October 5, 2020
Howdy!
I spent very little time online last week because I was driving a U-Haul, loaded with all my possessions, the 1,800 miles from New York City to Denver. I didn't think I would miss that much. Here's what happened instead:
- The New York Times obtained years of President Trump's tax returns and reported that he'd paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017. He also wrote off $70,000 in haircuts and styling as business expenses.
- Trump squabbled with Joe Biden during what many people considered the worst debate in memory. I listened to about 45 minutes of it on NPR before turning the radio off in disgust.
- A former aide to the first lady leaked secretly recorded audio of Melania Trump complaining about the media's focus on family separations at the border and its failure to appreciate the hard work she put in decorating the White House for Christmas. But that story didn't get a lot of play because shortly thereafter...
- Trump got COVID. The eventuality we all considered but never really believed would happen actually happened. Surely, we thought, Trump exists within his own 6-foot personal bubble at all times. Surely, anyone who enters that bubble has tested negative. Not so.
- And Trump wasn't the only one to get sick. So did Melania Trump. So did Kellyanne Conway. And Chris Christie. And Thom Tillis. And Kayleigh McEnany. And many more people who came in contact with our reckless, superspreader president.
- Instead of recuperating at the White House, or at the hospital, Trump showed just how much he cares about his Secret Service agents by getting in a car with them, risking their health so he could drive around and wave at his supporters.
Did I miss anything?
—Abigail Weinberg
Republicans are doing all they can to preserve their power at the expense of the democratic process.
BY ARI BERMAN AND AJ VICENS
BY DAN SPINELLI
BY SAMANTHA MICHAELS
BY DANIEL MOATTAR
BY LUNA SHYR
Trump also said that he had met with soldiers and first responders during his hospital stay.
BY INAE OH
SOME GOOD NEWS, FOR ONCE
Lual Mayen wasn’t old enough to walk when he fled South Sudan with his family to a refugee camp in northern Uganda, where he lived for 22 years. Food was scarce. School didn’t exist. “It was not an easy journey…I lost two of my sisters,” he said.
By the time he was 15, he saw his first computer in passing, and over the next three years, his mother worked to secretly save cash to buy him one. “I couldn’t believe that it was real,” he said in a story powerfully reported by Ryan Bergeron. “Where can I even charge the computer? Where can I even go and learn?…There was nobody that could train me.”
Mayen walked three hours to the nearest basecamp to charge the computer. “If [my mother] was able to take us from a war-torn country to an environment of a refugee, I can also make it,” he said. He taught himself to code and design, and he set out to create a game that promotes conflict resolution, first running it over Bluetooth and then posting to Facebook. “That was the first time I started connecting with the video game community and getting support.”
His game took off. He’s now the founder of Junub Games, which is ready to release “Salaam” (“peace” in Arabic), a mobile game that puts players in the shoes of refugee runners. Through nonprofits, he’s arranging to provide food, water, and medicine to people in refugee camps whenever a player buys supplies in the game.
A Recharge salute to Mayen and his mother, and to Bergeron for the story and images.
—Daniel King
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