Me-Related Link Roundup

This is mostly for my mother, but she's right that I need to be keeping better track of my stuff. To wit:

1. I got a piece published in Grist for the first time, about DC food trucks and young conservatives.

2. Here's my print piece about "reformish" conservatives. Paul Krugman and Mike Konczal think I'm full of it. Response forthcoming.

3. Defending Paul Krugman from Clive Crook. Brad DeLong reprints.

4. Explaining why Michael Kinsley is wrong about austerity. DeLong kind of steps on my toes tone-wise, but in a fun way.

5. My debut on DC's sorry excuse for a gossip blog. Beware kids, get between me and my highlighter box and bad things will happen. The strangest thing about that is that it's actually quite a fair piece—she reprinted my email in full, and it basically deflates the story. The thing that strikes me is that this is someone's job. Some media critics write really compelling stuff about vicious backstabbery on the Today show. Others scour Twitter for cursing and then write blog posts about people so much less famous than Matt Lauer even with scientific notation there wouldn't be space enough in the universe to represent the scale of the difference. Think about that for a minute and give thanks.

Oh, and this song isn't bad:

Comments

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that...

Russiagate and the Left, Round II

Corey Robin has responded to my article arguing that the left should take the Trump-Russia story more seriously . I do appreciate that he considers me an ally, and I feel the same towards him. However I am not convinced. The points I want to make are somewhat disconnected, so I will just take them one at a time. What should be done? Robin complains that I don't give much attention to the question of how we should respond to Russian electoral espionage. As an initial matter, the question of whether a problem is an important one is logically distinct from what the response should be. There is a sizable vein of skepticism about Russiagate on the left, and the argument of the post was that skepticism was misplaced. Solutions can be worked out later. This point is rather similar to the centrist argument that you can't talk about Medicare for All unless you've got a fully costed-out bill detailing all the necessary taxes and regulation. However, I have advanced some pol...

Ryan Cooper

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