“Oh, I don’t know about that. I don’t know anything about that,” Trump said in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer this week. “You mean fans of mine?”
Trump, who said he hasn’t read the article, was still able to discuss most of the salient points made in it. But he declined to discuss his supporters’ rabid response to Ioffe.
“I don’t have a message to the fans,” Trump said, before sending a message to the fans: “A woman wrote an article that’s inaccurate.”
In a startling turn of events, Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer was a fan of this response.
Under the headline “Glorious Leader Donald Trump Refuses to Denounce Stormer Troll Army,” the blogger Andrew Anglin—who was largely responsible for inciting the campaign against Ioffe in the first place—wrote:
The Jew Wolf was attempting to Stump the Trump, bringing up stormer attacks on Jew terrorist Julia Ioffe. Trump responded to the request with “I have no message to the fans” which might as well have been “Hail Victory, Comrades!”
“People derive more happiness from pay when they know they’re earning more than co-workers, research shows. In a famous 1998 study...half of 257 people surveyed said they would rather make $50,000 a year when others around them earned $25,000 than earn $100,000 while peers earned $200,000.”
Did you know that, yesterday, presumptive Republican nominee and cost of our own collective sins Donald Trump ate a taco bowl for lunch? Of course you do. Because for the rest of the day (and well into the night), people couldn’t stop talking about that goddamn tweet. It was phenomenal.
I don’t mean the tweet, itself, of course. The tweet was dumb and condescending and racist and all the bad things everyone has already said about. The coverage of the tweet, though—that was an art form.
Local news stations sent reporters out into random Mexican restaurants just to squeeze a few extra minutes out of Donald Trump’s lunch. They read Twitter’s inane responses out loud. They argued about the virtues of the taco bowl. They asked a Mexican man off-camera to weigh in. Collective hours of people’s lives were lost to this taco bowl.
Rob Ford, one hopes, is off dancing to reggae music somewhere in heaven’s Steak Queen franchise. Meanwhile, here on earth, his ghost has deigned to grant presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump the coveted Canadian endorsement.
Here are his ghostly tweets, assuming I’m not the only one who can see them:
Just two red-faced racist politicians who wouldn’t say no to a taco bowl—surprised it didn’t happen sooner.
A disabled woman driving near Asheville, NC was involved in a minor fender-bender with a truck that left her Toyota Camry with a little damage, but unable to start. She called a towing company to get her back to her home in Travelers Rest, SC. When the tow truck arrived, though, the driver refused to tow her because she was a Bernie Sanders supporter. Why? You know, God told him to.
The woman, Cassandra McWade, suffers from chronic conditions, including psoriatic arthritis, fibromyalgia, and Crohn’s Disease, has a handicap placard hanging from her rear-view mirror and several Bernie Sanders-related bumper stickers and signs on the rear of her car. It was the Bernie Sanders signs that most affected Ken Shupe, owner of Shupee Max Towing, and his pal God, who, according to what Shupe told the Washington Times:
“I think the Lord came to me, and he just said ‘Get in the truck and leave.’ And when I got in my truck, you know, I was so proud.”
Yes, so proud. God must be so proud of you for leaving a person who needed help on the side of the road. God loves it when people refuse to do their jobs and impairs the safety of people because of political disagreements. He totally gets off on that shit.
Shupe told McWade that he was unable to tow her car because she was “obviously a socialist,” and helpfully suggested that she “call the government” for a tow. I guess you just call the front desk at the Department of Transportation for that?
Shupe identifies as a Trump supporter, and of course he has every right to dislike Bernie Sanders and any policies he espouses. In fact, legally, he has every right to do what he did; political affiliation is not a protected class, so if he wants to refuse service based on that, he’s breaking no laws, according to attorneys contacted by Fox News.
But that doesn’t mean that Shupe is not a colossal asshole.
Shupe defended his decision by citing recent business dealings, just in case the Voice of God he heard wasn’t enough to get you on his side:
“Every business dealing in recent history that I’ve had with a socialist-minded person, I haven’t got paid,” Shupe told the station.
He added: “Every time I’ve dealt with these people in recent history, I get ‘Berned.’
“With an ‘e,’ not a ‘u.’ ”
Of course, it didn’t matter that he had zero evidence to suggest that this person he was coming out to tow would burn or Bern him. Also, I’m sure this sort of thing has happened on both sides of the political spectrum, and the stranded motorist, McWade, has probably the best thing to say on the matter:
“You don’t have to agree on anything, just to be kind to one another.”
Seriously. You’re a tow truck driver, dude. Tow the car. You don’t have to marry them, or run a school board together. It’s business. You had one job to do, and that was not to leave your customer on the side of the freaking road. In November, you can vote as hard and vigorously for Trump as you want. Today, do your damn job.
A manhunt was underway Friday afternoon for the suspect in three fatal shootings in the Washington, D.C., area over the past 24 hours, the Associated Press reports. Police identified 62-year-old Eulalio Tordil, a Federal Protective Service employee, as the suspect.
Montgomery County Police reported having Tordil in custody just before 3 o’clock on Friday. FPS is a division of the Department of Homeland Security; it provides security at federal buildings.
The first shooting took place on Thursday at Beltsville’s High Point High School: Police say that Tordil followed his wife, Gladys Tordil, to their children’s school. There, he shot and killed her, the AP reports, and shot and wounded a man who tried to stop him.
According to the Washington Post, Tordil had been placed on administrative duties in March, after his estranged wife filed a protective order against him in Prince George’s County District Court.
The final protective order approved by the judge required Eulalio Tordil to surrender all firearms to law enforcement and refrain from using them, except “when respondent is at work and while he is on work premises.” The order said that “respondent may carry his work-issued fire arm which he will leave at work during non-work hours.”
But a Federal Protective Service official said Friday that the agency “removed his duty weapon, badge and credentials” after the protective order was filed. The agency did not detail what exactly Tordil did as a law enforcement officer or how long he had been with the agency.
The protective order documents indicate that an investigation had been forwarded to county social services for the alleged abuse of the stepdaughters. The order said Eulalio Tordil was to stay away from High Point High School and Parkdale High School in Riverdale, where Gladys Tordil said she worked.
Gladys Tordil’s order alleged that her husband subjected their children to “intense-military-like discipline” and physically abused at least one of them over the course of ten years. According to the order, he had in his possession a .40-caliber handgun, a .45-caliber handgun, an M-4, a revolver, and a “hunting gun.”
It has not been confirmed that Tordil was the gunman in the two shootings Friday morning, which took place at a mall parking lot and a nearby mall. CNN reports Tordil is suspected in those shootings based on eyewitness accounts.
Rain mountain! Embryo debate! Mercury crossing! Leopard range! High metabolism! Huge holes! Dead starfish! And grotesque intimations of the carnal kind! It’s your Friday Science Watch, where we watch science—until it falls off!
“Could a man-made mountain increase rainfall in the United Arab Emirates?” I don’t know—could a man-made valley increase electricity in Western Qatar? Could a man-made iceberg increase humidity in Upper Mongolia? Could a man-made fjord increase gross domestic product in Lesser Norway? All questions of equal meaning to the original. The subtle point is that “science,” as it is presented to the general public, through the machinations of the mainstream media, is a farce. If you are reading this column—stop.
Researchers have grown human embryos outside of the womb for 13 days. Is that ethical? Let me phrase the question a different way: It was me who smashed your car window and stole your iPad a few months back. It was just sitting there in plain view. Ethical? What if we both came from “wombs,” and yet you felt qualified to judge me for my actions? Ethical?
This coming Monday, Mercury will cross the sun’s face from the perspective of Earth. This won’t happen again for years, and yet if I just threw a ball in front of a flashlight, would it really be so different? It wouldn’t.
The range of leopards has declined by about 75% worldwide. With another 24% decline we’ll have them backed into a corner. Then we strike the final blow.
When it comes to asking the question “How did humans get bigger brains than primates?” one good answer containing accuracy is “humans have a higher metabolism and more body fat to fuel it which helped us evolve larger brains, and later, we thought up how to make guns.” When answering in front of a crowd, project your voice to the back row.
What would you do if I told you that one freaking black hole is 660 million times more massive than the sun? Would you believe me? Based on what evidence? Just my professional demeanor? What if I told you I’m the credit card number inspector?
We don’t know why North American starfish are dying off. We do know that not a single starfish was selected in this year’s NFL draft. Perhaps starfish should focus more on the quality of their play and less on excuses.
When you open up a family newspaper today, do not be surprised to find yourself subjected to blaring headlines about “Space Sex.” A company named “Space Sex” is reportedly “landing” its “rocket” in “just the right place” after it “blasted off.” If you’re not already disgusted by the quality of the “news” today, just be glad the “editors” who work at these rags didn’t feel the need to spell their little double entendres out any more explicitly before blaring them out into the world where a child could see them while innocently eating their breakfast cereal. If I may now comment in a voice that is absolutely dripping with sarcasm: Thank you, members of the “media” for informing us of the very latest “news” about “Space Sex”—heaven forbid we be allowed to lead our lives without being showered with “breaking” information about the tawdry exploits of these extraterrestrial harlots... Pardon me. The company’s name is actually “SpaceX.”
Michael Grimm, the former New York congressman who was convicted of felony tax evasion in 2014, is back home on house arrest after a seven-month term in federal prison. The congressman has not ruled out a return to politics, he told NY1 in a recent interview.
Grimm, a Republican whose district included Staten Island and parts of southern Brooklyn, was accused of filing fraudulent taxes at the Upper East Side health food restaurant he owned before his election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010, and resigned from Congress shortly thereafter. More than for his legislative record, New Yorkers may remember Grimm as the guy who once threatened to throw a reporter—a NY1 reporter!—off of a balcony for asking him a question he didn’t like.
A return to past glories doesn’t seem entirely likely for Grimm, but New York City has a proud tradition of scandalized politicians stepping up for a second at-bat. On the heels of his sexting scandal in 2013, Anthony Weiner ran for mayor, only to have a second round of leaked sexts torpedo his campaign. The same year, the prostitute-loving former governor Eliot Spitzer ran for city comptroller. Both men lost, but that shouldn’t discourage Grimm. There’s a mayoral election coming up next year, and the debates would be a lot more fun to watch if Mr. “I’ll Break You In Half Like a Boy” got involved.
As has been often noted this election cycle, Donald Trump is a member of the WWE Hall of Fame. Trump and WWE founder Vince McMahon have known each other since 1988, and worked together frequently. But in 2007, Trump and McMahon pretended to be bitter rivals, culminating in Trump shaving McMahon’s head on pay-per-view TV. This was all play-acting, or “work” as its known in professional wrestling. In real life, Trump and McMahon were friends, and the feud was mutually beneficial to both.
Donald Trump and Joe Scarborough (and Mika Brzezinski) are longtime friends. Trump has been a frequent guest on Scarborough’s MSNBC morning show, “The Morning Joe.” Trump himself has been pleased with how “The Morning Joe” has covered his campaign, expressing his gratitude to its hosts off-the-air. Scarborough and Brzenzinski even spent at least a portion of the night of the New Hampshire primary election watching the returns in Trump’s hotel room.
Today—and I apologize for the content of this sentence—reliable media rabble-rouser and former Gawker features editor Leah Finnegan put up a post on Genius, in which she reprinted the pitch email sent out by former New York Observer editor Aaron Gell about his new pop-up blog at New York Magazine, a six-week project called Beta Male. Gell describes Beta Male as “something like The Cut”—NYMag’s successful women’s site—“but for men,” and his description...
Think of a typical men’s site, then imagine if it were truly comfortable in its own skin; if it dropped all the incessant backslapping, quit performing maleness and instead gently probed and interrogated it; if it dared to acknowledge that “what it means to be a man” is actually a wide-open question with a range of answers; if it quit overcompensating. In short, if it grew a pair.
...evokes, to me, something fairly close to what my colleagues at Deadspin have been doing with their own successful subsite, Adequate Man. There’s a large market for this! Vulnerable masculinity is in. Esquire slideshows about whiskey stones are out. Or something.
Gell is looking for “personal essays, oddball profiles, trend pieces, reported features, rants, quick counterintuitive takes, stunt pieces, and left-field stories you never thought an editor would actually hire you to write.” Emphasis on that first category, and emphasis in this quote mine:
One further note: Among the many areas in which women are just totally crushing it lately (sheesh, women!) is the confessional essay. We would like to demonstrate that men can be introspective and self-aware, too. So by all means, whatever you pitch me, try to include a personal essay idea or two. These can be about sex and relationships, family, work, friendships, race, art, beauty, obsession, the body, war, childhood celebrity crushes, parenthood, butt play and/or shoes.
Well, sheesh, women! When it comes to gut-wrenching confessions of a deeply personal nature, you have this shit locked down!
There is an obvious reason for this that has nothing to do with whether or not there are outlets available for men to confess things about their personal lives online. At the end of 2014, I wrote about the “women’s essay,” which has been a daily focus of mine in my last three years as an editor for women’s sites; the genre, to me—a method of directly commodifying personal experience—has always seemed like an attempt to spin gold out of shit and straw.
By shit and straw, I mean the material conditions that have surrounded women’s publications, which are rarely able to fund the type of reporting or coddle the voicey analytical thinkers that define both men’s publications and ostensibly gender-neutral mainstream ones. (The first things I ever wrote on the internet were personal essays, because I was broke and the financial barrier to entry was nonexistent, and because I was a totally inexperienced writer who was willing to write for free.)
And I also mean the material conditions that have determined women’s lives—in which your gender was expected for almost all of history to shut up and get penetrated and have babies and stay at home, in which all of the other factors that give people something interesting to write about (because, unless you are a genius, you can’t write a personal essay about basic comfort or stasis and expect anyone to read it) are compounded, and the problems auto-delivered to you by your gender are multiplied by other factors of economics and orientation and race.
So the online confessional personal essay remains one of the only counterexamples to the truism that a Men’s Thing is just a Thing. This thing, the personal essay, is a women’s thing by default; personal writing is dominated by women because, as I wrote in 2014, women were confined to this situation, and so women’s writing will bethe business of inward meditation as long as it’s still risky for women to walk around alone. This particular online personal essay explains it. And as we are now in a cultural moment where people are—thankfully—interested in learning about social structures and what life is like for people who have suffered greater hardships, we have, to mixed effect, progressed on the personal essay front from “A Room of One’s Own” into sort of “A Room of One’s Own, Wallpapered With Identity and the Particular Difficult Things It Brings.”
And identity does bring things of particular, fascinating, important difficulty. I edit a lot of these essays and think they can be wonderful, when the perspective is rare and the writing has craft: take this recent one by Melissa Valentine, a black writer who lost a brother to gun violence, for one example among a hundred.
But the fact that identity and hardship are the foundation of the online personal essay genre works both for better and for worse. And the better the tie between that identity and material privilege, the worse the idea of hardship tends to fit. And when that hardship is seen as trivial (XOJane’s infamous “My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina”) or distasteful to people (take our essay by Natasha Rose Chenier about a brief, incestuous relationship she had with her father), people will click—maybe—and they’ll also hate it. That makes it a risky proposition to simply say, “Let’s get a lot of writing out there about the hard issues that come with particular identities—by men!”
What is emerging as a particular (white) male hardship stemming from identity, however, is the hardship of privilege, via the encroachment of political correctness, itself. And let me say, I have remained a loyal participant in the online personal essay genre because I believe in it. I am glad Aaron Gell wants to engage in this particular quest; some of my favorite first-person writers are, and I’m not being sarcastic, men. But on the internet in particular, the personal essay waters are treacherous, as is the process of trying to do something like, Hey, we noticed you built some great-looking houses in this crap-ass neighborhood we put you in, and we’d like to start building those kinds of houses in our own, historically nicer neighborhood, too. The perspective of the 2016 (usually white, usually straight) “beta male” is only so appealing on an internet that has made much of its living off of identity politics. Be careful, or you’ll end up either with Chris Jones wanting women to fuck better, or else a surfeit of wokeness: “I Feel Bad About My Dick.”
Donald Trump once famously said that he “could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Last night in West Virginia he tried out a get out the vote strategy only slightly less daring than that one.
Speaking in Charleston, in advance of the state’s May 10 primary, Trump told the assorted crowd to... not vote (via Time):
“Now what I want you to do is save your vote,” Trump told the crowd in Charleston, West Virginia. “You know, you don’t have to vote anymore. Save your vote for the general election, OK? Forget this one, the primary is gone.”
Earlier this year, a Hudson County Superior Court judge dismissed a former Jersey City cop’s whistleblower suit against the city itself, Jersey City’s public safety director, two former police chiefs, and eight other police officials. The retired cop, Frank DeFazio, claimed that an anti-government clique operating within the department’s Emergency Services Unit had targeted him for harassment, and that he had been subject to retribution from high-level police officials after he complained.
In February 2012, DeFazio filed a “hostile work environment” complaint with Internal Affairs against ESU Sgts. Clyde Banks and Thomas Johnson. In an act of retribution, DeFazio claimed, Banks filed a “neglect of duty” complaint against him. After being interrogated by Internal Affairs, DeFazio was ordered to surrender his weapons and undergo a fitness-for-duty exam, which he passed. In his suit, DeFazio said that at one point he felt so intimidated that he began unsnapping his gun when he went to work. In his complaint, DeFazio claimed to have been the victom of
...a continuous pattern of harassment, which began with the actions of Banks and Johnston by alienating co-employees and creating gang-like mentality among co-employees to accomplish their agenda...Further, the supervisors’ [sic] condoned these actions and retaliated against plaintiff Defazio.
But in January, Hudson County Superior Court Judge Francis B. Schultz dismissed those charges—which implicated Public Safety Director James Shea, former police chief Tom Comey, and former police chief Robert Cowan—on the grounds that the alleged harassment, which DeFazio maintains began in 2009, happened too long before DeFazio brought the suit, in 2014, by which point he was retired. And on Wednesday, two Jersey City police officers were cleared of the remaining charges of harassment, intimidation, and age discrimination.
According to DeFazio’s suit, Sgt. Banks “immediately began causing friction” when he was assigned to the ESU in September 2009. Banks was on the overnight shift, and began advocating for higher performance and shooting range qualifications. He criticized those who worked during the day as “whiners, crybabies and waiting-to-die crew.”
Banks didn’t dispute that he had called for higher standards, saying that it was a result of fellow ESU officer Marc Anthony DiNardo’s death in a shootout the preceding July. “When that happened, that hit everyone at home, and the chief, everyone, wanted the training,” Banks said after the verdict came down. Per a report by NJ.com:
“I spoke to the inspector, and I said, ‘Everyone has to amp up on training.’ [DeFazio] was in favor of that, too, until he had to perform. He felt like he shouldn’t have to do the training. He felt like he should have to sit around and do nothing. I am a proactive police officer.”
Banks, of course, was relieved to be cleared of any wrongdoing with respect to DeFazio. “It felt great,” he said. “I had not doubt. There really was nothing.”
Except there was something to DeFazio’s allegations: The existence of an anti-government clique within the JCPD was first reported by the Jersey Journal in 2013, after an anonymous letter was sent to the paper alleging that some ESU officers were wearing patches declaring their allegiance to the Three Percenter movement.
The loosely organized Three Percenters believe that only three percent of colonists participated in the American Revolution, and that they are part of a similar revolutionary vanguard in a contemporary struggle against oppression—that is, against the federal government. Anyone can declare themselves a Three Percenter, but there are also more organized groups, predominantly in the Pacific Northwest.
“They were separating themselves from the others in the unit and we put a stop to it immediately,” JCPD Deputy Chief Peter Nalbach told the Journal. From that same report:
The letter also says some official ESU patches were altered by adding “3%” to them. The letter also includes a picture of such a patch.
Finally, the letter includes a patch with the image of a skull and says ESU officers wore the skull patch and Three-Percenters patches while on patrol.
Nalbach confirmed that officers were wearing a patch and said “It was removed because we don’t allow unofficial patches.”
The letter also includes an image of a Three-Percenters flag and said it was hung in the ESU gym. Nalbach said he was not aware of a flag.
The flag photographed was the Nyberg Battle Flag, embraced by Three Percenters since at least 2009. DeFazio’s suit alleges that this was the group of men against whom he attempted to speak out and who in turn targeted him. “I drink whiskey. It keeps me angry so I don’t blindly follow sheep. You need to wake up before you’re lead to slaughter,” one of the officers named in the initial suit wrote in a recent (now-deleted) Facebook comment, a screenshot of which was obtained by Gawker.
Accused officer’s name redacted in black.
“They wanted to get rid of the day tour guys, the older guys with more experience,” DeFazio’s attorney, Theodore Campbell, said in his opening statements last month. “They marketed themselves Three Percenters. They began calling [the older officers] ‘Those waiting to die,’ and ‘lazy.’ They began posting signs.”
Meanwhile, defense attorney Matthew Collins said “the concept of the Three Percenters, to get people to join them, originally it was a joke.” The idea “was to bring the group together, motivate them.”
After the verdict came down, Banks said the patches had nothing to do with the anti-government group: “It was from a motivational speaker that said only 3 percent of people are motivated, want to do things, want to move forward.”
It’s been a long 67 days since we last heard from Sad Jeb. And considering his sodium-addled state, we were starting to get worried. But fear not. Noted scion Jeb Bush is still here, and he’s (probably) fine(-ish). Also, he’s not voting for President.
Sad Jeb is voting in all his local and state elections but snubbing the general. Will this change anyone’s mind? And is anyone even going to care? The answer to both is almost certainly not.
Most of the comments responding to the post expressed annoyance, while some merely took the opportunity to pour salt in Jeb’s still fresh, always gaping wounds.
What I am forced to assume is a fake account made by Jeb’s mom had some nice things to say, though.
On an unrelated note, happy Mother’s Day, Barbara!
Elizabeth Warren, who is doing a far better job humiliating Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton’s own campaign, let loose a scathing string of tweets earlier this evening. I cannot recommend them highly enough.
The wordsmiths over at the Hillary Clinton campaign just can’t help themselves from coming up with insipid, potentially self-destructive names for their main opponent, a man whose appearance alone lends itself to an infinite array of much more spectacular nicknames.
During a campaign stop at an elementary school in Oakland, California, on Friday, the Democratic presidential candidate unveiled her new jab at Donald Trump, who is the Republican presumptive nominee: The “presumptuous nominee.” She went on, according to ABC News:
“Their presumptive nominee, otherwise called their presumptuous nominee has made it really clear he basically said wages are too high in America. And that’s why he doesn’t think we need to raise the minimum wage. And I gotta tell you I ask myself all the time, who he is talking to?”
Tack on five letters to an already jargon-y word, and voilà! You’ve made an ineffective meme. But at least, mercifully, this may signal a departure from that other nickname beloved by the Clinton campaign.
“Everybody who left town and drove north, between 10,000 and 20,000 of us, knew that at some point we had to return. Past our burning homes and our deserted city,” writes Kevin Thorton, a resident of fire-ravaged Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada. His piece in The New York Times is a spine-chilling ode to the land that oil sands emptied.
Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s self-congratulatory newsletter and lifestyle brand for rich healthies, will release its first sex issue on May 9. So, sorry brand new white bed spread, because you’re about to have about a gallon of pomegranate juice sanctimoniously sprayed all over you, I bet.
Said to be inspired by Paltrow’s recent comments about embracing one’s sexuality, the issue will include both features and roundups of “sexy toys” and “erotic theaters.” It will, of course, have a Goop spin on it: A statement hinted at an informative piece about the parabens found in most standard lube brands.
Erotic theaters? I mean, my seat was drenched after Avenue Q, so I’m in. Also, they’re called shows.
But how are the Gwyneths and the Jessicas and the Blakes—a.k.a. the ungodly wealthy and well—fucking correctly? What exactly is Goop Sex?
Is it holding your partner in an intimate, unmoving hug for 30 minutes? Is it seeing who can achieve the most middle part? Is it mindfully standing on a scale? Is it lovingly feeding your partner homemade organic apple sauce? Is it watching someone else clean your pizza oven? Is it inhaling your partner’s exhale? Is it paying a pilot to keep almost taking off your private jet but landing it at the last second? Is it holding a ripe pear in each of your hands? Is it looking into your partner’s eyes and saying a Sanskrit phrase that could honestly mean anything for all you know? Is it breaking into a Best Buy and exploding all the televisions? Is it looking in a full-length mirror?
“Wherever there is number, there is beauty,” wrote the Byzantine philospher Proclus Diadochus in the 5th century, unaware how very wrong he was. According to the average plane-riding American, mathematics is now nothing but the Satanical scripture of olive-skinned terrorists.
The Washington Post published a mind-boggling account Saturday of an American Airlines passenger who was nearly kicked off a flight. The passenger’s seat mate, a woman unsurprisingly wearing flip-flops, complained about his behavior, and the mysterious scrawling he was doing on a piece of paper. As it turns out, that man was the prestigious economist Guido Menzio, who was grinding out a differential equation on the way to give a lecture. From WaPo:
That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.
After questioning, Menzio was allowed to re-board, though his new flip-flopped friend didn’t join him. Though he says he was treated respectfully by authorities, sees the incident as one episode in a “broken system that does not collect information efficiently.”
And the root cause of that problem—who but?
“What might prevent an epidemic of paranoia? It is hard not to recognize in this incident, the ethos of [Donald] Trump’s voting base,” he said.
London elected its new mayor, Sadiq Khan, on Friday, making him the first Muslim person to hold the position in the city—or that of any major western capital, for that matter.
Khan, a former human rights lawyer and now a member of the center-left Labour Party, beat out Tory Zac Goldsmith by 1,310,143 votes to 994,614, according to BBC. The election ends eight years of Conservative rule in the city. The son of a Pakistani bus driver, Khan has promised to address London’s housing crisis and freeze hikes on transportation fares.
“London has today chosen hope over fear,” he said in a speech immediately after his victory was announced.
