Vox Sentences: A no-speculation, no-fearmongering Brussels reading list

A terrorist attack both shocking and unsurprising; the government punts on the Apple case; the death of Rob Ford.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Europe's new reality

Carl Court/Getty Images

• A pair of suicide bombs that hit the airport and a subway station in Brussels killed more than 30 people today. ISIS has taken credit for the attacks.

  [Reuters / Philip Blenkinsop and Francesco Guarascio]

• Police are currently searching for a suspect who they believe survived the attacks.

  [LA Times / Christina Boyle]

• The attacks come a few days after the arrest in Brussels of Belgian native Salah Abdeslam, believed to have helped plan November's ISIS attacks in Paris. US officials believe the Brussels attack was likely planned before Abdeslam's arrest. They'd had some information about a possible Brussels attack, but no details.

  [Reuters / Phil Stewart and Mark Hosenball]

• In some ways, Brussels is the least surprising location in Europe for an ISIS attack. More Belgian citizens (per capita) have gone to fight for ISIS in Iraq and Syria than citizens of any other European country — a phenomenon captured in this feature from last year.

  [The New Yorker / Ben Taub]

• And because Belgium's federal government is severely weakened by regional disputes, it hasn't been able to step up its anti-terrorism efforts in the way other European countries have.

  [Politico Europe / Tim King]

• This New York Times article, written in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, illustrates the problem well. The fact that it's even more relevant months after it was written illustrates the problem even better.

  [NYT / Andrew Higgins]

• The fact of the matter is that as ISIS continues to lose strength, this is going to become a new reality for Europe. That should be the real lesson.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

FBI: New phone (hacking plan), who dis

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

• On Monday night, the federal government abruptly canceled the hearing, scheduled for Tuesday, in the case to compel Apple to unlock the iPhone used by suspected San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook.

  [Motherboard / Sarah Jeong]

• The reason: The FBI says it got a lead from a third party on another way to gain access to the phone, so it doesn't need to compel Apple to open the phone anymore, at least not until it's tried this other method first.

  [Engadget / Roberto Baldwin]

• Apple doesn't know what method the FBI is trying. But tech experts believe it's probably a "NAND technique," which could open the phone within weeks by brute force and which Republican Rep. Darrell Issa asked FBI Director James Comey last month if the agency had tried.

  [Zdziarski / Jonathan Zdziarski]

• If that's true, though — even if the NAND works — the FBI has only barely forestalled the problem, since the NAND hack won't work on later generations of iPhone (and, of course, eventually someone will invent an unhackable phone).

  [The Verge / Russell Brandom]

• Apple and its defenders have always said this is about more than one iPhone. They insist the dispute is really about whether, and when, the government can compel companies to allow them access to privately owned technology. At best, the FBI is just putting off the ultimate reckoning.

  [NYT / Katie Benner and Matt Apuzzo]

The Man From Etobicoke

Robert Laberge/Getty Images

• Rob Ford, former mayor of Toronto, died Tuesday of cancer. He was 46.

  [National Post /Richard Warnica]

• Ford attracted global fame as the "crack mayor" — as mayor, he was caught on camera smoking crack cocaine not once but twice.

• But if that's all you know of Ford, it's hard to understand his significance. This 2012 profile captures the drama of his mayoralty — something Torontonians are still recovering from — even before the crack scandal hit.

  [Toronto Life / Marci McDonald]

• Ford left an important political legacy. He rode the resentment of white voters who felt they'd been shut out of government all the way to the top. Like most populists, he used racism and homophobia to do it — and as with most populists, his critics attacked him for it, and his supporters didn't care.

  [New Republic / Jeet Heer]

• To some liberal Torontonians, Ford's politics were despicable, a demonstration of how public services get gutted in the name of the culture war.

  [Spacing Toronto / John Lorinc]

• But for Americans, who may be on the verge of electing our own sort of irrepressible populist, this column by Edward Keenan is worth reading, as an illustration of how the legacy of Ford's political style deserves to be taken seriously alongside his policy record.

  [The Star / Edward Keenan]

MISCELLANEOUS

One of Donald Trump's foreign policy advisers lists his experience in Model UN as a credential on LinkedIn. [Washington Post / Missy Ryan and Steven Mufson]

• Following the Supreme Court nomination? Then check out the Merrick Garland Project, which is collecting some of Garland's most consequential rulings from his time on the DC Circuit.

  [Merrick Garland Project]

• One easy way to help fix Congress: Hire more staff, and pay them better.

  [Roll Call / Lee Drutman]

• Two architects are converting an abandoned streetcar tunnel in Washington, DC, into an IRL version of Minecraft. It's as cool as it sounds.

  [CityLab / Kriston Capps]

• In praise of drunk-grading papers.

  [Chronicle of Higher Education / David Andrew Stoler]

VERBATIM

"I didn’t feel attractive or wanted, but these ladies told me that everybody has beauty and that there is someone out there who will appreciate it — who’ll even pay for it." [Chelsea Lane to NY Mag / Mac McClelland]

• "This devotion to personal expression has presented itself in several outlets for the cosmopolitan millennial, including the $435 Hamilton-themed SoulCycle class in Red Hook, and the increasing popularity of Dr. Vanessa Sullivan, a hypnotherapist in Murray Hill who speaks only in references to the 1999 film She’s All That."

  [Fusion / Jason Gilbert]

• "To be honest, I've had a very sheltered life up until now, so having an embarrassing teen movie proposal that I had to turn down in front of a room full of primary school teachers was all pretty terrible."

  [Alex to Vice / Amelia Dimoldenberg]

• "While there is a difference between a serial-worst-boyfriend-ever and a rapist, the fact remains that even if all of the women who have complained in public in the past week or in private over the last decade turned out to be lying, the media’s assessment of James Deen was still a failure of WMD-in-Iraq proportions."

  [Medium / Zak Smith]

• "Nationalism is a power structure as toxic as racism and sexism: it is based in the idea that certain groups of people are different from and better than others because of something as arbitrary as where they were born."

  [Kelly Vee]

WATCH THIS

Why over-the-counter birth control is so necessary [YouTube / Liz Scheltens, Matt Moore, and Sarah Kliff]

Vox / Liz Scheltens

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