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Why are cats so big on the Internet? A writer goes to Japan, “where the Internet-feline market began,” to find out:

Marx and I watch a few new cat videos, some of the up-and-comers, those challenging or exceeding Maru’s pageviews. ‘An interesting thing, here in Japan, is that it’s not just the cat partners who post cat stuff. It’s everybody.’ Soezimax, for example, is an action-film maker, one of the most popular partners in Japan, with millions of views. But some of his most popular videos are the ones he posts of the fights he has with his girlfriend’s vicious cat, Sashimi-san, who regularly puts Soezimax to rout. He’s the anti-Maru, the standard-bearer of uncute Internet cat aggression. The videos are slightly alarming, especially when we’re all so used to anodyne felinity. Then Marx brings up Japan’s most popular Internet comedian, who used to post regular videos of himself in a cat café. (In Japan, they have cafés where you go to pet cats.)

‘It’s like,’ Marx says, ‘no matter how successful you are here on the Internet on your own terms, it’s de rigueur that you still have to do something with a cat.’ In a culture of Internet anonymity, bred of island claustrophobia and immobility, the Japanese Internet cat has become a crucial proxy: People who feel inhibited to do what they want online are expressing themselves, cagily, via the animal that only ever does what it wants.

“In Search of the Living, Purring, Singing Heart of the Online Cat-Industrial Complex.” — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Wired

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The wealthiest Americans are effectively seceding from this country—raising questions about the long-term goals of conservatism: 

If a morally acceptable American conservatism is ever to extricate itself from a pseudo-scientific inverted Marxist economic theory, it must grasp that order, tradition, and stability are not coterminous with an uncritical worship of the Almighty Dollar, nor with obeisance to the demands of the wealthy. Conservatives need to think about the world they want: do they really desire a social Darwinist dystopia?

The objective of the predatory super-rich and their political handmaidens is to discredit and destroy the traditional nation state and auction its resources to themselves. Those super-rich, in turn, aim to create a ‘tollbooth’ economy, whereby more and more of our highways, bridges, libraries, parks, and beaches are possessed by private oligarchs who will extract a toll from the rest of us. Was this the vision of the Founders? Was this why they believed governments were instituted among men—that the very sinews of the state should be possessed by the wealthy in the same manner that kingdoms of the Old World were the personal property of the monarch?

Revolt of the Rich — Mike Lofgren, American Conservative

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A look at how residents in Arkansas are dealing with the health implications of drilling for natural gas in their communities:

Keith didn’t want to think about Iraq, but the tankers and water trucks reminded him of the vehicles he’d seen in Iraq’s oil fields. In Iraq, if an eighteen-wheeler pulled up on him, it either backed off or got blown away.

Tracy had headaches for the entire month of August 2010. Skin lesions and blisters broke out on her back. Her lymph nodes swelled to golf-ball size, she says. Her doctor gave her antibiotics and topical creams, but nothing worked. Keith developed nosebleeds; he’d never had them before. His nose would start running and there would be blood.

A month before the big quake, Tracy blacked out and fell down the stairs. She tore a tendon and chipped a bone in her left ankle. The bone refused to heal. Her doctor didn’t know why.

“Backyard Battlefields.” — J. Malcolm Garcia, Oxford American

A brief history of the political cartoonist, whose job is endangered in the digital age:

Martin Rowson in particular seems to revel in mixing allusions to obscure literary texts with lashings of excrement. A cartoon he drew last month for the Morning Star features a ‘fivearsed pig’, shitting turds emblazoned with the logos of London 2012 sponsors through sphincters coloured like the Olympic rings.

Occasionally, the digestive obsession becomes a bit too much even for left-wing papers. Rowson tells me that his fellow Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell always files as late as possible to make the staff grateful that the picture has arrived at all. ‘There’s a wonderful story about Georgina Henry, when she was deputy editor, going past the comment desk at about eight o’clock one evening and Steve’s cartoon had just come in,’ he says. ‘It was a wonderful one of [George W] Bush as a monkey, squatting on the side of a broken toilet, wiping his arse with the UN Charter. And there’s all this shit splattered on the wall behind it, and she looks and says, “Oh God, no.” [Alan] Rusbridger had put down this edict saying less shit in the cartoons, please – you know, the editor’s prerogative – and she and Steve had this eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.’ What happened? ‘He finally caved in. In one of the greatest betrayals of freedom of speech since Galileo, he tippexed out three of the turds.’

“Ink-Stained Assassins.” — Helen Lewis, New Statesman

A look at Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital:

Marc Wolpow, a former Bain colleague of Romney’s, told reporters during Mitt’s first Senate run that Romney erred in trying to sell his business as good for everyone. ‘I believed he was making a mistake by framing himself as a job creator,’ said Wolpow. ‘That was not his or Bain’s or the industry’s primary objective. The objective of the LBO business is maximizing returns for investors.’ When it comes to private equity, American workers – not to mention their families and communities – simply don’t enter into the equation.

Take a typical Bain transaction involving an Indiana-based company called American Pad and Paper. Bain bought Ampad in 1992 for just $5 million, financing the rest of the deal with borrowed cash. Within three years, Ampad was paying $60 million in annual debt payments, plus an additional $7 million in management fees. A year later, Bain led Ampad to go public, cashed out about $50 million in stock for itself and its investors, charged the firm $2 million for arranging the IPO and pocketed another $5 million in “management” fees. Ampad wound up going bankrupt, and hundreds of workers lost their jobs, but Bain and Romney weren’t crying: They’d made more than $100 million on a $5 million investment.

“Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.” — Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

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A political reporter desperately searches for a sign of joy in this year’s presidential race:

I am as cynical as any political reporter. And perhaps my recent craving for uplift was a sublimation of my own anger at being a small cog in a giant inanity machine. But I write and read and talk about politics because beneath that cynicism I understand that the stakes are high. On top of which, oddly, the job also keeps me patriotic, a byproduct of seeing — as I did at a Romney event in Ohio in July — things like a Korean War veteran in a wheelchair removing his insignia cap and struggling to his feet to salute the flag during the national anthem. (Immediately after which, I looked down at my BlackBerry to learn that the Democratic National Committee had just released a new ad ridiculing Ann Romney’s dressage horse.)

But what’s been completely missing this year has been, for lack of a better word, joy. Yes, it’s always kind of fun to follow Joe Biden around and wait to hear what will come out of his mouth next, and who knows what Paul Ryan has hidden under his oversize jacket. But the principals don’t seem to be experiencing much joy as they go through their market-tested paces. A kind of faux-ness permeates everything this year in a way that it hasn’t been quite so consuming in the past. The effect has been anesthetizing and made it difficult to take any of the day’s supposed gaffes, game-changers and false umbrages seriously. The campaigns appeared locked in a paradigm of terrified superpowers’ spending blindly on redundant warfare. How many times do they have to blow up Vladivostok?

“Feel the Loathing on the Campaign Trail.” — Mark Leibovich, New York Times Magazine

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Bobby Jackson has received much recognition for engaging students in the classroom, including an award for “Texas history of the year.” A look at one very popular history teacher’s classroom:

He starts challenging kids’ expectations the first day of school. ‘We do a brainstorming activity where I put the kids on a timer and ask them to give their perceptions of a Texan. Then we talk about stereotypes, myths, and legends. I tell them that a lot of our stories could or could not be true. The kids need to know there’s more to every story.’ Then he stays as personal, passionate, and interactive as he can. He has his students write letters to Stephen F. Austin applying to be among the first three hundred colonists. He reenacts Gonzales, Goliad, and San Jacinto in his classroom. ‘I portray a survivor of the Battle of San Jacinto, Stephen Franklin Sparks, who lived and died in Rockport. He was sixteen when he fought for Ben Milam, and he ended up being the second-to-last survivor of the Texas Revolution to pass away. And he was just about their age when he did all this.’ When he gets to the 1919 hurricane, he plays interviews with aging eyewitnesses that he recorded as part of his master’s thesis at Corpus Christi State. He also tells the students his own family’s hurricane stories, all while dressed in a two-piece, striped bathing suit and straw boater that look like an outfit Buster Keaton would have worn to the beach.

“Confessions of a Seventh-Grade Texas History Teacher.” — John Spong, Texas Monthly

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Police are recruiting young drug offenders to become confidential informants on drug cases—with little training and tragic consequences: 

According to a confidential deposition from a friend of Hoffman’s, the police made it clear that run-of-the-mill pot busts wouldn’t be sufficient to work off her charges. Instead, the friend said, the cops were looking for large quantities of ‘heroin, cocaine, crack, Ecstasy, guns.’ The Florida State student told her about a young man he’d seen dealing drugs at a car-detailing shop near campus—the man, whom he knew only as Dre, might have access to Ecstasy and cocaine, and possibly more. Hoffman, it turned out, had just had her Volvo worked on by Dre at the same shop, and he had joked about the car’s pungent marijuana smell. Soon, she was wired up and dispatched to the shop, where, using her friend’s connection, she put in a request to Dre’s brother-in-law, Deneilo Bradshaw, to buy a stash of cocaine, fifteen hundred Ecstasy pills, and, as she described it, a ‘small and pretty’ handgun. The order was large, by any standard. She wanted the drugs for friends who would be visiting from Miami, she explained. And the gun? ‘I’m a little Jewish girl,’ she told Bradshaw, as police listened via a surveillance device. ‘I need to be safe.’

By early May, the deal had been arranged. She was to show up with thirteen thousand dollars, and they’d make the swap—at Bradshaw’s parents’ house, in a quiet green neighborhood on the outskirts of Tallahassee. Behind the scenes, the police worked up an Operational and Raid Plan, which involved more than a dozen local and federal agents.

“The Throwaways.” — Sarah Stillman, The New Yorker

More from The New Yorker