The Sunday — May 5
This is the Tangle Sunday Edition, a brief roundup of our independent politics coverage plus some extra features for your Sunday morning reading.
What the right is doodling.
What the left is doodling.
Reader essay.
When Robyn’s mother, Annie, received an ALS diagnosis, she didn’t let it prevent her from living her remaining years the same way she’d lived the rest of her life: To the fullest. And when Annie eventually passed, Robyn didn’t let the sadness of her loss tarnish the joy of her memory of her as an adventurer. Robyn’s daughter, together with her granddaughter, collaborated on a multi-generational children’s book to commemorate and celebrate Annie’s life. Robyn reflects on watching her own daughter and granddaughter embark on their own adventures in a beautiful essay, and you can read the piece here!
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Reader review.
In this section, we like to include reader responses that counter opinions we publish in the newsletter. On our issue on NPR bias, commenter David Schuler pushed back on our conflation of “liberal” with “progressive”:
I wanted to make two points in reaction to your piece on Berliner's NPR article. First, please don't refer to progressives as liberal. "Liberal" actually has a meaning. Sadly, today's progressives have left liberalism far behind them. Our modern "liberals" aren't liberal and our "conservatives" aren't conservative.
Second, identifying one's own biases is always tricky. I wrote one of my earliest posts on it. One of the challenges is that most people seem to view their own views as centrist or moderate whether they actually are or not. I try to recalibrate my own views by taking the Political Compass quiz annually. The AllSides.com is good, too. One of the things I have notice by following AllSides.com's media bias graphic is that the center column is becoming more sparsely populated with [each] passing day.
I regularly find myself right in the middle. The key point is that if your views are right of center you will see most people as being leftists and if your views are left of center you see most people as being rightwing nuts. The farther to one pole or another your views are, the greater that tendency.
Tangle’s main stories this week were Trump's immunity case, the NPR controversy, Biden's Title IX changes, and marijuana reclassification. For full versions, you can find all of our past coverage in our archive.