Weekend Reads 11/26/16

Why the White Working Class Abandoned the Democratic Party

Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but the deal proved a Faustian bargain as Democrats become financially dependent on big corporations and the Street.

After six months in orbit, that space inflatable habitat is holding up well

"BEAM is the first of its kind, so we’re learning as we go, and this data will improve our structural and thermal models and analyses going forward," said Steve Munday, NASA's manager for the program. "Through the NASA sensor suites on board, our teams on the ground, and astronaut support on station, we’re gaining extremely valuable data about the performance of expandable structures and habitats in space."

A Shocking Find In a Neanderthal Cave In France

Some 336 meters into the cave, the caver stumbled across something extraordinary—a vast chamber where several stalagmites had been deliberately broken. Most of the 400 pieces had been arranged into two rings—a large one between 4 and 7 metres across, and a smaller one just 2 metres wide. Others had been propped up against these donuts. Yet others had been stacked into four piles. Traces of fire were everywhere, and there was a mass of burnt bones.

Dear liberal friends: you do not have the tools to fight Trump

We need to have a talk, because I don’t think you have even begun to realise yet how out of your depth you are. You simply don’t have the frame of reference: you have never lived in a state that was openly, actively, viciously hostile to you, there’s nothing in your set of life experiences to date to help you process this. And that is a problem, because your cluelessness and flailing is playing into the hands of fascism and doing damage to the rest of us.