Slate Plus

What Happened at Slate This Week?

Senior editor Emily Bazelon shares what frustrated and intrigued her this week.

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Illustration by Charlie Powell

Hey Slate Plus folks, thank you for being here! You are the early adopters who are making us feel like our new entrepreneurial endeavor will work, and we are grateful. Here I am bringing you your weekly newsletter: In Case You Missed It for the faithful.

I’m Emily Bazelon. I’ve been a senior editor at Slate since 2005, writing about law and kids mostly, but also when I’m lucky Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad. I co-founded DoubleX, spent a day drinking as much in the office as Don and Roger on Mad Men, and (entirely sober) wrote the series What Really Happened to Phoebe Prince?. When I moved to New Haven five years ago, I was sorry to leave D.C. because my grandmother lived there and most days I got to walk to lunch with David Plotz, John Dickerson, and Bill Smee. I dried my tears by finding a great audio engineer in Connecticut who lets me tape the Political Gabfest every week, with John and David, from his basement.

This week at Slate I was driven half-mad by my son’s changing soccer and carpool schedules, to the point of stupidly letting my car get towed. How boring is that?  When I was working instead of screwing up, I urged the White House to do more to address sexual assault on college campuses and expressed frustration that it took shoplifting crab legs to get star quarterback Jameis Winston in trouble at Florida State University (a fellow student accused him of rape in 2012; it took the university more than a year, and a lot of bad PR, to investigate).  

I also edited this piece on an important development in the controversy over murder convictions based on a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome, an issue I’ve been following for a while.

I was most intrigued this week by Hanna Rosin’s spotlighting of data showing that men are raped nearly as often as women, most convinced by Mike Pesca’s questioning of stripping ownership of the Clippers from Donald Sterling (not to defend the man—he is odious), and most relieved to hear that Klout is dead.

Here’s the most useful piece we published this week.

I was pleased to procrastinate by remembering how mean Mean Girls is and I’m so glad Dahlia Lithwick led her write-up of Supreme Court argument with Justice Breyer’s admission that he doesn’t know what kind of cellphone he has because he can’t figure out the password. (The case was about whether the police can search your cellphone without a warrant.)

I think I’m ready to buy foreign sunscreen even though the FDA hasn’t approved it, because if you wait for the FDA, you can wait forever.

Thank you for being a member of Slate Plus! And hey, I have a question for you—do you hate the new promo picture for the Slate Political Gabfest?  John and I think the three of us look like corporate sales reps. David is unmoved. How can that be? Feel free to pile on in the comments.

And as always, email Jeff and Jennifer at plus@slate.com if you have any questions or concerns or suggestions. And thanks again!

Emily