Category: Quick Hits

Once America had a president who wrote the following:

Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.

Dear Madam,–

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming.
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But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
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Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln

Now look at us.

I'm mildly sad that the recent Nation piece about Columbus now has a correction.

In emphasizing that there is no obvious historical connection between Christopher Columbus and colonial America at the time Columbus surged to popularity, I pointed out that Columbus set foot in no part of the United States as it is today while other explorers of his era did. This is not technically true. On a subsequent voyage (not his 1492 "discovery" one), Columbus landed in Puerto Rico.

Now. Allow me to be defensive for a moment. I'm good at it. Point to follow.

Part of the issue here was where and how I did my research / fact-checking, focusing (obviously too much) on the famous 1492 voyage. And, as the editor kindly agreed, this factual error did not subvert the argument in the paper. Nobody in 1770s America thought of Puerto Rico (which would not become part of the US for more than a century) as Columbus's claim to American soil. Chances are they didn't even know Puerto Rico existed.

But. More importantly, I did something that the vast majority of Americans probably do a lot: I forgot about Puerto Rico. That's all there is to it. I looked at it at some point, going over lists of Columbus's voyages and landings. And I simply did not register "United States" when I saw "Puerto Rico.
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"

I feel badly about this. Not only for making an error in a piece people actually saw, but for consistently forgetting about the people who live in parts of the United States that are not states. Perhaps I'm projecting, and in reality you think about Guam and the Virgin Islands and the CNMI all the time. I suspect not, though. Hell, there are people in elected and appointed positions in the federal government who forget they exist on a regular basis.

Intellectually I know Puerto Rico residents are Americans.

If you asked me, I would say yes without hesitation. But the point is, I obviously haven't internalized it well enough in 38 years for my radar to pick it up when I'm scanning a list of place names for parts of the United States.

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Even with PR in the news constantly for the last few weeks, I/we still think about it as Not Quite.

Maybe it's time to do something about the second-class status of the island, which might help the rest of us not treat it like a second-class citizen.

Part of me thinks I'm making too big a deal out of missing something on a fact check, but there's something subconscious at work here. I had to have seen it, so why didn't I see it?

Hoo boy you want to watch a really good doc / investigative reporting about a tragedy in the UK I remember being horrified by as a ten year-old, check this out. Just remember, kids: all cops, everywhere, protect their own at all costs and will do whatever is necessary to cover their own asses.
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ACAB, man. ACAB.

We have a problem throughout society with allowing anecdotal evidence to overrule data. (Blank) can't be that common, nobody I know has one!

That said, there are plenty of statistics that we encounter that deserve a double take.
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The unemployment rate is a classic example.
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Does anyone really think only 4.2% of Americans are unemployed? Only one adult in 25? No, and a closer look at the methodology – particularly the trick of removing people from the workforce after they've been unemployed for six months – reveals that the true unemployment rate as most people would define the term is higher. How much higher? Hard to say. But if a rate of something like ten or fifteen percent were announced, I doubt many people would feel that was unrealistically high.

I admit to having this reaction when I saw a report that traffic fatalities increased despite "distracted driving" being down. Consider your own driving experience and tell me, honestly, does it seem plausible to you that texting while driving is actually becoming less common? I must live in some sort of anomalous bubble if this is true, because if I had a nickel for every person I see whipping down the interstate or navigating a busy city street with their eyes down and glued to a phone I'd be a millionaire.

I see the data. And there's no reason to be suspicious of the motives of the Department of Transportation since they're perfectly willing to admit that fatalities increased. But there's something going on with these numbers that explains the decline in distracted driving in some way that has nothing to do with actual distracted driving. Maybe cops handed out fewer citations for it. Maybe whatever sample they analyzed is atypical. Maybe the decrease was a small amount well within the margin of error for their study. But it's hard to believe that people suddenly decided to stop looking at their phones or in-dash screens while driving. More people with more smartphones getting better data connections suggest that if anything, it should be on the increase.
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Nobody wants to go wading into methodology, but often it's difficult to make any sense of data like this without it.
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And the more people see data that give cause for skepticism, the more they'll justify being skeptical of all data.

Very excited about a Columbus Day themed piece that I got into The Nation. Rather than rehash the fact that Columbus was a bastard – which I think is fairly well established at this point, or at least there is a substantial quantity of content out there that makes that point well – I wanted to look at how and why Columbus became a Thing in the first place.

There certainly is no obvious reason we should celebrate him.
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He was Italian, he sailed on behalf of Spain, and he landed in the Dominican Republic and Bahamas. And Europeans were known even in his day to have seen or set foot in North America before he did.

The politics of the American revolution and some bad historiography are largely to blame, and I get to throw in a bunch of historical arcana along the way.

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Which is kind of my favorite thing to do.

So, enjoy. There were considerable efforts to present this as a "Columbus was a prick" piece for reasons of internet appeal, but I am happy with the extent to which the things that make it unique and interesting were preserved.

In 2008 the Oliver Stone-directed W was released starring Josh Brolin as the (at that moment still incumbent) ex-president. It pulled in a weak $29 million at the box office on a budget of $25 million, meaning that when other costs like marketing are factored in the movie likely lost money or broke just even with DVD and pay per view sales.

The movie was cast well (Brolin, Ellen Burstyn, Jeffery Wright, James Cromwell) and avoided the paranoiac plotlines that characterized early Oliver Stone. It isn't, I suppose, a bad film. But as I wrote at the time, it simply was too soon to release a movie about the GW Bush years. It was still ongoing when the film opened and the truly worst parts of it – the Iraq War, Katrina, etc – were recent enough memories that the movie was assured of alienating any potential audience. Bush fans would assume the movie was just going to mock him, and people who didn't like Bush were nowhere near ready to laugh about what at the time seemed like the American presidency at its rock bottom worst.

The W film has been almost completely forgotten, but it came back to me in a flash when I received the first of a thousand "Sean Spicer was just on the Emmys trying to make jokes" messages Sunday evening into Monday.

To say that it is "too soon" to laugh about any aspect of the Trump presidency is a wild understatement, and for the individuals involved there may never be a time where they can be viewed sympathetically. Every time I have felt the urge to feel slightly bad for the White House staff under this administration I have found it useful to remind myself that they are doing this of their own will. They are not career civil servants duty-bound to serve whoever happens to have power.
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These are opportunists, losers who no half-respectable campaign would hire and who latched onto Trump like barnacles because nobody else would elevate such total losers to such highly visible positions.
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Sean Spicer could have walked away at any moment; in fact he could have avoided the situation altogether quite easily. But he didn't. He wanted the money, he wanted the attention, and he wanted a chance to leap from Single-A (where he belongs, doing PR for some tenth-rate 501c in northern Virginia) to the Major Leagues despite being devoid of any skills except for dog-like loyalty to a very bad person.

Americans have a great capacity for people with bad jobs, because most of us feel like we understand what it is like to show up every day to work for a bad boss and/or at a bad job. But Sean Spicer was not living in a cardboard box until Trump came along. He took a job in the White House in order to be a big shot and to get paid. Fine. That's the choice he made. Now live with it. If ever there is going to be a time at which seeing these Trump hangers-on do image rehabilitation, it certainly isn't now. It will be a very long time from now, and quite possibly never.
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Today I got something published in which I call Steve Bannon a trash bag full of old taco meat right before I describe Alex Jones as an anthropomorphic sweat gland.

Boy I had fun writing this. I like it when it's fun. And the end result is probably better for it.

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I'm late to the party on this 2016 best seller, but Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography needs to go on your reading list immediately. The Aughts fad for treating Non-State Actors as the Next Big Thing caused a lot of people to forget that geopolitics is still a thing. Subject matter experts will find some of these takes a bit thin (it's pretty hard to do India-Pakistan justice in 50 pages) but nearly everyone short of expertise on a given region will learn a lot here. And the best part is that even if you fancy yourself an expert on one country or region, there are nine other chapters to tell you things you probably do not already know. 100/100 read immediately.

I have a new thing up at Rolling Stone; the editor is getting more comfortable with me and is beginning to encourage me to be more of an asshole. I think the final product is better that way.

The commenters on Facebook have spoken.
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I was on the fence about this one, but recent events suggest that it needs to happen. Here they are in the popular "big words on a shirt" format: the Gin and Tacos Get Mad Punch Nazis Be Free shirt.

As with previous shirt sales, this is a pre-order and you will receive your shirt in about four weeks. Please digest those words. Final design may vary slightly, as the graphic designer is still fiddling with it. Text and colors will not be changed.
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I am not an Amazon warehouse, but I do try my absolute best to get these out of the shipping box and into the mail for you as quickly as humanly possible.

For every shirt sold, I will donate $1 to the Southern Poverty Law Center. I'll post proof here and on Facebook once the print run is set, in case you're the skeptical type.

Canvas brand, screenprinted (no print on demand crap), no text on the reverse side, women's v-neck and men's/unisex crew neck available. Simple. Black. Bleak. Let everyone know how you feel.
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Let everyone know your favorite blog. Canvas sizing guides for unisex and women's v-neck shirts are here. The quality on these shirts has been great – they don't fall apart or fade after one wash.

Please note that all international orders, even in Friendly Canada, must choose the more expensive International Shipping option. Those rates have gotten pricey recently, and I apologize for that. But as much as I'd like to lose on every one of these sold to a non-US customer, I can't.
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Order soon, as once the pre-order period is over (end of this week, likely) the print run will be set and there won't be a shirt on the way for you! I order a few extra, but not many because I can't warehouse a bunch of unbought shirts. Thanks for understanding the limitations of this "operation."