Long Reads That Caught Our Eye This Week

We love to read. . . Your weekly roundup of longreads that caught our eye. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray [View this email in your browser]( We love to read. Here are a few longreads from around the web that caught the attention of our editors this week. San Francisco’s Homeless Encampments Expose The Failure Of A Liberal Utopia John Daniel Davidson | The Federalist In America's most liberal city, increasingly visible homeless camps are a stark symbol of San Francisco's economic hollowing out and the failure of progressive governance. --------------------------------------------------------------- SAN FRANCISCO – “You want the down-low? I’ll give you the down-low. These guys will all tell you something different, but the one thing everyone here has in common is that they all do drugs.” I’m talking to a group of homeless men camped out under Highway 101 in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, where a half-dozen tents are set up on a wide sidewalk across the street from a Best Buy. The thirtysomething guy who’s telling me it’s all about drugs doesn’t want to give me his name. That’s partly because he doesn’t consider himself homeless—he stays with boyfriends, he says, and couch-surfs—and partly because he’s smoking weed with his friend, Robert Shuman, a 45-year-old self-described “homeless tweaker” who freely admits he’s homeless because he got hooked on drugs and lost everything. They’re reclining next to a large tent amid a heap of bicycles, scavenged office furniture, and a shopping cart full of food. Every few minutes, someone emerges from one of the tents and grabs something to eat. The smells of weed and urine punctuate the air. [Read More]( Automated Liberalism? James Poulos | Law and Liberty The liberal mind has probably always been troubled by the prospect of what we’re currently apt to call “thought policing.” Since the likes of Mill and Constant, liberals have believed that the spread of commerce and knowledge tends to be mutually reinforcing and conducive to enlightenment and peace. They have also imagined that the age of commerce, to stick with Constant’s framing, has simply replaced the age of conquest. In a time when the machinery of enlightenment is laboring away, the ancient work of coercion—they might say—just doesn’t function well enough to endure, much less to dominate. Bad, illiberal words and deeds may burst on the scene like invaders from another planet, but the peaceful system of enlightenment is as hostile to them as an immune system to bodily invaders. At this point in history, according to the liberal imagination, immunity always wins. So the faster the historical progress of the machinery of enlightenment, the faster illiberal invaders are purged from the system. The contemporary implication of this imaginative framing, developed over centuries, is significant. [Read More]( Cardi B’s Money Moves Caity Weaver | GQ The rapper responsible for last year’s most unexpected hit emerged from a singular New York City story of strip clubs, gangs, and below-board basement butt injections. Navigating new fame and a new record, Invasion of Privacy, Cardi B is fighting to stay true to her Bronx roots while the world clamors for her to become a global superstar. --------------------------------------------------------------- "I love…," begins Cardi B—pink, glistening ribs in hand; slick, brick-colored barbecue sauce clotting under Swarovski-crystal manicure—and then hangs in silent pause. She does this a lot: stops like a cliff diver savoring the charged seconds before a jump. Her speech is hyper-fast but full of built-in extra time for you to catch up. For her to ensure you're paying attention. With the aid of cutting-edge Millennium science, in the form of orbicular breast implants and illegal buttocks injections, America's sudden favorite rapper, Cardi B, has built her body for optimal viewing at medium-to-long-distance range. This engineering foresight helps explain why, before she began making music history (a randomly chosen milestone from her tennis bracelet of success: she is the first rapper to have her first three Billboard Hot 100 entries in the Top 10 simultaneously), she was not just a successful stripper but a wildly successful one. The hills and slopes of her body are so captivating that you might not even notice the delicate beauty of her countenance until it's staring at you head-on from across a dimly lit restaurant booth while you wait to discover what it is that Cardi loves. Tonight her hair, lately blonde, has been teased into a kind of spun-sugar bouffant: Cardi B as Jackie O. She is tiny enough that she can wear a long black tank top as a dress in a public restaurant, but for modesty's sake she has added a rosebud pink sweatshirt over it. In big black letters, the sweatshirt says: ᴅᴇsɪɢɴᴇʀ ᴘᴜssʏ. Cardi finishes her sentence. "…Franklin Delano Roosevelt." She nods, agreeing with herself. "Yes." [Read More]( Charlie Rose's Life Now: "Broken," "Brilliant" and "Lonely" James Oliver Cury | The Hollywood Reporter Before the devastating allegations of sexual misconduct hit, Rose was a legendary man-about-town. Now, the former CBS and PBS star, one of TV’s most feted journalists, is hiding out on Long Island with occasional, mostly disastrous forays into Manhattan: "He’s focusing on trying to understand" --------------------------------------------------------------- On the night of April 2, Charlie Rose walked into Gabriel's Bar & Restaurant, a Lincoln Center eatery that's popular among New York's media elite. Al Pacino had just left, while the state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who recently filed a civil lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein and The Weinstein Co., entered only minutes before the arrival of the 76-year-old ex-anchor of CBS This Morning. Rose, a legendary man-about-town in addition to one of the most iconic broadcast journalists, once exuded an "old-school New York socialite vibe," notes one media executive who has known him for a decade, adding, "When Charlie goes to Michael's, it takes him 10 minutes to get to his table because people come up to him and he always says hello. He's fearless: He'll talk to anybody and he knows everybody." [Read More]( I Was A Disney Princess, I Had An Abortion, And It Almost Ruined My Life Deanna Falchook | The Federalist Recently, Planned Parenthood tweeted, ‘We Need a Disney Princess Who Had an Abortion.’ No, we do not. --------------------------------------------------------------- At 18, I received a great job working at Walt Disney World as a singer. More than 5,000 people auditioned to fill 10 positions for singer/dancers (five women and five men). I performed five shows daily in front of Cinderella’s Castle, singing such classics as “When You Wish Upon a Star,” and “Some Day My Prince Will Come.” This was a dream come true for me. I was frequently hired to sing in the recording studio as the voice of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. I was paid well, had my own apartment, and enjoyed life independently as a professional singing princess and entertainer. Shortly after starting my contract at Disney, I met a charming, 22-year-old prince named Dave who worked as an engineer in the theme park. We were highly attracted to each other and spent most of our time off work together. Dave eventually moved in with me. Within a few months of living under the same roof, I became pregnant. This is where the fairy tale between Dave and I took a turn. He made it clear that he had no interest in “settling down” or making that type of commitment. In fact, he let me know he was experienced with knowing about “places” that would take care of the “problem.” I soon realized he was not my Prince Charming. [Read More]( Copyright © 2015 The Federalist, All rights reserved. You are receiving this e-mail because you opted in to receive e-mail updates from TheFederalist.com. Our mailing address is: The Federalist 8647 Richmond Highway Suite 618 Alexandria, VA 22309 [Add us to your address book]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences]( The Federalist · 8647 Richmond Highway · Suite 618 · Alexandria, VA 22309 · USA