Vox Sentences: “Just another day in the United States of America”

A mass shooting in San Bernardino; Mark Zuckerberg's giving away $45 billion; and Mein Kampf will be reprinted in Germany for the first time since 1945.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

14 killed in San Bernardino

Frederic Brown/AFP via Getty Images

• Multiple shooters killed at least 14 and wounded at least 17 people at a social services center in San Bernardino, California on Wednesday.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• In other words, as the BBC World News put it, it's "just another day in the United States of America."

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• As of 4:45pm Pacific time Wednesday, law enforcement had reportedly killed one suspect and reportedly taken another suspect, who was wounded, into custody, but were still searching for a third

• The shooting took place at a holiday party for employees of San Bernardino County.

  [Los Angeles Times / Richard A. Serrano, Veronica Rocha, Joseph Serna and Paloma Esquivel]

• San Bernardino's police chief told reporters that the shooting was tactically reminiscent of "domestic terrorism," but said that "We have no information at this point to indicate this is terrorist related in the sense that people may have been thinking" — which sure sounds like a euphemism for "it wasn't Muslims."

  [New York Times]

• Manhunts like the one that took place after the shooting rely on voluntary cooperation from the public: police can't order civilians to stay in their homes, but they certainly request it.

  [Huffington Post / Nick Baumann and Ryan J. Reilly]

• Everyone else just needs to treat all news with caution as the story develops. This is a great guide.

  [On the Media]

• And as the conversation turns to gun control in the following days — as it inevitably will — it's good to remember that the policies that would actually reduce gun deaths go way beyond what any politician in either party is proposing.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

Mark Zuckerberg gives away a crapton of money

Facebook

• In a letter this week, released after the birth of their child, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, doctor Priscilla Chan, announced they'll donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares over the course of their lifetimes. Those shares are currently worth about $45 billion.

  [Mark Zuckerberg via Facebook]

• The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's mission sounds vague — "advance human potential and promote equality" — but it also alludes to progressive causes that Zuckerberg has supported in the past (including immigration reform, criminal justice reform and LGBT rights) alongside technocratic ones like education reform and Internet connectivity.

  [The Hill / David McCabe]

• But the foundation's structure is raising a lot of eyebrows: it's going to be a limited-liability corporation, not a traditional nonprofit, which will allow it to invest in private companies.

  [BuzzFeed / Alex Kantrowitz]

• Chan and Zuckerberg do plan to invest in companies, though they promise to funnel any profit back into philanthropy. But they also want to lobby government and spend on political causes — spending that's tightly restricted for nonprofits.

  [New York Times / Vindu Goel and Nick Wingfield]

• Zuckerberg's often associated with Silicon Valley technocracy, and it's true that he's given lots of money to education reform. But he's more idiosyncratic than most tech philanthropists. His immigration spending has focused on lobbying for a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants, and he and Chan donated $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation last year to find a cure for Ebola.

  [Inside Philanthropy / Michael Gentilucci]

• His donation to the Newark public schools was his highest-profile giving to date, though, and it was largely a failure.

  [New Yorker / Dale Russakoff]

• What Chan and Zuckerberg ought to do, Dylan argues, is give all the money to Zuckerberg's roommate from Harvard. No, seriously.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

A Talmudic take on Mein Kampf

Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

• For the first time since the end of World War II, Hitler's manifesto Mein Kampf will go back into print in Germany at the beginning of 2016.

  [AFP via The Local]

• Germany has anti-incitement laws that prevent spreading Nazi propaganda. But they'd actually restricted the printing of Mein Kampf through copyright law: the US gave the copyright to the state of Bavaria after the war, and Bavaria simply refused to allow anyone to print it.

  [The Telegraph]

• The copyright is expiring in 2016, although German justice officials have agreed that the anti-incitement law prevents anyone from "uncritical publicizing" of Hitler's views.

  [Financial Times / Stefan Wagstyl]

• Instead, the new edition will surround Hitler's words with commentary and scientific and historical context. (Ironically, this format will probably be easiest for Jews to read — it's reminiscent of the formatting of the Talmud.)

  [New York Times News Service / Alison Smale ]

• In a country where neo-Nazism is on the rise again, though — partly spurred by anti-refugee backlash — it's not clear that the people who most need to see Hitler's message in context will shell out the $65 for a copy.

  [Vox / Annett Meiritz and Amanda Taub]

MISCELLANEOUS

This piece nails it: Kilgrave on Jessica Jones is the best villain Marvel has put onscreen yet. [NY Mag / Angelica Jade Bastién]

• Among the Obama administration's least-touted but most important achievements: making it much easier for trans people to change their legal genders.

  [Washington Post / Juliet Eilperin]

• When Marshall Islands foreign miniter Tony deBrum mentioned that climate change may mean his entire nation sinks underwater, "Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar of India listened to his pleas, then responded brusquely, 'So what?'"

  [NYT / Coral Davenport]

• The demands of a National Security Letter — a tool federal investigators use to get private information without any warrant or judicial oversight — have been made public for the first time. In this case, the FBI was seeking a person's whole browsing history, all their online purchases, and the IP of every person they'd corresponded with. Without a warrant.

  [Ars Technica / David Kravets]

• Vulture compiled every line spoken by a non-Leia woman in the original Star Wars movies. The video is 1 minute, 23 seconds long.

  [NY Mag / Chris Wade and Abraham Riesman]

VERBATIM

"I was a single parent for about 16, 17, 18 years. I would occasionally get questions that way then. But not much. It really is what you people — meaning reporters — ask women, not men, as you know." [Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) to Huffington Post / Amanda Terkel]

• "Going to primary school back home, being different meant being punished by the teacher; but in America, being different is cool."

  [Foreign Policy / Zara Zhang]

• "The mother is extremely important in jihadist Islam. Mohammed said ‘Paradise lies at the feet of mothers.’ You have to ask her permission to go on jihad or to say goodbye."

  [Daniel Koehler to Huffington Post / Julia Ioffe]

• "He recalled when he was on the cover of Entrepreneur magazine last December and the relief he felt when the next issue went on sale. 'I was so happy when they changed issues and I wasn’t on the cover anymore," he said. "I’m in the airport a lot, and I was just so happy to not see myself.' Yet for all the relief, Price and his team asked six times if he’d be on Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover."

  [Bloomberg Businessweek / Karen Weise]

• "Imagine aliens have abducted you. They’re kind enough creatures, however: Theirs is the slow-motion torture of trying to make you understand them. They flash their strange alphabet at you and prompt you with esoteric questions: Are you allowed to put this symbol here? To rearrange this into that? At first you struggle. Soon enough, though, you start to see patterns; eventually you begin to answer correctly. This, Dan Meyer says, is how too many students experience mathematics."

  [New Republic / Boyce Upholt]

WATCH THIS

They lost parents in 9/11. Here's their message for Paris. [YouTube / Eléonore Hamelin]

Vox / Eléonore Hamelin