From rape survivor to Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Amanda Nguyễn shares her personal story on the Makers.

Susan B. Glasser writes in the New Yorker:

In his twenty months as President, Trump has seen firsthand the shift on the Hill among formerly skeptical elected Republicans, most of whom (aside from Sessions) were not enthusiastic supporters of his Presidential campaign. The South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham called Trump a “kook” when he ran against him in the 2016 primaries, before becoming one of the President’s closest confidants in the Senate and his frequent public defender. Ted Cruz, another 2016 rival, called Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” before endorsing him; now he’s bringing Trump to Texas to campaign for him in an unexpectedly close November race. Few senators, however, have flip-flopped on the subject of Trump more dramatically than Dean Heller, the highly vulnerable Nevada Republican who welcomed the President for a campaign rally in Las Vegas on Thursday. A few weeks before the 2016 election, Heller was quoted memorably as saying he was “a hundred per cent against Clinton” and “ninety-nine per cent against Trump.” But that was then. Today, Heller considers Trump a “great leader” and told Republicans in a call to drum up interest in the rally beforehand, the Times reported. “We’re so thrilled to have the President.”

What a bunch of Trump-suckers.

Jeremy W. Peters and Elizabeth Dias report in the New York Times:

Worried their chance to cement a conservative majority on the Supreme Court could slip away, a growing number of evangelical and anti-abortion leaders are expressing frustration that Senate Republicans and the White House are not protecting Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh more forcefully from a sexual assault allegation and warning that conservative voters may stay home in November if his nomination falls apart.

Yes, evangelical fuckers who don’t give a fuck about women’s right should just stay the fuck home. You will do a great service for this country by not voting for the GOP bag of dicks.

The GOP guys are nothing but a bag of dicks. They are anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and anti-women.

They will push that alleged rapist through whether Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testifies or not. She has put everything on the line for nothing. They don’t give a fuck about her even they know damn well that she is telling the truth.

Like Anita Hill, Dr. Blasey Ford will go down in history as a victim and her perpetrator will hold one of the most prestigious positions in this country. It’s fucked up, but we are still living in the white men’s world.

Jia Tolentino shares her own account of an incident happened to her when she was in high school. It is such a powerful story that I am going quote in length. She writes in the New Yorker:

Like Ford and Kavanaugh, I went to a private high school where excess and entitlement abounded. Reading the details of Ford’s account, and listening to Kavanaugh’s defenders since, I have found myself thinking about something I’d almost forgotten: a night when I was home from college for the summer, at a house party, where a group of friends drained a couple of bottles of tequila and bourbon. Late in the evening, one guy at the party asked me to come upstairs and tuck him in. I did, wasted and giggling, and then he pulled me onto the bed, briefly trapping me, kissing me, saying all sorts of things. I struggled against him, and after a fierce, alarming tussle—“rough horseplay”—I wrenched myself free. This did not traumatize me, but the feeling was unmistakable. He was trying to establish that he could make me do whatever he wanted—an essentially violent impulse, familiar to anyone who has ever been forced into an encounter she cannot control.

While writing this, I went back to my diary, to see how I described, at the time, what occurred. “That’s where I went wrong, agreeing to tuck him in,” I wrote. “But tucking people in is so adorable. I wish I could be tucked in, you know? . . .He pulled me on the bed and kissed me, and I had no idea what to do. I see him every night, even though we just met this summer. He’s a good guy. I couldn’t, like, slap him.” A few paragraphs later, I wrote, “Fuck. I kept trying to leave! He kept fucking pulling me on him. I finally got out. I keep asking myself how I could have handled it . . .I was afraid to be rude.” I decided that I was “an enormous idiot, and I feel taken advantage of. That’s what they call it, isn’t it? Unwanted sexual advances? I wish there was an absolute jury, to tell me how much is my fault. Because I feel so guilty that I feel like that’s a sign that it was my fault.” I continued to berate myself, even after writing that there was “no acquiescence. It was someone kissing me, and me trying to get away.”

Men are so afraid, in this moment, that they will suddenly be held accountable for things they always thought they could get away with. But look at how profoundly inertia is on their side. After this party, which took place not even a decade and a half ago, I told one friend and my boyfriend, about what happened. I didn’t tell anyone else. I knew, without anyone having to explain it to me, that this was a common and unremarkable incident—that everyone, including me, had been shaped by the disgraceful understanding that he had the right to make me uncomfortable but that I did not have the right to make him uncomfortable by telling them what he did. I think of Ford not telling anyone—“in any detail,” the Post reported—about what happened to her until 2012. Why would you tell someone about a stupid high-school party where some stupid kid pushed you down on a bed and groped you when you can summon a hundred voices reminding you that tons of guys do this, that it’s no big deal? I am certain that the boy who pulled me onto the bed has no memory of it now. I hope, sincerely, that he has a good life. But I wouldn’t put him on the Supreme Court.

Thank you for sharing such a painful past. I believe Dr. Ford as well.

George Mason relaunched its homepage two days ago. According to the Office of Communications and Marketing, “The new design is based on data analysis of visitor traffic on the homepage over the past three years and is intended to make the page more user-friendly for all visitors.”

The visual has not changed too much, but I do notice the big four action buttons: visit, apply, jobs, and give. A couple of years ago, our dean showed off our website to the president and the president immediately pointed out the action buttons we have on the Scalia Law website: visit, request information, and apply now. It makes me wonder if the president requested those buttons based on what he liked on our site.

Maybe it is just a coincidence, but I am glad they made that change. This is what the previous design of the GMU homepage looked like and this is the new homepage redesign.

David Dayen writes in the Intercept:

According to the affiliation agreement, all of Mercatus’s activities and programs “shall be carried out consistently with the educational and research missions” of the university, including cooperation with other units of the university on “projects of mutual interest.” While Mercatus employees are explicitly not to be designated as employees of George Mason, Mercatus leases office space on the George Mason campus in Arlington, Virginia (for the low price of $1 for a 28-year lease, according to a space usage agreement reviewed by The Intercept); employees of Mercatus receive ID cards from George Mason; employees are eligible to be appointed as “affiliate faculty members” of George Mason (Blahous does not appear to be an affiliate faculty member); and the university pays tuition costs for any Mercatus employees who want to take classes, as it does for George Mason employees.

Wow, $1 for a 28-year lease a huge building that looks like an high-end hotel. What a deal.

Noam Cohen writes in the New Yorker:

The e-mails of the celebrated programmer Linus Torvalds land like thunderbolts from on high onto public lists, full of invective, insults, and demeaning language. “Please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place,” he wrote in one. “Guys, this is not a dick-sucking contest,” he observed in another. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” he began in a third.

Just wow!

Mark O’Connell writes in the New Yorker:

Twitter, as everyone knows, is Hell. Its most hellish aspect is a twofold, self-reinforcing contradiction: you know that you could leave at any time and you know that you will not. (Its pleasures, in this sense, are largely masochistic.) My relationship with the Web site, which has, for years now, been the platform most deeply embedded in my daily—hourly, minutely—routine, has come to feel increasingly perverse. It mostly seems to offer a relentless confirmation that everything is both as awful as possible and somehow getting worse. And everyone else on Twitter appears to feel the same way.

He concludes:

To be alive and online in our time is to feel at once incensed and stultified by the onrush of information, helpless against the rising tide of bad news and worse opinions. Nobody understands anything: not the global economy governed by the unknowable whims of algorithms, not our increasingly volatile and fragile political systems, not the implications of the impending climate catastrophe that forms the backdrop of it all. We have created a world that defies our capacity to understand it—though not, of course, the capacity of a small number of people to profit from it. Deleting your social-media accounts might be a means of making it more bearable, and even of maintaining your sanity. But one way or another, the world being what it is, we are going to have to learn to live in it.

I am still on Twitter and Facebook, but more passively. I only tweet once in a while when I have something to promote. I only post my kids’ photos on Facebook to share with family and friends. I am pretty much checked out of LinkedIn until I need to find a new job.

Many people I follow on Twitter have moved to Micro.blog and Mastodon. I am still hesitate to join simply because I don’t want get myself hooked on more social networks. I already am having a hard time quitting Twitter and Facebook. I want to reduce my online presence to just this blog.

If you are still interested in finding out what I am up to, this is still the place to be. Grab the RSS feed for your own pleasure. I still love a good old RSS. I still like reading blogs over quick tweets. So if you have a blog, please share. I am definitely interested.