If you’ve seen polls that find Bernie more electable than Hillary when pitted against Trump or Cruz, you shouldn’t believe them, Will Saletan argues. “Currently, Sanders outperforms Clinton by more than seven percentage points against Trump, and by nearly nine points against Ted Cruz,” Saletan writes. “But that’s not because Sanders is the stronger nominee. It’s because Republicans haven’t yet trashed him the way they’ve trashed Clinton. Once they do, his advantage over her would disappear.”
Should you make an effort to hold on to friends who admit they are voting for Trump? No, writes Isaac Chotiner, most definitely not. “Call me moralistic, but I think being a racist or supporting a racist is a deep character flaw,” Chotiner argues. “I don’t think I believe this because politics is too central to my life.”
Simon Doonan remembers his encounters with Prince, fashion icon. When the musician arrived to a launch party Doonan was decorating, he “was dressed à la the Sandeman brand of port, with a black cape, over-the-knee boots, a ruffled blouse, and a wide brimmed hat. Instead of his usual shades he wore a vintage bandit eye mask. As theatrical as it was, his outfit did not look Halloween-y. Prince always attired himself with such precision and such unstoppable conviction that he defied mockery.”
Can Beyoncé’s album Lemonade rescue her husband Jay Z’s troubled streaming service Tidal? It better. “There’s a lot riding on Lemonade,” Jordan Weissmann writes. “If Beyoncé can’t get her husband’s enterprise to escape velocity at this point, it’s hard to imagine who could.”
Science-fiction author Paolo Bacigalupi wrote an original short story for Slate, about a seduction robot run amok, and it’s great. And Ryan Calo, an expert in robotics law, analyzed it: “I intend to assign ‘Mika Model’ to my students. … Until reading it, I had never quite appreciated something important: There is a fundamental similarity between the question of whether a robot can be responsible and the question of whether a robot should enjoy rights.”
For fun: Princeton professor of psychology and public affairs Johannes Haushofer’s “CV of Failures.”
We all feel a little bit better,
Rebecca
