The Angle

The Angle: Pretentious Is as Pretentious Does Edition

Slate’s daily newsletter on sexual harassment in yoga, the anti-abortion movement’s double bind, and a new book about pretension. 

Brian Eno, whom Mark O’Connell calls “that most productively pretentious of artists,” at a protest in central London on Nov. 28, 2015, against the British government’s proposed involvement in air strikes against the Islamic State. 

Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Michelle Goldberg writes about a sexual harassment lawsuit being brought against perennial Manhattan favorite Jivamukti Yoga. Reporting on her interview with the plaintiff, a former teacher-in-training at the studio, Goldberg observes: “The case hinges not just on what [one teacher] did but on what sort of place Jivamukti is. Is it a business, an ashram, a cult, or some hybrid of the three?

Donald Trump’s recent comments about women needing to be “punished” for getting abortions, and his subsequent walk-back of that position in the face of pro-life objections, have exposed a fundamental paradox in pro-life ideology, writes William Saletan. Saletan sets up a diabolical logical puzzle by pointing to several recent cases in which women have been convicted of killing their grown children: 

If pro-lifers … continue to make excuses for women who procure abortions while rejecting the same excuses for women who procure the deaths of their born children … then there’s only one logical explanation: They don’t really believe abortion is morally equivalent to killing a person. They sense that something about abortion … mitigates the gravity of the deed and the culpability of the procurer.

Mark O’Connell reviews Dan Fox’s new book, Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, which he finds offers a nice argument on behalf of this least likeable of traits. “What the book is interested in, and what it largely succeeds in doing,” O’Connell writes, “is inverting the charge of pretentiousness so that it becomes a marker not of dissimulation or self-delusion, but of intellectual ambition and personal autonomy.” (“A defense of pretentiousness on Slate? What are the odds of that?” snorts a Top Commenter, right on cue.) 

Everybody loves Hamilton, right? Hmmm. I interviewed Lyra Monteiro, a historian with some serious qualms about the way the musical represents American history. “It’s still white history,” Monteiro argues. “No amount of casting people of color disguises the fact that they’re erasing people of color from the actual narrative.”

For fun: Julieanne Smolinski, aka @boobsradley, is thinking about taking a good long Twitter break, and she writes about it with characteristic verve.

Just a dumb cookie jokester, 

Rebecca 

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