Two presidential candidates, two approaches to foreign policy: Donald Trump has confidently asserted that he trusts himself above any foreign policy advisers, because “I have a very good brain.” But Ted Cruz has hired a foreign policy team with members that are, Fred Kaplan writes, hawkish, paranoid, and conspiratorial. Cruz’s ideas about foreign policy, Kaplan argues, are “nearly as bad [as Trump’s], and perhaps more dangerous because they’re more coherent.” Great!
The Washington, D.C., Metro announced this week that it could be shutting down whole lines for up to half a year, in order to carry out much-needed repairs. Good, writes Alex Baca. “Shutting down a Metrorail line for a month isn’t poor service. It’s excellent customer care, and it shows that the system’s management—far from letting its subway network rot, as it has in slow motion for decades—is finally taking seriously how essential WMATA is to the D.C. area.”
Stop comparing the NFL to Big Tobacco, Daniel Engber writes. In doing it, we’re mistaking rhetoric for true insight. “When we compare the NFL to Big Tobacco, we’re imposing a verdict of guilt by association,” Engber argues. “We’re implying, via syllogism, that since the two businesses appear so much alike, they must have engaged in the same ruthless business practices.” In reality, “the tobacco industry is far deadlier than most of the industries to which it’s gleefully compared.”
Dame Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi-born architect who died on Thursday at age 65, made beautiful work “so forward-thinking it risked looking ridiculous in its glossy techno-glamor,” writes Jesse Dorris. She also “played the game of modern celebrity, and was damn good at it … she gave countless, combative interviews, refusing to back down against allegations of being too intellectual, too ambitious, or too bold, and calling out how she was held to standards higher than those of her male peers.” (Here is a roundup of gorgeous pictures of Hadid’s projects, courtesy of Kristin Hohenadel.)
In the Guardian, Robert Macfarlane looks at ways that writers and artists have been reacting to the Anthropocene. “Old forms of representation are experiencing drastic new pressures and being tasked with daunting new responsibilities,” Macfarlane writes. “As the notion of a world beyond us has become difficult to sustain, so a need has grown for fresh vocabularies and narratives that might account for the kinds of relation and responsibility in which we find ourselves entangled.”
For fun: Designer/writer Paul Ford’s exploration of why April Fools’ Day doesn’t work on the Internet.
Laughter does not scale,
Rebecca
