The Angle

The Angle: Press Pit Edition 

Slate’s daily newsletter on being a reporter assigned to the Trump campaign, loss of tenure in Wisconsin, and the glories of leftovers. 

Improv with leftovers: Not just for wartime, argues Sara Dickerman.

National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons

Seth Stevenson went on the campaign trail with the reporters covering Trump. “The more time I spent with the Trump press pack, the more sympathy I had for them,” Stevenson writes. “They display equanimity in the face of outrageous behavior. They display physical courage in the face of near rumbles” at the candidate’s rallies. (We’re keeping an ongoing list of those.) “Perhaps I’m a fragile soul—Trump would no doubt come up with a snappy epithet to encapsulate my wuss-itude—but I’m not sure that I could handle the emotional rigors of their workplace.”

The aftereffects of the state of Wisconsin’s 2015 actions to weaken tenure at state universities are still unfolding, Rebecca Schuman writes. While a large group of fancy research professors were eventually enticed to stay in the state, despite the changes, “how [the administration] will recruit new superstars to a university that can’t promise proper tenure to anyone remains a mystery.”

Christina Cauterucci has been watching the Underwoods’ open marriage on House of Cards with interest. The show’s portrayal of Frank and Claire’s polyamorous—and generally happy—arrangement reflects our ambivalence about other possibly-open political marriages in the real world. “Depending on who’s watching, their open marriage and Frank’s queer sexuality can complicate and humanize the Underwoods,” writes Cauterucci, “or it can solidify their characters as depraved utilitarians with no solid moral compass.”

Leftovers may not appeal to everyone, but Sara Dickerman loves them. “My attachment to leftovers is as much emotional as it is practical,” writes Dickerman. “After all the missed communications and unfinished business of an ordinary day, cooking offers me a chance to pull together a purposeful project, creatively. Working leftovers into that dinner, I feel like those fragments of everyday life are woven back together in a most satisfyingly way.”

Pair with Helen Veit’s piece for the Atlantic’s website, which tells the history of how Americans came to fall out of love with leftovers.

For fun: If You Give a Judge a Meeting …

Because milk, 

Rebecca