The Angle

The Angle: Gloriously Mutated Children Edition

Slate’s daily newsletter on why Hillary should team up with Elizabeth Warren, the Olympics and Zika, and a few fond farewells.

Nashville will soon take its final bow. Stars of the show Connie Britton and Charles Esten performing in Nashville, Tennessee, Feb. 15, 2016.

Rick Diamond/Getty Images

Hi, Slate copy editor Heather Schwedel here, filling in for Rebecca Onion on newsletter duty for a few days. Here’s what you should read in Slate today, in my humble opinion.

Hillary Clinton should name Elizabeth Warren her running mate, Michelle Goldberg writes. All the baggage associated with Clinton has dampened what should be genuine excitement over the prospect of our first female president, and Warren would be just the woman to bring the magic—and disappointed Bernie Sanders supporters—back into the fold. “She’s a choice who could electrify both Clinton’s fiercest progressive critics and her most devoted acolytes.”

The Summer Olympics should stay in Rio. Despite a few warnings of an oncoming “full-blown global health disaster,” Marc Siegel cautions that the threat of the Zika virus taking hold in the U.S. or Europe remains relatively low: “We must be governed by our analysis of the data, not by our fear of unlikely outcomes.” Transmission usually requires a mosquito, and mosquito control is just a much smaller issue here and in Europe than it is in Brazil.

Willa Paskin is going to miss Nashville, the ABC soap that was canceled this week, not because it was a good show but because it had glimmers of promise. And also because, somewhere along the way, it got its hooks in her. “Thanks to bingeing, shorter episode runs, and the sheer volume of television shows, long-term relationships with mediocre TV shows are swiftly being replaced by shorter-term relationships with less mediocre TV shows. While, on the whole, this can only be a good thing, it is my right as a nostalgic human being to lament the change, simply because it is a change.”

Slate is also going to miss the Toast, Mallory Ortberg and Nicole Cliffe’s indie women’s website; the two announced, in a characteristically thoughtful and sweet chat, that they will shut it down this summer. We celebrated by rounding up some of our favorite Toast pieces and talking about what made them so special. Thank goodness the archives will stay online.

The novelist Katherine Dunn died this week, and Dan Kois celebrated her legacy with an obituary: “For the readers who have discovered [Dunn’s third novel] Geek Love in the years since its publication in 1989, oddballs all, the novel serves as a kind of secret handshake.” Kois also quoted from a cherished email Dunn once sent him and linked to what may be her last published work: an essay in Slate about Leonard Gardner’s novel Fat City.

For fun: Slate staffers choose their weird dystopian Colin Farrell movie spirit animals. (Dahlia Lithwick’s is a koala!)

I think I’m a mole,

Heather