Brain Trust Media

A collection of interesting news and media brought to you by people who better things they should be doing. 

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[Letter from Washington] | A Special Relationship, by Andrew Cockburn | Harper's Magazine

The United States is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again

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How AT&T Execs Took Over the Red Cross and Hurt its Ability to Help People

Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern, who was hired to revitalize the charity, has cut hundreds of chapters and thousands of employees.

A great example of how private sector mentality isnt allways the best

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Star Lords

'Star Wars' and the monomyth of Silicon Valley

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Rebuilding the Middle Class the Army Way

The old-fashioned organizational values of the United States military — hierarchy and bureaucracy — might be crucial to strengthening the nation’s economy.

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STAR WARS RETURNS today with its fifth installment, Attack of the Clones. There will be talk of the Force and the Dark Side and the epic morality of George Lucas's series. But the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good. It's a difficult leap to make--embracing Darth Vader and the Emperor over the plucky and attractive Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia--but a careful examination of the facts, sorted apart from Lucas's off-the-shelf moral cues, makes a quite convincing case. First, an aside: For the sake of this discussion, I've considered only the history gleaned from the actual Star Wars films, not the Expanded Universe. If you know what the Expanded Universe is and want to argue that no discussion of Star Wars can be complete without considering material outside the canon, that's fine. However, it's always been my view that the comic books and novels largely serve to clean up Lucas's narrative and philosophical messes. Therefore, discussions of intrinsic intent must necessarily revolve around the movies alone. You may disagree, but please don't e-mail me about it.

If you are a neo-con life is tuff, you dont even get to be the good guy in the films.

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The Radicalization of Luke Skywalker: A Jedi’s Path to Jihad

You may find yourself surprised by how much the original Star Wars trilogy's characters and themes echo the current War On Terror.

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Alexander Litvinenko: the man who solved his own murder | Luke Harding

This week, the inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko will deliver its findings. The former Russian spy was poisoned with a cup of tea in a London hotel. Working with Scotland Yard detectives, as he lay dying, he traced the lethal substance to a former comrade in the Russian secret service

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Museums are keeping a ton of the world’s most famous art locked away in storage

Quartz collected data on 13 artists across 20 museum collections. What we found is frustrating, but might also be unavoidable.

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The New Sick Man of Europe Has an AAA Credit Rating

A chronically depressed economy, rising unemployment and an aversion to free-market reforms. Sound like a familiar European tale?

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How The Worst Person On The Internet Redeemed Himself (Sort Of)

Meet Scott Breitenstein, the owner of ComplaintsBureau.com

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Secrets of the MIT Poker Course

I formulated a simple plan: Take the class, hit the poker tables of Atlantic City, and profit.

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This is the brightest supernova astronomers have ever seen

It was 50 times more luminous than the entire Milky Way galaxy.

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How close are we to creating artificial intelligence? — David Deutsch — Aeon Essays

The very laws of physics imply that artificial intelligence must be possible. What’s holding us up?

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The poisoning of Flint

Decades of policies based on the premise that government spending is always a problem led us to this.

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How a College Student Used Creative Commons to Dominate Political Photography

Gage Skidmore has photographed nearly every presidential candidate since 2008 — and by giving away all of his images for free, he has quickly become the Internet's most prominent political photographer.

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We may be running out of fish far faster than we realized

We've plucked at least 50% more fish from the ocean than official data told us.

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America Is Still Losing at Skyscrapers

Last year saw the construction of a record-breaking 106 skyscrapers. The U.S. built two.