If Donald Trump thinks he can just throw bile into the world and get approbation back, recent polls showing most Americans continue to hold negative views of the candidate prove him wrong, Jamelle Bouie writes. “Over the past year, Trump’s attention-at-all-costs strategy has done nothing but tank his ratings among the public at large, Republicans excepted,” Bouie argues.
The revelation that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel is bankrolling Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker Media just proves that Silicon Valley is in desperate need of the kind of coverage the now-defunct Valleywag provided, Will Oremus writes. “Valleywag’s editorial philosophy was about tearing back the masks and capes in which Thiel and other members of Silicon Valley’s tech elite tend to cloak themselves,” Oremus points out. “If Valleywag had been wrong that its targets were as powerful and as petty as politicians, its meanness would have been unjustifiable. But Thiel, perhaps more than anyone else, has proven that the site was right.”
Congress should not reallocate funds designated to combat Ebola for the cause of fighting Zika, Donna A. Patterson argues. In fact, the fear of Zika has diverted attention from many other public health crises, and it’s a shame. “Zika is getting coverage now because it’s here now,” Patterson writes. “But it is not the only deadly disease in the world, nor are the others necessarily going to stay remote.”
A recent piece by Alana Massey in the New Inquiry defending the female clique has Katy Waldman shaking her head. “Of course, close female friendships are things of power and beauty, soul-restoring and even feminist,” Waldman writes. “I want as badly as Massey does to celebrate their magic. But provocative and badass as it seems to reclaim cliques for a political movement, it just doesn’t pass the ‘don’t be a jerk’ sniff test.”
The stringy, lithe British phenomenon who’s shown up in movie after TV show recently may be attractive and beloved of Tumblr, but, Jeffrey Bloomer writes, Tom Hiddleston would not be a good James Bond. “Hiddleston has cultivated a more circumspect, nuanced masculinity than this role requires. That’s not a bad thing,” Bloomer writes. “And it would be a disservice to his unique gifts—and also to the Bond franchise—to insist he assume the part because he’s a tall, square-jawed British guy who once played a spy.”
Timely: This 2011 New York Times editorial by historian David Blight, on the origins of Memorial Day in 1865 South Carolina, is a yearly revisit for me.
Happy weekend,
Rebecca
