The Angle

The Angle: Open Up the Tanks Edition 

Slate’s daily newsletter on SeaWorld’s next phase, cholera in Haiti, and Bernie’s influence on the race.

An abalone diver wrestling with an octopus, woodcut by Yoshitoshi, 1870s.  

Wellcome Images

Isaac Chotiner came away from Thursday night’s Democratic debate convinced that while Bernie Sanders may be losing the race to the Democratic nomination, he has accomplished a feat just as impressive“Sanders has captured the radicalized spirit of a Democratic Party that is increasingly attentive to the appeal of economic populism and to the realities of racial injustice,” Chotiner writes. “While the candidates ricocheted between discussions of global warming as the primary threat to America and whether to raise the minimum wage to $12 or to $15, it was hard not to feel that Sanders had won a battle almost as large as the race to be the 2016 nominee.”

For her part, Michelle Goldberg appreciated Bernie’s willingness to say a word last night on behalf of Palestinian rights. “Whether or not this was strategically wise,” Goldberg writes, “it was a mitzvah.”

Dahlia Lithwick and her friend (and college roommate!) Gillian Frank, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project and author of Because of Sex, IM’d about HBO’s new Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill movie Confirmation, and we get to read the transcript. (Willa Paskin, by the way, liked the movie—with some reservations.) 

“To me, the enduring value of the Hill–Thomas hearings is that men started hearing from the women in their lives about the sexual harassment that had happened to them, and women began speaking frankly with one another about their own experiences,” Frank writes to Lithwick. “The aggregate effect of those one-on-one conversations …spawned one of those rare moments when you could practically see the tectonic plates of the cultural landscape shifting.”

Jonathan M. Katz, who writes about Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake, looks at a damning map of the island’s cholera epidemic in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s museum, pointing out that while the CDC refuses to acknowledge the origin of the outbreak—a United Nations base—the evidence is right there. “The U.N. itself has never accepted any responsibility for the outbreak,” Katz writes. “Responders prefer to highlight their role in fighting the epidemic their troops began”—and the CDC has fallen in line. 

Kobe Bryant walked off the basketball court and into retirement on Wednesday night, scoring 60 points as the Lakers beat the Utah Jazz. This final performance was a perfect demonstration of Bryant’s “flawless imitation of virtuosity,” Josh Levin writes in an appreciation (?) of Bryant’s long career. “Kobe is a relentless self-mythologizer,” Levin observes. “His greatest skill is his ability to discern what fans and sportswriters want to see.”

What will SeaWorld do, now that it’s sworn to put an end to captive breeding? Rachel Gross wonders whether the edutainment giant will really shift its focus to rehabilitating and releasing stranded cetaceans that need its help. “The problem is that there can be an inherent conflict of interest between SeaWorld’s rescue objectives and its profit model,” Gross writes. “Making this change would have enormous implications for their financial strategy—even while people rage against the captive animals, there’s no telling whether they would actually pay the same kind of money to see rehabbed, nonperforming animals.”

Inky the Octopus, who escaped an aquarium in New Zealand in dramatic fashion, has been relentlessly anthropomorphized. You’re missing half the fun with your Shawshank jokes, argues Jacob Brogan; octopus intelligence is fascinating. “When we speak of celebrity octopuses as if they were just like us, we may actually minimize how wonderfully strange they are,” Brogan writes. “What’s astonishing about Inky’s story isn’t that he escaped—in fact, octopus literature is full of such flights to freedom—but how he figured out that such a path to freedom might be feasible in the first place.”

Squeezing through a drain pipe as we speak, 

Rebecca