Dissatisfied with two establishment candidates, Darby Saxbe voted for Nader in 2000, and she lived to regret it. In a letter to Bernie Sanders’ supporters, Saxbe writes: “To the Bernie voters who are disgusted with the process and disillusioned with the Democratic nominee, I hear you. But if you plan to stay home, defect to a third party candidate, or vote Trump in November, think back to the fall of 2000. It only took 100,000 ideological purists in one state to give our country away to a know-nothing nightmare of a president.”
Some “playboy industrialist” named Lapo Elkann kiss-attacked Uma Thurman at Cannes on Thursday, and neither Thurman nor Christina Cauterucci were amused. Comparing the Elkann-Thurman incident to the Halle Berry–Adrien Brody kiss at the Oscars a few years ago and the famous Alfred Eisenstaedt V-J Day photo taken in Times Square, Cauterucci writes: “The most disheartening part of these images is that the women remain composed and gracious, keeping the focus on their respective events, even as their bodily autonomy is invaded … Thurman’s characterization, ‘opportunism at its worst,’ is apt.”
Yale students are petitioning to eliminate requirements to read eight fusty old canonical poets from the English major. Katy Waldman has advice for those students: “If you want to become well-versed in English literature, you’re going to have to hold your nose and read a lot of white male poets. Like, a lot. More than eight … These guys are the heavies, the chord progressions upon which the rest of us continue to improvise, and we’d be somewhere else entirely without them.”
The Wall Street Journal recently hailed Nigerian Scrabble players for developing a totally new winning strategy. That’s a little bit overblown, write Stefan Fatsis and Oliver Roeder, diving deep into the nuts and bolts of the Nigerian approach. “The importance of shorter words doesn’t represent some sea change blowing in from across the Atlantic,” they argue. But the story of Scrabble in Nigeria is fascinating anyway.
For fun (in some qualified sense of “fun”): Heather Schwedel asks why online neo-Nazis have hailed Taylor Swift as their “Aryan goddess.”
Squad goals,
Rebecca
