‘America’s trillion-dollar failure’
Ro Khanna at Foreign Affairs
The media’s Department of Defense coverage “has focused on military parades, high-profile firings, and lectures about haircuts,” says Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). But a “less acknowledged but just as worrisome development has been progressively undermining the U.S. military: Defense acquisition remains stubbornly slow and wildly over budget.” The Pentagon “needs to be as nimble as it is strong or it risks losing its ability to respond to global hot spots and to deter great-power conflict.”
‘When did sports get so loud?’
Ellen Cushing at The Atlantic
Baseball is “wall-to-wall stimulation,” and “in this way, baseball is explicitly following other sports, which were earlier to invest in state-of-the-art multifactor sound systems, huge screens, and sophisticated lighting schemas,” says Ellen Cushing. Many organizations are “focusing not on season-ticket-holding die-hards but on more casual fans who want a big night out, are willing to pay for it, and may need to be guided through a game with aural or visual cues about how to feel at any given moment.”
‘I see my father in the fathers killed by ICE’
Ingrid Rojas Contreras at Time
“As a Latina, it is impossible for me not to see my father when I think of” the men killed by ICE, says Ingrid Rojas Contreras. “In them, I see men who wanted nothing but a better life for their children.” Families “like mine can’t help but feel their families’ pain.” To “grieve is to take stock of what we have lost, can lose, and to spend time deconstructing the harmful narratives that cause our grief.”
‘How the networks handled President Trump’s speech about election integrity’
Tom Jones at the Poynter Institute
In the “days leading up to Thursday night’s address, there were questions about just how factual Trump’s address would be,” and “because of all the discourse beforehand, there were questions about whether or not TV networks would air Trump’s address,” says Tom Jones. It was “another night of networks trying to figure out how to cover a president who often makes claims that simply are not true or, at the very least, are misleading.”