There’s the big picture, and then there are the details. One detail is the town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota.

Claas Relotius, who spent weeks reporting in Fergus Falls last year for one of Europe’s most respected publications, could have written about the many residents who maintain friendships across partisan lines, about the efforts to lure former residents back to west-central Minnesota or about how a city of roughly 14,000 people maintains a robust arts scene.

To give a sense of the place, he could have described local landmarks like the giant statue of Otto the Otter. Or the Minnesota-shaped welcome sign next to the Applebee’s. Or the expansive prairie that surrounds the town.

But he did not.

Instead,

SpiegelOnline a few days ago:

It has now become clear that Claas Relotius, 33 years old, one of DER SPIEGEL’s best writers, winner of multiple awards and a journalistic idol of his generation, is neither a reporter nor a journalist. Rather, he produces beautifully narrated fiction. Truth and lies are mixed together in his articles and some, at least according to him, were even cleanly reported and free of fabrication. Others, he admits, were embellished with fudged quotes and other made-up facts. Still others were entirely fabricated. During his confession on Thursday, Relotius said, verbatim: “It wasn’t about the next big thing. It was the fear of failure.” And: “The pressure not to fail grew as I became more

An actual feminist fighting an actual oppressive patriarchy…. https://t.co/Ex0N4DDHwO

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) December 26, 2018

Well thank fuck we have Jordan Peterson to tell us which oppressive patriarchies are actual, right?… Read the rest

Nick Cohen says the reason Corbyn and pals are so chill about Brexit may be that old Leninist magic.

Labour has inherited the mental deformations of the Leninist style of doing business: the leadership personality cult, the love of conspiracy theory, the robotic denunciations of opponents, and most critically for our current crisis, the ineradicable fantasy that the worse conditions for the masses become, the brighter the prospects of the far left are. Disaster socialism is its alternative to disaster capitalism.

You know the one: don’t support reformist candidates because they will merely make things slightly better and thus kneecap more radical reforms. The idea is clear enough but…risky.

Labour’s leaders don’t sound remotely fearful, however. When asked about

Here’s a new distinction – for the first time ever the US is on the Reporters Without Borders list of most dangerous countries for journalists. High five?

At least 63 professional journalists were killed doing their jobs in 2018, a 15 percent increase over last year, said the group, Reporters Without Borders. The number of deaths rises to 80 when all media workers and people classified as citizen journalists are included, it said in its annual report.

The world’s five deadliest countries for journalists include three — India, Mexico and, for the first time, the United States — where journalists were killed in cold blood, even though those countries weren’t at war or in conflict, the group said.

Speaking of Wall and the border and holiday festivities and telling brown people to get out, we’ve killed another child in custody.

An 8-year-old boy from Guatemala died in United States custody early Christmas Day, according to the United States Customs and Border Protection.

The boy died just after midnight on Tuesday at a hospital in Alamogordo, N.M., where he and his father had been taken after a Border Patrol agent saw what appeared to be signs of sickness, according to a news release from the agency.

… Read the rest

I think Trump’s sudden lurch into rational skepticism at a socially inappropriate moment is hilarious, but I’m not going to pretend the whole “don’t tell the kids Santa is a story” routine makes any sense.

What’s the point of telling one’s children a lie that you know they’ll find out is a lie long before they’re out of childhood? Why not just tell them it’s a story? Adults don’t tell children pumpkins are the personified Spirit of Halloween, so what’s with all the “Shh shh don’t spill the beans” silliness? Apart from anything else I don’t see why parents would want to give their children reason to think Mommy and Daddy make a habit of lying to them.

Like so… Read the rest

Claire McCaskill tells us what we already suspect – Senate Republicans know Trump is many cards short of a deck but they keep shtum because Republicans.

In the interview, the blunt-speaking Missouri Democrat, reflecting on her election loss to Republican Josh Hawley — a political novice whom she also referred to as a “bright shining object” — also didn’t mince words for the Republican Party.

While she warned that history “will judge some of my colleagues harshly that they didn’t stand up to this President at some of the moments where he has been unhinged about particularly the rule of law,” she also said that GOP senators have privately conceded they can’t speak out against Trump because of backlash they’d

Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice in the Times yesterday:

This country’s national security decision-making process is more broken than at any time since the National Security Act became law in 1947. Nothing illustrates this dangerous dysfunction more starkly than President Trump’s reckless, unilateral decisions to announce the sudden withdrawal of all 2,000 United States troops from Syria and to remove 7,000 from Afghanistan.

These decisions went against the advice of the president’s top advisers, blindsided our allies and Congress, and delivered early Christmas presents to our adversaries from Russia and Iran to Hezbollah and the Taliban. The costs of this chaos are enormous, starting with the blunt, unnerving resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, one of the last

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1077309430084059137… Read the rest

Once again Peter Tatchell steps in to patronize women and tell us how to do better.

Martina #Navratilova tweets (& then deletes) rant about #trans athletes She promises to educate herself. Her tweet was wrong but she's apologised. Plus one misguided tweet does not cancel out her decades of equality activism. Time to forgive & move on https://t.co/twOuT4KISq

— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) December 23, 2018

There was no “rant.” She doesn’t need to “educate herself” (Peter Tatchell, on the other hand…). Her tweet was not wrong and she shouldn’t have to apologize. Her tweet was not “misguided” and she doesn’t need to be “forgiven” by Peter Tatchell.

https://twitter.com/Jessie_XL/status/1077000297640349696

https://twitter.com/Jsoosty/status/1076990940236132353

https://twitter.com/Leadinglady0609/status/1076942116708904961

I scrolled through the replies for a long time and … Read the rest

The Treasury Secretary causes the Dow to plunge.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened sharply lower Monday after U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin shocked investors worldwide over the weekend by tweeting that he had spoken to the CEOs of the six largest U.S. banks to ensure they were liquid.

He really did – he tweeted it.

Today I convened individual calls with the CEOs of the nation's six largest banks. See attached statement. pic.twitter.com/YzuSamMyeT

— Steven Mnuchin (@stevenmnuchin1) December 23, 2018

The Post was predicting it last night.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin startled financial analysts, bankers and economists on Sunday by issuing an unusual statement declaring that the nation’s six largest banks had ample credit to extend to American