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Informed

The Atlantic: The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning

Reading Time: 4 minutes This improbable question—how did a person with a weakness for conspiratorial thinking achieve the presidency?—might be among the most consequential of the coming election, which is not merely a political contest, but a referendum on Enlightenment values and on reality itself.

Nonsense is nonsense, except when it kills. And conspiracy thinking, especially when advanced by the president of the United States, is an existential threat.

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Vox: The agonizing story of Tara Reade

Reading Time: 12 minutes Reade’s latest allegation is far more serious and comes in a far more fraught political context. The story that both she and her corroborating witnesses are telling has changed dramatically. This leaves me — all of us — in an agonizing place. I’ve written many articles through the Me Too era. It’s unrealistic to demand “perfect” victims. And, like most who come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct or assault, Reade has suffered for speaking out. In several exchanges this year and last year, she’s shown me disturbing messages she’s received online.

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The only non-negotiable is to erase white supremacist culture

Reading Time: 3 minutes Don’t just talk to your kids about the killing of a 24-year-old innocent Black man in Brunswick County, Georgia. Talk to them about what white supremacist culture is and how you have inherited it and you probably all have some blindspots to it. Talk about how it shows up in your home and how you are now, as a family, committed to eradicating it because it only produces victims. You are a victim of it because it limits you to being a violent, oppressive, entitled conspirator to the system.

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Politico: ‘The Nightmare Scenario’: How Coronavirus Could Make the 2020 Vote a Disaster

Reading Time: 10 minutes Preparations need to happen right now. If you’re expecting five times the number of absentee-ballot applications — like Wisconsin saw — you’re going to need to have a printer set up for that, and you’re gonna need to have a procedure set up to mail those ballots out. And if people have to apply for absentee ballots individually, those are all going to have to be processed. Lots needs to happen now that wouldn’t ordinarily have to happen quite so early.

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Forbes: The Dr. Fauci of the 1918 Spanish Flu

Reading Time: 7 minutes A public health official getting fired over unpopular social distancing measures during a pandemic has an eerie echo today, when business leaders and politicians are chafing against restrictions urged by authorities to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. But it was precisely these restrictions that enabled Seattle and other cities in Washington to protect themselves from the Spanish flu—and similar actions helped Kansas abate another influenza wave in the fall of 1919.

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This Should Not Come as a Surprise

Reading Time: 4 minutes The really, really unsettling thing about this “news” is that if the United States government were to falter, the majority of Americans don’t freaking want the most corrupt, racist, incompetent, dangerous, selfish, greedy, power-hungry, science-averse, lying, deliberately obtrusive Administration in the entire history of the United States to be the administration that survives whatever chaos unfolds. Who wants the administration that has worked harder to erode this government and its institutions than any group of Americans in history to be in charge of reconstituting the US if everything goes to crap?

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