Elsewhere for November 10, 2018

You should read this for 11/10/2018:

Art and Film

Murdered mob boss gave stolen Boston art to IRA, says former Met detective

Rembrandt and Vermeer masterpieces taken in 1990 heist linked to James “Whitey” Bulger are stashed in Ireland, says sleuth.

Extreme Sheep-Herding With LED Lights “Baaastud’s multifaceted team visits the hills of Wales to lightly promote Samsung LED TV sets with the help of sheep fitted with LED vests.”

Books, Writing, and Language

Our book launch was botched and it’s been crazy at work trying to fix it

Education

“Phenomenally saddening”: inside the sordid world of America’s for-profit colleges “The new documentary Fail State, executive produced by Dan Rather, tells the 50-year tale of profit-driven colleges scamming society’s most vulnerable”

Relying heavily on federal student loans, from which it took $1.4bn in yearly revenue, Corinthian was on the brink of collapse after the department of education halted the company’s flow of federal funding due to evidence of rampant fraud in its reporting of grades and job placements.
Corinthian, a behemoth of the for-profit college industry that marketed its vocational and post-secondary programs to single mothers at or below the poverty line, was already under investigation by various federal agencies, the education department, and 20 different state attorneys general when it said it could not operate for more than a few days without an influx of cash.

And this is particularly important:

That the president himself once ran a criminal for-profit education company – and that he’d appoint in education secretary Betsy DeVos a willing foot soldier for their cause – was not something Shebanow and his team anticipated when they began work on Fail State back in 2013. The saga of Trump University has been well-documented, but DeVos’s overtures toward the for-profit industry, including the elimination or rollback of Obama-era gainful employment and student borrower defense regulations, have gone mostly under the radar. DeVos, the director explains, is also tinkering with rules mandating “substantive teacher-student interaction”, which ensures students at for-profits are not navigating their coursework alone.

Food and Drink

Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon Recipe as a .pdf from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

History and Archaeology

Thomas Becket’s bloody tunic returns to Canterbury 850 years after he died

Vatican to send back historic relic worn by archbishop as he was brutally murdered

How to explain the KGB’s amazing success identifying CIA agents in the field? “Paranoid CIA heads blamed Soviet moles, but the real reason for the repeated disasters was much simpler”
A Ramp Contraption May Have Been Used to Build Egypt’s Great Pyramid “The finding could help answer a longstanding question of how massive stone blocks were hauled into place.”
“It was very hard for him”: relatives remember first world war survivors
The Kindertransport children 80 years on: “I was bowled over that these non-Jewish people were nice to us”

Music

The Freddie Mercury biopic isn’t homophobic – it’s inspiring
Back with the real Beatles: the White Album reviewed – archive, 1968 “Fifty years ago, the Guardian printed two reviews of The Beatles and recommended listening to ‘what is likely to be the biggest event of the pop music year’ in stereo”
What the Beatles Sounded Like Unedited “Fifty years after its debut, The White Album has been reissued to include demos and sessions, giving listeners a wider lens through which to examine the seminal work from the band.”

Science and Nature

World’s largest deep-sea octopus nursery discovered

Scientists discovered over 1,000 females, many brooding eggs, in a shimmering “octopus garden” that may be seeping natural gas or hot water.

Recent Interstellar Asteroid May Have Been Alien Artifact, Speculates New Paper
Ocean floor rover finds large shark nursery in Irish waters “Vehicle discovers school of blackmouth catsharks around thousands of egg cases”
Millions of starfish are mysteriously dying, and now scientists think they know why

Society

The American civil war didn’t end. And Trump is a Confederate president

His supporters hark back to an 1860s fantasy of white male dominance. But the Confederacy won’t win in the long run. . . . It’s worth remembering that the Ku Klux Klan also hated Jews and, back then, Catholics; that the ideal of whiteness was anti-immigrant, anti-diversity, anti-inclusion; that Confederate flags went up not in the immediate post-war period of the 1860s but in the 1960s as a riposte to the civil rights movement.

I Didn’t Know I Was Intersex — Until I Made a Film About an Intersex Character

Experiences like mine are common for intersex people around the world. Vulnerable and scared parents adamantly follow doctors’ orders to “normalize” our bodies with unnecessary surgeries — removing or adding to our natural anatomies and pumping us with “corrective” hormones without consulting us about how we identify or how we feel. They fail to understand that gender, sex, and sexuality occur on a spectrum. Furthermore, doctors perpetuate the false idea that ‘no one is like us,’ — that we are not normal — keeping us in cycles of shame and immense loneliness. In fact, 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 people are intersex — it’s as common as having naturally red hair. Statistically, it’s likely that there is someone in your own community who is intersex but is perhaps too scared to be public about their identity (and understandably so).

Technology

Touring the recreated 1969 birthplace of the internet at UCLA

On October 29, 1969, UCLA grad student Charley Kline sat in a room in Boelter Hall and typed the first message on the ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet. He wrote “lo;” before he could get to the “g” in “login” the system crashed.

Via NPR: Supreme Court Won’t Review Decision That OK’d Obama-Era Net Neutrality Rules

Still, the high court’s rejection preserves the appeals court’s decision as a possible precedent and makes it even more likely that the issue will resurface if the FCC shifts its makeup — something that would happen if Democrats are able to win back the White House in 2020.
The FCC’s repeal of net neutrality is also the subject of separate legal battles, after it was challenged by tech companies and advocacy groups, in addition to more than 20 U.S. states.

“He said jobs were coming back”: the Trump voters who feel cheated

“I wanted to believe in Mr Trump,” one manufacturing worker laid off after 30 years says. “This has been a slap in the face”

Trump wants voters to think the US economy is booming – is it?

As the Federal Reserve raises rates, stock markets are wobbling, and Trump has publicly attacked the Fed, an unprecedented move for a sitting president. China’s growth is stalling, Europe once more looks like it is heading for trouble, some economists are predicting a recession next year.

Greg Miller. The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy. The Apprentice review: Trump, Putin and the subversion of US democracy

“All of this happened,” Miller writes. But instead of it happening in secret, nearly all of it occurred in plain sight, overwhelming the ability of most journalists to keep up and preventing millions of average voters from reaching the rather obvious conclusion that Trump is Vladimir Putin’s apprentice.

US democracy is in crisis. But Trump is only the symptom

This situation points to the true constitutional crisis that afflicts the United States. The fact that Trump is president and the fact that the Senate and supreme court are, if not in his hands, then at least likely to back him, are not the cause of this crisis – they are symptoms of it.

The bitter reality for journalists covering a president who lies, and lies, and lies some more
Trump slams “stupid question” from female reporter, calls April Ryan a “loser”
AP: Video expert says White House clip of CNN reporter was likely doctored [Updated]

The video is altered, Shapiro told the AP, to make Acosta’s actions as he held on to the microphone look faster and more aggressive. Shapiro noted that one first indicator that the video is not an original is that the sound has been removed, which makes it easier to alter frames. Next, in a frame-by-frame comparison, several extra frames appear toward the beginning of the video, which would be true if a video manipulator was trying to slow the video down. Someone might do this if they later wanted to speed the video up, to keep the clip and its original a similar length. Sure enough, the White House’s clip appears sped up during the actual exchange between Acosta and the White House intern.

In photos: #ProtectMueller protests in cities all across America See also: #ProtectMueller protests demand justice, “Trump is not above the law.” (Video, Photos)

Women’s Work

Setting sail: one woman’s year alone at sea
“She’s made us proud”: Ilhan Omar’s journey from Kenyan refugee camp to US Congress

Ilhan Omar, a Democrat, will assume office in January, sharing the historic distinction with Rashida Tlaib of being the first Muslim women elected to the US Congress.

Michelle Obama reveals miscarriage and condemns “reckless” Trump in new book
Gentleman Jack by Angela Steidele review – seductions of a secret diarist “A new account of a pioneering lesbian life draws on a diary with graphic descriptions of sex in code”
“I did it for every single girl”: the first Afghan woman to scale Mount Noshaq “Conquering Afghanistan’s highest peak was once unthinkable for Hanifa Yousoufi. Then she joined a climbing group, braving frostbite and the Taliban to strike a blow for gender equality”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is working from home today, because it’s just three broken ribs
Millennial congresswoman “can’t afford rent” “The youngest woman ever elected to Congress has a problem — she can’t afford her rent. That is until she starts her new job in January.”

Ms Ocasio-Cortez joins Republican Elise Stefanik, 34, and newly-elected Democrat Ilhan Omar, 36, amongst others, in the “millennial caucus” in Congress.
She was elected to New York’s 14th congressional district, after running a progressive campaign that focussed on issues like poverty, wealth inequality and immigration.

Pay It Forward and Make It Better

Business Statement for Transgender Equality

We, the undersigned businesses, stand with the millions of people in America who identify as transgender, gender non-binary, or intersex, and call for all such people to be treated with the respect and dignity everyone deserves.
We oppose any administrative and legislative efforts to erase transgender protections through reinterpretation of existing laws and regulations. We also fundamentally oppose any policy or regulation that violates the privacy rights of those that identify as transgender, gender non-binary, or intersex.