Wonklife

Ezra Klein's Tumblr. Vox. Twitter. I think you're great.

[vox]

The Supreme Court just legalized same-sex marriage across the US.

[vox]

Wednesday night, a white man walked into a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot nine parishioners. Today, a Confederate flag is flying on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia — as it does every day. While the flags on top of the statehouse itself are flying at half-mast, the Confederate flag (displayed at a Civil War memorial) is flying at full mast.

That the Confederate flag flies high today, after what Charleston police are describing as a hate crime, is profoundly ugly. 

[vox]

The cloudiest places on Earth, in one beautiful map.

Dark blue areas see very little cloud cover. White areas are cloudy almost all the time.

Image: Average cloud cover across Earth, from 2002 to 2015. Click to enlarge. (NASA Earth Observatory)

[vox]

The riots in Baltimore that started after Freddie Gray’s funeral Monday, April 27, have produced dramatic, violent images: burning cars and buildings, smashed windows, and young protestors throwing bricks and rocks at the police.

But the aftermath of the riots has also provided powerful photos of a community pulling together: dozens of people showing up to a burned CVS as Tuesday morning dawned, children home from school helping sweep the streets, volunteers helping feed and entertain kids while school is canceled, and men trying to keep order and ensure the demonstrations are peaceful.

As the unrest continues, these photos show its other side — a side that isn’t as likely to loop nonstop on cable news.

[vox]

The growth of partisan polarization has transformed US politics in recent decades, and the effects are especially visible in Congress. Now a new paper in PLOS One (and flagged byWonkblog’s Chris Ingraham) demonstrates this transformation in a particularly cool way.

Six researchers — Clio Andris, David Lee, Marcus Hamilton, Mauro Martino, Christian Gunning, and John Armistead Selden — have created a visualization of how likely the House of Representatives’ Democrats (in blue) and Republicans (in red) are to vote with their own party, or to cross party lines. The change over the past six decades is remarkable. 

Chart: Andris, Lee, Hamilton, Martino, Gunning, and Selden, “The Rise of Partisanship and Super-Cooperators in the U.S. House of Representatives.”

[vox]

Be obsessed. Be obsessed. Be obsessed.

Justine Musk, on what she learned about the insane demands of success by witnessing the ascent of Elon Musk, from the time they met in college to the end of their eight-year marriage. (via vox)

[wonklife]

50 comic books that explain the comic industry today

Perhaps the greatest comic book story ever told is that of the books themselves.

[wonklife]

The breakdown of American constitutional democracy is a contrarian view. But it's nothing more than the view that rather than everyone being wrong about the state of American politics, maybe everyone is right. Maybe Bush and Obama are dangerously exceeding norms of executive authority. Maybe legislative compromise really has broken down in an alarming way. And maybe the reason these complaints persist across different administrations and congresses led by members of different parties is that American politics is breaking down.

American democracy is doomed - Vox

[theverge]

"World of Tomorrow," the new animated short by Don Hertzfeldt, promises to be one of the best sci-fi movies in years — if the first trailer is any indication.

[dontbotherfiguringitout]

[wonklife]

Touché

[wonklife]

If you read the article you’ll note there’s a big “if” before my not giving of said shit.

A mile wide, an inch deep — Medium

[theverge]

Welcome to the Internet of Guns. Yikes.

[wonklife]

I think there's at least a 50 percent chance that we'll undertake some kind of major geoengineering project by 2035, either unilaterally or as a global initiative. It will almost certainly be something of a clusterfuck, but we'll get better with experience and the continued development of AI.

16 New Year's Predictions That Are Not For 2015 | Mother Jones

[wonklife]

I almost never bother with editorials from the Wall St. Journal, which read to me something like, “Boy, if toasters could sing and dance, breakfast would be a lot more fun!”

Jared Bernstein gets saucy

[wonklife]

Brutal.

[wonklife]

Godzilla, in one graph. (via The amateur's guide to Godzilla - Vox)

[wonklife]

What the Middle Wast looked like in 1914. (via 40 Maps That Explain The Middle East)