Your 5/20 Experiment
Welcome to your always free, reader-supported, mid-week edition of The Experiment where we share great things to read, cook, listen to, and watch. As always, this bugga free.
A ship’s crew tried to escape the Strait of Hormuz. They met with a hail of bullets. Holy hell. Can you imagine voting to risk getting blown up for two extra month’s pay? (gift link)
Firing Squads Expose the Brutality of the Death Penalty. Fresh thinking on the death penalty from ny friend Maurice Chammah. (gift link)
The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians. Here’s the Nicholas Kristof column that has Benjamin Netanyahu threatening to sue The New York Times… (gift link)
How a public editor could deal with the extreme reactions to Kristof’s column. And here’s what Margaret Sullivan would do if she were still the public editor of The New York Times. (free link)
I tried to watch Veep over the years and have always admired Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but this satire hit too close to home for me to enjoy it. If Parks and Rec exposed local government as a bunch of well-meaning doofuses, Veep let everyone in on the joke that national politics was overstuffed with preening imbeciles. Now that I’m a decade removed from political consulting, I’ve got enough distance from the crater to enjoy the jokes. And boy howdy, there are a lot of them.
We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment.
Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself.