Why do Donald Trump’s supporters support Donald Trump? Reihan Salam thinks he has come up with a working hypothesis that would explain Trump voters’ acceptance of the candidate’s “many ideological heresies” and “flip-flops”: “The short version of my Trumpsplainer: Many conservatives believe first and foremost in the importance of keeping Americans safe, and Trump has emerged as their candidate.”
Jessica Winter eyes the newish tradition of the gender reveal party and the recent spate of anti-trans “bathroom bills” and finds them to be connected. “The gender-reveal phenomenon pulls off a rousing counter-progressive two-for-one,” Winter writes. “Weapons-grade reinforcement of oppressive gender norms (sorry, feminists!) and blunt-force refusal of the idea that sex assigned at birth does not necessarily equate with gender identity (sorry, trans-rights movement!).”
In the wake of the revelation that Facebook’s editors quash conservative news stories, Will Oremus argues that of course Facebook’s curation process is subjective, whether it picks its trending topics by engineered algorithm or by editorial hand. “Humans are biased. Objectivity is a myth, or at best an ideal that can be loosely approached through the very careful practice of trained professionals,” Oremus writes. “The news simply is not neutral. Neither is curation, for that matter, in either the journalistic or artistic application of the term.”
In an excerpt from her book Pit Bull, Bronwen Dickey talks about the work of a coalition developing strategies to help lower-income people keep their dogs, many of which were ending up in animal shelters. As the women in the coalition delved into this work, Dickey writes, it became clear that in many cases “the real enemy was not neglect or cruelty; it was poverty. Residents of lower-income communities simply did not have access to the same veterinary clinics, pet supply stores, and pet care information that other animal lovers took for granted.”
Why are cellists—like Sergei Rolgudin, recently named in the Panama Papers leak—so prone to rebelliousness and mischief? “The instrument has a long history of association with rowdy activists, sultry libertines, genre iconoclasts, and all manner of rebellious spirits,” writes Brian Wise. Wise’s brief history of the wild cellist includes the brave, like Karim Wasfi, who showed up with his instrument at the sites of terrorist bombings in Baghdad, and the louche, like Pablo Casals, who married a 21-year-old when he was 80.
For fun: Some super-adorable Depression-era posters advocating for kindness to animals.
Somebody’s pet,
Rebecca
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