Why We Unfriend Each Other

The Article: Why We Unfriend by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic.

The Text: In the 1997 movie Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, the two title characters, worried that they haven’t done anything noteworthy to share at said reunion, decide instead to lie and claim they invented Post-it notes.

Their story quickly unravels, of course, but had the movie been made a decade later, even the very concept of the ruse would have been impossible. Everyone would have known about Romy’s daily slog at the Jaguar dealership through Facebook.

Or would they?

The ebb and flow of Facebook friendships has become fruitful territory for social scientists in recent years. At least 63 percent of people report having unfriended someone on Facebook, but what prompts these digital rejections can tell us a lot about both the nature of real-life friendship and about how we manage our online personalities.

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Rand Paul, Actually Getting Something Right

The Kentucky senator speaks on Dick Cheney’s work with Halliburton, his influence on the Iraq War and balancing the budget by taking a hard look at our foreign policy.

The Real Leaders Of The United States

This is assuming that in 100 years, the world will even look like a remotely inviting place to extraterrestrials.

Obama, Deporter-In-Chief?

The Article: Is Obama Really the Deporter-in-Chief? Yes and No. by Caitlin Dickson in The Daily Beast.

The Text: To immigrant’s-rights advocates, President Obama is the “Deporter-in-Chief,” on track to deport more people than any president in U.S. history. To immigration enforcement hawks, he is soft on illegal migrants, using his executive authority to make the interior of the country a haven for certain classes of undocumented immigrants. So which is it? Who is right?

According to a new report by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute that examines deportation trends in the U.S. over the past two decades, both sides are.

“There’s no question that there’s been a record number of formal removals, no question that enforcement has not tailed off,” Marc Rosenblum, deputy director of MPI’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, told The Daily Beast ahead of the report’s Tuesday release. “But [Obama] is exercising a lot of discretion in the interior, a lot of people are coming across ICE’s radar and not being put through removal.”

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Obama Speaks At The White House Correspondents’ Dinner

For a Kenyan, he has a pretty good sense of humor.