Link Roundup #11

Nearly a year since he took office, the department’s Office for Civil Rights has not entered into a single new resolution agreement involving racial harassment of students, a ProPublica analysis found. 

“The message that it sends is that the people impacted by racial discrimination and harassment don’t matter,” said Paige Duggins-Clay, an attorney with a Texas nonprofit that has worked with families who’ve filed racial harassment complaints with OCR.

The media has spent the last few months trying to make sense out of nonsense, attempting to conjure motive, manifesto, and meaning out of the dumbest shit scrawled onto bullets. These were sad attempts to impose meaning on an increasingly incoherent world by a literati that has not yet accepted its irrelevance in a postliterate society. But the most humiliating display of literate obliviousness in the face of the total collapse of meaning, however, was Ezra Klein’s bizarre eulogy to Charlie Kirk. The now-infamous column (“Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”) can best be understood as an expression of class solidarity. Klein, I would argue, sees both himself and Kirk as being Debate Guys, wordcels who engage in the marketplace of ideas and let speech sort itself out into political action.

A lack of clarity about a geriatric politician’s health is, at this point, a feature of American government, with President Donald Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden being the two foremost examples. Senator Dianne Feinstein died in office in 2023 after constant reports about her inability to serve. Seven members of Congress, all Democrats, have died in office over the last two years. There was also the peculiar case of Republican Kay Granger, who spent the latter half of 2024 at a senior-living facility experiencing what her son called “dementia issues” while still technically representing her Texas district in Congress.

Not unlike Bratz dolls, Rumi, Mira, and Zoey have also stirred up a little controversy among some parents. KPop Demon Hunters features the perfect combination of ingredients to capture the tween imagination: music, angst, a uniquely pre-teen goofiness, and just a hint of not-for-parents edginess. In a world where algorithms are feeding 8-year-olds anti-aging skincare tips, HUNTR/X is exactly what we need to counteract the onslaught of short-form brain-rot that has largely filled the void in the absence of content tailor-made for tweens.

In a blog post titled “Decentering Men: Why You Need To Let Go of Men,” Taylor encourages to let go of the “idea of men” as the ultimate prize but says this doesn’t mean “forgo[ing] romantic relationships, pleasure, or touch because those things are essential for the human experience.” While the phrase has seemingly given women permission to live a life free from men, it literally just means not making men the center of your universe.

“Community building alone is not enough to build a movement,” said Han, the political scientist. A movement must bring “people into community with each other so that they begin to understand the ways in which what they can do together is greater than what they can do alone” and also become a space through which they “realize their interests in the public sphere”.

And I find it utterly implausible that the 60 Minutes segment was pulled because there was something that an entire team of experienced reporters and producers, many lawyers, and many standards-and-practices people who are employed specifically to hold stories at the slightest indication that they might be incomplete or inaccurate, missed. More likely, she is just doing what she always does: producing a line of propaganda masquerading as news coverage that serves the interest of her patrons—in this case, David Ellison, whose interests are served by protecting Donald Trump.

Jeremy Cole, executive director of the Mosaic Clinic in Clarkston, which serves uninsured people, said there is a lot of uncertainty about how federal changes will affect his team’s work, but they are planning for a “significant increase” in uninsured patients seeking their services.

“What we are currently anticipating and planning for, unless things change, is a domino effect in the years ahead, each one causing more people to lose their health insurance: first, the lapsing of the enhanced subsidies on Jan. 1 (again, unless Congress acts before then); second, the cutting of federal benefits for refugees and asylees who have been here less than 5 years (this is at least how we understand it, although it is all a bit confusing) starting next October; and finally, the Medicaid cuts that we understand go into effect in 2027,” Cole said.

“I worry very much about kids spending their entire days getting emotional support,” he added. “So we have got to take a hard look on that.” The senator said lawmakers need to be “thinking seriously” about a moratorium on new AI datacenters. “Frankly, I think you have got to slow this process down,” he said. “It’s not good enough for the oligarchs to tell us, it’s coming, you adapt. What are they talking about? They going to guarantee health care to all people?

In a landscape where thousands of people are losing their jobs, I'm not exactly jonesing to see that number increasing in favour of stuff slapped together by a computer. Am I going to become incredibly annoying by huffing and puffing every time something that has and should be done by a human isn't? Yes, but I'd rather be that friend advocating for a human touch than someone who's only asking why it's this way when it's too late. Because if we're not careful, videogames are going to become very safe, very boring, and very unhuman.

What troubles Sanderson isn’t the sales cycle but the long game – as books increasingly come under fire with bans in the US and rising political pressures on education and libraries worldwide, the importance of defending rigorous, long-form nonfiction as a tool for critical thinking has never been clearer. “Regardless of sales, I hold passionately to the importance of long-form nonfiction in helping us understand the world,” she says. “We need it. Sales fluctuations are the weather; it’s the climate we need to worry about.”

My issue is this: too many book influencers (non-exclusively) profit from casual classism and racism. Those who never interrogate their biases reinforce them, making things worse for society overall. I am concerned about the negative impacts of the weak and, frankly, bad review culture that has emerged from social media, which informs what gets picked up by agents and presses, what sells, what is marketed, how and to whom. This is intensified by the "Sheinifaction" of the industry.

Not all books are for all people. However, the people at the centre of the world – the loudest, the most visible, who designed the world to be this way – have resources to spend on books, to write books, to publish books, to review books, to market books. Consequently, books are geared to them, with all the exoticisation and fetishisation, neglect and ignorance that comes alongside, at every level. In my view, that is poor culture-making, because stories are universal. We could all enjoy more variety in traditional publishing across all genres if people at the centre contributed less white noise, and tuned in to our frequencies for a while.

Durant added that letting go of the pressure to maintain a polished public look actually helped his peace. “I really used to care at some point about like, ‘Man, I need to get a cut this week.’ Then after a while, I was like, ‘I’m way more relaxed when I’m just not giving a f**k,’” he revealed. “So, I just stop getting cuts, stop lotioning… I take showers.”

When VanVleet teased him about the showering part, KD clarified, “I shower, I shower, I shower… but I might go a day without, two days. I might go two days sometimes without, you know what I mean, hopping in that water, wait ‘til I get to the gym.” He doubled down, adding that if he’s home, “I might just want to go musty for a day or two… I just like to feel close to, like, the trenches like that.”

Milwaukee also hung a banner last season, and I’m sure if you asked anyone on that team, they would trade their meaningless banner to avoid their third straight opening-round elimination.

Indeed, what the new age of DEI amounted to was a mild reshuffling of the Black professional class.

At the same time, “governments don’t backlash against things that aren’t working,” Sam says. “They let it die on the vine. What that implies is that we did make progress.” I keep thinking back to Myers’ point, about how DEI has been a scaffolding for so many people and how, for the foreseeable future, that scaffolding will be virtually nonexistent. Just because DEI was mishandled doesn’t mean it was worthless.

Parts of the housing market are slowly waking up, and some lucky buyers are emerging victorious. Sales of existing homes rose for the third month in a row in November, as some buyers came back to the market. But by and large, purchasing a house remains unaffordable for many. Home prices and mortgage rates remain high, so the overall pace of sales remains sluggish and is running below last year’s.