Vox Sentences: Iran convicts Washington Post reporter for the crime of journalism

Iran treats journalism as espionage; a bombing at a peace rally in Turkey; and Better Know a Nobel Prize-Winning Economist.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Iran should be ashamed of itself

(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

• Jason Rezaian, the Tehran bureau chief at the Washington Post, has been convicted of espionage by an Iranian court. No sentence has yet been announced.

  [Washington Post / Martin Baron]

• Rezaian has been detained by Iran for 447 days, since he and his wife (a journalist for another outlet) were arrested in a home raid in July 2014.

  [Washington Post / Joby Warrick]

• In May, Rezaian was formally charged with espionage, "collaborating with hostile governments," and "propaganda" for gathering information about Iranian policy and presenting it to people with "hostile intent." Rezaian, his lawyer, and most of the world refer to this activity as "journalism."

  [Washington Post / Carol Morello]

• Putting journalists on trial for doing their jobs is a threat to journalism everywhere. This article helps put Rezaian's trial in global context.

  [New Yorker / Amy Davidson ]

• It's generally accepted that Rezaian is being used in an internal power struggle between Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and anti-American hard-line government officials.

  [New York Times / Thomas Erdbrink]

• President Obama wasn't willing to include Rezaian's release as a condition in his nuclear deal with Iran.

  [Washington Post ]

• But Rouhani is hinting he might be interested in releasing Rezaian as part of a prisoner exchange.

  [New York Times / Thomas Erdbrink]

Blowing up a peace rally and a ceasefire

(Burak Kara/Getty Images)

• More than 100 people were killed in the Turkish capital of Ankara on Saturday, as two bombs exploded during a peace rally.

  [CNN / Don Melvin]

• The rally was a call for peace between the Turkish government and a group of Kurdish separatists (the PKK), who have engaged in escalating violence for the past few months.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Many of the protesters at the scene blame the Turkish government for the deadliness of the attack — they say there wasn't nearly enough security at the rally, and that protesters who tried to get close to victims to help them were teargassed.

  [The Guardian / Kareem Shaheen and Constanze Letsch]

• The government itself, meanwhile, is blaming ISIS for setting the bombs.

  [BBC ]

• ISIS doesn't have a particular gripe against the Turkish government. It does, however, hate the Kurds. So the bomb could have been intended to prevent the PKK and Turkey from agreeing to a ceasefire before the elections in a few weeks.

  [New Yorker / Robin Wright]

• In fact, that's just what happened in July, when a bombing in the town of Suruc led to the disintegration of a two-year ceasefire between Turkey and the PKK.

  [The Economist]

• After Saturday's bombing, the PKK said it would not launch any attacks unless attacked first. But the government is already stepping up operations against the Kurds.

  [Financial Times / Piotr Zalewski]

Meet Angus Deaton, 2015 economics Nobel winner

(Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences)

• The 2015 economics Nobel has gone to Scottish economist and Princeton professor Angus Deaton. Matt Yglesias explains Deaton's career here.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• (Yes, we know the economics Nobel is not technically an OG Nobel. But the distinction is not only tremendously pedantic but utterly useless.)

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• Deaton's done a bunch of work across many topics — all focused on the economics of individuals and households.

  [Nobel Committee / Alex Smith and Angus Deaton]

• You might have heard of Deaton's much-cited — but almost always misunderstood — finding that "emotional well-being" peaks among people making $75,000 a year. It doesn't mean what everyone thinks it means.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• Alex Tabarrok of the economics blog Marginal Revolution has a relatively accessible (i.e., not PhD-level, but wonk-level) post laying out some of the questions in economics Deaton helped answer.

  [Marginal Revolution / Alex Tabarrok]

• Interestingly, Deaton is a leading critic of one of the biggest trends in economics research right now: the use of randomized controlled experiments.

  [Slate / Joshua Keating]

• He's also a critic of foreign aid — often with good reason. But he's probably too pessimistic about it.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

MISCELLANEOUS

So-called "worker ants" are in fact lazy as hell. [Science / David Shultz]

• A scientist at the American Museum of Natural History took a photo of a bird that hadn't been seen in half a century. Then he killed it.

  [Washington Post / Sarah Kaplan and Justin Wm. Moyer]

• The co-working company WeWork has fewer than 17,000 members — but it got valued at $10 billion by promising it'd get to 260,000 in a matter of years.

  [BuzzFeed / Nitasha Tiku]

• In the past, technology supplemented, not replaced, horse labor. Then the automobile happened. Is a similar turning point coming for human labor?

  [Dallas Morning News / Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee]

• Claire Hollingsworth broke the news that World War II had begun. How come most people have never heard of her?

  [BuzzFeed / Rossalyn Warren]

VERBATIM

"Immigration is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised." [The Atlantic / Alex Tabarrok]

• "Do you really think that this country is going to elect a black guy from the South Side of Chicago with a funny name to be President of the United States?"

  [Barack Obama on Kanye West, via USA Today / David Jackson]

• "Just 158 families have provided nearly half of the early money for efforts to capture the White House."

  [NYT / Nicholas Confessore, Sarah Cohen, and Karen Yourish]

• "What Hitler says is that abstract thought — whether it’s normative or whether it’s scientific — is inherently Jewish."

  [Timothy Snyder to The Atlantic / Edward Delman]

• "The median earnings from one single act of theft are only $37.50, and a surprising amount of thieves make nothing or next to nothing per theft."

  [Washington Post / Ana Swanson]

WATCH THIS

Meet the enormous boats that carry your stuff [YouTube / Joseph Stromberg and Joss Fong]

(Vox/Joss Fong)

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