Europe's energy policy and attempts to become more independent from Russian gas have been a success.
A long and eclectic selection of links about the post-9/11 surveillance culture, at bookforum (and from that, a primer on internet encryption, a roundtable on the issue at The Awl, and on aiming for obscurity rather than privacy online).
Robots are coming for office jobs next.
After the end of Ted Cruz' campagin, five people who have written about Donald Trump in the past about their subject - why the GOP and Cruz lost to Trump - and Hillary Clinton's first Trump-focused ad relies solely on how much the GOP hates Donald Trump.
About James Baldwin in contemporary times:
Today, like sixty years ago, much of the public rhetoric about race is devoted to explaining to an incurious white public, in rudimentary terms, the contours of institutional racism. It must be spelled out, as if for the first time, that police killings of unarmed black children, indifference to providing clean drinking water to a majority-black city, or efforts to curtail the voting rights of minority citizens are not freak incidents but outbreaks of a chronic national disease. Nebulous, bureaucratic terms like “white privilege” have been substituted for “white supremacy,” or “micro-aggressions” for “casual racism.” “All Power to the People,” “By Any Means Necessary,” and “We Shall Overcome” have yielded to the understated, matter-of-fact “Black Lives Matter.” The rhetorical front has withdrawn from “How can we cure this?” to “What is the nature of the problem?"
The New York Review of Books: James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation, May 12, 2016One woman does what an entire European Union is sadly and frustratingly failing to do.
Pop Culture:
"No one is hard to look at" - beautiful, by Mallory Ortberg at The Toast.
In the annals of 2016, 10,000 thinkpieces about how The 100 messed up and Person of Interest brilliantly and almost effortlessly became one of the most relevant and humane shows (also Person of Interest is back for its final hurrah and this show is just LOVELY oh my gosh even though it seems to be steering towards something like Dollhouse's Epitaph I).
The future of CBS is a new Star Trek series (?!)
New White Lung, new Andy Stott, new SBTRKT.
