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  • The West Coast is still battling the wildfires, with over 500,000 people in Oregon told to evacuate. You can see intense photos of the scene out there here.
  • Los Angeles has announced a contact tracing partnership with the Citizen app, Vice reports.
  • A chilling detail from this story about Donald Trump's racism and disinterest in engaging with Black Americans: "The president seemed to place particular emphasis on systematically erasing the legacy of the first Black president; one of his aides printed out a checklist of Mr. Obama’s accomplishments to attack them, one by one."
  • Trump said he lied about the virus to the public to instill calm. And yet he continues to do everything he can to scaremonger and govern with fear.
  • WTF is Paul Krugman talking about? "Overall, Americans took 9/11 pretty calmly. Notably, there wasn't a mass outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence, which could all too easily have happened. And while GW Bush was a terrible president, to his credit he tried to calm prejudice, not feed it."
  • Instead of that false revisionism, revisit Spalding Gray's touching letter to NYC written on September 12th, 2001.
  • Several former employees of Housing Works claim that the Downtown Brooklyn nonprofit fired them during the pandemic as retribution for union organizing.
  • Here's an update on what's been going on at The Strand and the ongoing tension between the union and owner Nancy Bass Wyden: “She used the pandemic to, basically, clean house of management,” one laid-off Strand worker said. “Nancy is running things in a way that she hasn’t before. There used to be people to push back.”
  • Not a lot of really notable new albums this week, but the Flaming Lips' new record American Head may be their best album in a decade. Also: James Blake covered Frank Ocean, Angel Olsen covered George Harrison, and T.I. & Young Thug teamed up for new single "Ring."
  • And finally, the cub clearly wants to play with its mom!