Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Gina. Rosanne. Guy. What do you do the day after you storm the Capitol? They can’t arrest us all,’’ a future defendant had posted days before, and this was the vibe in the moment, the ecstatic invulnerability that leads someone to smear feces on the floor of the building in which the most powerful country on earth writes its rules. The worry set in later. There were photographs on the FBI’s web page and online sleuths trawling for clues. There were tipsters calling in names of old classmates. If you were paying attention, you were waiting for them, and the thousands who stormed the Capitol on January 6 were people who took immense pride in paying attention. (New York Magazine)
• The National Association of Realtors Is Sorry About All the Discrimination: The Realtors want to make amends to Black Americans. So long as they don’t have to talk about the 6% commission. (Businessweek)
• America is now in fascism’s legal phase: The history of racism in the US is fertile ground for fascism. Attacks on the courts, education, the right to vote and women’s rights are further steps on the path to toppling democracy (The Guardian)
• The Vaccine Scientist Spreading Vaccine Misinformation: Robert Malone claims to have invented mRNA technology. Why is he trying so hard to undermine its use? (The Atlantic)
• ‘The Corpse Bride Diet’: How TikTok Inundates Teens With Eating-Disorder Videos The app’s algorithm can send users down rabbit holes of narrow interest, resulting in potentially dangerous content such as emaciated images, purging techniques, hazardous diets and body shaming (Wall Street Journal)
• The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning Why is this “profound transformation” happening? And why now? Most analysis has focused on one man: Xi and his seemingly endless personal obsession with political control. The overlooked answer, however, is that this is indeed the culmination of decades of thinking and planning by a very powerful man—but that man is not Xi Jinping. (Palladium)
• Scars on the Cities: What should America do about its urban highways? Cities are accretions of historical periods of development. At the center of many European cities sit the remnants of a medieval town, where citizens crowded along narrow streets located behind a high wall for protection. But U.S. cities are newer, many the products of the immigration, internal migration, and industrialization that heralded the nation’s emergence as a global power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Later in the twentieth century, many were remade for the motorcar; the new highways often severely damaged the viability of the communities they were intended to save. Many of these cities want to undo the damage that the highway builders of the 1950s and 1960s caused. To achieve that balance, many of the urban highways must go. (City Journal)
• Inside the Fall of Kabul As the U.S. withdrawal approached, analysts thought it would be months before the Taliban brought the fight to Kabul. Instead, to the shock of the world, the Afghan capital fell in a matter of hours. This is the story of why it happened and what came after — by a reporter and photographer who witnessed it all. (New York Times)
• Drones Take Center Stage in U.S.-China War on Data Harvesting China’s DJI makes most of the drones Americans use, and now it’s in the cross-hairs. (Bloomberg)
• Himalayan Glaciers Are Melting at Furious Rate, New Study Shows An analysis of almost 15,000 ice sheets in the region shows they are shrinking 10 times faster now than in previous centuries (Wall Street Journal)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with, Max Chafkin is a features editor and tech reporter at Businessweek. His work has also appeared in Fast Company, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times Magazine. His most recent book is “The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power.”
Red Covid?
Source: New York Times
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