The Only Safe Election Is a Low-Tech Election
2020-02-04
Basically, we should be begging for the most analog election technology possible.
— The Only Safe Election Is a Low-Tech Election, Kevin Roose in The New York Times
Politics
How Iran Covered Up the Downing of an Airliner
2020-01-27
The officer tried to reach the command center for authorization to shoot but couldn’t get through. So he fired an antiaircraft missile. Then another.
The plane, which turned out to be a Ukrainian jetliner with 176 people on board, crashed and exploded in a ball of fire.
— How Iran Covered Up the Downing of an Airliner, Farnaz Fassihi in The New York Times
2020-01-27
Because detective shows and soap operas use this blurry-foreground move so regularly, its sudden ubiquity in the news represents a significant shift in register, or even genre, for journalism. Photojournalism has for decades restricted itself to a stark framing of visual facts, never wishing to compromise its evidentiary role in the narration for a more theatrical one. The best news photos deftly capture the drama with a shutter click, but that is also the abiding rule: it either happens in that click, or it doesn’t make it to print. Framing and depth-of-field are the only things the photographer can deploy in that moment, so that’s why they’re being used together and pushed to extraordinary limits in the rise of the blur.
— Rise of the Blur, Dushko Petrovich in n+1
This Is Not the Senate the Framers Imagined
2020-01-21
Indirect election was also crucial to some of the Founders’ faith in the Senate’s ability to act in the public interest-and their decision to vest the Senate with particular powers, including the ‘sole Power’ to conduct impeachment trials. Consider Hamilton’s claim, in ‘Federalist No. 65,’ that only the Senate ‘would be likely to feel confidence enough in its own situation, to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality between an individual accused, and the representatives of the people, his accusers.’ Specifically, he is asserting that unlike their House counterparts (the ‘accusers’ entrusted to render the equivalent of a presidential indictment), individual senators could be expected to issue fair judgments because their selection by fellow political professionals, for relatively long, six-year terms, insulated them from the vicissitudes and foibles of popular opinion.
— This Is Not the Senate the Framers Imagined, Jane Chong in The Atlantic
2019-10-01
I read the Penguin Classics translation of Wasps by Aristophanes the other day. It’s a satirical play about how an older generation of Athenians who fought in the Peloponnesian War were taken in by a pandering demagogue called Cleon. To grasp what’s happening and get the jokes, you have to know a little bit about the context of Athenian politics at the time and how the jury system worked. But all of that is explained in a very quick note at the beginning of the edition.
2019-08-05
There were lots of interesting and terrible things in Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini but here’s something that stood out. Eugenics was a widely respected field of study around the time of the turn of the 20th century, well before the rash of state-sponsored genocide programs we now associate with Nazis etc. University College London established a Eugenics Record Office, that aimed to study races of man and conct the best ways to hone the (presumably white) superior race to perfection. Of the many people who were both active in the field then, and still respected now: Karl Pearson, inventor of the field of statistics but also the first Professor of National Eugenics at the UCL unit.
2019-07-31
James Meek (author of Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs To Someone Else) did a great profile of new Leader of the Commons, Jacob Rees-Mog. It sums up the argument incredibly well that the stuffy all-English persona he affects in Parliament is at odds with his source of income in a transnational investment firm. Meek goes deep on the problematic network of offshore financial instruments used to shroud Mogg’s investment firm in secrecy, which makes sense given his work on Private Island.