Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
Wired magazines in-depth interview with Eric Snowden:
Snowden is careful about what’s known in the intelligence world as operational security. As we sit down, he removes the battery from his cell phone. I left my iPhone back at my hotel. Snowden’s handlers repeatedly warned me that, even switched off, a cell phone can easily be turned into an NSA microphone. Knowledge of the agency’s tricks is one of the ways that Snowden has managed to stay free. Another is by avoiding areas frequented by Americans and other Westerners. Nevertheless, when he’s out in public at, say, a computer store, Russians occasionally recognize him. “Shh,” Snowden tells them, smiling, putting a finger to his lips.
TOJ Contributor Collin Cornell responds to why he cares about why he, as a Christian, cares about Michael Brown:
The Christian Bible tells varied stories of God’s struggle against chaos, sin, and death. This struggle does spill over into the hereafter, in that it concludes for the individual after death and for human history at the end of time. And its scope does eventually involve the entire cosmos. But this is not because the hereafter and the all are the center of God’s purpose. They are not. The heart of God is set on the local and particular. God loves Israel – and, in the Christian Bible, its epitome, the Jew Jesus of Nazareth. Specific episodes – Elijah feeding the widow of Zarephath, the healing of Na’aman the leper, the psalm’s celebration of rescue at sea and housing the homeless – aren’t instantiations of some larger abstraction. The encounters these stories remember were each in themselves the concrete epicenter of God’s life-giving will. They open onto other situations of deprivation and death because God passionately seeks life here and now just as he did then and there.
Vox provides a look into what it is like to work in Mississippi’s only abortion clinic:
There are three doctors who terminate pregnancies at Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, a bright pink building in Jackson. Two keep their identities private: legal documents only refer to them as “Drs. Roe and Doe.” This anonymity is not atypical for abortion providers, who often face harassment and threats of violence. Eight abortion providers have been murdered in the past two decades, and another 17 have been victims of attempted murders. The third doctor who provides abortions in Mississippi is Willie Parker.
A picture into the marriage of Leo Tolstoy and his wife, Sophia (Source:NYTimes) :
In her long and often turbulent marriage to Leo Tolstoy, Sophia Andreevna Tolstoy put up with a lot, but “The Kreutzer Sonata” qualified as special punishment. Published in 1889, the story presented Tolstoy’s increasingly radical views on sexual relations and marriage through a frenzied monologue delivered by a narrator who, in a fit of jealousy and disgust, murdered his wife.
The conservative “Gospel Coalition” hosts a strong lament on evangelicalism and the events in Ferguson by Thabiti Anyabwile:
When James Cone wrote A Black Theology of Liberation in the late 1960s, he was attempting to provide a theological framework for understanding and guiding the feelings and actions of African-American protestors. He wrote in the wake of a deadly riot in Detroit. He felt a burden, a heavy weight to say something meaningful as a Christian. He felt, as many had before him, that if Christianity had no answer for Black people caught in the roiling cauldron of Jim Crow segregation and state-sponsored terrorism then Christianity had no credibility whatsoever.
I wish the evangelical church felt the same way that Cone felt. Though I find Cone’s answers unbiblical and untenable, he at least raised and grappled with legitimate questions of justice from the vantage point of the oppressed. And until evangelicalism finds the courage and the love to enter those questions with empathy for that vantage point on a quest for better answers than Cone’s, then evangelicalism as we know it is dead.
Buzzfeed compares how Facebook rules the ALS challenge and twitter has dominated the news on Ferguson:
If you spend any significant amount of time on Twitter and Facebook, you’ve probably come to the same conclusion that many are reaching over the past week: Twitter has been dominated by relentless, riveting, in-depth, second-by-second coverage of the Ferguson protests and police clash, documenting the year’s most important domestic news story, while Facebook has largely been dominated by life events, viral news, and buckets full of ice water.
How one family coped when police gunned down their unarmed son (Source: Politico):
I have known the name of the policeman who killed my son, Michael, for ten years. And he is still working on the force in Kenosha.
Yes, there is good reason to think that many of these unjustifiable homicides by police across the country are racially motivated. But there is a lot more than that going on here. Our country is simply not paying enough attention to the terrible lack of accountability of police departments and the way it affects all of us—regardless of race or ethnicity. Because if a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy — that was my son, Michael — can be shot in the head under a street light with his hands cuffed behind his back, in front of five eyewitnesses (including his mother and sister), and his father was a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew in three wars for his country — that’s me — and I still couldn’t get anything done about it, then Joe the plumber and Javier the roofer aren’t going to be able to do anything about it either.
A breakdown on the podcasting settlement reached with Adam Carolla:
Big news from Texas: Adam Carolla has settled with the podcasting patent troll Personal Audio. Although the settlement is confidential, we can guess the terms. This is because Personal Audio sent out a press release last month saying it was willing to walk away from its suit with Carolla. So we can assume that Carolla did not pay Personal Audio a penny. We can also assume that, in exchange, Carolla has given up the opportunity to challenge the patent and the chance to get his attorney’s fees.
The Verge complies a listenable history of Kanye West samples:
Kanye West’s songs have always been huge, elaborate affairs that either build off of an existing song or pick out the best parts of several others to create one coherent and cooler whole. And while West may be known for his early work with soul, his choice of samples has now made it all the way to Elton John and Bon Iver.
And finally, the bizarre Madden 2015 television ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DL0W9AUCuY