For Transgender New Yorkers, a Center of Their Own in the Bronx →

Winnie Hu, writing for The New York Times:

The Bronx Trans Collective, the new drop-in center near Yankee Stadium, will aim to bring together people who are often overlooked or disconnected even in New York City, which is considered to be the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement. The center will help transgender people get surgeries, hormone treatments, mental health counseling and assistance with legal name changes and job searches, among other services. It will also host regular support groups, youth counseling, meditation and yoga classes and cookouts on its back terrace.

It's pretty great to see this kind of support and acceptance happening in the Bronx.

“I’m old,” she quipped, “but I’m not cold.” →

Tara Bahrampour, writing for The Washington Post:

Leona Barnes doesn’t remember when, back around the close of World War I, she met Gladys Butler, Ruth Hammett and Bernice Underwood. Growing up in Southwest Washington, they were part of the landscape, in the same way that her house and her street and her church were.

As little girls, the four played jacks and jumped rope; later they shared gossip and danced the two-step and the Charleston. Two of them lived in the same house at one point, and three of them had babies the same year — 1933. But they could not have predicted that someday they would be poised to celebrate their 100th birthdays together.

Every day of the week should include a story like this.

America isn't dead yet.

/via Ruth Marcus

Who Sponsored the Hate? →

Jane Meyer, writing for The New Yorker:

The effort to attack Obama, not as a legitimate and democratically elected American political opponent but as an alien threat to the country’s survival, was very much in evidence at the Defending the American Dream Summit in Austin during the summer of 2010. Peggy Venable, who was then the director of the Texas branch of Americans for Prosperity, and who has been on the payroll of various Koch-run groups since 1994, presided over the summit. There the Texas branch gave out its Blogger of the Year award to a woman named Sibyl West, whose work described Obama as the “cokehead-in-chief” and as suffering from “demonic possession (aka schizophrenia, etc.).” The Republican donor class may now disown vile language, but six years ago they were honoring it with trophies.

On November 9th, 2016, when Republicans wake up to the looming prospect of a HRC presidency, they'll look in the bathroom mirror and wonder who is to blame. What's good for them is that they won't have to move from that spot to answer the question.

What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About ‘the Deal’ →

Adam Davidson, writing for The New York Times Magazine:

The centrality of the ‘‘deal’’ to Trump­onomics is especially strange when you consider how tangential that concept is, or at least should be, to a modern economy. In Microeconomics 101, deals are an afterthought: Transactions have the most socially optimal outcome when buyer and seller reach a mutually beneficial agreement. The very idea of a ‘‘good’’ deal for one party and a ‘‘bad’’ deal for another suggests a suboptimal outcome; an economy built on tough deal-making, with clear winners and losers, will always be a poorer one. Meanwhile, in macroeconomics — which covers the big, broad issues that a president typically worries about — the concept of the ‘‘deal’’ hardly exists at all. The key issues at play in a national or global economy (inflation, currency-exchange rates, unemployment, overall growth) are impossible to control through any sort of deal. They reflect underlying structural forces in an economy, like the level of education and skill of the population, the productivity of companies, the amount of government spending and the actions of the central bank.

I think it's important to fight Trump on intellectual grounds, the same as you'd push back against any other conventional candidate. To sink to his level of name-calling and fear-mongering is to allow him to win, even if he loses. This piece is just another example of why, without just copying and pasting a picture of him with a Hitler mustache, he is unfit to be President.

Dandekar Makes a Sandwich →

Armed with plenty of time on his hands, RK Dandekar, a curmudgeonly retiree with a picky palate, will stop at nothing to find just the right ingredients for the perfect sandwich. A heartfelt, offbeat tale about the perks of aging. Winner, Grand Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking, Indian Film Festival of LA.

There's just something about this short film. I couldn't bring myself to love it, but I couldn't stop watching it, either. By the end, I just wanted to know what other people think. For me, that's successful art.

/via Devour

'Everybody's gonna be very, very happy.' →

Eric Fershtman, writing for Soapbox DC, on Medium:

Well so, the point is, it’s this complexity that’s at the core of what Trump is suggesting: his plan to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN is to make America understandable again (whether it ever actually was is, of course, probably not even debatable: it wasn’t). Societal complexity is framed as an issue that needs resolution, and Trump’s suggestion to resolve the complexity-of-society-and-its-resulting-malfunctions is, in a neat tautological trick, to just make it simple again, duh!

I've linked to the data article, the misogyny article, the race article—now here's the sociology article.

'Women, you have to treat 'em like shit' →

Everybody's seen this ad, so I'm not breaking any news here. But I just want to point something out that I hope everyone realizes: the Super PAC that released this ad, Our Principles PAC, is a Republican Super PAC. The likely Republican nominee for president is being attacked by a Republican Super PAC.

/via Vox

The Very Hungry Caterpillar Who Then Came to Realize That Life Was Meaningless →

View fullsize

/via Existential Comics

How Trump Happened →

Jamelle Bouie, writing for Slate:

But none of these theories answer the question why now. Each of these forces has been in play for years. Wages for working-class Americans have long been stagnant, and the collapse of job opportunities for workers without a college degree was apparent in the 1990s, long before the Great Recession. What’s more, economic and social decline—as well as frustration with foreign competition, which Trump has channeled in his campaign—isn’t unique to white Americans. Millions of Americans—blacks and Latinos in particular—have faced declining economic prospects and social disintegration for years without turning to a demagogue like Trump.

Race plays a part in each of these analyses, but its role has not yet been central enough to our understanding of Trump’s rise. Not only does he lead a movement of almost exclusively disaffected whites, but he wins his strongest support in states and counties with the greatest amounts of racial polarization. Among white voters, higher levels of racial resentment have been shown to be associated with greater support for Trump.

All of which is to say that we’ve been missing the most important catalyst in Trump’s rise. What caused this fire to burn out of control? The answer, I think, is Barack Obama.

But not in the way you might think he means. There is some real hard empirical evidence used here that potentially reflects just how racist Trump's following really is. And, no, not in the singular. The you reading this—no, of course you're not a racist. But the person to your left at the Trump rally? And the person to your right? And the person in front of your? And the person behind you?

'After the dinner ended, Mr. Trump quickly left, appearing bruised.' →

Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns, writing for The New York Times:

Repeatedly underestimated as a court jester or silly showman, Mr. Trump muscled his way into the Republican elite by force of will. He badgered a skittish Mitt Romney into accepting his endorsement on national television, and became a celebrity fixture at conservative gatherings. He abandoned his tightfisted inclinations and cut five- and six-figure checks in a bid for clout as a political donor. He courted conservative media leaders as deftly as he had the New York tabloids.

At every stage, members of the Republican establishment wagered that they could go along with Mr. Trump just enough to keep him quiet or make him go away. But what party leaders viewed as generous ceremonial gestures or ego stroking of Mr. Trump — speaking spots at gatherings, meetings with prospective candidates and appearances alongside Republican heavyweights — he used to elevate his position and, eventually, to establish himself as a formidable figure for 2016.

During the rise of Trump as a presidential candidate over the past eight months, I've tried to only post links that point out the mostly indirect responsibility that the GOP bears for his ascendancy. To my mind, for the moment, it's the most important story to tell. But this piece by Haberman and Burns blows the door wide open on the theory as a whole.

Until now, I saw Trump as a byproduct; a forest fire of hate and bigotry created by a movement that was only stoking the flames of the original camp fire. But this reporting suggests two very important things:

1. The GOP played a far larger role in his candidacy than anyone knew.
2. He's got nothing to lose and, simultaneously, everything to gain.

Trump is a blowhard and a know-nothing, a pathological liar who uses his money and power to insulate himself from any version of the truth in which he is not on top.

But—he's got the money to keep this facade up. For a very long time. And as long as he sees this presidential run as as a me-against-the-world scenario, and millions of disenfranchised Americans are content to see him as their proxy for their anger and fear, he is dangerous. From here on out, I will no longer consider him just a clown, a charlatan.

And I think you should read the above linked-to piece, and I think you should—we should all—reconsider how we think of him, before it's too late.