In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today! (Your daily shutdown thread is here.)

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Here's what happens when the Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Acts: States start making plans to disenfranchise voters. Specifically, states with Republican legislatures start trying to find ways to disenfranchise people who disproportionately vote Democratic.

[Sexual violence; victim-blaming; self-harm; arson] This is rape culture. I may have something to say about this case in a later post; I may not. It is a difficult story for me, as any story about a teenage girl being raped by a high school athlete who gets away with it is. There are lots of those stories.

The NSA is reportedly harvesting "hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden." I just basically assume the NSA has access to every part of my digital life, at this point.

There have been serious problems with the Obamacare roll-out. Not good.

[CN: Racism; othering] This is an interesting headline: "'Very anxious': Is America scared of diversity?" Because who, exactly, is "America" in that construction? Maybe the people who are "scared of diversity" are that way because they are routinely told in overt and implicit ways that they are "America" and the people who constitute "diversity" are somehow not "America." Just a thought.

Sir Anthony Hopkins wrote to Bryan Cranston about how much he loved Breaking Bad. HE LOVED IT SO MUCH! Here is his gushing fan letter.