In Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State Is in Retreat on Multiple Fronts →

Liz Sly, writing for The Washington Post:

Front-line commanders no longer speak of a scarily formidable foe but of Islamic State defenses that crumble within days and fighters who flee at the first sign they are under attack.

Since everyone else seems content to write about which line from Snaps: The Original Yo' Mama Joke Book Trump and Cruz are using on each other's wives, I thought I'd put this out there for the adults to read.

Microsoft Created a Twitter Bot to Learn From Users. It Quickly Became a Racist Jerk. →

Daniel Victor, writing for The New York Times:

Microsoft set out to learn about “conversational understanding” by creating a bot designed to have automated discussions with Twitter users, mimicking the language they use.

What could go wrong?

How does that saying go? Every nation gets the Twitter bot it deserves?

The Green Room with Paul Provenza, ft. Garry Shandling →

There's obviously a lot of sadness over Garry Shandling's death (although, I have to be honest—am I the only one who watched his recent episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and thought: Jesus, Garry Shandling looks awful.) and there have been a ton of pieces and clips and tributes going around, but this has been the one I enjoyed the most.

My favorite is how empathetic he is towards Bo Burnham, which stands out in a group of guys who are otherwise doing the normal you're-younger-than-me-therefore-eat-my-shit routine.

/via somebody Marc Maron retweeted

N.F.L.’s Flawed Concussion Research and Ties to Tobacco Industry

Alan Schwarz, Walt Bogdanich, and Jacqueline Williams, writing for The New York Times:

The National Football League was on the clock.

With several of its marquee players retiring early after a cascade of frightening concussions, the league formed a committee in 1994 that would ultimately issue a succession of research papers playing down the danger of head injuries. Amid criticism of the committee’s work, physicians brought in later to continue the research said the papers had relied on faulty analysis.

Now, an investigation by The New York Times has found that the N.F.L.’s concussion research was far more flawed than previously known.

This is such a damning report that the NFL had a point-by-point statement ready to go to try and limit the damage, which The New York Times has already responded to. It seems impossible, but at some point in the next decade, I think we're going to see a paradigm shift in the American sports landscape. Football will eventually go away if it doesn't adapt.

Why Donald Trump? →

Claire Malone, writing for FiveThirtyEight:

What I kept returning to, though, was the surprise of it all.

Polling’s long arm, we were promised, could reach farther than any reporter into the brambles of American politics and retrieve what was difficult to see from the outside: the hidden proclivities and preoccupations of demographic groups. Political science, in turn, was meant to act as a killjoy, a gulp of dusty academic air amid the breathlessness of campaign news cycles.

But for months political obsessives doubted poll numbers with the strength of a thousand Thomases. The numbers said one thing, but common sense indicated otherwise. Political scientists had no perfect historical precedent to call upon. Reporters, meanwhile, had only the piecemeal musings of the voters they happened to accost at rallies and coffee shops, nothing to suggest that a new paradigm was being formed.

Now Trump is the likely Republican nominee for president.

Given the limitations of statistical analysis, political science and traditional reporting, I reasoned that a hybrid approach using all three could help answer the prevailing question in American politics: Why Donald Trump?

The next step after treating Trump as you'd treat any other presidential candidate is treating his supporters are you'd treat any other candidate's supporters. Pointing out the 'Heil Hitler' tattoos on a few of their hands will not suffice.

The Mind-Boggling Story Of Our Arcane And Convoluted 'Primary Politics' →

Fresh Air:

Author Elaine Kamarck explains superdelegates, the difference between caucuses and primaries, what happens in a brokered convention and how the rules of primaries can sometimes change.

As of late, I've seen a lot of people questioning the primary process. That's good. The first step is admitting that you have a problem. Now take the next step, and inform yourself. Spend the forty minutes or whatever it is (less if you listen at 1.25x on your favorite podcast app) and you'll learn something here, I guarantee it.

'3's company, Appetite for Destruction tee, Chunky Monkey, Funyuns, I can feel the cat judging me' →

Is Aesop Rock—back?

Sidenote: you'd be a fool not to check the lyrics for this as well.

MLB Gives Young Latin-American Players a Voice →

Mark Feinsand, writing for The New York Daily News:

“That was a really tough night,” Pineda said. “I’m a little sensitive and I was sad. I wanted to explain everything. I forgot English, Spanish, everything that night.”

Beltran looked around the room and saw Masahiro Tanaka, Hiroki Kuroda and Ichiro Suzuki standing by their lockers with their own personal translators, ready to interpret their words at a moment’s notice.

“They all had their own guys, but when Pineda had the situation with the pine tar, it would have been great for him to have someone next to him so he could have expressed himself the way he wanted to express himself,” Beltran said. “There would have been no misinterpretation of how he was able to handle the media that day.”

I love sports, but I really love when sports provides us with something to aspire to, a map for how we can make the real world a better place. Imagine if we approached even half of the world's problems with the humility and care that this piece outlines?

The Prison-Commercial Complex →

Chandra Bozelko, writing for The New York Times:

Unless they’ve known someone who’s been incarcerated, most people don’t know that the corrections system has an entire commerce arm of its own. Everything an inmate can buy — phone calls, commissary, copays for substandard medical care, video visitation or the new email service — is purchased through a special account created by the prison or a private company.

Merely to add funds to an account, the family or friends of inmates must pay a service fee. I have an account myself with the prison phone giant Securus so that inmates I want to keep in touch with can call me. In February, I’d loaded my phone account without any fee. Then, a few weeks ago, I was charged $6.95 to add $5 of call time. So, the $11.95 that used to buy 49 minutes then purchased only 20.

On a day full of disturbing news, this article might have unsettled me the most. What a horrible way to treat people.

The End of Facts →

Jill Lepore, writing for The New Yorker:

A “fact” is, etymologically, an act or a deed. It came to mean something established as true only after the Church effectively abolished trial by ordeal in 1215, the year that King John pledged, in Magna Carta, “No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned . . . save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” In England, the abolition of trial by ordeal led to the adoption of trial by jury for criminal cases. This required a new doctrine of evidence and a new method of inquiry, and led to what the historian Barbara Shapiro has called “the culture of fact”: the idea that an observed or witnessed act or thing—the substance, the matter, of fact—is the basis of truth and the only kind of evidence that’s admissible not only in court but also in other realms where truth is arbitrated. Between the thirteenth century and the nineteenth, the fact spread from law outward to science, history, and journalism.

This piece made me think of a line in the Stephanie Vaughn short story Dog Heaven:

She believed, like the adults in my family, that a fact was something solid and useful, like a penknife you could put in your pocket in case of emergency.

There has never been more things that are true than at this point in time. It's a gift and a curse.