Lie ‘N Wait

For the past few days, Americans have been engaged in a nonstop debate over who is telling the truth and who is lying. It’s an age when human jobs are being taken over by machines, but we’re on our own on this one. As Wired reports, lie detectors don’t provide much help. “Over the past century, scientists have debunked the polygraph, proving again and again that the test can’t reliably distinguish truth from falsehood. At best, it is a roll of the dice; at worst, it’s a vessel for test administrators to project their own beliefs.” That said, the test is still widely used. And Brett Kavanaugh is not alone as polygraph tests can often be used to keep someone from getting a federal job. The Lie Generator: Inside The Black Mirror World Of Polygraph Job Screenings.

+ So who was telling the truth last Thursday? Current Affairs goes deep in its look at how we know Kavanaugh is lying. Meanwhile, the GOP-hired prosecutor Rachel Mitchell filed her report, questioning the credibility of Christine Blasey Ford.

+ Now it’s up to the FBI to find the truth. But as Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow report in The New Yorker, there’s a lot of confusion about what exactly the FBI will be allowed to investigate.

+ Kavanaugh’s new-fangled defintions of phrases like Devil’s Triangle and Boofing did stretch credulity. Maybe the rest of us are just speaking a different language. To close the gap, I decided to write up a Brett Kavanaugh-inspired Glossary of Prep School Slang.