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Trump threatened to pull federal funding from UC Berkeley after a night of violent protests prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from delivering a scheduled speech. (Campus officials had already condemned the violence.) The entire incident brings up an important point when it comes to dealing with trolls and hate speech. The key is to give trolls as little coverage and attention as possible. These protests (even if they hadn't been violent) do just the opposite. The same goes for celebrities and other influencers who quote hate-tweets from trolls. Their main goal is to go viral. Don't help them. I never thought it would be possible to turn the word Yiannopoulos into a household name...
"The biggest influence on kids are other kids. It's not uncool to say, 'I don't take drugs or drink.' It's perfectly acceptable now." Vice looks at some of the forces behind numbers when it comes to drug use among young people in the UK: Gen Z Is Too Busy to Drink or Do Drugs. (I guess my generation was pretty good at multitasking...)
Trump on the nuclear option: "Go for it." Thankfully, he wasn't talking about actual nukes, but rather a filibuster-busting tactic that Senate Republicans could deploy to push through his Supreme Court nominee, Colorado federal appeals court judge Neil Gorsuch: a justice who is likely to follow in the legal footsteps of Antonin Scalia.
+ "The White House aides ferried Gorsuch down a quiet farm road to the airport, where they boarded a military jet for the flight to Joint Base Andrews." As he announced his pick, Trump asked, "Was that a surprise?" Here's how hard the White House worked to keep the pick a secret. (I imagine keeping the boss away from Twitter was the most difficult aspect of the strategy.)
"At one point, Trump informed Turnbull that he had spoken with four other world leaders that day -- including Russian President Vladimir Putin -- and that 'this was the worst call by far.'" The president appeared to successfully migrate his Twitter communication style to a landline phone as a call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull turned sour. (I've had less heated calls on a Samsung Galaxy Note 7.)
+ "Politicians have gotta talk from both sides of their mouth, gotta please everybody because they want votes. He don't have to. He's saying, listen, this is the way it's going to be. He's changing all the rules, and I love it." From NPR: Trump Supporters Cheer Quick Starts On Campaign Promises.
"Often, animals have to be taken back to the zoo they came from without mating. Things don’t always go well when a male and a female first meet." The solution? Tinder for Orangutans.
+ "In many species, a family dinner means something else." The NYT on new discoveries about cannibalism in the animal kingdom. So I guess it's not just a DC thing after all...
"She was like, 'Oh, did you see that firefighter? He’s so cute.' And I was like, 'Mom, I just got blown up.'" Here's a nice story about a Boston Marathon bombing survivor who is getting married to the fireman who saved her.
"The recipe for populism is universal. Find a wound common to many, find someone to blame for it, and make up a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys. Label them: the minorities, the politicians, the businessmen. Caricature them. As vermin, evil masterminds, haters and losers, you name it. Then paint yourself as the savior." In a very interesting piece, Andrés Miguel Rondón explains how populism works, and maybe more importantly, how to fight it. (Hint: it's pretty much the opposite of what most people are doing right now.) How to let a populist beat you, over and over again.
+ "Many conservative foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his temperament; not his program but his character. We were right." A hawkish neocon explains why this is a clarifying moment in American History.
The New Yorker's Adrian Chen on the human toll of protecting the internet from the worst of humanity. "He developed symptoms of P.T.S.D., including insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, and auditory hallucinations. He began to have trouble spending time around his son, because it triggered traumatic memories." (If you've never worked on a site where people share content or perform searches, trust me, you have no idea...)
"These are luxury, nuclear-hardened bunkers that are engineered… to accommodate not just your physical protection but your mental well-being as well." From the BBC: The nuclear bunkers designed for luxury living. All I need is coffee and some decent Wi-Fi, and I'll be fine. I am the cockroach of news curators.
+ Outside: Everything wrong with Peter Thiel’s doomsday survival plan. (When it hits the fan, the last people I will run to for advice are Internet nerds...)
You have thousands of terrible photos that you've been meaning to cull through. You have tens of thousands of emails that you still haven't deleted. Maybe you're just overwhelmed or a little bit lazy. Or maybe you're a digital hoarder.
+ It's one of the longest running and most irritating debates in human history. And now a college student from Georgia may have come up with a way to answer one of life's pressing questions: What should we have for dinner?
+ Here's a great idea for a way to redesign nutrition labels in a way that might actually motivate you to cut down on sugar.
+ Joe Buck on Howard Stern. It's an interesting chat on universal topics like social media, family dynamics, and hair plugs. And it's not politics. Enjoy.
+ "Police in northern Oklahoma say they've arrested a substitute teacher on an indecent exposure complaint after she reportedly did a cartwheel in front of students while wearing a skirt but no undergarments."
This is a weekly best-of version of the NextDraft newsletter. For daily updates and to get the NextDraft app, go here. (Original story reprinted with permission from NextDraft.)
