With Margaret Brennan, Rudy Giuliani, Susan Collins, Steve Scalise. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's attorney; Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine); Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), House Majority Whip; Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.); author David Sanger; panel discussion with Rachel Bade, Ben Domenech, Jeffrey Goldberg and Eliana Johnson;
With George Stephanopoulos, Stephen K. Bannon, Karen Finney, Rick Klein. Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist; roundtable discussion with Rick Klein, Karen Finney, Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), Matt Schlapp, and Greta Van Susteran;
Definitely the fluffiest of the morning shows today. In all this morning there was too much featuring of Trump administration officials blowing fluff and pushing blame without taking any stance toward leading on the situation.
In this last episode before David Shanske and I head to the Indieweb Summit in Portland, Oregon, we discuss updates to people’s Indieweb experience, little things David has hidden in plugins, web-signin vs IndieAuth, etc.
We’re both looking forward to seeing those of you who can join us in Portland.
We live in a country where billionaires make the decision to pay their workers less than minimum wage & then when they donate the most infinitesimal amount of their relative wealth to a decent cause they get buildings named after them & endlessly praised.
It’s all so backwards.
— Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) June 18, 2018
When bilingualism isn’t obviously valuable, you have to decide what you think of the language.
A nice essay that focuses on the personal side of raising bilingual children. In my experience needing to have a reason to speak a language is very important. Often around the age of three (or the beginning of daycare and/or school) children who realize they don’t have to speak a language will give it up (and often flatly refuse) as they begin to become more broadly socialized. It definitely helps if they’ve got a peer group who primarily speaks the language as well.
I quite liked the parts about a language “filling one up” or the ways in which language was implicated with attention. These are intriguing observations.
It’s been a while since I’ve actively read Om Malik‘s blog, but I noticed that he’s using graphical indicators that add some semantic detail about what each post is. It’s a design element I’ve only seen lately out of the IndieWeb community with plugins like the Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress or done manually with emoji in post titles the way Aaron Davis has done relatively religiously, particularly on his “Collect” site.
Om Malik is using some graphical indicators to give quick additional semantic meaning to what he’s posting.
I highly suspect that he’s using the Post Formats functionality from WordPress core to do some of this using a custom theme. Sadly it’s generally fallen out of fashion and one doesn’t see it very often any more. I suspect that it’s because WordPress didn’t take the functionality to its logical conclusion in the same way that the Post Kinds Plugin does.
The way Aaron Davis uses emoji in his posts helps to provide additional context about what is being written about to indicate what is going on in a link before it’s clicked.
I think some of my first experience with its resurgence was as helpful UI I saw suggested by Tantek Çelik on the Read page of the IndieWeb wiki. I’ve been doing it a lot myself, primarily for posts that I syndicate out to micro.blog, where it’s become a discovery function using so-called tagmoji (see books, for example), or Twitter (reads, bookmarks, watches, listens, likes). In those places, they particularly allow me to add a lot more semantic meaning to short notes/microblog posts than others do.
I do wish that having emoji for read posts was more common in Twitter to indicate that people actually bothered to read those articles they’re sharing to Twitter, the extra context would be incredibly useful. I generally suspect that article links people are sharing have more of a bookmark sentiment based on their click-bait headlines. Perhaps this is why I like Reading.am so much for finding content — it’s material people have actually bothered to read before they shared it out. Twitter adding some additional semantic tidbits like these would make it much more valuable in my mind.
It doesn’t appear that Om has taken this functionality that far himself though (at least on Twitter). Perhaps if WordPress made it easier to syndicate out content to Twitter with this sort of data attached it would help things take off?
University of Florida mathematician Kevin Knudson and I are excited to announce our new math podcast: My Favorite Theorem. In each episode, logically enough, we invite a mathematician on to tell us about their favorite theorem. Because the best things in life are better together, we also ask our guests to pair their theorem with, well, anything: wine, beer, coffee, tea, ice cream flavors, cheese, favorite pieces of music, you name it. We hope you’ll enjoy learning the perfect pairings for some beautiful pieces of math.
We’re very excited about the podcast and hope you will listen here, on the site’s page, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will be published approximately every three weeks. We have a great lineup of guests so far and think you’ll enjoy hearing from mathematicians from different mathematical areas, geographic locations, and mathematical careers.
Directed by Lawrence Trilling. With Billy Bob Thornton, William Hurt, Maria Bello, Olivia Thirlby. A burned-out attorney gets a second chance for redemption when he agrees to pursue a wrongful death lawsuit against the biggest client of his former law firm.
There was an unexpected note on page 66 that indicated that J.R.R. Tolkien may have been fascinated by a cursed ring described on a lead tablet in Lydney and a very similar (the same?) gold ring found at the Roman city of Silchester in Hampshire. The text posits that perhaps the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings were potentially inspired by these archaeological finds from Irish myth.
A year after the killing of Freddie Gray, a teenager in Baltimore was fatally shot by the police. This is the story of his life and death, and of a grieving family looking for answers.
As soon as I heard Davetta Parker’s voice, I knew I had to meet her. Her grandson Lavar Montray Douglas, known as Nook, was among seven young people from one high school in Baltimore who were killed in the spasm of violence that shook the city after the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died of a severe spinal cord injury while in police custody.
I cold-called her. She was sitting at her desk in a Baltimore public library. She said, “I think God sent you to me.” She said that she had so many questions about the death of her grandson, who had been shot by a police officer, and that she needed someone to help investigate, because the police never did. She said that she had written letters to news channels and newspapers, but that no one had written back. And there I was on the phone.
My colleague Lynsea Garrison and I spent four months examining Nook’s case. It took us on a journey from a quiet back room in the central library, where we first met Ms. Parker and her daughter Lashanda Douglas, known as Toby, into the streets of Baltimore, to drug corners, living rooms and grand homes in the county.
We wanted to tell his story for the simple reason that events like these are rarely told, even though they have become ordinary. Nook and his friends — many of whom have also been killed — were typical for homicide victims in Baltimore. They all had records with serious crimes. But they were boys. Most hadn’t even turned 18. And the deeper question in our minds was: How did things get like this for them?
You’ll meet Ms. Parker and Ms. Douglas in Part 1. Every day this week, we’ll bring you a new chapter in the life of Nook and his family’s search for answers about his death.
How did trust between the police and the people in Baltimore collapse within the span of three generations?
Yesterday, we started telling you the story of Lavar Montray Douglas, known as Nook, an 18-year-old in Baltimore who was killed by the police in the spasm of violence that began after Freddie Gray died from injuries sustained while in police custody.
In Part 2, we visit Nook’s mother, Lashanda Douglas, known as Toby, in the house she moved into after her son was killed. She sits on the floor of her bedroom, partially covered by a large pile of clean clothes. She is grieving, and folding them and putting them away is soothing. We learn about her past. She graduated from high school with honors. She fled Baltimore to escape a bad boyfriend. But the city eventually lured her back.
We’ll also go back in time, to the Baltimore of Nook’s grandmother and great-grandmother, of flower pots and tidy blocks, when men were still part of families and middle-class jobs were plentiful. We’ll see that relations with the police weren’t always bad. But job loss and drugs tore through the city like plagues. And the policing idea of zero tolerance, transplanted from New York City, created an entire generation of young men with criminal records.
Every day this week, we’ll bring you a new chapter in Nook’s life and his family’s search for answers about his death. If you’d like to start from the beginning, here’s Part 1.
What happened to the generation caught between a crack epidemic that consumed their neighborhoods and the aggressive police tactics meant to fix the problem?
Nook spent the first few years of his life in an affluent suburb. But when he returned to Baltimore, he became part of a young generation caught between the crack epidemic and the aggressive police tactics meant to fix the problem.
For the past two days, we’ve been bringing you the story of the life and death of Lavar Montray Douglas, known as Nook. He was 18 years old when he was shot dead by a police officer in Baltimore in 2016.
In Part 3, we look at Nook’s childhood. He spent the first few years of his life with an aunt in an upper-middle-class home outside Baltimore, taking piano lessons and going to church every week. Yesterday, we learned that Nook’s mother, Toby Douglas, kept returning to Baltimore. The same thing happened to Nook.
We go to Nook’s Baltimore, to his corner on Calhoun Street and Pratt Street. Some of his friends are still there, and we talk to them about Nook’s life. He was ambitious, they say. A leader. His mother was proud of that.
Everybody was talking about the Baltimore police officers who had just been on trial, accused of stealing from drug dealers. You see, they said, we were right. The cops are robbers. We said this all along, but nobody believed us.
Suddenly, two police officers pull up, and we encounter something that seems to be emblematic of the changes in the Baltimore Police Department.
If you’d like to start from the beginning, here are Part 1 and Part 2.
Directed by Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady. With Etty, Chani Getter, Ari Hershkowitz, Luzer Twersky. Penetrating the insular world of New York's Hasidic community, focusing on three individuals driven to break away despite threats of retaliation.
A painful documentary to watch. It’s fine for communities like this to exist and even flourish, but they should not be so insular so as to force people to live within them and deal with tremendous abuse and lack of choice.
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