This week, as the Russiagate noose tightened around Donald Trump’s neck, he met with Vladimir Putin in Vietnam.
Kim Jong-un said I’m an “old lunatic,” Vlad. You don’t think I’m old, do you?
With that blouse on, Don, you look as young as a schoolgirl.
Somebody call my name?
• CRISPR mail-order kits are the beginning of our decentralized biotech future. It’s worth remembering Freeman Dyson warned a decade ago that the games could be “messy and potentially dangerous.”
• It’s not nearly their worst outrage, but the way these Pepe pigs and Russian trolls have used nihilism to advance their racist, autocratic agenda is maddening. Nihilism isn’t good as an operating system, but it can be a useful bug to disrupt the machine.
• Stephen Galloway of the Hollywood Reporter, who wrote the most shockingly amoral take of the Nate Parker rape controversy last year, is now very worried about the Weinstein Effect. Strange priorities.
• Harvey Weinstein was able to afford David Boies, former Mossad officers and numerous international security agencies when trying to undermine, cajole and intimidate victims and journalists determined to go public about his sexual harassment and abuse, as Ronan Farrow reports.
• In Ross Andersen’s wonderfully written Atlantic account of his trek to China’s premier SETI setup, which looks like a caved-in Apple campus dotted with oil rigs and is the “the world’s most sensitive telescope,” the author visits with novelist Liu Cixin and revisits the populous state’s scientific history.
• One of the few trips Timothy Leary never got to take, except posthumously, was a trek to outer space. In 1976, during his “comeback tour” after stays in 29 jails and a retirement of sorts, Leary dreamed of leaving it all behind—way behind.
• Zam EIC Laura Michet thinks the robotization of writing may be slowed because, as armies of Facebook friends and tweeters have proven, “people find writing pleasant and will do it for free.”
• Old Print Article: The Lost Cause was a systematic plan by the vanquished of the Civil War to win the postbellum information war via revisionist media—statuary, textbooks, etc. In 1915, sculptor Gutzon Borglum was asked to create a KKK-friendly Stone Mountain monument.
• This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches: Jennifer Doudna, Otto and George, etc.