The guardian

Friday

The Spectator

Tracking the Trump transition

Donald Trump has successfully won his second term, which means it’s time for him and his allies to buckle down and fervently start hiring for the incoming administration. Prior to his election, Trump announced that his transition would be chaired by former head of the Small Business Administration Linda McMahon and billionaire businessman Howard Lutnick, with assists from Trump’s sons as well as former Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.The president-elect made his first pick for his administration on Thursday, announcing that his campaign co-manager Susie Wiles would be his chief of staff. She will be the first ever woman to hold this key White House post.

dc
Cockburn

Is a DC ‘journalist brain-drain’ even possible?

The flawed logic of the anti-Trump sex strike No one really knows what a second Trump administration will hold for America — given the breadth of his coalition of contradictory factions, some of his voters are bound to be disappointed. But the prospect of the Donald’s mere presence back in the White House has led to a spasm of outrage on social media, with young women and members of the LGBTQIAA+ community fearful of the erosion of “rights” in case Trump, J.D. Vance and the Republicans eschew the campaign manifesto and draw instead from the Heritage Foundation’s more hardline Project 2025 agenda.Drastic measures are being mooted.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Johann Hari’s career-long trouble with the truth

British fabulist Johann Hari is at it again. After revealing he used Ozempic to lose forty pounds in his tell-all book, the alleged journalist still hasn’t shed his penchant for telling porkies. While the miracle drug made him “listless,” “strangely muted” and “emotionally dulled,” it hasn’t killed his energy for dreaming up facts.  In his latest book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, Hari alleged that food critic Jay Rayner had lost pleasure in eating at even the finest Parisian establishments after taking Ozempic. The catch: Rayner has never used Ozempic or any other weight-loss drug.

johann hari

Sunday

Teresa Mull

Guardian writer doesn’t get why Americans love fall

We Americans are used to the Brits weighing in on our affairs. I try to view their concerns with compassion, as a hard-to-kick habit leftover from the pre-Revolution days, or an endearing tendency they can’t help, like when your mother continues to remind you to wear a coat in winter even after you’re well into your forties. But our English cousins have finally crossed the line. Writing for the Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi vilifies that which we Yanks hold most sacred: “the season they call ‘fall.’” According to Mahdawi, autumn is “overrated” “rubbish.” Instead of pumpkin-spicing everything, she suggests we elevate another squash variety, “the humble courgetti,” as our favorite flavor profile of the season. I simply cannot let such abuse go unchallenged.

Monday

Phoebe Greenwood

Will the right save Julian Assange?

In late 2018, Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture, was contacted by lawyers representing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, asking him to intervene on their client’s behalf. ‘I was like, “No. Not this guy. Isn’t this the rapist hacker guy?”’ Melzer recalls. He ignored the email. Three months later, the lawyers contacted him again, this time warning that Assange’s extradition to the US — where he faces 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents — could be imminent.

assange

Sunday

Cory Doctorow

The coming stitch-up

To look upon a freshly painted wall is to behold a smooth surface; to look at it through a magnifier is to see a rough and irregular landscape — but turn the magnification up sufficiently and see it become regular again, a geometric matrix of atoms held in molecular bonds. Keep magnifying and you enter the unimaginably messy realm of the subatomic, a weird place of eldritch geometries and smeared-out, probabilistic motion. The world is smooth and rough, orderly and messy, all at once, depending on how closely you look.

tangled web

Wednesday

Meghan Murphy

You’re not ‘demisexual’…you’re a normal human being

Do you find yourself uninterested in jumping random men at your local coffee shop? Have you ever become interested in a person after getting to know them? Do you like to have a conversation with a person before ripping off all your clothes and showing them your most intimate body parts? Maybe even several conversations? Does the idea of having a strange dick in your mouth give you the yucks? Congratulations — you are completely normal. Which is, apparently, the worst thing to be in this day and age. So much so that the notion that one would form romantic connections after, not before, getting to know a person has been given its own special category on the LGBTQI&%$! spectrum. That’s right, your completely healthy behavior makes you a 'demisexual'.

demisexual

Sunday

Charlie Nash

Morrissey hasn’t turned right: our establishment has turned insane

On Thursday, May 30, Morrissey was ‘canceled’. According to the Guardian, a British newspaper fond of such decrees, fans now feel ‘betrayed’ by the singer’s recent controversial and provocative statements, which have included support for Anne Marie Waters’s nationalist For Britain party. ‘Morissey [sic], what happened?’ the Guardian agonized on Twitter. But maybe they already know the answer. In just a decade, political correctness has obtained a stranglehold on Western culture. The provocateurs and counter-cultural icons of the late 20th century have been replaced by commercially compromised ‘influencers’, and artists who are carefully selected by social censors.

morrissey

Sunday

Jacob Heilbrunn

A storm’s a coming for Trump over the ‘dirty ops’ allegations

So aides to Donald Trump, the Observer reports, retained an Israeli intelligence organization to launch a 'dirty ops' campaign against two former national security officials in the Obama administration, Colin Kahl and Ben Rhodes. Both happen to have been involved in the negotiations about the Iran deal and the idea seems to have been to find information that could be used to smear their reputations. On Twitter today, Kahl freely confessed to many sins, including selling off his valuable X-Men comic book collection as a lad to help finance a trip to debate camp. It remains to be seen whether Rhodes, too, will fess up to any such grave transgressions dating back to his childhood.