Good Lord, Bill Clinton! Take a seat, writes Michelle Goldberg, looking on in horror as the former president responded to Black Lives Matter protesters on the campaign trail in Philadelphia yesterday with a fiery, ill-advised diatribe destined to go viral. Sure, he’s aging, but “it is somehow only when he is working on his wife’s behalf that he veers into sabotage,” Goldberg notes. “What is needed here is probably a shrink, not a neurologist…Hillary should shut him down. She can’t divorce him, but she can fire him.”
Chuck Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, gave a speech on Tuesday that, Dahlia Lithwick writes, “went after the Supreme Court as a purely political institution, pantsing the entire high court, and Chief Justice John Roberts by name, on the floor of the United States Senate.” He should have known better, Lithwick argues; the speech “not only damaged the Senate’s relationship with the court in a way he may not be able to repair, but also exposed Grassley’s own hypocrisy as chairman of a judiciary committee tasked with ensuring that the court can function.”
Ruth Graham reads the Pope’s newly published document on family life, “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”), which she calls less a regulatory proclamation than “a meditation on love and family in the 21st century.” Graham sums up the 256-page document: “To the disappointment of those hoping for definitive new directions, it offers subtle shifts in tone and emphasis.”
A designer in Hong Kong made a robot in the form of actress Scarlett Johansson, and Margot E. Kaminski sees a host of interesting legal and ethical issues emerging from its creepy-beautiful self. To start with, who has the right to make a robot in the shape of an existing person? Is this a protected form of expression? “What if instead of making the Scarlett Johansson robot without the actress’s permission,” Kaminski asks, “a robot manufacturer legally licensed her face and trotted out millions upon millions of ScarJos to serve as personal assistants?”
For fun: Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, coded by gender and age.
Who’s talking here,
Rebecca
