Category: Politics

Playboy Interview: Martin Luther King Jr.

Flip Schulke

I have a job to do. If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn’t function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically. I must face the fact, as all others in positions of leadership must do, that America today is an extremely sick nation, and that something could well happen to me at any time. I feel, though, that my cause is so right, so moral, that if I should lose my life, in some way it would aid the cause.

→ Playboy via The Daily Beast

‘A Terrible Price’: The Deadly Racial Disparities of Covid-19 in America

On April 6, Louisiana became one of the first states to release Covid-19 data by race: While making up 33 percent of the population, African-Americans accounted for 70 percent of the dead at that point. Around the same time, other cities and states began to release racial data in the absence of even a whisper from the federal government — where health data of all kinds is routinely categorized by race. Areas with large populations of black people were revealed to have disproportionate, devastating death rates.

→ The New York Times Magazine

One Nation, Tracked

One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy Mansion, some overnight. Without much effort we spotted visitors to the estates of Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, connecting the devices’ owners to the residences indefinitely.

If you lived in one of the cities the dataset covers and use apps that share your location — anything from weather apps to local news apps to coupon savers — you could be in there, too.

If you could see the full trove, you might never use your phone the same way again.

→ The New York Times

How to Improve Political Forecasts

Probability has been the mathematical language of uncertainty for over 300 years and has shown its usefulness in wide-ranging contexts from gambling to meteorology, economics, and political science. Used properly, it can help us learn from observation and construct better forecasts of what’s to come. But such forecasts are always subject to possibly flawed model assumptions. There will always be room for improvement. As the Danish aphorism goes: “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” What recent experience has taught us is that the alternative—listening to paid spokespeople and pundits, often biased toward conflict, prone to spin tales about momentum and upsets—is worse.

→ Nautilus

He voted for Trump. Now he and his wife raise their son from opposite sides of the border

Like so many separated families, the couple have experienced the years of Trump’s presidency as a grim journey of restless nights and tearful goodbyes. But unlike many in their predicament, Jason voted for Trump.

He knew Trump planned to get tough on immigration — building a wall and deporting drug dealers, rapists and killers. He never imagined anyone would consider his sweet stay-at-home wife a “bad hombre.” 

→ Los Angeles Times