wow I pounded my head against this for like eight hours straight but shit turned out good. Steve knows exactly what he’s doing with you tonight, Bucky. You gonna be a shit and argue?
“All quiet on the Eastern front” … really, mum. They’re just horribly misunderstood creatures, Ironbellies. Pyotr Kravchenko, the Chief Warlock of the Beast Division here in Tarnopol, is a staunch supporter of the Tsar and has named all the dragons after members of the Muggle royal family. Nikolai is positively sweet. Anastasia can be a handful at times, but nothing we can’t handle. I think she may be allergic to something they’re feeding her.
Thanks for the woollen socks you sent, and especially for the Hot Air Charm you’ve put on them.
Please give my love to Theseus when you write to him. And make sure Nipper eats properly. He always moults so badly while I’m away. They say we’ll be home by Christmas, so I’ll be seeing you soon.
as in, stop quoting the fucking daily caller, for the love of god. we are all gross liberals/progressives/socialists here, so if you see any political post on your dash that uses any news outlet in the first list as its source, then there is like an 80% chance you’re about to reblog hyperbolic conservative propaganda with very little basis in reality. don’t do it, guys. don’t do it. check sources. save a life.
Hot Air: doesn’t vote the straight conservative opinion ticket, some columnists have more liberal social views, but still. on the top 10 list of popular conservative blogs. don’t do it.
National Review: tbh if you gotta cite a conservative news source, go with TNR. the print magazine and policy institute especially do some high quality pieces, but like as a rule, you’re probably not gonna like the conclusions they come up with. online-only content can be a bit more opinionated. maybe do it.
Wall Street Journal: so center-right the right has actually started to disown it. you’re not gonna like their economics, but they’re not scandal-mongering drivel like some of the blogs on this list. maybe do it.
The Washington Examiner: very good local D.C. reporting, actually, but like, the opinions section is still not gonna be anything you wanna read. maybe do it.
The New York Post: conservative AND a tabloid, do not look to for unbiased reporting or anything except like vile exploitation of tragedy. don’t do it.
Special Mention:The Daily Mail: do not cite the Daily Mail for any goddamn reason, i will come to your house and rub your nose into your keyboard like an untrained dog.
GOOD HEARTY LIBERAL STOCK:
The New York Times (plus Magazine): american paper of record and probably deserves it. will surely be too white elite new york liberal center-left for most of your commie asses, but still excellent.
New Yorker: i mean it’s not breaking news and it’s frequently so pretentious you get sucked up your own ass turning the page, but they do know their investigative journalism.
The Washington Post: on average, best political/policy reporting of any paper in the country. their wonkblog, even after Ezra Klien &co’s mass exodus, does excellent daily roundups of domestic political news.
The LA Times (and most other city papers): LA’s great, p much everything is center-left, some of them are gonna be better at covering national issues than others (looks pointedly at SF Gate). good for local, double-check for national.
Huffington Post: PROCEED W/ CAUTION, their news reporting is fine enough but the sheer number of bloggers attached to the site means there’s not always so much quality control. double-check that shit.
BuzzFeed: PROCEED W/ SLIGHTLY LESS CAUTION: be on the watch for bloggers here too, but tbh their staff reporting is some real good shit. they have a white house correspondent now and everything.
Mother Jones: some good liberal shit. older than you.
The Guardian: actually does some great US reporting, had reporters in Ferguson last summer.
Al Jazeera: also has an american bureau, good stuff, and, of course, international coverage unlike almost anything in the US.
BBC: doesn’t care as much about the US, but more foreign policy coverage worth reading.
Vox: where Ezra Klien and his crew all ran off to. unfortunate tendency for clickbait headlines, but their explainer cards do an excellent job of breaking complex news stories into easily digestible parts. i’m biased, but i love them.
SORTA INBETWEEN, THIS IS A SLIDING SCALE AFTER ALL (look, a graph):
The Economist: technically has a majority center-left readership, but you’re not gonna like their economics. they love themselves some free markets.
AP/Reuters: about as neutral as it possibly gets. all facts, no opinion. (pronounced roi-terz btw, impress your friends)
USA Today: well i guess making every hotel guest in the country step over it on their way to breakfast qualifies it as the most popular print paper in the country.
CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.: all technically left of center (by maybe a milimeter), but watch out for sensationalism. they are 24-hour networks after all.
The Daily News: i have no opinion on the daily news and i doubt any of you do either.
TIME magazine: i mean like, not objectively unreliable, but you could be making better choices.
I’m so glad there’s a link to that Jon Stewart tears into Crossfire video my soul needed that
A note on the BBC: they bust their asses trying to be neutral. If you need a source with little bias, the BBC is usually a good place to go, especially if you’re a UK person. I usually use it as a barometer of ‘this is story actually a thing’.
Reblogging mostly for the comment on the Daily Mail, but also to suggest ProPublica as another good liberal source, primarily for long form reporting.
NPR relies on public funding, and will sometimes be so aggressively neutral to protect it that they wind up on the wrong side in weird little ways that add up (see: refusal to refer to Barak Obama as President Obama, refusal to call the bloviating yam a liar). Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to them, as they can do excellent work, but be aware of the weakness in the system.
ProPublica does do excellent long-form investigative journalism! They don’t cover as much, but what they do cover, they drill down to the core.
Extra warning about Breitbart: pretty much all Trump’s WH stable of Nazis are Breitbart veterans. Do not read any of their articles, and if one of their contributors is standing near you and spontaneously combusts, don’t put them out. New York Post is so aggressively pro-Trump that he probably masturbates to it late at night- DON’T mix them up with the NYT!
Also not to mix up: do NOT mistake the Washington Times for the Washington Post! WaPo is a paper of record with excellent reporting. Washington Times is the paper owned by the Moonies (google it) and is aggressively far-right. Verrrrrry different things.
That little roundup at the end is very weird to me! AP and Reuters are very neutral sources. AP is bigger in the US (it’s us-based) and Reuters in Europe, but they both get contributions from reporters around the world and most newspapers will run at least some content licensed from them- particularly if the paper isn’t big enough to have reporters stationed around the world. The Economist is okay, if annoyingly capitalist, but it’s reasonably respectable. USA Today isn’t really partial, just bland. It is the shredded wheat of newspapers. (Also, they don’t publish on weekends and they LOVE infographics.)
Time magazine is what I call “brain candy.” It has shiny pages, color pictures, and seems to only cover anything of importance when they think it will scare people into buying it. They run a lot of “trend” articles, shit like “Why Millenials Aren’t Buying Houses.”
If you are getting your news from network tv, stop. Just…stop. It is all sensationalist, rarely complete or correct, and will usually make you less informed and possibly strip some iq points. CNN is still regarded as a more neutral/reliable network, in some circles, but I gave up on them in disgust after their 2000 election night coverage, and have never been given a reason to change my mind. They have SEVERE problems with sensationalism because they are a 24-hour network, and they are one of the biggest offenders when it comes to legitimizing dumb bullshit by giving it equal time with facts (they like to kill time by bringing on talking heads to argue about things like vaccines and global warming as if these are legitimate discussions we should be having). They also have a history of employing far-right douchebags like Glenn Beck and human dumpster fire Don Lemon in the interest of “objectivity” (notably, CNN was the broadcaster of the execrable Crossfire with Tucker “Jizzrag” Carlson).
Anyone who loathes the Daily Mail is my friend, now and forever.
I need to add as a scot that the BBC is 100% willing to warp and twist the narrative of a story to their (read: the current government’s) needs. So while they are respected for a reason, they definitely aren’t unbiased.
The National so far has had their anti-fascist/anti-racism sentiments right on their front pages and I would point to them for a different take on both UK politics and some world stuff.
These are the words written on a post-it (a human invention) in Persephone’s bedroom. They’re written in what she fondly calls New English, aka the English that her mother still doesn’t know, even after all these years.
Every morning, when she wakes, she sees this post-it stuck onto the stone wall and makes herself read it out loud.
“Stop checking on him,” she says, arms wrapped tight around her knees. “He doesn’t miss you.” The words bring the familiar sting of pain, the familiar tightness in her chest, the accompanying breathlessness. There’s still a part of her that rebels at the thought, that clings to what he said before and not after.
She thinks she might have been happier loving a mortal, which is so in fashion these days that her mother is gallivanting about Earth like she hadn’t spent centuries chastising Persephone for the same. If she loved a mortal, she could bind them in ways that it’s impossible to bind a god.
She gets up and gets ready for her day. Being an immortal means that she can’t just spend all day in bed. That path leads to centuries of apathy and she’s still young. So very, very young.
“Go back to Olympus. I should have known better than to let a child into my kingdom.”
There was no “letting” about it. She’d been younger still and in chains and in captivity and in love. She’d beguiled and coerced so that he’d take her with him, made him free her.
She’d thought she was shedding her chains, choosing new ones that better suited her, but she didn’t see the way her discarded shackles slipped onto him. She didn’t see what a burden she was, what a burden she would become to him, how limiting, how heavy, how stupid.
It’s been five years now and she’s still counting seasons like she has a chance of being let back in. Summer and winter, summer and winter, summer and winter, ad nauseum. Her mother had said that she’d stick to the cycle, that the Earth actually benefited from winter, but Persephone sees the way the summers are growing longer and hotter, the way the winters are short but so sharp she could cut her teeth on them.
Spring? She stopped that a long time ago. The melting of winter is good enough for mortals and gods alike. They don’t notice and, therefore, they don’t ask.
kototyph 
