Dagbladet: The Baby in the Plastic Bag. “One frosty October morning, a newborn baby boy is found inside a plastic bag in an Oslo graveyard. The baby is about to die. A true story in nine parts.” By Bernt Jakob Oksnes.
Link via MetaFilter: Ullevaalsalléen 5, Oslo.
The Atlantic: The Electoral College Was Meant to Stop Men Like Trump From Being President. “The founders envisioned electors as people who could prevent an irresponsible demagogue from taking office.” By Peter Beinart, November 21, 2016.
“Donald Trump has changed the way I view American government. Before this year, I would have considered Hamilton’s demand for independent-minded electors who could prevent candidates with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity“ from winning the presidency to be antiquated and retrograde. Now I think the framers were prescient and I was naïve. Eighteen months ago, I could never have imagined President Donald Trump. Now I’m grateful that, two hundred and twenty-seven years ago, they did.”
The Atlantic: My President Was Black. “A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next.” By Ta-Nehisi Coates.
A lot of food for thoughts.
Link via MetaFilter.
The Washington Post: Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House.
“The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.”
Chicago Tribune: Member of Putin’s party: ‘United Russia won the elections in America’.
“Russia’s government denies that it tampered in the U.S. election or even took sides. But now that the results are in, members of President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party aren’t holding back.
“It turns out that United Russia won the elections in America,” Viktor Nazarov, the governor of Omsk, Russia, declared in a radio interview.
Long before Donald Trump was on the radar of American voters, Russia had deep interests in the outcome of elections around the world. But 2016 presented a unique window.
Motivated by years of crippling economic sanctions and decades of post-Soviet setbacks, the Russians were keener than ever to pounce; the race for the White House, plagued by party infighting and scandal, was easy bait.”
Links via MetaFilter.
The Washington Post: Annie Glenn: ‘When I called John, he cried. People just couldn’t believe that I could really talk.’.
“As John [Glenn] himself wrote, “We practically grew up in the same playpen. We never knew a time when we didn’t know each other.“ (Annie says they were 2 years old when they met.)
But they were different. John was athletic and outgoing while Annie barely spoke, not because she didn’t have anything to say, but because when she did, people often assumed she was either deaf or mentally deficient.
For most of her life, Annie was afflicted with an 85 percent stutter, meaning she would become “hung up on 85 percent of the words she tried to speak, which was a severe handicap,“ as John put it.
Those years must have been torture for Annie.”
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