Reading List: December 19, 2016

Happy Monday! The electors meet today and will select Donald Trump.

I wrote about five silver linings of Trump’s election for Paste.

While President-Elect Donald Trump has been an absolute horror show — hate crimes spiked in the wake of his election, his picks for the Cabinet have been universally terrifying, and he seems to have little to no interest in actually governing — there have been some silver linings to his ascendancy to the nation’s highest office.

The Washington Post is reporting that the amount of lead in children’s bodies has reached a crisis level in Flint.

The proportion of infants and children with above-average levels of lead in their blood has nearly doubled since the city switched from the Detroit water system to using the Flint River as its water source, in 2014.

The crisis reached a nadir Monday night, when Flint Mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency.

“The City of Flint has experienced a Manmade disaster,” Weaver said in a declaratory statement.

A Bolivian hip-hop music festival is focusing on gender violence this year, Telesur says.

All four elements of hip hop — the DJ, the MC, graffiti and breakdancing — featured at the festival. The event served as a fundraiser for the feminist Apthapi Jopueti Foundation, which works on empowering Bolivian women.

This year’s edition, which was organized by SonidoenVena Records, follows from a similar event held last year on urban issues. The organizers plan on hosting the festival annually, with each year focusing on a different social issue.

Sam Kriss shreds centrists in a must-read Slate piece.

Clearly something horrifying has happened to America’s great liberal intellects. One moment they were yapping along in the train of a historic political movement; now, ragged and destitute, they wander with lolling tongues in search of anything that might explain their new world to them. This is, after all, how cults get started. Cultists will venerate any messianic mediocrity and any set of half-baked spiritual dogmas; it’s not the overt content that matters but the security of knowing. If Trump’s devoted hype squad of pustulent, oleaginous neo-Nazis can now be euphemized as the “alt-right,” the Eichenwalds and Jefferys of the world might have turned themselves into something similar: an alt-center, pushing its own failed political doctrine with all the same vehemence, idiocy, and spleen. So it’s strange, but not surprising, that so many people would sing the praises of Garland’s masterpiece, because it is absolutely the worst piece of political writing ever inflicted on any public in human history.

See you tomorrow.