even a close call,” as he later said, he tore into Clinton in order to protect himself from criticism—both from Republicans and from his own agents. This is especially damning given the subsequent evidence that Comey’s criticism of Clinton was wildly overstated. The same dynamic played out in reverse a couple of months later over the FBI investigation into Donald Trump and Russian interference in the election:

Mr. Comey and other senior administration officials met twice in the White House Situation Room in early October to again discuss a public statement about Russian meddling….At their second meeting, Mr. Comey argued that it would look too political for the F.B.I. to comment so close to the election, according to several people in attendance. Officials in the room felt whiplashed. Two months earlier, Mr. Comey had been willing to put his name on a newspaper article; now he was refusing to sign on to an official assessment of the intelligence community.

And it played out yet again in September, when agents discovered some Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Michael Steinbach, a former FBI agent who worked closely with Comey, explained what went through Comey’s mind:

Agents felt they had two options: Tell Congress about the search, which everyone acknowledged would create a political furor, or keep it quiet, which followed policy and tradition but carried its own risk, especially if the F.B.I. found new evidence in the emails.

….Conservative news outlets had already branded Mr. Comey a Clinton toady. That same week, the cover of National Review featured a story on “James Comey’s Dereliction,” and a cartoon of a hapless Mr. Comey shrugging as Mrs. Clinton smashed her laptop with a sledgehammer.

Congressional Republicans were preparing for years of hearings during a Clinton presidency. If Mr. Comey became the subject of those hearings, F.B.I. officials feared, it would hobble the agency and harm its reputation. “I don’t think the organization would have survived that,” Mr. Steinbach said.

Once again, the primary concern was protecting Comey and the FBI. Republicans had made it clear that their retribution against anyone who helped Clinton would be relentless, and that clearly had an impact on Comey. Steinbach’s suggestion that Republican vengeance would have destroyed the FBI is clearly nuts, but Comey was taking no chances. He didn’t want the grief.

Even after it was all over, Comey’s partisan influences continued to work on him:

Officials and others close to him also acknowledge that Mr. Comey has been changed by the tumultuous year.

Early on Saturday, March 4, the president accused Mr. Obama on Twitter of illegally wiretapping Trump Tower in Manhattan. Mr. Comey believed the government should forcefully denounce that claim. But this time he took a different approach. He asked the Justice Department to correct the record. When officials there refused, Mr. Comey followed orders and said nothing publicly.

Daniel Richman, a longtime friend of Comey’s, said this represented “a consistent pattern of someone trying to act with independence and integrity, but within established channels.”

The evidence does indeed show consistent behavior, but of a different kind. At every step of the way, Comey demonstrated either his fear of crossing Republicans or his concern over protecting his own reputation from Republican attack. It was the perfect intersection of a Republican Party that had developed a reputation for conducting relentlessly vicious smear campaigns and a Republican FBI director who didn’t have the fortitude to stand up to it. Comey may genuinely believe that his decisions along the way were nonpartisan, but the evidence pretty strongly suggests otherwise.

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James Comey Wasn’t a Partisan Hack. He Was Worse.

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Britain Will Spend the Next Decade Doing Nothing But Negotiating a Pointless Exit From the EU

by StewartOZX Posted on February 10, 2017

Mother Jones

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For a brief moment, let’s turn our attention away from Donald Trump and focus on another country’s woes. The folks over at National Review are no fans of the EU and have generally been pretty happy about the passage of Brexit. Today, however, Andrew Stuttaford—relying on Brexit expert Christopher Booker—is pretty scathing about prime minister Theresa May’s handling of the whole thing. First, here’s Booker explaining what he’s learned over the past 25 years about exiting the EU:

As I came to appreciate just how enmeshed we were becoming with that system of government, was that extricating ourselves from it would be far more fiendishly complicated than most people realised…Also, as I listened and talked to politicians, was how astonishingly little they seemed really to know about how it worked. Having outsourced ever more of our lawmaking and policy to a higher power, it was as if our political class had switched off from ever really trying to understand it.

That sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it? Continuing:

On leaving the EU the UK becomes what the EU terms a “third country”, faced with all the labyrinth of technical barriers to trade behind which the EU has shut itself off from the outside world. Last week I read a series of expert papers explaining some of the mindbending regulatory hurdles we would then have to overcome in trying to maintain access to what is still by far our largest single overseas market.

Take, for instance, our chemicals and pharmaceutical industries, which currently account for a quarter of all our exports to the EU, which currently account for a quarter of all our £230 billion a year exports to the EU. By dropping out of the EU, these would lose all the “authorisations” which give them what Mrs May calls “frictionless” entry to its market, and the process of negotiating replacements for them would be so complex that it could take years.

And now Stuttaford:

Booker observes that these aspects of Britain’s divorce from the EU “could have been achieved infinitely more easily if Mrs May had not slammed the door on our continued membership of the EEA the European Economic Area, which would guarantee us much the same “frictionless” access we enjoy now”.

That would be the ‘Norway option’ that you may have read about a few times in this very Corner, an option rejected by May for reasons so unclear that I cannot keep thinking the (doubtless unfair) thought that she has very little idea of what it actually is.

And then, Booker frets, there is May’s “terrifying” threat “that, if she is not given what she wants, she will simply “walk away”.” He’s right to worry. May has said that “no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain”, an elegant but false dichotomy: “No deal” for Britain would be a “bad deal”, a very bad deal indeed.

This has all the signs of becoming an unbelievable cockup. By a slim 52-48 vote, Britain has doomed itself to many, many tortuous years of negotiating dozens or hundreds of separate agreements with the EU. Switzerland has done the same, and it’s taken them the better part of 20 years.

If there were any real advantage to this, it might be worth it. But just to keep Polish immigrants out? This might be one of the dumbest things any country has ever voluntarily subjected itself to.

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Britain Will Spend the Next Decade Doing Nothing But Negotiating a Pointless Exit From the EU

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McCabegate Is the Latest Scandal That Will Totally Destroy Hillary Clinton

by stephenagee641 Posted on October 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today in the category of…oh, forget it. I don’t have the heart for snark. It’s just so goddamn tiresome. The Wall Street Journal headline on the right describes the latest pseudo-scandal in Hillaryland, and it’s obviously intended to make you think there’s yet more fishiness in the Clinton family. In a nutshell, here’s the story:

In early 2015, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe recruited Dr. Jill McCabe to run for state Senate.
Various organizations under McAuliffe’s control donated lots of money to her campaign.
She lost.
Several months later, McCabe’s husband was promoted to deputy director of the FBI. Because of that promotion, he “helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use.” This was presumably in addition to the hundreds of other things that a deputy director has oversight responsibility for.

There’s literally nothing here. Not “nothing substantial.” Not “nothing that other politicians don’t do.” Literally nothing. There’s not a single bit of this that’s illegal, unethical, or even the tiniest bit wrong. It’s totally above board and perfectly kosher. And even if there were anything wrong, McAuliffe would have needed a time machine to know it.

Honest to God, I’m so tired of this stuff I could scream. I’ve been joking about it lately by appending gate to every dumb little non-scandal that’s tossed in Hillary’s direction, and I guess I’ll keep doing that. But our illustrious press corps needs to pull its collective head out of its ass. If you’ve got real evidence of Hillary being engaged in something fishy, go to town. I won’t complain. But if all you’ve got is a thrice-removed, physics-challenged gewgaw that proves nothing except that you know how to play Six Degrees of Hillary Clinton,1 then give it a rest. It just makes you look like those monomaniacs with thousands of clippings glued to their wall and spider webs of string tying them all together.

Just stop it.

1Here’s how it works:

  1. Make a list of the entire chain of command that had some oversight over the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server. That’s going to be at least half a dozen people.
  2. Make a list of all their close family and friends. Now you’re up to a hundred people.
  3. Look for a connection between any of those people and the Clintons. Since FBI headquarters is located in Washington DC and the Clintons famously have thousands and thousands of friends, you will find a connection. I guarantee it.
  4. Write a story about it.

See how easy this is? But please don’t try it at home. This is a game for trained professionals only.

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McCabegate Is the Latest Scandal That Will Totally Destroy Hillary Clinton

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LAT Poll Finally Makes It Unanimous: Donald Trump Is a Loser

by GeraldSalting0 Posted on October 12, 2016

Mother Jones

In the LA Times poll, Donald Trump has been consistently in the lead for the past month, even as other polls show Hillary Clinton ahead. Today, 27 days before November 8, doomsday has finally been postponed:

There is a 19-year-old black man in Illinois who has no idea of the role he is playing in this election. He is sure he is going to vote for Donald J. Trump….He’s a panelist on the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, which has emerged as the biggest polling outlier of the presidential campaign. Despite falling behind by double digits in some national surveys, Mr. Trump has generally led in the U.S.C./LAT poll.

….Our Trump-supporting friend in Illinois is a surprisingly big part of the reason. In some polls, he’s weighted as much as 30 times more than the average respondent, and as much as 300 times more than the least-weighted respondent. Alone, he has been enough to put Mr. Trump in double digits of support among black voters.

….He is also the reason Mrs. Clinton took the lead in the U.S.C./LAT poll for the first time in a month on Wednesday. The poll includes only the last seven days of respondents, and he hasn’t taken the poll since Oct. 4. Mrs. Clinton surged once he was out of the sample for the first time in several weeks.

In some way, I suppose it was worth experimenting with the unusual, panel-based design of the LA Times poll. However, their decision to weight lots of tiny subgroups separately is harder to defend. It’s the reason that one guy in Illinois can have a significant effect on the entire poll.

Nate Cohn’s piece on the LA Times poll is worth a read. It’s a very good introduction to the whole issue of poll weighting and how it works. There’s as much art as science to this stuff sometimes.

From – 

LAT Poll Finally Makes It Unanimous: Donald Trump Is a Loser

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Here Is the Latest Campaign Faux Controversy

by MarguerSeay Posted on September 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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I can’t tell if this faux controversy is actually getting much attention, but I know my readers all want to stay up to date:

Donald Trump’s campaign sought an apology Saturday from his Democratic rival after Hillary Clinton took aim at the Republican’s supporters, suggesting that half of them are what she called “deplorables.”

….“To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?,” Mrs. Clinton told donors in New York City. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.” The former secretary of state added that “some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.” The Trump campaign quickly punched back, saying that Mrs. Clinton had revealed “her true contempt for everyday Americans.”

I’m sure this will be followed up on social media with lots of folks “fact checking” Clinton and showing that she’s right. Let’s take a look. Yep, here’s one:

Typical Hillary shill. The Reuters poll he links to clearly shows that less than half of Trump’s supporters are deplorable. At most it’s 49 percent, and the average is only 43 percent. As usual, Hillary Clinton is spinning and exaggerating for her own benefit. No wonder Americans don’t trust her. A tisket, a tasket, Hillary’s in a basket.

OK, fine, that was lame. But hopefully everyone just skips this whole affair. It’s one of those things that belongs in the category of stuff literally everyone knows but can’t say out loud. Trump’s outreach to the racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamaphobic community is pretty obvious and hardly needs any further evidence. Every campaign reporter in the country knows this. The question is, can they say it? Or will they just “report the controversy” and declare that it “casts a new shadow” over a “struggling campaign”? I guess we’ll see.

UPDATE: Well, it’s now on the front page of the LA Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. So I guess it’s getting some traction. Is this just because it’s a slow weekend news day? Or will it last? Come back Monday for your answer!

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Here Is the Latest Campaign Faux Controversy

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Bernie Sanders Officially Admits He Lost

by AmparoTrn382087 Posted on May 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bernie Sanders gets tossed a bone today:

Top Bernie Sanders supporters Dr. Cornel West and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) will be among those on the Democratic Party’s important Platform Drafting Committee after the Vermont senator won a key concession as he looks to leave his mark on the party’s platform. The roster of the drafting committee, released by the Democratic National Committee on Monday, reflects the party’s agreement that Sanders would have five supporters on the committee, compared to six for Hillary Clinton.

First off: If Bernie has officially agreed to accept five out of 11 members on the Platform Committee, isn’t that a tacit admission that he’s already lost the nomination?

But also: Does anyone care about the platform? Seriously. I know it’s a big fight every four years, but does either party platform ever have any effect at all on the election?

And as long as we’re talking about Bernie, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels write today that his supporters don’t actually support his lefty politics:

In a survey conducted for the American National Election Studies in late January, supporters of Mr. Sanders…were less likely than Mrs. Clinton’s supporters to favor concrete policies that Mr. Sanders has offered…including a higher minimum wage, increasing government spending on health care and an expansion of government services financed by higher taxes.

….Mr. Sanders has drawn enthusiastic support from young people, a common pattern for outsider candidates. But here, too…the generational difference in ideology seems not to have translated into more liberal positions on concrete policy issues — even on the specific issues championed by Mr. Sanders. For example, young Democrats were less likely than older Democrats to support increased government funding of health care, substantially less likely to favor a higher minimum wage and less likely to support expanding government services. Their distinctive liberalism is mostly a matter of adopting campaign labels, not policy preferences.

That’s interesting, if not especially surprising. We’re all basically tribalists at our cores. Except for you and me, of course.

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Bernie Sanders Officially Admits He Lost

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Charts: Hollywood’s White Dude Problem

by Palahnajje Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s 2014, yet women and people of color still are vastly underrepresented in the United States media landscape. A report published Wednesday by the Women’s Media Center found that, while some progress toward equality has been made, journalism and entertainment still lack a diversity of voices and a variety in representation. If the US media were a person, he’d be an old white guy.

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Charts: Hollywood’s White Dude Problem

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Walmart bribed its way around Mexico’s environmental rules

by RubinkJoseph Posted on December 19, 2012

Walmart bribed its way around Mexico’s environmental rules

By Susie Cagle

BREAKING: Walmart did another terrible thing!

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The retail giant is not just the biggest employer in the U.S. — it also dominates Mexico with 2,275 outlets. And it got there by playing very, very dirty. According to the second part of a New York Times investigation, Walmart de Mexico routinely bribed officials not just to get its plans bumped to the top of the pile, but to “subvert democratic governance.” This is how the company successfully built a Walmart in a Teotihuacán alfalfa field a mile from ancient pyramids that draw tons of tourists. (Now those tourists get a view of a boxy Walmart supercenter when they climb to the top.) The local leaders said no, so Walmart de Mexico paid a guy $52,000 and redrew the zoning map itself.

Frankly, this is not very surprising. But it’s damning as hell. From the Times:

Thanks to eight bribe payments totaling $341,000, for example, Wal-Mart built a Sam’s Club in one of Mexico City’s most densely populated neighborhoods, near the Basílica de Guadalupe, without a construction license, or an environmental permit, or an urban impact assessment, or even a traffic permit. Thanks to nine bribe payments totaling $765,000, Wal-Mart built a vast refrigerated distribution center in an environmentally fragile flood basin north of Mexico City, in an area where electricity was so scarce that many smaller developers were turned away.

But there is no better example of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s methods than its conquest of Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field. In Teotihuacán, The Times found that Wal-Mart de Mexico executives approved at least four different bribe payments — more than $200,000 in all — to build just a medium-size supermarket. Without those payoffs, records and interviews show, Wal-Mart almost surely would not have been allowed to build in Mrs. Pineda’s field.

The Times seems eager to point out that this is a Walmart problem, not a Mexico problem. These bribes were not, as Reuters puts it, “routine payments.” Except that in effect they actually were.

Walmart now says it’s all kinds of ready “to fully cooperate with the competent authorities in whatever investigation,”  Fox helpfully reports (even though the company abandoned its own internal investigation years ago). Perhaps this is because it could be facing “sizable fines.”

This is both vindicating and infuriating, like most times Walmart gets caught doing something terrible. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice might be investigating, but they aren’t commenting on the story, at least not yet. Meanwhile, shares of Walmart’s stock rose 30 cents today.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Walmart bribed its way around Mexico’s environmental rules

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