In 2008, journalist and author Bill Bishop co-authored The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. It examines how communities across the US are becoming more politically one-sided. This isn’t just a Kentucky vs. California thing – within these states, you’ll find increasingly sharp political divisions. Part of the reason is that people like to live with others who think like them: they “sort” into communities that reflect their values.

In this climate of polarization, it can become easy to fall into stereotypes, and to lose sight of common concerns that all communities share: jobs, access to health care, working infrastructure, clean water and clean air, and so on. Bishop is also a journalist and the co-founding editor (with his wife) of the Daily Yonder, a website that focuses specifically on the needs of rural communities. As such, it also seeks to overcome stereotypes and help people see the diversity of rural America.

The Daily Yonder is published by the Center for Rural Strategies, a non-profit based in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and Knoxville, Tennessee. The Center had about $832K in revenue in 2014, much of it from well-established foundations like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (yes, named for the guy who founded the cereal company) and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Although there’s a big fundraising button on every page, individual or small organization contributions average to only about $20K a year.

Its reach can only be described as tiny at this point: The publication has about 3,500 followers on Twitter and another 3,500 on Facebook (the Facebook page is more regularly updated); its traffic rank is similarly underwhelming. There are some self-inflicted reasons for this: once you get past the frontpage, it’s easy to get lost in the laundry list of topics and inscrutable headlines without any kind of content preview. If clickbait is one extreme of how to present news and analysis, the Yonder is close to the other end.

This also shows a fundamental challenge covering “rural America” as a whole: it’s big, and it’s hard to make local stories exciting for people who aren’t from that specific part of the country. Right now, the frontpage tells me in large letters: “DYNAMIC DELTA LEADERS: EDUCATION IS THE KEY”. Is that a story I want to read? Who knows!

But if you dig, there is lots of good content here. The Viewfinder series, for example, showcases rural photography. The In the Black series is a column that relates the experiences of an underground coal miner. Beyond Coal examines the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy. The “Speak your piece” columns reflect on many aspects of rural life while staying clear of the vitriol that has become a mainstay of US politics.

Bill Bishop himself followed up on his “The Big Sort” analysis with an insightful article that examines the rapidly increasing percentage of voters who live in “landslide counties” where one of the two parties is likely to win a presidential election with large margins.

Each story has a small Disqus-enabled section for comments, though few stories attract significant discussion. The content is under conventional copyright, and some is syndicated from other sources.

The Verdict

The Daily Yonder deserves to exist, because it provides a much-needed journalistic perspective on rural America. But to truly reach people (rural or not), it will need to strive to become a more engaging source that can successfully perform the difficult task of translating local experiences into public interest journalism with broad appeal to readers in different parts of the country. Because it falls short of that potential, I give it 3 out of 5 stars. If you are interested in authentic perspectives on rural America, I do nevertheless recommend liking their Facebook page or subscribing to their RSS feeds as a way to keep up with their important work.

Suicide Squad is exactly what the trailers suggest it is: a bunch of villains (Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, etc.) are captured and (under threat of execution) forced to cooperate against a common threat. Many of the characters are entirely forgettable, the two exceptions being Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and Deadshot (Will Smith). Jared Leto pops in from time to time to play the Joker in a very polarizing performance (I personally didn’t find him interesting at all).

The plot is minimal and centers around Enchantress who fits the “awakened ancient alien/super-human who wants to destroy/rule the world” stereotype.

What do you do when you have a bunch of morally irredeemable characters? You make the rest of the world morally irredeemable as well. The prison guards are Abu Ghraib style sadists and perverts. The government official who convenes “Task force X” is herself a villain who doesn’t hesitate to kill anyone who gets in her way.

We’re supposed to root for the most morally ambiguous characters – the very confused and anarchistic Harley Quinn, and the “I don’t kill women and children” hitman with a heart Deadshot. But except for a bit of Joker/Quinn backstory, we don’t spend enough time with any one character to really get interested in them. Quinn is the most entertaining of the bunch, pulling off exactly the right mix of seductive, deceptive, and just plain fucked up to make it work.

So what are we left with? A memorable and enjoyable performance by Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, some solid work by Will Smith, a lot of special effects, and a lot of senseless violence. Skip it or save it for when there’s truly nothing better to watch.

The Center for Media and Democracy is a pretty small organization, with just a $1M budget, stretched across many different projects. Yet they draw a lot of attention from right-wing sources (example: Fox stories, Breitbart stories), often centered around a grant from the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations (which give support to many progressive organizations while being at the heart of every “globalist new world order” conspiracy theory).

Why is CMD so heavily targeted? I can only conclude that it’s because they attack disinformation where it hurts the most: at the source. It documents the connections of right-wing spinmeisters like Steven Milloy, who are paid to attack environmental science or other findings and activism that could affect a company’s bottom line, as well as the activities of ALEC, a right-wing group that drafts (usually reactionary) legislation for Republican-controlled state legislatures.

Long before most people had heard of Wikipedia, CMD set up an instance of MediaWiki to document funding connections, revolving doors, and influence networks, calling the result SourceWatch. You need to send an email to become an editor – I’m unclear as to whether they do any kind of additional vetting. It’s a typically chaotic wiki where it’s not always clear why something is categorized in a certain way. The abundance of branded micro-projects like “ALEC Exposed”, “Koch Exposed”, “FrackSwarm”, “CoalSwarm”, “NFIB Exposed”, Fix the Debt", and occasional links to other micro-sites can be confusing, as well.

But there’s a lot of high quality information, much of it footnoted. If you ever see an expert talking head spout off something suspiciously corporation-friendly, chances are SourceWatch will tell you a lot about the think tank they’re part of, the corporations that are funding it, and the causes they’ve previously supported. And if the journalist who gave that person a platform doesn’t mention those pertinent facts, you can point that out – and ask journalists for more disclosure and careful selection of exports.

So, as with any wiki, read it critically, and expect to get lost a little bit – but SourceWatch is unique, and if you ever want to track information provenance, it’s a useful resource to know about.

Jacobin is a New York based socialist quarterly magazine founded by Bhaskar Sunkara when he was 21 years old. It was started online in 2010 and is now also in print, with some content only available to subscribers of either edition. The website features news and analysis on an ongoing basis.

Sunkara is also a vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and he takes the “democratic” part seriously (“Any socialism we build will need to have a free, open civil society and multiparty democracy”, he recently tweeted). At the same time, you will find in Jacobin a perspective that is deeply critical of US mainline politics. On Bernie Sanders’ run, Sunkara predicted that Sanders would lose in the primaries, but that his run could be “an opportunity for movement building”.

In an interview with New Left Review, Sunkara articulated this focus on movement-building as core to his political philosophy: “What’s needed is to build movements until we reach a point where electoral options are actually viable.”

The organization behind Jacobin is a non-profit with about $300K in revenue in 2014. There is no Annual Report, which is not surprising for a tiny organization. In the aforementioned interview, Sunkara stated that most of this revenue is from subscriptions, with donations accounting for about 20% of the budget. In spite of its political radicalism, Jacobin is under conventional copyright terms (including back issues), and offers no discussion forums or other interactive components.

The print issue of Jacobin contains in-depth articles alongside beautiful graphic design (example issue). Unlike quite a few leftist magazines, Jacobin doesn’t engage in a lot of postmodernist piffle; its articles are often supported by charts and data, and tend to share a focus on issues that have real world relevance, including occasional departures into sci/tech themes like 3D printing or Silicon Valley politics.

So what can we find here that’s not reported elsewhere? Here are a few examples:

• an in-depth analysis of the prospects of the Kurds in Turkey, written by Djene Bajalan, an assistant professor with focus on Middle Eastern affairs
• a reasonable critique of Chuck Schumer, the prospective Democratic minority leader in the US Senate
• an analysis of the US media industry and the impact of the profit motive by Annenberg media studies scholar Victor Pickard.

One might wonder how a socialist magazine treats left-wing authoritarians. Will it applaud or rationalize as they restrict speech and political freedom, or will it criticize? The coverage of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s elected authoritarian Nicolás Maduro give us some idea. The Jacobin Castro obituary is in fact one of the better ones I’ve read, and is unambiguous in its criticism, for example:

“It was relatively simple to dismiss the calls for democracy from internal critics as imperialist propaganda, rather than a legitimate claim by working people that a socialism worthy of its name should transform them into the subjects of their own history. Public information was available only in the impenetrable form of the state newspaper Granma, and state institutions at every level were little more than channels for the communication of the leadership’s decisions.”

“An opaque bureaucracy, accountable to itself alone, with privileged access to goods and services, became increasingly corrupt in the context of an economy reduced to its minimal provisions. Castro’s occasional calls for ‘rectification’ removed some problem individuals but left the system intact.”

It concludes that “any socialism worth its name needs a deep and radical democracy.”

Jacobin’s coverage of Venezuela’s dysfunctional, corrupt and increasingly authoritarian government has been less robust and more likely to look for justifications primarily in the behavior of the right-wing opposition, though the article “Why ‘Twenty-First-Century Socialism’ Failed” by Venezuela-born socialist Eva María offers a more critical perspective which echoes the commitment to worker-focused democracy that defines Jacobin’s politics:

“The party, however, did not rely on its members’ active participation no matter how much Chávez liked to say it did. Instead, a bureaucratic structure, where criticism, open debates, and rank-and-file power were more often the exception than the rule, took over. The party formalized the bureaucratic layer of nominal Chavistas who were put in charge of different state sectors. In no time, this new caste engaged in corrupt behavior while continuing to deploy socialist rhetoric. The government’s ideas of funding and supporting popular power didn’t work in practice.”

The Verdict

Operating on a tiny budget, Jacobin offers a much-needed, intellectually coherent journalistic challenge to the prevailing social and economic order. The pitfalls of its political position are easy to pinpoint: the history of socialism and communism is riddled with failed economies, brutal autocrats and centralized bureaucracies, which calls into question whether its aspirations can ever be achieved in practice.

To build a mass movement for democratic socialism in the United States may seem like the remotest of possibilities, but the political successes of Bernie Sanders and the failure of the Democratic party to protect the progressive gains it has made under the Obama administration will lead many young people to search for alternatives.

Whether Jacobin can be a leading voice of that search for alternatives (within the two-party system, or outside mainline politics) will largely depend on whether it can maintain its commitment to a vision of radical democracy, consistently oppose political violence, and overcome any impulse to jump to the defense of authoritarian leaders who share some political objectives. The left is not immune to group polarization, and unreconstructed old-school socialists who habitually defend the indefensible are the political anchor around its neck.

I recommend Jacobin with reservations: read critically, it offers a useful complement to anyone’s diet of news and analysis. It is also aesthetically pleasing and edited with care, and their Twitter account is a good way to follow their work. 3.5 out of 5 stars, rounded up.

Fantastic Beasts is only loosely inspired by the mini-encyclopedia of the same name that formed a small addendum to the Harry Potter canon. But its screenplay was written by J.K. Rowling herself, which makes it a proper contribution to the popular fictional universe.

The film’s protagonist, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), is a magizoologist from Britain. Traveling with a suitcase that contains multitudes of magical beasts, he finds himself immersed (and scapegoated) in a sinister plot revolving around a child with magical powers. Along the way, he befriends a muggle (or “no-maj” as the Americans say, a person without magic) and two sisters who work for the Magical Congress of the United States of America.

Much of the film deals with capturing some of the beasts that have escaped from the suitcase, and they are indeed a joy to behold. The niffler in particular steals every scene it is in, looking for opportunities to amass wealth while avoiding re-capture. But there’s a beast for everyone to enjoy, and lots of merchandising is sure to follow.

At times, the film introduces characters we only meet once or twice without giving us much of an understanding why they are there, like the newspaper magnate Henry Shaw Sr. (played by Jon Voight) and his family. A sequel to the film is planned, so this may well tie into a larger story that is yet to unfold. Either way, the storytelling isn’t always as smooth and coherent as it could be. But the film’s upsides strongly outweigh these deficits: imaginative visuals, lovely chemistry between the main characters, lots of attention to detail, and an extension of the Harry Potter universe that feels organic rather than forced.

The Verdict

If you enjoy the Harry Potter universe, you will most likely enjoy this film and look forward to the sequel. If you aren’t too familiar with the franchise, you’ll miss some interesting references (and contrasts between the American world of magic and the British one that the franchise previously focused on), but you’ll still be able to have fun. Recommended.

When I started my video podcast I needed a suitable microphone. The Samson Meteor Mic received a lot of good reviews, so I went with it (you can hear it in all episodes except the first one). It uses a cardioid pattern, meaning that it picks up most sound in front of the mic. Indeed, ambient noises that are far away don’t get a lot of pickup, so the occasional background noise won’t disturb your recording or call.

The mic comes with a mute button and a headphone jack/volume knob (so you can monitor your input without latency). It is chrome-plated and looks quite nice on any desk. The three legs are foldable, so it won’t take up a lot of space in your laptop bag. It also has a mic stand adapter, which I haven’t used.

Linux compatibility

This USB mic works fine under Linux (tested with the last three Ubuntu releases); it gets immediately recognized. You may just need to activate it in your sound preferences and in some applications (browser may require a restart).

The Verdict

As of this writing the Samson Meteor is priced at $55 on Amazon. That’s a pretty good deal for a very high quality device.

The wacom intuos drawing tablet is fully supported out of the box on ubuntu and other distros with the xserver-xorg-input-wacom package installed. The tablet is configurable through the xsetwacom command line tool. While the cli tool is not as user friendly as the GUI tool for windows and macOS it is feature complete and can configure the tablet buttons as well as many other settings for the tablet.

Powell’s is the real deal. If you love books, you can spend a day here and still not want to leave. Nice in-store cafe, re-sorting racks for the books (so you don’t have to worry about putting them back in the right place), great used book bargains, nice staff picks & descriptions, information desks everywhere, clear maps and reasonably sane categorization. What’s not to like? Well, you’ll occasionally pay a good bit more for a new book than on the soulless-website-that-shall-not-be-named. But if you want this kind of place to exist in the world, that’s worth it, isn’t it?

Founded in 2005 as a simple multi-author blog (Wayback Machine copy), ThinkProgress has grown into one of the more popular progressive news sites, with an estimated reach of 1.8M monthly uniques per Quantcast. Behind it is a powerful NGO with strong ties to some prominent players in US politics.

Organizational Structure, Funding

You may have never heard of the Center for American Progress, but it’s one of the most well-funded political nonprofits in the US, with over $45M in revenue in 2014. It was founded by none other than John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and victim of a phishing attack of likely Russian origin on his email account.

CAP’s funding comes from foundations, corporations, individual major donors, and small donations. Its “Supporters” page provides a breakdown, and says that “corporate funding comprises less than 6 percent of the budget, and foreign government funding comprises only 2 percent.” Big foundation funders include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Sandler Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

CAP has a sister organization, the Action Fund. Unlike CAP, it is organized under the 501c4 section of the US tax code which permits political lobbying, but means that donations are not tax-deductible. It is a smaller organization, with about $8.5M revenue in 2015, the single largest chunk of which comes from CAP itself. The organizations also share the same CEO, Neera Tanden.

The Action Fund is the organization behind ThinkProgress, which is said to be fully editorially independent. Founder and editor Judd Legum left ThinkProgress in 2007 to join Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid as research director and then returned to his role, which is an example of the revolving door from CAP to the US Democratic establishment.

In 2015, Legum received total compensation of $199K from the organization, which is comparable to other nonprofit publications like Mother Jones.

Transparency

The ThinkProgress website is one of the worst we have reviewed in terms of disclosing organizational internals. The About page mentions its parent organization without even linking to it. There, with some luck, you may find the list of supporters; beyond that, the only reporting I was able to find on the organization’s work was a 10th Anniversary Report (and only with Google).

Considering the combined revenue of the two organizations, this is a remarkably poor level of transparency; much smaller organizations like Truthout manage to report regularly about their own work (reports) and make these reports easy to find.

Positioning, Bias

ThinkProgress describes itself as dedicated to “providing our readers with rigorous reporting and analysis from a progressive perspective”. Beyond that positioning statement, does it have bias toward specific politicians or policies?

Using the 2016 election as a yardstick, political connections notwithstanding, I did not find evidence of bias in favor of one of the Democratic candidates (Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton) in the coverage itself. Privately, the Wikileaks disclosures show that ThinkProgress editor Judd Legum did sometimes casually forward items of interest that could be used against Sanders (emails that include Legum and Sanders).

One exchange in particular caught the attention of right-wing critics. It was a heads-up by Legum that Faiz Shakir, a former ThinkProgress staffer, had started doing some work for the Bernie campaign. CEO Neera Tanden (Legum’s boss) reacted in a manner that can only be described as vitriolic.

It would be unfair to infer too much about ThinkProgress itself from these leaked private exchanges. They only serve to underscore the strong personal connections of some of its key players to the Clinton campaign. Now that the campaign is lost, it remains to be seen how these same players act in the changed political environment.

I would describe ThinkProgress editorially as left-of-center, which in the age of Trumpism makes them a useful source of adversarial journalism. Its content selection reflects a progressive perspective that is relatively free of reflection and squarely directed at the political right. In pursuing this agenda, the site sometimes overstates/sensationalizes slightly, but not as much as clickbait sites like Occupy Democrats do; more on this below.

Stories do appear to go through internal fact-checking (though the editors fell for a fake news site in 2014).

The site also engages in independent fundraising from readers, e.g., for its recently launched Trump Investigative Fund.

Content Examples

Consistent with its origins as a blog, ThinkProgress does not distinguish between news, analysis, or commentary. Some of its reports are in-depth investigative journalism that would be right at home on sites like ProPublica (e.g., its report on the growth of the sanctuary city movement since Trump’s election).

An example article that shows reasonable depth, while also not presenting any perspective that disagrees with its analysis: “Trump poised to violate Constitution his first day in office, George W. Bush’s ethics lawyer says”. See this NYT piece for a somewhat more balanced assessment of the same situation. This is a case where citing only a single perspective serves to slightly sensationalize reporting.

Similarly, when 46 US Attorneys were fired by the Department of Justice, ThinkProgress focused on framing the action as part of a larger purge narrative, not spelling out that Bill Clinton fired all 93 attorneys in 1993 (see the Vox reporting). This is an example of using a fairly ordinary political event as a “hook” to support a larger narrative.

As an example for overstating, one article calls the war in Yemen a “climate-driven war”. While the article itself makes good arguments, that summary overstates the role of climate change (compare this analysis by International Policy Digest).

Sometimes the site does use clickbait tactics. The headline “SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch faces extraordinary sexism allegation from former student” uses ambiguous language which could describe a wide range of behaviors in order to sensationalize Gorsuch’s alleged comments about maternity leave.

Worse, these comments are disputed by several other students (see NPR coverage, or National Review for the right-wing perspective). This isn’t mentioned in the article, and ThinkProgress kept tweeting the piece at least until March 24, when other media had already reported the dispute.

Design, Licensing

ThinkProgress design in 2005, 2011 and 2017 (old screenshots courtesy of archive.org).

The ThinkProgress website is a branded version of Medium, with all the associated advantages and disadvantages (e.g., it works poorly without JavaScript, but looks nice on mobile and has decent built-in social features such as commenting, notifications and following).

Content is under conventional copyright, with permission to re-use granted on a case-by-case basis.

The Verdict

While I would not put it in the same journalistic category as publications like Mother Jones or The Intercept, I do recommend following ThinkProgress on Twitter or by other means as a source of progressive advocacy journalism. At its best, ThinkProgress provides valuable in-depth investigative reporting.

The complex influence web behind CAP and the parent organization of ThinkProgress raises questions about how autonomously it can operate, but one shouldn’t overstate the case. The organization it is not dependent on a single funder and relies on public support, as well. Perhaps ThinkProgress would better served being a truly independent organizational entity, which would also enable tax-deductible donations.

The rating is 3.5 stars, rounded down. Points off for a slight tendency toward sensationalizing (primarily through framing and selective reporting) and a lack of transparency.

(Updated in March 2017 with new information and to be more consistent with our review methodology.)

I didn’t think Ridley Scott had another great movie in him, but he proved me wrong. The Martian turned out to be visually powerful, well-paced and well-acted, and will likely be remembered as one of the best sci-fi movies of this decade.

Matt Damon does a great job with a challenging lead role, conveying both the desperation and witty resourcefulness that define Mark Watney. Among the support cast, Kate Mara shines and lets us experience the emotional journey of one of Watney’s fellow crew members.

The movie lacked suspense in its last third, which in my view is because part of the story arc from the book has been omitted in favor of greater focus on the supporting characters. A bolder choice might have been to go the opposite route: to focus almost completely on Watney’s isolation.

We’re left with a movie that conveys optimism in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, and enthusiasm for scientific exploration, while being highly entertaining. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend it.