After months of protest by Native American tribes, and a particularly volatile weekend in which police used rubber bullets, sound cannons, and pepper spray against protesters and arrested more than 100 people for trespassing, President Barack Obama finally waded into the tensions surrounding the construction of the pipeline. This week, he cautiously offered an update that the government was exploring options to reroute the pipeline, stating, “As a general rule, my view is that there is a way for us to accommodate sacred lands of Native Americans.” He also added that the administration would monitor the situation and allow it to “play out for several more weeks.”

This drew sharp criticism from both North Dakota officials and Native American activists. Cody Schulz, an elected state official, said Obama’s comments “affords the opportunity to the out-of-state militant faction of this protest to keep escalating their violent activities.” Schulz’s comments reflected a visible divide between the state, which declared a state of emergency and called in police reinforcements from seven other states to push back protesters, and the federal government, which had asked Energy Access Partners to “voluntarily pause all construction activity” on and near federal water resources (which the company hasn’t done).

For the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which has led the efforts against the pipeline in defense of their water supply and sacred sites, Obama’s comments offer hope, but are not enough. David Archambault II, the tribe’s chairman, said that all construction should stop until the Army Corps of Engineers finishes considering alternatives, while others in the tribe expressed concern that letting the standoff “play out” for several more weeks would continue to jeopardize the safety of those protesting the pipeline.

As for the 2016 presidential candidates, the Clinton campaign finally broke its silence and released a brief, non-committal statement about the pipeline last week, stating, “All voices should be heard and all views considered in federal infrastructure projects,” reflecting her divided loyalties between the unions who want the pipeline jobs and the Native American tribes and environmentalists who oppose its construction altogether. Donald Trump, of course, has both invested in and received contributions from Energy Access Partners, and has stayed silent on the issue. All of this points to the likelihood that the standoff will continue into the winter months.

During the early phases of the election, Trump had a standard response when asked to name his favorite book: the Bible, with Trump’s own The Art of the Deal coming in second. As he said at Liberty University in January, “The Art of the Deal is second to the Bible. ... There’s nothing like it, the Bible.”

But there was always ample reason to doubt the sincerity of this claim. After all, at the same Liberty University event, he mistakenly referred to a Biblical book as “Two Corinthians” rather than Second Corinthians. On other occasions, he also struggled to come up with a favorite Biblical verse.

But now that the campaign is in its final days, Trump has been liberated to speak his mind. Interviewed by the TV program Extra, Trump said his favorite books are The Art of the Deal and Surviving at the Top, both nominally written by Donald J. Trump.

~Did you know~ the FBI is actually good? Sterling, even? Did you also know that Clarice, fictional special agent and cannibal lover, is one of the reasons the FBI is good?

In his latest entry for The Washington Post’s “The Fix,” Chris Cillizza asserts that our democracy faces certain ruin because people report low confidence in institutions like the FBI:

The decline in the FBI’s reputation is in keeping with a massive fade in confidence of what have long been considered venerable institutions... The foundational pieces of society—the things we always knew we could rely on—are no longer foundational. But, with nothing to replace them, we are left rootless—casting about for a new set of institutions on which we can rely.

This argument suffers from a fatal assumption: If an institution is iconic, it must also be good. But institutions don’t always merit our trust. There are very good and specific reasons to distrust the FBI, and many Americans have known this for a long time. It has a well-documented history of surveilling people who are not Chris Cillizza—civil rights activists, feminists, leftist dissidents, and others. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover sent a letter to Martin Luther King, Jr. strongly suggesting he kill himself. Calling it “venerable,” an entity “we always knew we could rely on,” is ahistorical.

His piece contained other, more entertaining inaccuracies too:

Briefly, anyway. Those inaccuracies have vanished, as if by magic. Cillizza’s piece now sports a jaunty little notice that it’s been “updated.” That’s it.

You would think these many failures would compel Cillizza to interrogate his methods. Instead, he has decided to portray his critics as sad losers bent on attacking his special and amazing blog:

Sad!

Cillizza’s piece also reports that the American people have lost confidence in the media. If he ever wants to know why, he need look no further than his own blog.

When the world is depressing and awful, you can (almost) always count on sports. And 2016 has been especially depressing and awful, from our interminable election to the rise of American authoritarianism to the ongoing devastation in Syria to the refugee crisis to the deaths of David Bowie and Prince to the rise of The Chainsmokers to the slow but steady erosion of everything we once held dear.

But sports, perhaps sensing impending global devastation, delivered in 2016. This year, we got a Villanova game-winner, the triumph of Leicester City, the Cleveland Cavaliers coming back from 3-1 down to beat the greatest time in the history of basketball, LeBron James turning into Basketball Apollo for three games, the goddamn Olympics, and then, to cap it all off, the Chicago Cubs winning their first World Series in 108 years in one of the greatest baseball games ever. (Also, the Euros were pretty good until Portugal won.)

There was a tendency, at least in political circles, to read last night’s game through the lens of our completely dysfunctional politics—that the stress and Joe Maddon and the rain-induced unpredictability of the 10-inning game were broadly indicative of this fucked-up year. That is myopic and wrong, because Game 7 of the World Series ruled. Everything about it was great, even Aroldis Chapman’s inevitable transformation into a pumpkin. The game had an arc, and only the final four minutes of the 2016 NBA Finals (which, it’s worth saying, were mostly garbage) could compare in terms of narrative tension. If the Indians had won, it would have been almost as sweet, but, like so many 2016 sports moments, the Cubs’ victory was the perfect capper.

Of course, not every sports moment in 2016 was glory. The Super Bowl was trash, but it really belonged to 2015, anyway.

There has been talk that Donald Trump may be helped by something loosely referred to as the “reverse Bradley Effect.” The original Bradley Effect was named after Tom Bradley, the black former mayor of Los Angeles, who lost the 1982 California governor’s race despite leading in polls. Political scientists later found that poll respondents said that they were supporting him in order to not appear racist.

In the case of Trump, some speculated that the reverse could happen—that Trump voters would be too ashamed to openly support him because he’s a racist and a sexist and a demagogue and would therefore lie to pollsters, underreporting his true level of support.

There was some evidence that Trump benefited from the “reverse Bradley Effect” in the primaries. Trump himself has often proudly pointed to the Bradley Effect. “He was supposed to win by 10 points, and he lost by 5 or something. So it’s a certain effect,” Trump said in June. “Now, I have—unfortunately, maybe fortunately—the opposite effect. When I poll, I do fine. But when I run, I do much better.”

But a recent study showed that, while “pockets” of “shy Trump voters” still exist, they are not significant enough to swing the election—even if it’s a close one. A Politico/Morning Consult study of likely voters found that “a hidden army of Trump voters that’s undetected by the polls is unlikely to materialize on Election Day,” and that most of Trump’s voters seem to have no scruples with openly supporting their candidate.

To some extent, this is troubling, since it points to the normalization of Trump’s toxic rhetoric, behavior, and politics. But one of the most persistent narratives over the last two election cycles is that there is an army of secret voters—Mitt Romney’s camp was convinced that “missing white voters” would vote for him on Election Day—that would come to the GOP’s salvation, like Gandalf at Helm’s Deep. As we get closer to November 8, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

During an interview on the Tom Joyner Morning Show on Wednesday morning, President Barack Obama near scolded African-Americans for their low early-voter turnout. “I’m going to be honest with you right now ... but the African-American vote right now is not as solid as it needs to be,” he said, according to Politico.

With six days left until Election Day, Democrats and Obama are desperate to energize the black vote. Last week, the Clinton campaign released an ad called “Barbershop,” featuring black voters in barbershops and hair salons discussing why they are voting for Hillary. But Obama’s comments reflect a troubling truth about how politicians, both Democratic and Republican, have historically treated black voters.

In a poignant piece, The New York Times Magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones points out that, while liberals are quick to condemn Trump and the Republican Party’s rhetoric about black Americans, too often Democrats are guilty of employing a similar version of that rhetoric, particularly when it comes to responsibility politics and shaming black communities for their own woes. But black voters are stuck when it comes to options:

Since first securing the right to vote, black Americans have had to be single-issue voters — and that single issue is basic citizenship rights. Maintaining these rights will always and forever transcend any other issue. And so black Americans can never jump ship to a party they understand as trying to erode the hard-fought rights black citizens have died to secure.

This predicament has led to a complacency and lack of consideration for issues concerning black voters. When Obama evokes his legacy as a reason to vote (“If you really care about my presidency and what we’ve accomplished, then you are going to go and vote”), he fails to acknowledge his own shortcomings when it comes to improving the lives of black Americans. It conforms to the disappointing standard that fails to see black citizens as more than their votes.

In an op-ed for The Guardian’s Australian edition today, writer Van Badham railed against progressive men who have allegedly silenced Clinton’s female backers:

Whether “brogressives”, “brocialists” or “manarchists”, they denounce Clinton’s claim on American left leadership despite her popular nomination, policy, activist record, her spoken statements or her trouncing of Donald Trump in three debates.

Badham later attacked “cabinet ministers, WikiLeaks wannabes and Bernie Bros alike” for “minimizing” Clinton’s feminist record—without citing a single female Clinton critic. Instead, she paints in binary shades to create a revisionist history inhabited solely by angry men and cowed women. In her telling, Clinton criticism is the special provenance of a “testosterone left” because men can’t stomach a female president.

Sexism is everywhere, even in the left. But men are not immediately guilty of sexism for criticizing a female candidate’s economic and foreign policies. And it is particularly disingenuous for Badham to attribute those concerns to a “testosterone left” when women have criticized Clinton since she announced her candidacy. Many are women of color. They’ve written articles. Books, even!

But Badham isn’t the only writer to minimize or even ignore left-wing female Clinton critics. Behold Salon’s Amanda Marcotte:

It is self-evidently anti-feminist to pretend that Clinton criticism is only produced by a “testosterone left” or victims of internalized misogyny. No one’s liberated by portraying left-wing women as oppressed automatons incapable of independently formulating political thought.

Feminist writers who promote this rhetoric also leave themselves little space to pressure their candidate if she takes office. And they’ll need to, as Kathleen Geier previously wrote for The New Republic: Clinton’s political record contains several entries that should concern any feminist. And testosterone has nothing to do with it.

Ever since Amazon opened its first physical bookstore a year ago, people have been speculating what the point was. Amazon, after all, has strived above all else to keep infrastructure costs down. Spending more on infrastructure spooks its investors, who are obsessed with growth (something Amazon does effortlessly) and profit (not so much).

One theory was that the physical stores would become shipping hubs for Amazon’s expanding mail empire. Another was that, despite Amazon’s small collection of titles, it was planning on finally digging Barnes & Noble’s grave. The stores also could be giant experimental labs to test various schemes, or showrooms for Amazon products, like the Echo and the Kindle, that encourage people to shop at Amazon.

All of those might still be true, but the evidence suggests that Amazon wants to use the bookstores to lock in more customers to Amazon Prime. Geekwire reports that Amazon bookstores are changing their pricing models. Before, prices in the store were the exact same as those online. Now, only Prime members get the online price—other customers pay full price.

Amazon has been more margin-focused in recent years, so one explanation may simply be that this is in keeping with a larger shift in the company’s strategy. Amazon’s books were often sold at such a steep discount (in order to increase market share) that the company made little money on them. And, as Geekwire points out, Prime members spend significantly more money at Amazon than non-Prime members.

Interestingly, this would be similar to the membership program that Barnes & Noble has had in place for years, where you pay a sum (currently $25) and receive a set discount on all books (currently 10 percent). And Geewkire notes that Costco and Safeway also have similar programs. But, as Sarah Weinman wrote on Twitter, Amazon has used these stores as testing grounds, so it’s very possible that Amazon will roll out a similar program online in the months to come. This means that non-Prime members will no longer get the discounts they have long been accustomed to.

It’s an interesting pilot program, and interesting pilot programs seem to be the Amazon bookstores’ purpose. They’re good at testing pricing schemes, even if they’re still pretty lousy bookstores.

Back in mid-October, after the Billy Bush tape unleashed a surge of leaks about Trump’s boorish behavior on the set of The Apprentice (as well as rumors that Trump was recorded saying the n-word) America turned its weary eyes to Burnett, whom it believed controlled access to the tapes. Burnett claimed that he had absolutely no power to release anything:

“MGM owns Mark Burnett’s production company and The Apprentice is one of its properties. Despite reports to the contrary, Mark Burnett does not have the ability or the right to release footage or other material from The Apprentice. Various contractual and legal requirement also restrict MGM’s ability to release such material.”

But Burnett, the Australian producer of Survivor and The Apprentice who was sent back in time to destroy America, has apparently spent the last few weeks sending signals to former Apprentice staffers that leaking to the press could result in serious professional and legal blowback. One Apprentice staffer told The Daily Beast, “They didn’t directly ‘threaten’ [legal action] … but the message was clear: Don’t talk to the media, don’t leak to reporters.”

It’s possible that Burnett is just trying to protect his own skin—that he believes that these leaks damage his ability to attract talent to his shows because they suggest that he doesn’t run a tight ship. But as I wrote this morning, the rule of this election has been that whichever candidate is receiving media attention is losing. By clamping down on leaks, Burnett is working to keep Trump out of the spotlight and therefore helping his chances of winning the election.