Matt left a sock behind, and now Sansa finds it wherever we hide it and chews on it mournfully, awaiting his return.
Melissa Harris-Perry bids farewell to her staff:
I have stayed in the same hotels where MSNBC has been broadcasting in Iowa, in New Hampshire, and in South Carolina, yet I have been shut out from coverage. I have a PhD in political science and have taught American voting and elections at some of the nation’s top universities for nearly two decades, yet I have been deemed less worthy to weigh in than relative novices and certified liars. I have hosted a weekly program on this network for four years and contributed to election coverage on this network for nearly eight years, but no one on the third floor has even returned an email, called me, or initiated or responded to any communication of any kind from me for nearly a month. It is profoundly hurtful to realize that I work for people who find my considerable expertise and editorial judgment valueless to the coverage they are creating.
The Times piece on the Republican establishment’s ongoing panic over the unstoppable Trump path to the nomination is full of delightful details, and you should read it, but also, even though he’s not going to beat Hillary, I am really depressed and disappointed with this country for buying into his racist nonsense, and that’s not going to go away:
While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.
He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.
A Toastie correctly assumed we might enjoy a fine poem that mentions strap-ons.
Steph Curry is magic:
Stephen Curry is not normal. He just broke the record for three-pointers in a single season, and there are still 24 games left to play. The record he broke was his own, set last year. Saying he’s the best shooter of all time undersells his shooting ability. Curry is so good at tossing the ball through the net that he makes other professional basketball players look pathetic by comparison. He is playing a different game than everyone else in the NBA. He is a great shooter like Einstein was a great physicist.
No one ever changes their mind about anything, so it’s nice when someone does (this is in no way meant to excuse previous bigotry, just that I sometimes fear that people are completely incapable of reexamining their beliefs, and here’s a counter-example):
I simply could not reconcile the joy and tolerance I saw in the gay community with the views I was supposed to hold. The more progressive I became, the more gratitude I received from gay men and women and the more visceral hatred from their opponents. It radicalized me of course; it could not do otherwise.
I now not only believe that equal marriage is a fundamental right but also a manifestation of Christian love and of the face of the living God. Of the 200,000 words in The New Testament a mere 40 refer to same-sex attraction and many leading theologians question the genuine meaning of those references. When it comes to the Old Testament it simply won’t do in the light of modern scholarship to accept the story of Sodom as referring to homosexuality; it’s a condemnation of rape, violence and rejection of strangers. There are around 20 further mentions of Sodom in Scripture itself and not one of them speaks of homosexuals. The handful of so-called anti-gay “clobber verses” in The Bible are deeply ambiguous. I could go on.
Deadspin broke down how the Holtzclaw story happened, and it is fascinating and aggravating:
We found, in the course of our reporting, that the failure here was in part a function of structural problems at SB Nation, which set up a system that would allow it to enjoy the benefits of running longform stories without actually having to do much work on them, and in part a function of the style and sensibility of Glenn Stout, who has, we can report, already been fired. We also found that this failure could have been averted if only Stout and top editorial staff had listened to one of their colleagues, senior editor Elena Bergeron, who explicitly and repeatedly drew attention to the story’s flaws in the days leading to its publication—and was, somehow, ignored.
Our own An Historian, the perfect Mo Moulton, will be on the Diane Rehm show next Thursday, talkin’ ’bout Downton Abbey, don’t miss it!
HERE FOR YOU, JENNIFER GARNER, YOU ARE SO PRETTY AND BEN SUCKS:
We live in a visual world, where a picture paints a thousand words. Millions of people had grown accustomed to seeing photos of this family to the point where we felt we knew them and their daily routines: getting coffee, going to the farmers’ market, working out, dropping the kids off at school. The combination of the two movie stars and their perfect family was both tabloid gold and aspirational ideal. After all, Garner and Affleck were a glamorous version of normal that almost defied believability. “It was a real marriage,” Garner tells me. “It wasn’t for the cameras. And it was a huge priority for me to stay in it. And that did not work.”
Now to end on what the gossip pages call “nannygate”—it’s all so unsavory and such a cliché. “Let me just tell you something,” Garner says. “We had been separated for months before I ever heard about the nanny. She had nothing to do with our decision to divorce. She was not a part of the equation. Bad judgment? Yes. It’s not great for your kids for [a nanny] to disappear from their lives.” Months later, she’s still assessing the damage. “I have had to have conversations about the meaning of ‘scandal,’ ” she says, with her children.
Mallory went Too Far expressing her love for me in an interview for an Australian publication and now it’s awkward between her and my husband:
Rembert talked to Wyatt Cenac:
People are beginning to navigate the world of talking about police brutality topics with any smidgen of jest. I’ve had hesitation even substituting the “black” in Black Lives Matter for a joke, something you do in your stand-up. You also spend some time listing names of those killed, being like, “This is fucked up.” Going into it, did you want to make sure it wasn’t just jokes?
It’s tough. You’re talking about real life and you’re talking about real people and you’re talking about real issues. You want to be respectful, but, at the same time, I grew up with that sense of laughing to keep from crying. My thinking was, Well, if I’m going to make this joke, is there a way of making it so it both can give some people a sense of laughing to keep from crying, but also give other people a little bit of a dig, like, “Imma laugh, but it kind of hurts”? And it should hurt, and you shouldn’t necessarily be able to fully walk away from this absolved, whether it’s guilt or whatever discomfort you feel.
I definitely felt this sometimes with The Daily Show, where we gave people a catharsis. Okay, here’s something crazy that happened in the world and now you laugh at it, and afterwards you can go to sleep and not feel like you have to be burdened with it anymore. So, for me, the challenge has been, Can I talk about something in a way that is both funny but also doesn’t let you off the hook?
I have a Thing for Bill Hader, and the fact he reads like a mofo and thinks a lot about serial killers doesn’t help:
For instance, this is an awful thing: I was reading about the one guy who escaped Jeffrey Dahmer. And I was reading about him, and when he described his night with Jeffrey Dahmer, I was like, “Oh, I would never buy that!” You know? A killer…he gets the person alone, he tries to drug him, and then he just kills the person. But his whole thing with Jeffrey Dahmer was that Jeffrey Dahmer tried to drug him, but he didn’t like alcohol, which ended up, you know, saving his life, and Jeffrey Dahmer pulled a knife on him and tried to bind him up, and then the guy was able to talk Jeffrey Dahmer down so then they sat and watched a movie together? They watched The Exorcist III, and then everything was fine—
Wait—
And then Jeffrey Dahmer said, “Okay, I’m going to eat your heart now.”
And the guy said, “Okay, well before you eat my heart, can I go to the bathroom?”
And Jeffrey Dahmer said, “Sure!”
[Laughs]
And he ran out! I mean, if you were to put that in a movie or something, you’d go, “Oh, no way.” The plausibility and the logic of it is, “No. He’d kill the guy.” But that’s how it actually happened.
Two separate men did not care for How To Tell If You’re In a Flannery O’Connor Story, and they can suck my dick:
Oh, okay, I should include these as well:
