After the Wednesday night shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota, Dahlia Lithwick recommends we read, or re-read, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s June dissent in Utah v. Strieff. ”With citations from W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Sotomayor warned her colleagues that seemingly trivial police encounters may prove to be life-and-death experiences for people of color,” Lithwick writes.
The outcome of the Hillary Clinton email scandal shows how desperately the Espionage Act of 1917 needs an overhaul, argues Steve Vladeck, who calls the law “anachronistic, labyrinthine, constitutionally problematic, and confusingly verbose.” ”The Espionage Act is at once too broad and not broad enough—and gives the government too much and too little discretion in cases in which individuals mishandle national security secrets, maliciously or otherwise,” Vladeck writes.
Watching Fox News, Christina Cauterucci always suspected its workplace culture was probably deeply sexist. Gretchen Carlson’s suit against Roger Ailes has proved it. “It’s a strange mix of gut-wrenching and gratifying to see all our dystopian conjectures about the inner workings of Ailes’ kingdom written out in a legal complaint by someone who experienced it firsthand,” Cauterucci writes.
Companies use a lot of food coloring in the United States, Shilpa Ravella writes, despite some (admittedly inconclusive) evidence that it’s not great for kids. ”When it comes to food coloring, why should we have to prove just exactly how and why the substance causes a negative effect on the people who consume it before we can ban it?” Ravella asks. “If this were a necessary or meaningful food ingredient in any way, sure, that would be a reasonable standard. But food coloring has no nutritional value. Why are we risking it?”
Closer is an interesting case: It’s a celebrity gossip publication specifically dedicated to older women, promising zero Kardashian coverage and only “real stars” like Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, and Susan Lucci. Ruth Graham investigates.
For fun: Guns N’ Roses brought their original drummer on stage with them in Cincinnati last night. Here’s video.
Still with the best hair,
Rebecca
