Vox Sentences: We know the “who” of San Bernardino, but not the “why"

Learning about the killers and their victims in San Bernardino; the armed forces end gender segregation; and a coal kingpin goes to prison.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

A stockpile of weapons, a paucity of motives

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

• The two attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California yesterday have been identified as Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Farook was a 28-year-old employee with the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, whose holiday party the pair attacked. Malik, age 27, was his wife. Both were killed in a shootout with police Wednesday.

• Police found a massive stock of ammunition in their garage — including several makeshift bombs.

  [Fox 5 San Diego / Brad Ponting]

• Law enforcement doesn't know what the motive is yet. The FBI is investigating it because there's a possibility that it was intended as a terrorist act; law enforcement says that Farook had been in touch with radical Islamists on the Internet. But police are also investigating it as a postential workplace dispute.

  [New York Times / Ian Lovett, Richard Perez-Pena, Michael S. Schmidt and Laurie Goodstein]

• The uncertainty hasn't stopped plenty of media outlets from indulging in some pretty gross Islamophobia over the last day, which they should (but won't) stop.

  [Vox / Jennifer Williams]

• Ironically, Farook stopped attending his local mosque two years ago — shortly after marrying Malik. One of their victims, however, was a mosque regular.

  [Los Angeles Times / Dexter Thomas]

• The Los Angeles Times — whose coverage of the shooting has been terrific — is compiling reports on each of the victims, whose names were released today. You can read those here.

  [Los Angeles Times]

GI Jane, American Hero

Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

• Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced today that in the next 30 days, the last 220,000 jobs in the military that are currently gender-restricted will be opened up to qualified women.

  [Vox / Emily Crockett]

• The Department of Defense first announced they were going to gender-integrate the armed forces at the beginning of 2013. They gave each branch of the armed forces until the end of 2015 to figure it out.

  [Bloomberg / Justin Sink]

• Most branches were receptive. The exception was the Marines; in September, they published a 4-page summary of their investigation into women in combat, concluding that integrated units would not be as quick or competent.

  [Christian Science Monitor / Anna Mulrine]

• When the full study was leaked by a women's group, however, it was clear that the Marines' investigation had figured out ways to work around the difficulties — and concluded that integrating units by gender had positive consequences as well.

  [New York Times / Dave Philipps]

• Secretary Carter overrode the Marines to force them to integrate women. But the head of the Marine Corps wasn't at today's announcement — raising questions about how supportive he really is.

  [Military Times / Andrew Tilghman]

• For a look at how integration is going in the other branches, check out this Anna Mulrine feature about the first two women to go through Army Ranger school.

  [Christian Science Monitor / Anna Mulrine]

The fall of Don Blankenship

Alex Wong/Getty Images

• Don Blankenship, the former head of coal giant Massey Energy, was convicted today on nine counts of conspiring to violate federal safety regulations in his West Virginia mines.

  [Charleston Gazette-Mail / Ken Ward Jr.]

• The charges stemmed from the 2010 explosion in Big Branch Mine, which killed 29 miners. The explosion led to a five-year federal investigation, which snared 4 other Massey employees as well as Blankenship.

  [Charleston Gazette-Mail and the Atavist / Ken Ward Jr. and Joel Ebert]

• Massey had been fined for regulatory violations before — he paid millions to the feds over Clean Water Act violations — but he'd never been held personally accountable in criminal court.

  [Charleston Gazette-Mail / Ken Ward Jr.]

• In the just-concluded trial, prosecutors established Blankenship's knowledge clearly. A former mine safety official testified (with tears in his eyes) that he told Blankenship, "One thing you can’t afford to happen, sir, is a disaster – because most mines can’t survive a disaster."

  [WV MetroNews]

• Blankenship will be sentenced early next year, but he won't get more than a year in prison.

  [Charleston Gazette-Mail / Ken Ward Jr.]

• He was acquitted of all the most serious charges — which could have put him in prison for 30 years. Those weren't for safety violations themselves, but lying to federal investigators afterward.

  [Mother Jones / Tim Murphy]

MISCELLANEOUS

Three years ago, a Harvard divinity professor revealed a scrap of ancient Egyptian papryus containing the half-sentence, "Jesus said to them, 'My wife …'" Critics immediately dismissed it as a fake. But the case is still unresolved. [Boston Globe / Lisa Wangsness]

• If you turned 37 this year, congrats: you're older than most Americans.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Mona Chalabi]

• Michael Bloomberg's crackdowns on smoking and trans fat were reviled as nanny state-ism. But years later, the results speak for themselves.

  [Washington Monthly / Shannon Brownlee]

• A brief history of the "it me" meme, which I (Dylan) support entirely as a means of annoying grammar pedants.

  [Paper / Safy-Hallan Farah]

• Critics say AirBnB lets people start unregulated hotels. But the share of hosts who rent out their homes for more than half the year is vanishingly small.

  [Bloomberg / Eric Newcomer]

VERBATIM

"You know, there’s an expression … ‘Keep your eye on the doughnut, and not on the hole.’ A concept like ‘Lynchian’ is more like the hole. If I start thinking about that, it’s so dangerous." [David Lynch via Slate / Laura Bennett]

• "The music you listened to in tenth grade will always be the best music in the world, and the lightsaber you saw when you were 12 will always be the best lightsaber."

  [NY Mag / Nate Jones]

• "In the first place, as we all know and as Nabokov on numerous occasions was pleased to remind us, art is at bottom an elaborate con game, but one whose techniques are designed to lead us by degrees into a realm of authentic emotion and aesthetic bliss, which justifies the con."

  [NY Review of Books / Gerald Howard]

• "You can meet all my squid during our initial meeting and pick which one you want for the ink on your will or healthcare power of attorney."

  [McSweeney's / John Frank Weaver]

• "Did the prosecutors truly expect a teenager facing a possible death sentence to have a frank discussion about his sexual victimization with a court-appointed lawyer he'd just met?"

  [Mother Jones / Marc Bookman]

WATCH THIS

America's gun problem, explained in 90 seconds [YouTube / Matt Moore, Yvonne Leow, Allison Rockey, German Lopez, Joe Posner]

Vox / Matt Moore