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A spoiler-free celebration of the Star Wars franchise; Bernie Sanders is suing the Democratic National Committee; and don't look now, but there's momentum toward a peace in Syria.

TOP NEWS

Star Wars: The Fandom Awakens

Getty / Sean Gallup

• Don't worry, we are not here to spoil The Force Awakens — or even tell you anything about it. We're here to celebrate Star Wars fandom — a tremendous force that Todd VanDerWerff attempts to explain here.

  [Vox / Todd VanDerWerff]

• As an artistic work, Star Wars is a massive mashup of standard Western hero tropes with early-20th-century sci-fi—this essay by Amy Sturgis is a good genealogy of its influences.

  [Reason / Amy Sturgis]

• As a business, however, it's much more reliant on merchandise than on the films themselves — something that new corporate owner Disney is definitely aware of.

  [Vox / Maddison Connaughton]

• Sometimes, corporate interests can stiflfe fan interests. Take the "despecialized" version of the original trilogy — the best one, and one that it is literally illegal to watch under current intellectual-property law.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Or take the Extended Universe — a long-standing book series — which Disney officially kicked out of the Star Wars canon to make way for The Force Awakens and the forthcoming Episodes VIII and IX.

  [The Toast / Louis Evans]

• (Not all of this is a loss — The Courtship of Princess Leia, for example, is apparently so bad it's funny.)

  [io9 / Katherine Trendacosta]

• But because of the richness of the original Star Wars universe, there's plenty to pick up on, and even to build conspiracy theories around.

  [Vox / Alex Abad-Santos]

• Fans have analyzed the linguistics of Yoda's speech — in English and in other languages the films have been translated into (in Estonian, Yoda's original syntax is grammatically correct).

  [The Atlantic / Adrienne LaFrance]

• Or they make shot-for-shot remakes of Ken Burns' The Civil War, complete with an Imperial-apologist "historian."

  [Washington Post / Alyssa Rosenberg, Dan Drezner and Sonny Bunch]

• In the best cases, fans actually expand the Star Wars universe. This is a group that even dared to ask and answer the immortal question, "What if the prequels were good?"

  [Belated Media via Digg]

Bernie Sanders v. the Democratic Party

Getty / Chip Somodevilla

• The Bernie Sanders campaign is suing the Democratic National Committee after the DNC locked it out of a major Democratic voter database.

  [AP via Twitter]

• Here's the deal: All Democratic Party campaigns use voter databases from an IT firm called NGP. But campaigns can put in their own data to target particular voters, without having to share it.

  [Washington Post / Philip Bump]

• Thanks to a bug, though, the Sanders campaign was able to view and save some private Clinton-campaign data about certain voters — like voters in Iowa and New Hampshire who were less likely to support Clinton.

  [Bloomberg / Jennifer Epstein]

• The staffers responsible were fired. But the DNC still locked the Sanders campaign out of the database for abusing the bug — and the Sanders campaign has retaliated by suing.

  [NPR / Scott Detrow and Tamara Keith]

• That might seem like needless escalation. But DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been under fire for months for protecting Clinton, and the Sanders campaign is losing patience.

  [Politico / Gabriel Debenedetti]

• It probably doesn't help that all of this is happening the day before the Democrats have their third debate, all but one of which have been on Saturday nights.

  [Vox / Alvin Chang]

• Arguably, the DNC's attempts to protect Clinton through the primary schedule have backfired by being so obvious. They've also now helped create a literal federal court battle between the DNC and one of its presidential candidates.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

A real step forward in Syria

Getty / Andrew Renneisen

• The UN passed a resolution today in support of a formal peace process to end the Syrian civil war.

  [NYT / Somini Sengupta and David E. Sanger]

• This actually has the potential to be a pretty big deal.

  [UN Dispatch / Mark Leon Goldberg]

• The resolution comes from a group of countries called the International Syria Support Group, which includes everyone from the US to Saudi Arabia to Iran.

  [Stratfor]

• The group is largely the product of Secretary of State John Kerry, who, as this New Yorker profile shows, has been frantically globe-hopping in order to get and keep various countries "in the room" to discuss Syria.

  [New Yorker / David Remnick]

• What solution the group can settle on is unclear. But the US has already budged on one point: it won't require Bashar al-Assad to leave office.

  [Alexander Marquardt via Twitter]

MISCELLANEOUS

30 percent of Republicans, and 19 percent of Democrats, support a US bombing campaign in Agrabah — the setting of the 1992 Disney classic Aladdin. [BuzzFeed News / Hayes Brown]

• Small sample size/self-reporting-based data caveats apply, but according to one database, Islamophobic hate crimes have tripled after Paris and San Bernardino.

  [NYT / Eric Lichtblau]

• This article about a serial sexual harasser leading a "progressive" PR firm has been getting shared around DC a lot today, often with the warning that there are tons of guys like this in so-called progressive circles.

  [Huffington Post / Amanda Terkel, Ryan Grim and Sam Stein]

• The New York Times dramatically screwed up its reporting on evidence left on social media by the San Bernardino shooters, and outgoing public editor Margaret Sullivan wants to see some major changes in response.

  [NYT / Margaret Sullivan]

• This is cheating, but this list of "underappreciated" Longreads features seems at least as well curated as anything we can manage.

  [Longreads ]

VERBATIM

"Between the anti-science epidemic and the pervasive assumption that poor people deserve what they get, this whole Santa enterprise seems risky." [Family Inequality / Philip N. Cohen]

• "Once you accept that "House of Cards" is not the next "The Wire" but rather a live-action political cartoon about Evil Foghorn Leghorn, it’s perfectly fun."

  [NYT / James Poniewozik]

• "When The Daily Beast published the article, 44-year-old Namazi himself wasn’t in the best position to offer a rebuttal: He was stuck in Iran, where authorities had confiscated his passport weeks earlier and told him not to leave the country for reasons that are unclear."

  [Huffington Post / Jessica Schulberg and Michael Calderone]

• "The Jedi and the Sith or the Empire and the Alliance are not really opposing forces; they’re all on the side of jointure. If only a Sith deals in absolutes, then the Star Wars films are a Sith."

  [Jacobin / Sam Kriss]

• "People older than me, smarter than me, with better English and more extensive academic backgrounds, were saying I was willfully hurting my own people."

  [Oberlin Review / Cyrus Eosphoros]

WATCH THIS

Fear and loathing at a Trump rally [YouTube / Vox]

Vox / Joe Posner