Wait, can we just replace every Confederate monument with a statue of Dolly Parton?

Personally, I believe statues of Dolly Parton would really bring this country together. Also in this week’s issue:
How one artist used presidents to depict the Ten Commandments
What misinformation in the UK election can tell us about 2020
When Pete met Lizzo
Yours,
P.S. I read
this story
about OYO, a Delhi, India-based hotel brand that’s set to surpass Marriott next year, and thought this detail was really interesting: the company found portraits of Marilyn Monroe increased revenue per available room by 10%-11% on average. After putting up her portrait at their hotel in Wichita Falls, Texas, they started putting them up elsewhere, and consumers classify the image with hotels that are “boutique.”
How one artist used presidents to depict the Ten Commandments

For her photo series “The 10 Commandments,” Canadian-Israeli artist Dina Goldstein used U.S. presidents to depict the commandments and “examine the socio-political makeup of America through its political icons.” In an email, Goldstein said she was inspired by the 2016 election and Christian conservatives turning a blind eye to then-candidate Donald Trump’s “Access Hollywood” comments and accusations of sexual misconduct and “volatile behavior” while “holding up the Bible and the Ten Commandments,” she wrote. “The hypocrisy became so transparent and dangerous!”
Over the course of a year, Goldstein cast models and friends from Vancouver and shot the 10 images.
Founding Father George Washington is shown in a rest home to illustrate the 5th Commandment to honor thy father and thy mother, while Abraham Lincoln, the first president to be assassinated, is depicted in the halls of a school following a shooting, for the 6th Commandment against killing.
Goldstein depicted presidents of both parties “to stress that the problem does not lie within one party alone,” she wrote. Barack Obama is shown at a stock exchange with a “Best President” sash for the 8th Commandment to not steal as a statement against the lack of Wall Street executives jailed over the financial crisis, while Trump is used for the 1st Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” because it “perfectly embodied his self serving nature, demagoguery, and hubris,” she said. The model who plays Trump is actually a woman, actor Sue Sparlin.
“I hope that the series can be taken in with a grain of salt and an open mind,” Goldstein said.
You can see the full series here and see a behind-the-scenes making of the series video here.
What misinformation in the UK election can tell us about 2020

Credit: New York Times
Conservatives won in a landslide in last week’s UK election while the Labour Party had its worst showing in more than 80 years. Across the Atlantic, some see the results as an indicator of what could happen in the U.S. “If Democrats don’t take the lesson, Trump is headed for a Reagan-like ’84 victory,” Steve Bannon told the New York Times.
Misinformation played a big role in the UK election, according to research from nonprofit First Draft. The group found 88% of the more than 6,000 Facebook ads run by the Conservative Party between December 1 and 4 were misleading. Many of the falsehoods were inflated figures, such as promised hospitals, the number of nurses that would be recruited, or the spending for the National Health Service.
“This election has been full of accusations of dishonesty and that is at a scale we’ve never seen before,” Will Moy, the chief executive at FullFact, a fact checking group, told Yahoo News UK.
Carole Cadwalladr, the Guardian journalist who covered the Cambridge Analytica story, tweeted this about what the UK election means for America:

Meanwhile, the Washington Post Fact Checker found President Trump has now made 15,413 false or misleading claims as president, and his rate of making false or misleading claims has increased every year in office.
Awesome!
Are Colin Kaepernick’s Nike shoes about to drop?

Credit: @jim_frd via Sole Collector
According to Sole Collector, Nike is tentatively set to drop their Colin Kaepernick Air Force 1 collab on December 28. The black-and-white shoe shows an image of Kaepernick’s face, while the outsole of the right shoe has “081416,” or August 14, 2016, the date of his first protest.
In other political athlete shoe news, LeBron James has his “More Than An Athlete” LeBron 17 coming out on Christmas Day. The sneaker comes with branded Sharpies for wearers to write their own messages.
Gender inequality, and keep it catchy

Billboard named Taylor Swift its Woman of the Decade, and in her cover story, Swift talked about “The Man” and why it was important for her to make a song about gender inequality that was catchy.
“It was a song that I wrote from my personal experience, but also from a general experience that I’ve heard from women in all parts of our industry,” she said. “I wanted to make it catchy for a reason — so that it would get stuck in people’s heads, [so] they would end up with a song about gender inequality stuck in their heads. And for me, that’s a good day.”
Wait, can we just replace every Confederate monument with a statue of Dolly Parton?

Credit: @dollyparton
A Tennessee Republican offered that up as an option for at least one Confederate statue. State Rep. Jeremy Faison said a statue of Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee’s state capitol should be moved into a museum and replaced with a statue of a woman. He suggested Dolly Parton or suffragette Anne Dallas Dudley.
“If we want to preserve history, then let's tell it the right way,” Faison told the Tennessean.
A tweet calling for every Confederate statue to be replaced with Parton has racked up more than 24,000 retweets.
When Pete met Lizzo

Credit: CBS
South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg was on “CBS This Morning” Thursday and got some time with Lizzo, who was also on the show. When host Gayle King asked Buttigieg to describe himself in three words, he said, “standing near Lizzo.” Lizzo’s answer to the Q was “glamorous, talented, and bootyful.”
Buttigieg was then asked whether he’d taken a DNA test recently, referring to Lizzo’s hit “Truth Hurts,” and he said “I am 100% that…” before Lizzo shouted “wait!” assuming the Democratic nominee would say “b-tch.” After Buttigieg continued his thought with “nominee,” Lizzo fanned herself, seemingly unaware that Buttigieg does not say profanity on camera.
It’s politics for your e̷y̷e̷s̷ ears

ICYMI, I wrote how the 2010s was an era of peak political pop music. You can read read the story here and spin a playlist of songs from the article here.
Also, thank you to Michael Bierut and Jessica Helfand from Design Observer’s The Observatory for including Yello’s list of 101 political memes, art, and visual rhetoric that defined the 2010s in your podcast. You can spin their episode here.
Yello will be off next week for the Christmas holiday.
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It’s December on Instagram, and you know what that means: our feeds are clogged with people sharing their top nine most liked posts of the year. I looked up the top nine for nine presidential candidates to find out what their best performing posts were and what we could learn from them. Here’s what I found.