Let’s say, hypothetically, Donald Trump wins the presidency, and the Republicans control both houses of Congress. Will the party stand in the way of Trump’s objectives, at all? Not likely, writes Isaac Chotiner. “If you don’t think the authoritarian candidate and the ideologues in the House and Senate will make peace, you haven’t been paying attention for the last month,” Chotiner writes (in a piece published before Paul Ryan’s capitulation to Trump on Thursday afternoon). “Both sides could very easily get what they most desire in a Trump presidency. The results would be terrifying.”
Helaine Olen read the scammy Trump University playbooks released by a federal judge on Tuesday and found that the manuals, printed for instructors looking to hook prospective students, reveal some depressing things about our own relationship to leadership. “Attacking Donald Trump for being a fraud doesn’t take,” Olen writes. “We should know this by now. Sure, he’ll say whatever necessary to close the sale. But this is what his fans like about him. They think this means he’ll get things done.”
Money from the program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families has been spent in all kinds of weird ways since welfare reform, Krissy Clark finds: “A workshop full of middle-class couples working on their love styles”; “a program that gives private college scholarships to students from households with incomes as high as $250,000 or more”; “funding for so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ that counsel women against abortions.”
When we can all use voice-recognition technology in our cars, magazine-style, appointment-listening radio shows like NPR’s All Things Considered will perish, replaced by a la carte personal playlists, Steve Lickteig predicts. “In the future, what possible motivation will listeners have to tune into a radio news magazine, with all of its programming eccentricities, when they can assemble the show they want as effortlessly as they can speak it?” Lickteig asks.
Contra most people who issue writing advice, Colin Dickey loves adverbs, and he’s not ashamed to say it. Passionately. “What’s striking about adverbs is the way in which they resist a treatment of language that sees it as a bare conveyance of information,” Dickey writes. “We want our language the way techies want their Soylent: bland packets of protein and nutrients, without taste or individuality. We must continually seek out and praise writing that resists this tendency, that asserts itself as more than just information to be read and consumed as quickly as possible.”
Delightfully, fancifully,
Rebecca
