Kids today have no idea how good The Onion was, like when Autistic Reporter Michael Falk delivered this news package, “Train Thankfully Unharmed In Crash That Killed One Man”

Isn’t this the textbook definition of Chutzpah?

Monty Python’s @JohnCleese makes a point here that should be obvious, but somehow isn’t. Learning usually starts with the uncomfortable realization that you weren’t misled by villains or harmed by disagreement. You were just wrong.

Is it masculine to run from a storm? Is it masculine to allow a man to insult you, call your wife ugly, and call your father a criminal...and then kiss his ass?

Dear Harvard: It's not too late to right the wrong done to Carole Hooven. Please invite her to return to her teaching post at the University. Not only would it rectify an injustice, it would send a signal that Harvard honors academic freedom and intellectual integrity and no longer caves to mobs.

One very telling moment from that Trump interview on NBC that I keep thinking about —-

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man. The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero. The FBI located the man within a few days. He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City. The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave. He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father. He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris. When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship. He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion. He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg. He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry. He decided he wanted to fly. In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed. Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation. Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first. Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it. Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet. He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red. He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket. The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service. His application was rejected. The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service. He was the only one who was not. For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word. When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him. He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years. He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp. He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was. He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life. He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center. He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for. A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it. He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday. He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday. He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag. In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously. It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him. He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history. The French had been calling him a hero since 1917. The Americans got around to it in 1994.

You could start by walking down the hall. See why your boss keeps pardoning people convicted of money laundering, wire fraud, tax evasion, and securities fraud.

RT @sapinker: Jon Haidt @jonhaidt is one of the greatest psychologists of the 21st century, having illuminated moral cognition, the relatio…

In my view, @jonhaidt is the most visionary social scientist of my generation.

Whether you agree with him or not though, Ben is taking a stand in a very aggressive way for a certain side of things within the conservative movement and the larger Trump coalition. When Joe Biden was in power, it was easier to focus fire on a common enemy without fracturing a broader conservative audience. But since the relevant fight has largely turned within, I think Ben has been willing to spend his influence pushing what he believes in at the expense of friendships and followers. I don’t endorse everything he has said and done. But I respect that choice as a matter of principle. His media platform may be eroding to whatever degree, but what he has gained is the success of his positions in the world and an influence within the administration and the leadership of the Republican Party that has palpably shifted the direction of the nation. He may not be as wealthy for it at the end of the day. But I expect he is ultimately happy with that exchange.

It’s literally God’s oldest rule not to do this.

Me too! As a Minnesotan and Michigander, I feel this very strongly. I’ve always LOVED the Canadian national anthem.

Interestingly, I had no idea Strang taught linear algebra. My first exposure was his book on applied math that was the textbook for one of my classes in graduate school. But I thoroughly enjoyed the subject.

In his second administration, President Trump’s family, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner and sons Eric and Don Jr., are expanding their business ventures, earning hundreds of millions of dollars and prompting fresh concerns about influence peddling and conflicts of interest. @ElizLanders reports.

Neuroscientist explains how the SAT is redefining education

This is an excellent take!

Wow, what a thread. First the sad flex about hulking Tim C attacking someone’s family then getting ratioed from both sides of the political spectrum for being both a boot licker and an entitled putz.