I’ve been thinking a lot lately about that study showing that hate crimes went up 226% in counties that hosted Trump rallies in 2016. Just thinking a lot about all those isolated incidents.

Among other things, a Breitbart guy accused him of using Ben-Gay to create fake tears. These people are absolute ghouls.

Well, conservatives did condemn Obama for crying while speaking about Sandy Hook, so

Ah, excellent! I figured it was probably necessitated for some kind of technical reason, but didn’t know why. My background is more from painting, so I’ve always viewed the aspect ratios primarily in terms of how a painter might select a particular canvas or what have you, but knowing the background just makes it all…

4:3 is sometimes referred to as 1.33:1, which is slightly squarer. I honestly don’t know the technical reasons for it, but my understanding is there was a shift from 1.33:1 to 1.375:1 with the transition from silent to sound films.

If I’m not mistaken The Artist was in 4:3, which I assume was to capture the silent era feel. I think my favorite semi-recent usage of 4:3 was Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, where she chose it to mirror the perspective of the women’s bonnets.

Kent talks about the ratio here:

I think—and I could be wrong, because who the hell can say for sure—but I think he was actually quoting. . . himself. He tweeted this quote on 7/31 and on 7/29 had said he was “the least racist person there is anywhere in the world” in response to his attacks on Elijah Cumming.

Very excited to see Albinati highlighted here! Also, Olga Tokarczuk is really something else, and it’s great to see more and more of her work come into translation. Fitzcarraldo Editions has The Books of Jacob coming next year, which feels like a pretty major event in translated literature.

Yeah, I’m pretty baffled by the numerous “but what about all the other racists presidents, huh??” comments here. The title seemed fairly straightforward in its surface irony, and the actual gist of the article is the discovery of new recordings of the patron saint of conservatism literally saying wildly racist shit. I…

The popular phrase for this is “deconstruction,”

“his childhood summers in Communist Czechoslovakia that began his political thought process”

Well, well, well! Looks like this is one billionaire who hasn’t read Grundrisse!

What, you mean like how Menaker’s girlfriend is Splinter’s managing editor?

Here’s an article. Here is another. Here’s more. And another.

That jumped out at me, too. At first blush it just seems like a dreadful, fairly random manipulation of history. But it really does make sense that Carlson would invoke this once you realize that the Roman Empire and certain of its symbols are big ol’ dog whistles for white supremacists (the SPQR acronym, the fasces,…

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I feel like the excerpts here really don’t fully convey how viciously bonkers the exchange was. The reporter was asking, point blank, about the letter Trump dictated to Lewandowski in an attempt to curtail Mueller’s investigation. The reporter is emphasizing—as a matter of record—that this information came to light in…

I honestly wasn’t familiar with this particular false quote, but it seemed suspect to me for any number of reasons. It’s interesting to me that this particular quote got trotted out by Ben Carson on Fox News in 2013, and here it is again. I’m almost curious to see if I can trace its course a little more thoroughly,…