The Angle

The Angle: Other People’s Fun Edition

Slate’s daily newsletter on Garry Shandling, Trump supporters on climate change, and what it’s like to be a hotel housekeeper during spring break in Miami.  

Spring break, March 2008, South Padre Island, Texas. 

Rick Gershon/Getty Images

Michelle Chen contributes the latest installment to our series “The Grind,” writing about hotel housekeepers cleaning up after spring-breakers in Miami. Writing of one interviewee’s experience, Chen reports that because management makes no allowances for the increased difficulty of the job during spring break, “S. and the other workers had to race the clock against globs of caked beach sand and fungus plastered to the tub.” S. told Chen: “All the sheets are full of makeup and suntan lotion. You can barely even walk … I would clean up that whole mess, and the next day it would be exactly the same.” 

Halfway through the piece is Chris Kirk’s interactive, which you can use to calculate how the messiness of a hotel room would slow a worker down and decrease her wages, if she happens to be paid by the room (as many of them are). 

Trump has done a ton of bad things, writes Michelle Goldberg, but dragging Heidi Cruz’s mental health into the campaign has got to be the worst. “If you’re a normal person, it’s easy to sympathize with Heidi Cruz’s misery, and not just because Ted Cruz is her husband,” Goldberg writes, adding that the Cruzes probably thought that Ted’s opponents wouldn’t bring up Heidi’s 2005 depressive episode, because it would only serve to humanize the couple. 

“But Trump doesn’t think in terms of ordinary political strategy,” Goldberg writes. “His thuggery is blunter. He seeks to intimidate, hurt, and humiliate his opponents in any way he can, even if it costs him personally. Besides, the Voldemort-like power he derives from publicity, even bad publicity, immunizes him from public shame.”

Eric Holthaus went to a Trump rally in Arizona and asked the candidate’s supporters what they think about climate change. The results are surprising: Most of the people he talked to believe it’s happening, and that it’s anthropogenic

Garry Shandling, the beloved comedian who died yesterday at age 66, made the excellent HBO sitcom The Larry Sanders Show. Justin Peters argues that this show was “the best, most ambitious sitcom of the 1990s,” a “savage, self-aware” parody of the world of late-night talk shows; it was also a brave move from a performer who could have hosted his own talk show, and chose a funnier, but less certain, road. 

Amy Wallace, who profiled Shandling for GQ and became friends with him, wrote a heartfelt piece for GQ.com that includes the text of the last email he sent her, from the pretty-good address likeineedemail@aol.com.  

For fun: Writing negative things about Duke basketball sure gets you some interesting email

Definitely a sleazy toad,

Rebecca 

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