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PICKS are stories from many sources, selected by our editors or recommended by our readers because they are important, surprising, troubling, enlightening, inspiring, or amusing. They appear on our site and in our daily newsletter. Please send suggested articles, videos, podcasts, etc. to picks@whowhatwhy.org.
Trump’s confident and cocky because he senses that the whole system is afraid of what would happen if he were jailed and the Wrath of MAGA provoked.
Those of you following the prosecution trail will be interested to know that Patrick Leahy’s Truth Commission is a no-go. I was in a meeting with Leahy and 4 other Vermonters on Monday when he broke the news to us. We had asked for the meeting to learn why he supported a Truth Commission over […]
Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for publishing an excellent investigative piece today on how difficult it is to fire a tenured teacher in California, no matter what the charges. The piece starts with a juicy lede: The eighth-grade boy held out his wrists for teacher Carlos Polanco to see. He had just explained to […]
Here’s a fine piece of work that ran on the front page of The New York Times recently. The article, written by Ellen Barry, concerns a suspicious death, a cover-up and a commission’s inquiry into the death. See if you can guess where this incident took place (“spoiler” details have been removed from the excerpts […]
Was The New Yorker’s gripping moment-by-moment account of the Abbottabad operation that killed Osama bin Laden great journalism—or the ultimate spin job?
Forget the “humanitarian crisis” that justified the NATO bombing that helped destroy Qaddafi’s regime. It was always about oil and other strategic issues. And the rebels were a wholly owned subsidiary of West, Inc. Here’s the evidence.
A number of curious security breaches have dogged Obama. Are these simply bizarre, random events, or is someone sending someone a message? There’s a military thread running through it all, and we’d be prudent to take a closer look.
The common refrain that no unknown domestic plots exist, because “someone would have talked” and we would know about them…is plain wrong. People do talk—and suffer the consequences. So there aren’t many of them.
You’ve heard about “someone would have talked”? Well, someone did. An important new eyewitness, a credible one, talks about a second gunman firing at Robert F. Kennedy.
We keep getting reports of atrocities committed by the Syrian government. Those reports may well be accurate. But the truth is usually a bit more complicated in war zones. If news organizations don’t start adopting a higher standard for their reports, another Libyan-style intervention, complete with massive bombing and untold civilian casualties, may be inevitable.
Another massacre in Syria, more rush to blame the side Western governments oppose, followed by corrections. Journalists owe the public better, more careful reporting.