Since New Year's Day, @hindsightfiles has been tweeting a steady stream of links to leaked Cambridge Analytica documents revealing the company's work on election manipulation for candidates around the world, including Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil -- 100,000+ documents relating to 68 countries, which @hindsightfiles has pledged to release in the coming months. Read the rest

I just got back from a longer-than-usual family holiday during which I did much less work than I usually do when I'm off (I recommend both to you!), but one exception I made was tuning into Michael Moore's outstanding new podcast, Rumble, which Moore records from his apartment, usually with a special guest (I tuned in when I saw that he'd done an episode with the wonderful Anand "Winners Take All" Giridharadas (previously). Read the rest

Slate has dubbed the 2010s as the decade of Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that paved the way for unlimited, anonymous corporate election spending. In 2010, the year of Citizens United, the largest political donors were Robert and Doylene Perry ($7.5m for Republicans); in 2019, it was Sheldon and Miriam Adelson ($122m). Read the rest

Until recently, Jackie Fielder was living in her van. At 25, the Stanford sociology grad couldn't afford rent in San Francisco. Read the rest

Columbia Journalism School's Tow Center has published the results of a longrunning investigation into a network of shadowy "local news" sites whose bulk content is composed of algorithmically generated stories about subjects like local rates of gas tax, or which bridges are most structurally sound. Read the rest

Bernie Sanders' record-setting fundraising isn't just notable for how much he raised, it's also notable for how he raised it -- Sanders is the only leading candidate in the Democratic leadership race for 2020 who hasn't taken any money from billionaires. Read the rest

The whistleblowers who brought us The Paradise Papers and The Panama Papers risked their freedom and even their lives (Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated for reporting on the stories). Years later, financial secrecy havens are still on the rise, and it's easy to think that all that blood and treasure thrown at ending money laundering and corruption was wasted. Read the rest

The final spot on Boston's city council race for at-large councillors went to Julia Mejia, who edged out her opponent Alejandra St. Guillen by a single vote (22,491 to 22,492). Both were in the running to be the first Latina elected to council. Read the rest

Andy Moore writes, "My friend the marvelous Ms. Truelove Waits made a song containing election advice for anyone in the UK confused about who to vote for this Thursday." (I am a member of the Labour Party and a donor to the 2019 campaign). Read the rest

In 2000, Mayor Pete won the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum's Profiles in Courage Essay Contest with an excellent essay praising Bernie Sanders as a unique American politician, whom Buttigieg described as "a powerful force for conciliation and bipartisanship on Capitol Hill" who provides "an answer to those who say American young people see politics as a cesspool of corruption, beyond redemption." Read the rest

Both Phrma (the lobby for the global pharmaceutical industry) and Biotechnology Innovation Organization (biotech lobbyists) provided letters to a US-UK government meeting to discuss post-Brexit trade terms, in which both organisations called for substantially higher British prices for essential medicines after Brexit. Read the rest

The Bernie Blackout is a well-documented phenomenon: the press cover Bernie (far) less than other frontrunners, and when they do, they're (far) more negative than they are with other frontrunners. Read the rest

DMARC is an anti-email-spoofing tool that mail-server administrators can enable; it's designed to reject emails with forged return addresses. Read the rest

There's not really any dispute that the UK Liberal Democrats party sold voter data for £100,000 to the Remain campaign in 2016, though the Information Commissioner's Office tried to suppress that revelation until after the coming election; the Libdems say they did nothing wrong, but when Opendemocracy's Jim Cusick approached the party for a statement ahead of an article, he got no reply. Read the rest

For many years, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was a newspaper columnist for the Telegraph, where he espoused some of the most reactionary, disqualifying garbage ever published by a mainstream UK publication, a trend that continued after he began his political career. Business Insider has rounded up a "greatest hits" reel of Bojo's most disgusting and awful rhetoric, as the old Etonian plute fights his first-ever election as a prime ministerial candidate. Read the rest

Union organizers don't have arguments with workers, they have "structured organizing conversations" -- conversations in which the organizer asks someone to think about what change they want to see, what the obstacles to that change are, and then asks them to think about whether that change will come about unless they form a union. Read the rest

Sure, the Demopublican Centrist Michael Bloomberg is spending a lot of money on his presidential bid, but the former mayor has a lot more money: $52 billion. Read the rest