Will Saletan has put together a 10-count indictment against Donald Trump, enumerating his most egregious transgressions, and asks that the media start to require any politician who endorses Trump to justify and explain their candidate’s statements on each count. Targeting civilians, stereotyping Latinos, advocating torture … what say you, Newt?
Bernie Sanders needs to pull back from the presidential race, Jamelle Bouie writes. The truth is that Sanders can’t win, yet he’s “trying to get around these facts by arguing, in effect, that the will of his voters counts for more than the majority. In doing so, he isn’t just fighting till the last vote for a worthy cause,” Bouie argues. “He’s deriding and disregarding the votes of the party’s most loyal backers, voters who are key to any progressive project, now and in the future.”
Despite California’s recent decision to lift mandatory statewide water restrictions in urban areas, writes Eric Holthaus, “for Southern California especially, the drought is still just as bad as ever.” This winter didn’t deliver nearly as much in the way of El Niño–generated coastal storms as meteorologists expected. The result is that the state’s forests are growing drier and drier, and “dead trees are like matchsticks for forest fires,” Holthaus observes.
Colin Jerolmack spent eight months researching the social dynamics around fracking in northern Pennsylvania, and he found in the psychology of landowners who sold rights to gas companies a microcosm of the problems we face in trying to combat climate change. “The social dynamic propelled by fracking is a textbook illustration of what Garrett Hardin called the ‘tragedy of the commons’—a situation in which people are compelled to behave selfishly, even if they know that doing so is contrary to the common good and degrades shared resources like air or water,” Jerolmack writes. “They act this way because they know their self-sacrifice will have no effect unless everyone else behaves unselfishly as well.”
The movie Neighbors 2, out now, sounds pretty funny, but apparently it’s also full of food for thought. Katy Waldman calls Zac Efron’s character Teddy “our first post-frat-bro frat bro,” embodying the plight of the young man whose bacchanalian way of life is no longer cool. And Jeffrey Bloomer hails the movie’s gay twist, which does something interesting and new with the bromance genre.
For fun: Michelle Goldberg decided to take a walk around Copenhagen, ducked into a thrift store, and met a fascinating person.
Let’s all take more walks,
Rebecca
