Hey. I’m Slate’s news director, which means I run our breaking news blog, the Slatest, and make sure we’re on top of breaking news while traveling around in an action news helicopter and standing at the front of our formation when we fight Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd (luv u paul).
I also co-host Slate’s parenting podcast, Mom and Dad Are Fighting, with Slate’s culture editor Dan Kois (who drives a car, can’t fight for shit, and just has to make sure some sitcoms are reviewed). If you like this email and reside in the D.C. area, come to our live show on Oct. 20! Valerie Jarrett will be there! It’s going to be wild.
Slate this week was great. In his story on young Mormons denied medical treatment by the church while on missions in developing nations, Mark Stern exposed how LDS culture, bureaucracy, and a belief that God will just protect good missionaries can lead to lasting medical and psychiatric harm. After Cuyahoga County’s prosecutor released two reports calling the actions of the police officers who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice last year “reasonable,” Leon Neyfakh examined the Supreme Courts cases that established this concept of reasonableness. If you read the piece, in which Leon talks to several legal experts, and watch the video of Rice’s death, I bet you will conclude, as Leon writes, that if “lethal force against Rice is considered ‘reasonable,’ it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which an officer’s decision to approach an ostensibly armed suspect and shoot him would ever be deemed unreasonable.”
Matthew Duss’ piece on why it is ridiculous, unproductive, and plain wrong to only blame the Palestinians for the recent wave of violence in Israel—and how that wrongness gets amplified by conservatives in the U.S.—definitely resonated with me this week as I thought about my sister and her family, who live in Tel Aviv, and the hopelessness and hatred there.
More strong coverage of extremely important news: Ben Mathis-Lilley on Donald Trump’s upcoming Saturday Night Live hosting stint; the art by Juliana Jiménez on this post about Condé Nast buying Pitchfork; these old quizzes, which you can take to determine how cultured you are by 1950s standards (me: not very); and this extremely upsetting parenting column on how vile sandboxes are.
Finally, two pieces that did not get written this week but that I would be happy to discuss with you in comments: “Martin O’Malley Is Very, Very Handsome Who Knew Wow” and “I Got a Holocaust Calendar in the Mail.”
Thanks for being a Slate Plus member!
—Allison
