LETTER

It’s Thursday. In headline news, President Trump claimed in an interview with The New York Times that he wouldn’t have appointed Jeff Sessions attorney general had he known about Sessions’ meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He went on to berate Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign while playing down the significance of his second discussion with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In other top news, the White House announced that it would halt the CIA’s clandestine arms sales to rebel forces battling the Assad government in Syria; doctors to Senator John McCain discovered that the senator had a brain tumor and an aggressive form of brain cancer; and firefighters evacuated residents of communities near Yosemite National Park endangered by ongoing wildfires in the region.
Anyway, enjoy the day ahead and thanks for reading the newsletter.
Cheers,
The Wonks Team
Politics and Public Policy
- The Upshot analyzes how the Trump administration has undermined the progress of Obamacare, including limiting the implementation of the individual mandate, adding on requirements for Medicaid recipients, and more.
- In part two of his series on interpreting anonymous sources, Perry Bacon, Jr. of FiveThirtyEight explains which unnamed sources to trust in a news article based on their attribution or affiliation with an authority discussed in the story.
Business, Science, and Health
- Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times examines the Y2K threat of the 1990s and what the case illustrates about an ideal government response to a human-made catastrophe like climate change.
- “All Things Considered” from NPR interviews UNICEF deputy executive director John Forsyth on preventing multinational famines, as well as the current famine affecting Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan.
- Quartz writes about the eventual ability of artificial intelligence to create video footage of actual people, citing its applications for aiding the hearing impaired but also its possible use for spreading fake news.
Sports and Culture
- In Mike Freeman’s NFL column from Bleacher Report, Freeman reflects on the controversies surrounding Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliot, the growing outspokenness of NFL players on racial discrimination, and more.
- Vulture evaluates the impact of Game of Thrones on HBO’s popularity with viewers and how the show exponentially grew demand for the channel’s on demand streaming service, making HBO a direct competitor with Netflix.

