I’m With The Banned

This piece is terrifying and I admire Laurie Penny for experiencing this. Milo Yiannopoulos’ joie de vivre comes from the tsunami-sized waves of attention he receives. Whether it’s good or bad attention is unimportant. Being banned from Twitter is great news for those he abuses and offends, but it’s seemingly even better news for Milo because the spotlight is his once more. So it’s technically a win-win, but infuriatingly so.

Just as we set off, news breaks that Milo has been suspended from Twitter. A frenzy of jubilant activity: this is a huge win for Milo and his brand. He’ll be trending worldwide within the hour.

Why Calvin and Hobbes is Great Literature

Before I discovered crosswords and Will Shortz in high school, and before I become an English major in college, I would thumb through the paper and fold it every which way to get to the comics. That is completely expected from kids — comics and cartoons are considered light entertainment, as Gabrielle Bellot points out. But Calvin and Hobbes, which ran from 1985 to 1995, actually deals with pretty important themes, and its creator Bill Watterson allowed the comic strip to be whatever people needed it to be.

In Watterson’s words, Hobbes’s true nature is never fully defined by the strip, which is one of its beauties; Hobbes is a kind of ontological marvel, and yet utterly mundane all the same, for he is whatever he needs to be for whomever is perceiving him.

Calvin and Hobbes feels so inventive because it is: the strips take us to new planets, to parodies of film noir, to the Cretaceous period, to encounters with aliens in American suburbs and bicycles coming to life and reality itself being revised into Cubist art. Calvin and Hobbes ponder whether or not life and art have any meaning — often while careening off the edge of a cliff on a wagon or sled.

‘I Feel a Deep Sense of Remorse,’ Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Says

Alan Rappeport highlights some pieces of an interview with Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter in the 80s. That The Art of the Deal is a work of fiction comes as no surprise, frankly. And isn’t it comforting to know that Schwartz would rename our presidential candidate’s biography The Sociopath?

"I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is," Mr. Schwartz said. "I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization."

Shedding light on the dark web

The internet is wide and deep and has way more hidden corners than I imagined. But there’s also the dark web, where anything goes. Mostly it’s used for illicit and prescription drugs, but it’s amusing to see some people use it for ebooks and gift cards. Keep on keeping on, whoever you are.

Online drug markets are part of the “dark web”: sites only accessible through browsers such as Tor, which route communications via several computers and layers of encryption, making them almost impossible for law enforcement to track. Buyers and sellers make contact using e-mail providers such as Sigaint, a secure dark-web service, and encryption software such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). They settle up in bitcoin, a digital currency that can be exchanged for the old-fashioned sort and that offers near-anonymity during a deal.