Longreads That Caught Our Eye This Week

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. Tomi Lahren Played Trevor Noah and Charlamagne — and Won Justin Charity | The Ringer When engaging with a right-wing pundit goes wrong in a post-fact world --------------------------------------------------------------- The right-wing online anchor Tomi Lahren has spent a full week in the mainstream news. In the most remarkable Daily Show interview of Trevor Noah’s run, Lahren sat across from the host to disparage the Black Lives Matter movement as “rioting and looting and burning” and spout fabricated statistics about police violence — articulations that Noah only lightly, gracefully challenged. Lahren told Noah — and, more importantly, his audience — that “a black man is 18.5 times more likely to shoot a police officer than a police officer is to shoot a black man.” It is an unruly misstatement (Lahren says “times” instead of “percent”) of right-wing think-tank research that conservative bloggers mistakenly attribute to the FBI. But now you’ve got to hear both sides. [Read More] The Magic In The Warehouse Neal Gabler | Fortune Costco became a phenomenon by doing things its own way. But with Amazon ever more powerful, millennial shoppers burgeoning, and a new generation of leaders awaiting its turn, can the company preserve its edge? --------------------------------------------------------------- You would never guess by looking at it -- that the eerily quiet, nondescript beige-and-red brick office complex in the bucolic Seattle suburb of Issaquah, at the foot of a small mountain range called the Issaquah Alps, would be the nerve center of one of America’s corporate behemoths. The security guard doesn’t just wave you through; she takes time to chat with you. The reception desk has a plate of cookies, and the receptionists encourage you to take one. There is no bustle, only a sense of calm, which is especially striking, since this is the sort of week that would typically engender corporate jitters. It’s the week when Costco Wholesale, the world’s third-­largest retailer, with $116 billion in sales in fiscal 2016, is hosting a triple-header: its monthly budget meetings, with managers flying in from all over the world; its board of directors’ meeting; and, at week’s end, its annual stockholders’ meeting. [Read More] The Real War on Science John Tierney | City Journal The Left has done far more than the Right to set back progress. --------------------------------------------------------------- My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science? My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. [Read More] Tempus fugit, ars brevis Philippe de Montebello | The New Criterion On the ephemerality of art works. --------------------------------------------------------------- I know that when I was asked to participate in this symposium it was most likely expected that I would lament today’s obsession with obsolescence and the triumph of the ephemeral, and that I would proclaim the lasting qualities of art while decrying its diminishment in the culture at large and, in too many cases, the museum world as well. I would, of course, be perfectly ready and willing to expatiate along those lines. In the hope of eliciting a more lively discussion, however, I have chosen to speak instead to that other melancholy reality, and this one is permanent, because it is in the nature of the thing—I am referring to the inherent fragility of works of art, their precarious existence, their surprising vulnerability. For, from the moment of their creation, works of art are thrust into the physical world and all its vicissitudes. [Read More] Inside the Making of ​Home Alone​’s Fake Gangster Movie Darryn King | Vanity Fair “No children, a very simple shot plan, the exaggerated style of acting, the crazy action. . . . Given the rest of the film, it was kind of a party!” --------------------------------------------------------------- In the dead of a winter’s night in an abandoned building in Winnetka, 20 miles north of Chicago, an actor named Michael Guido, wearing a trench coat and fedora, suddenly found himself having a tense exchange with an older man pointing a gun at him: “I’m gonna give you to the count of 10 to get your ugly, yellow, no-good keister off my property before I pump your guts full of lead.” “All right, Johnny, I’m sorry,” Guido replied, backing away. “I’m going.” “One. Two. Ten!” [Read More] Copyright © 2015 The Federalist, All rights reserved. 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