Miles.

(sign up for the moose report right here. you won’t regret it.)

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It’s been a weird week.

Ok perhaps that’s an overstatement, but things certainly took an uncomfortable turn. It was either Tuesday or Wednesday, I think, and during a break from work (it was brief, promise), I scrolled through Twitter to see if there was anything happening. A series of tweets from one of my favorite accounts–Guy in Your MFA–caught my eye, which prompted some sleuthing.

If you’re not familiar, Guy in Your MFA is a parody account of, well…you can guess. It’s pretty funny and spot-on a lot of the time (“Just bought a hand-bound leather notebook in Italy. I’ll be sure to mention that every time I use it in class next year.”), and I realized that I’d never really checked out the person behind it. Turns out she’s 22, an aspiring writer like myself, and owner of another parody Twitter account. Between those two and her real handle, she has something to the tune of 120,000 followers (for comparison’s sake, I’m just shy of 160 [And no, this is not a plug to ask you to follow me. Unless you want to. I make good tweets though, really. Think about it?]).

That kind of publicity is invaluable in the modern publishing game, and that, combined with the media attention that has followed, virtually guarantees that whenever her debut novel drops, publishers will be fighting each other to get their paws on it. Of course, there’s always been competition between writers, and there have always been insecure writers, but the Internet, I’d contend, makes it easier than ever to wallow in other people’s astronomical success. And all of it was somehow more difficult to take in the middle of another afternoon in a cube during a break from writing an obituary.

Fast forward a few days. By last night, I’d mostly gotten over it, I guess, in part by trying to re-focus on my own projects. I just did my own thing last night–Lindsey spent the night in Oakland with a friend, so I hung around San Mateo. She has a race this morning, a big half marathon through Oakland. She signed up for it months and months ago, and at the time, she’d been sticking to a pretty good running schedule; but then she got strep, and then her family visited for about a week, and that combined with the other semi-regular interruptions of everyday life pretty well killed her training regimen. A few weeks ago, however, she really kicked it back into gear. Said she’d signed up for it, and needed to see it through. That it might be kind of a long race, for her, but it didn’t matter to her what her mile times were as much as it did that she stayed accountable to herself. Last night, I told her how proud I was that she followed through on it, and in the same moment, realized I could take a lesson from her. Writing’s a long game too; some people will blow right on through, but otherwise, you’ve just gotta put in the miles.

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News & updates.

Not a lot on this front–should have some SF Weekly news in the near future, but I’ll let you know more on that soon. Otherwise, I was just going to say that I think this is one of the better weeks for this newsletter link-wise, so you should check some out if you have time!

Read this.

On how a terror group claims that raping pre-teen girls is an act of Godly devotion:ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape. (Admittedly brutal and depressing, but so, so important.)

A brief explanation of the Oath Keepers, the fanatical paramilitary group that was wandering around Ferguson.

Speaking of Ferguson, STL Public Radio put together this awesome multi-sensory app that combines all sorts of photos and audio (can’t remember now if there was video, too). Powerful look back at what happened that day last year, and the chaotic weeks that followed.

True crime time! The culprit: the DuPont Chemical Company. The weapon: C8, a chemical used for half a century to make Teflon, known to cause a variety of nasty cancers. The victim: well, you, probably. Because C8 is a surfactant and because to the best of our knowledge it never ever breaks down, the CDC determined that more than 99% of Americans have it in their bloodstream. Part 1 of a wicked new feature from The Intercept.

There’s a reason women aren’t as consistently good at tennis as men: math.

Why is Russia, a country haunted by a legacy of starvation, burning its food?

The Coddling of the American Mind  – on how higher education’s attempts to accommodate its students/customers might actually be ruining them.

The Obama administration has “prosecuted more individuals under the Espionage Act of 1917 for improperly handling classified information [including whistleblowers]than all previous administrations combined.” Among the loud supporters of this practice was Hillary Clinton. Now that it turns our she was improperly handling documents classified as Top Secret, the DOJ and Friends are desperate for a reason to make an exception for her.

The New Yorker’s late-90s profile of Donald Trump provides some fascinating insight into the silky-haired monster we’re dealing with today.

Companies like Airbnb try to limit capital expenses by not actually owning anything, and instead connecting “contractors” with “clients”–in their case, hosts and guests. Since they don’t own the lodging they rent, though, when a “host” locks a “guest” in the apartment and sexually assaults them, questions of who is supposed to call the police, and who is liable, become a scary murky territory.

This bear and wolf became friends in the wilderness and it’s pretty cute.

“Build a 300 Mile Wall Around SF During Burning Man.” Maybe the funniest fundraising campaign I’ve ever seen.

Watch/listen to this.

Live jam by Juju & Jordash.

That’s it. Have a lovely weekend, everybody!

The end.

The Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson

“This was the epicenter of where people tried to grapple with race, and failed miserably.” Once unknown outside of Saint Louis County, the little municipality called Ferguson has become synonymous around the world with racial tension, protests, and what are sometimes violent clashes between civilians and police. But there were problems in Ferguson long before it burned. In this new piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones, published by ProPublica in conjunction with the New York Times, readers are led through the complicated racial politics of Saint Louis, essentially going from the Dred Scott decision  up until the present. Using a combination of newspapers, government studies, videos, radio segments, and interviews, Hannah-Jones presents the clearest and most thorough explanation of how Saint Louis became so divided that I have yet encountered. And her story all arises from one simple question: If Mike Brown hadn’t been killed on that August afternoon, what sort of life might he have had?

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The scoreboard for the Normandy High School football field can be seen from St. Peter’s Cemetery, where Michael Brown Jr. is buried. (Photo © Whitney Curtis for ProPublica)

ON AUGUST 1, FIVE BLACK STUDENTS in satiny green and red robes and mortar boards waited inside an elementary school classroom, listening for their names to be called as graduates of Normandy High School. The ceremony was held months after the school’s main graduation for students who had been short of credits or had opted not to participate earlier.

One of those graduating that day was Michael Brown. He was 18, his mother’s oldest son. He was headed to college in the fall.

Eight days later, Brown was dead. News reports in the days after Brown’s death often noted his recent graduation and college ambitions, the clear implication that the teen’s school achievements only deepened the sorrow over his loss.

But if Brown’s educational experience was a success story, it was a damning one.

Read the full story at ProPublica.

The Police Killed My Son

In an article for Politico Magazine, father Michael Bell shares the story of how Wisconsin police killed his son, and what he did in the aftermath. The piece is especially timely given the recent death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and from Bell’s piece, it seems the similarities don’t end there. Regardless of your personal politics and opinions on Michael Brown’s case, it is an important moment in modern American politics. Bell weighs in on the militarization of America’s police forces and their propensity towards excessive force, and although he largely ignores how race may play into these sorts of cases (in part because his son was white), he tells a compelling story, and it’s hard not to sympathize with a parent who’s lost their child in such troubling circumstances.

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After police in Kenosha, Wis., shot my 21-year-old son to death outside his house ten years ago — and then immediately cleared themselves of all wrongdoing — an African-American man approached me and said: “If they can shoot a white boy like a dog, imagine what we’ve been going through.”

I could imagine it all too easily, just as the rest of the country has been seeing it all too clearly in the terrible images coming from Ferguson, Mo., in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown. On Friday, after a week of angry protests, the police in Ferguson finally identified the officer implicated in Brown’s shooting, although the circumstances still remain unclear.

I have known the name of the policeman who killed my son, Michael, for ten years. And he is still working on the force in Kenosha.

Read the full piece at Politico.