The Angle

The Angle: Back off That Storm Edition 

Slate’s daily newsletter on reckless storm chasers, the failure of welfare reform, and Trump’s racist attack on a federal judge.

Tornado at Lebanon, Kansas, c. 1902. 

Library of Congress

On Friday, Donald Trump smeared the judge in the fraud case brought against his for-profit “university,” implying that because Gonzalo Curiel “happens to be, we believe, Mexican,” he is incapable of remaining unbiased in hearing the case. “If you can’t imagine a strongman coming to power in this country by mounting an ethnic propaganda campaign against minorities, wake up,” Will Saletan writes. “This is what it looks like.”

Yesterday, writes Jim Newell, the media managed to rattle Trump at a press conference by grilling him about his contributions to veterans’ charities, and the candidate turned meanGood, Newell argues: “Belligerence in reporters’ faces is a sign that the reporters in question have done something worthwhile and, by applying pressure, forced an insecure public figure to bend.” 

“Old welfare had been a federal entitlement…If a family was poor enough, the support was guaranteed,” Jordan Weissmann writes in an assessment of the impact of Bill Clinton’s welfare reforms on the nation’s safety net. “New welfare was something else entirely: a diminishing pool of money that guaranteed the poor precisely nothing.” (Weissmann’s history kicks off a new series of Slate pieces on the twentieth anniversary of welfare reform. More to come.) 

Storm chasers intent on getting close to tornados are clogging rural roads in the Midwest, and the practice is making things dangerous for residents, Eric Holthaus writes. “Storms have the potential to kill and seriously disrupt people’s lives—but the people in the small towns that chasers drive through aren’t willing participants,” Holthaus points out. “Extreme chasers make it harder for them to be safe. I can’t think of another activity in which enthusiasm is so juxtaposed with actual suffering.”

RIP Harambe, Susan Matthews writes. But why are we so upset about his singular death, when the plight of the world’s population of wild gorillas is so dire? “We should look at Harambe’s death as an unfortunate consequence of what essentially amounts to a freak accident,” Matthews writes, “and invest the time and money being spent mourning him into doing things that actually matter for gorilla survival.”

For funLists of household superstitions reported by college students in the early 20th century. “If a baby is gluttonous,” runs one, “it can be cured by being placed on a bread-shelf for a few minutes.” 

Is that so,

Rebecca