Where did the Pledge of Allegiance come from and when did we start doing it? Here’s the story.
TPM is looking for a Features Intern to assist with TPMCafe, our op-ed section, and The Slice, our features section that gets to the gut-level, human side of (mostly) American culture and politics. The Slice publishes researched essays, personal narrative and voicey reported pieces on things like politics, sex, identity, crime, history, pop culture and family. Read what we’ve published so far here, and read more from the editor here and here.
We’re hiring a new Junior Front End Developer to help us build out the publishing platform that will shape the future of digital journalism. Interested? Full listing after the jump …
Jindal’s massive resistance enters Monty Python/Holy Grail phase.
A look at two 1939 political rallies, one by German-American Bund (effectively the American pro-Nazi or simply Nazi party) at Madison Square Garden and another by the Communist Party USA in Chicago. See how each appropriated one US President (Washington for the Nazis and Lincoln for the Communists) as their claim to embody American history.
GOP mega-donor’s channel picks up Trump’s Miss USA Pageant. “The decision on the part of REELZ to acquire the rights to the MISS USA Pageant was based on our belief that this special event, and the women who compete in it, are an integral part of American tradition,” said Stan Hubbard, CEO of Reelz, in a statement emailed to TPM.
Key facts you should know on the fires at black churches in the South.
Fascinating look at what looks like the end of for-profit colleges – and how a movement that originally served a legitimate need got turbo-charged by Wall Street money into what amounted to a pump-and-dump educational scheme that is now biting the dust.
In response to last week’s High Court decision, Indiana women posts spellbinding anti-same sex marriage rant to Facebook while doing house cleaning, after the jump …
Here’s an (fun in a surreal, macabre way) article about a recent example of how Twitter has dramatically increased the velocity at which bullshit is able to travel at sea level and at higher altitudes. In fact, the increase is so great that Twitter has become a self-contained, frictionless bullshit perpetual motion machine capable of making an episode like this possible. This is the story of Zandria Robinson, an African-American assistant professor of sociology at the University of Memphis who made some that were both genuinely outrageous and also a peerless example of jargony academic nonsense-speak, became a target of right-wing media and twitter-hounds, then got fired by the University of Memphis because of the controversy, thus making the University a target of left-wingers on Twitter and driving Twitter to cross-partisan paroxysms of outrage and self-congratulation.
Except that she wasn’t fired and actually wasn’t even an employee of the University of Memphis in the first place.
Thanks, Twitter.