Matt Taibibi on that windbag with one idea, Thomas Friedman.

“The folksiness will irk some critics … But criticizing Friedman for humanizing and boiling down big topics is like complaining that Mick Jagger used sex to sell songs: It is what he does well.” –John Micklethwait, review of Thank You for Being Late, in The New York Times

With apologies to Mr. Micklethwait, the hands that typed these lines implying Thomas Friedman is a Mick Jagger of letters should be chopped off and mailed to the singer’s doorstep in penance. Mick Jagger could excite the world in one note, while Thomas Friedman needs 461 pages to say, “Shit happens.”

It is what he does; it is not what he … Read the rest

Awkward. The Kennedy School of Government sponsored a chat session with people from the Clinton and Trump campaigns yesterday, and it was as collegial as you’d expect.

As Trump’s team basked in the glow of its victory and singled out for praise its campaign’s chief executive, Stephen K. Bannon, who was absent, the row of grim-faced Clinton aides who sat opposite them bristled.

Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri condemned Bannon, who previously ran Breitbart, a news site popular with the alt-right, a small movement known for espousing racist views.

“If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am proud to have lost,” she said. “I would rather lose than win the way you guys did.”

Meghan Murphy points out what should be obvious: it’s misogyny to tell women to move over and shut up, but it’s the hip new thing to do.

Feminism! A movement by women, for women. Or is it something about… Equality…? For… People?

Depends on who you ask. According to a recent article at Bustle, it’s all pretty hard to pin down.

Suzannah Weiss writes, “A large part of feminism is obtaining equal treatment for women, so understandably, a lot of feminist efforts and rhetoric focus on women.”

You don’t say. Similarly, basketball players play basketball, and bankers work in banks, and bus drivers drive buses. Of course feminist efforts focus on women; what should they focus on, frogs?… Read the rest

The Independent reports another study that finds global warming is happening faster than thought because researchers hadn’t taken into account the carbon in soil.

The report, by an exhaustive list of researchers and published in the Nature journal, assembled data from 49 field experiments over the last 20 years in North America, Europe and Asia.

It found that the majority of the Earth’s terrestrial store of carbon was in soil, and that as the atmosphere warms up, increasing amounts are emitted in what is a vicious cycle of “positive feedbacks”.

The study found that 55bn tonnes in carbon, not previously accounted for by scientists, will be emitted into the atmosphere by 2050.

“As the climate warms,