Thursday Links!

* The slide of the professoriate into the gig economy remains one of the biggest threats to free speech on college campuses today. It’s hard to fire a tenured professor except in extreme cases. It’s easy to let adjuncts go the moment there’s any kind of ruckus, even one created in bad faith.

* Jeffrey Epstein and the power of networks.

* In about a single generation, Milwaukee morphed from the best city in the nation for a black laborer to a present-day cliche as one of “the worst cities for black Americans.”

* Tough medicine: people who talk about luxury socialism and infinity pools for everyone do not believe socialism can be built on a timescale on which practical problems or trade-offs of any kind will be relevant.

* Catastrophes in the Amazon and elsewhere are flash points for the larger, ongoing crisis that claims lives in less spectacular fashion—one that sees life itself as expendable.

* Trump Pushes to Open the World’s Largest Remaining Temperate Rainforest to Logging and Mining. America’s own rainforest tragedy.

* Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Arrives In New York After Sailing The Atlantic. The Misogyny of Climate Deniers.

* Marvel Comics Is Doubling Down on Its Misguided Crusade to Remain ‘Apolitical,’ and It’s Using Captain America to Do It.

* The growing narrative around Joe Biden’s gaffes, explained. Calling this a “narrative” seems like a bit of a stretch — it’s more like the simple facts of the matter. Elsewhere on the Biden beat: Joe Biden: It Would Be an Insult to My Dead Son for Everyone to Have Healthcare. How Much Of A Threat Is Elizabeth Warren To Joe Biden’s Front-Runner Status?

* Every day a new degradation: The Trump administration is no longer considering medical deferred action requests for immigrants.

* We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is.

Perhaps most significant, Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class — defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic.

Instead, Kitschelt and Rehm find that the surge of whites into the Republican Party has been led by whites with relatively high incomes — in the top two quintiles of the income distribution — but without college degrees, a constituency that is now decisively committed to the Republican Party.

* Jeffrey Epstein’s Victims, Denied a Trial, Vent Their Fury: ‘He Is a Coward.’

* Here’s one for you: A DEA agent got a drug trafficker to buy a $43,000 truck so the agent could seize it through asset forfeiture and use it as his work vehicle.

* No more jails in LA County.

* 10,872 New Yorkers to See Their Marijuana Convictions Disappear.

* I just witnessed the most extraordinary moment. Judge David Carpenter in Bessemer, AL has resentenced Alvin Kennard to time served after he got life without parole for robbing a bakery of $50 in 1983. He is now 58 & was 22 when he committed the robbery.

* The Dinosaur Artist.

* The Queen of Darts.

* Several high-profile game developers publicly accused of sexual assault.

* Telltale Games is being revived, presumably without any of the workers they were abusing the first time.

* This one cuts deep.

* And the past isn’t over, it isn’t even past: Huge hoard of Norman coins reveals medieval tax scam.