Josh Marshall on Sarah Huckabee Sanders inability to eat a meal:

When it comes to protests, mean words, civil disobedience, boycotts, public shunning, we may disagree when one or other is wise or called for. But these are entirely legitimate tools of political action, civic action. Many calls for civility are simply calls for unilateral disarmament from those protesting injustices and abuses of power.

… and The New York Times is on it!

As Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) could have written himself into history by helping to contain a corrupt presidential administration. He could even look like a patriot by simply voicing continued support for the Mueller investigation. The bar has been set very low for Republicans.

But in a week which has seen Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, headed to jail and his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, move ever closer to cooperating with investigators – not to mention New York State dropping a bomb shell of lawsuit on the Trump Foundation – it doesn’t really seem like McConnell can look past the midterm elections. He clearly doesn’t have the interests of either the country or the truth in mind when he spits nonsense about the Mueller investigation like, “[T]hey ought to wrap it up. It’s gone on seemingly forever and I don’t know how much more they think they can find out.”

Not a good look Mitch.

“Rice is a grain, not a vegetable that has been processed to resemble rice,” their letter stated. “While we recognize that consumers are entitled to select rice pretender products, we want to ensure this choice is not an error.”

Who knew the rice-industrial complex was so whiny?

Abraham Riesman for Vulture:

There are polite fans who say it quietly and don’t get mad when their needs aren’t met. But, by their very nature, such fans are always going to be drowned out by the ones who, like Bobby Axelrod, declare to the world, These are my needs. What’s remarkable and dangerous is the fact that, in the past 20 years, Hollywood started feeding them. They started getting what they wanted, and they’ve never looked back.

Wolverine with mouth claws IRL.

The perennial lesson of the internet is that it will forever find ways to subvert its egalitarian and democratic promise, delivering instead levels of inequality that would make North Korea blush.

– Felix Salmon

Liz Pelly writing for The Baffler describing how Spotify has turned reinforcing gender inequality into a business model:

In her book Weapons of Math Destruction, the mathematician Cathy O’Neil writes about the ways that algorithms uphold norms. As she once said in an NPR interview, “algorithms don’t make things fair” if you just blithely apply them: “They repeat our past practices, our patterns. They automate the status quo. That would be great if we had a perfect world, but we don’t. . . . Because we all have bias, it means they could be codifying sexism or any other kind of bigotry.”