Six days with a new President

Worrisome:

As of this very moment—and this is an incomplete list—the Trump administration has ordered a freeze on most federal hiring, reinstated the Global Gag Rule, helped kick off an Obamacare repeal, invented a universe of “alternative facts,” moved forward on the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines, manifested a voter fraud crisis and promised a “major investigation” into it, appeared to plagiarize a Batman villain, prepared an order that would enact “at least a 40 percent overall decrease” in U.S. funding towards international organizations like the International Criminal Court, named a net neutrality critic to the head of the FCC, launched an aggressive and wide-ranging attack on climate science across several government agencies, claimed that experts say “torture works,” announced a plan to strip sanctuary cities of federal funding, announced the imminent construction of a border wall and a crackdown on immigration from “terror prone” countries like Syria, drafted an executive order that would allow the reopening of CIA “black site” prisons, threatened the city of Chicago with martial law, attacked an individual reporter for a mistake that had been corrected, lied repeatedly and to the CIA about the size of the inauguration attendance, and hung a panoramic and inaccurately dated photograph of the definitely huge and throbbing crowd in the West Wing, right where the press can see it.

This is also good:

On any given reality TV show, including the one Donald Trump starred in, producers often manipulate contestants and shape or edit interactions to fit into the narrative they’ve mapped out, a story that viewers generally go along with (even when they’re aware of the basic fact that reality TV is often fake). Real-world values of honestly, intelligence, kindness and fair-mindedness are overwritten by the need to drive plot. Outrageousness, then, is often key to a character’s success, which is why Ramona Singer has been a cast member on The Real Housewives for 8 seasons running. Because good ratings require the wheels of provocative action to keep spinning, the sobbing, emotionally fragile Ashley I. keeps returning to Bachelor in Paradise, and The Real World casts individuals who are socially conditioned to mistrust one another, and contestants on The Bachelor are trapped in a house with alcohol and little else to occupy themselves.