Sometimes the flow of bite-sized news stories are where I’m at. And at other times, longer reads that delve into a topic are exactly what I need. Here are four pieces that I found thought-provoking this week:

What if the Obstruction Was the Collusion? On the New York Times’s Latest Bombshell
This piece by Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes stopped me cold when I read it. It’s one thing to think of Trump and the people on his campaign as a gaggle of unethical grifters who would say anything and take anything they could to win and/or make a buck. It’s quite another to find out that the FBI was investigating whether or not the President himself was a national security threat.

The 5 Corners of the 2020 Democratic Primary
I’m not terribly interested in anyone’s take on the declared and potential 2020 nominees (yet) but this article from FiveThirtyEight was fascinating. They categorize the left-leaning voters into 5 groups and then rank some of the most obvious potential nominees in each of the categories. Their premise is that the nominee who can build the largest coalition of voters will win.

Machine Politics
I ran across this podcast episode at Harper’s which was a wide-ranging discussion about the role of social media in our lives. They also talk about how the creation of platforms for individual expression also enabled more authoritarianism.  They rounded out the episode with a discussion of how as a society, we can change our relationship with technology and create solutions for affecting collective change. (You can listen to the podcast right on the webpage.)

Elizabeth Warren, the Democrats and the real problem with the “fake news media”
This Salon article is less about Warren herself, and more a deep dive into how the media has treated her of late. Again, the article is primarily interested in chronicling how the media creates a narrative and how incorrect they can be. I think we all need lessons like this one so we can be more skeptical and ask better questions when we read coverage.

If you read something interesting this week, let me know what it was in the comments!

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Categories: Explainers

Tags: 2020 Democratic primary, authoritarianism, collusion, Elizabeth Warren, featured, Lawfare, media coverage, podcast, social media, Sunday reading, technology, Trump Russia investigation, voters