Why can’t Republicans step back from Donald Trump? Jamelle Bouie asks. Sure, maybe they want to win more than they want to stand by their principles. But maybe they’re just plain scared and can’t figure out what to do. “Republicans, from the top of the ticket to the bottom of the ballot, are caught in a bind,” Bouie writes. “If they don’t say anything to counter or condemn Trump’s rhetoric, they are complicit in the Trump candidacy. If they say anything, they become fodder for Democratic efforts against their party.”
Democrats should help Bernie Sanders leave the race, instead of yelling fruitlessly at him from the sidelines, Jim Newell writes. “The best approach for those trying to talk him down is not to keep badgering him about how he lost, and needs to concede, and then campaign unconditionally for Hillary Clinton,” argues Newell. “This will only fuel resentment that he’s not being treated respectfully. Instead, the first question President Obama and others should ask Sanders while meeting him is: What can we do to help ensure your movement doesn’t disappear?”
Recently, municipal attempts to ban the use of plastic bags have met with pushback from states, who have instituted bag-ban bans. (Yep! Isn’t that fun?) Henry Grabar finds that the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council’s advice may be behind the new efforts: ALEC “anoited the state bag-ban ban as a piece of ‘model policy’ in the summer of 2015. ‘The free market is the best arbiter of the container,’ the ALEC model resolution states.” As Grabar observes, archly: “The free market has yet to solve the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, unfortunately, but we’ll keep following this story.”
Kimbo Slice, a fighter who first became famous for street combat bouts distributed on YouTube, died on Monday night at age 42. Kimbo had a career that was, Luke O’Brien writes, something of a cautionary tale. “Kimbo was an on-screen avatar of destruction, a prelapsarian Mike Tyson for the internet age,” Luke O’Brien writes. “His online badassery was so bad that it hardly seemed real.” But Kimbo failed to transition to fight MMA on television, making the trailing arc of his career into a sad spectacle. O’Brien writes, “Kimbo tried hard. He respected his craft. He was humble. He wanted to improve.”
Asian-American kids in Fairfax County, Virginia, are stereotyped as STEM-focused, college-obsessed, and achievement-driven. Laura Moser spoke with a few—Elaine Chun, her friend Sherry Feng—who don’t fit that picture. “When you spend some time with teenagers like Elaine, you begin to understand the complex forces underlying the culture of achievement that, on the surface, seems to center on success in the college-admissions rat race,” Moser writes.
For fun: I don’t watch either UnReal or The Bachelor, but this piece by Kathryn VanArendonk makes me want to start.
No time like the present,
Rebecca
