Extra, Extra
Bid Pro Quo: “The first time I heard someone use the term ‘bid’ was on my first day in federal prison, just four days before my 21st birthday. It was after the intake process, after I was fingerprinted, strip-searched, photographed, and given an inmate-ID card, an orange jumpsuit, and a roll of bedding. Before any of this, I’d been instructed by my pre-sentencing probation officer that I could bring ‘absolutely nothing’ with me into the prison. ‘Just your body,’ he’d said. So I left my eyeglasses at home, assuming I’d be issued a new pair. I walked blindly through a labyrinth of buzzing steel doors, deeper and deeper into the compound. When I asked about receiving a pair of glasses, one of the guards told me I’d have to wait until next year, since the eye doctor only came around once a year, and he’d just recently visited.” Eric Borsuk in The Marshall Project: The Art of Bidding, or How I Survived Federal Prison.
+ It’s in Their Hands: “The consequence is a politics in which neither party can sustain a durable advantage over the other, and political direction for a country of 330 million people is decided by a tiny sliver of voters in about half a dozen states—maybe a few hundred thousand people in all.” Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic: Why Politics Has Become So Stressful.
+ The Litter Truth: “To a person not steeped in the culture war battles over gender identity that have engulfed school districts nationwide, it’s the kind of claim that would sound bizarre and confusing — and, from high-profile GOP members, authoritative.” Or it could just sound as crazy as all the other nonsense dominating one American political party. How an urban myth about litter boxes in schools became a GOP talking point.
+ Attention Horror: The FDA has officially declared a shortage of Adderall.
+ Strike That, Reverse It: “British Prime Minister Liz Truss fired her finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng on Friday and scrapped parts of their economic package in a desperate bid to stay in power and survive the market and political turmoil gripping the country.”
+ Link Different: SpaceX tells US government that it can no longer pay for Ukraine’s Starlink service. (This has nothing to do with Elon’s pro-Putin peace plan or the fact that Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany recently told Musk to Eff Off.) Some folks in Ukraine say they’ve been paying for the service all along.
+ Flowering Inferno: “One of Van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers paintings has been cleaned and is back on display, after climate activists threw tins of what appeared to be tomato soup over it.” Painful to watch.
