Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president. We need to come to terms with this, while never forgetting how strange and upsetting it is, Jamelle Bouie writes. “Say it again. Donald Trump will be the Republican Party’s nominee for president of the United States. Take it in. Meditate on it. Roll it around on your tongue,” Bouie invites us. “Remember the taste notes, the acrid weirdness of it. It’s important never to let that sentence feel normal.”
Fred Kaplan offers a scathing report on Trump’s incoherent foreign policy speech, delivered Wednesday in Washington. Though Trump has begun using a teleprompter, it hasn’t done anything to make his prose more coherent; this was, Kaplan writes, “the most senseless, self-contradicting foreign policy speech by any major party’s presidential nominee in modern history.”
Twitter continues to struggle, failing to add users quickly enough to reverse its downward trend in growth. But maybe that’s fine, writes Will Oremus; the media should back off. “To equate Twitter’s slow progress with death is to buy into the most brutish elements of the Silicon Valley ethos, the ones that preach exponential growth at any cost,” Oremus argues. “Here we have a very large—and growing!—company whose core product is used by some 310 million people every month, many of whom not only use it but love it. And yet it is ‘dying,’ ‘failing,’ and ‘doomed’ because that number isn’t 400 million, or 500 million, or 1.6 billion.”
In her career thus far, Beyoncé has toggled back and forth between conservative traditionalism and provocative empowerment, and both Beyoncés are on view in Lemonade. “Lemonade stands in both these grand traditions,” Aisha Harris writes, “gorgeously produced and sung with the passion and conviction of someone who’s been through some stuff.”
Seen one of those “Use a paper towel, because air dryers blow disease everywhere” signs in a public bathroom or on your Facebook feed lately? Emma Bryce looks at this suddenly ubiquitous claim and finds that it’s based on dubious science. “Air dryers aren’t perfect,” Bryce writes, “but they’re hardly viral bombs of destruction either.”
For fun: Dan Kois visited Iceland, and all we got was this piece reporting on a horrifying debate about sauna hygiene.
Nude sauna or no sauna,
Rebecca
