Amid the chaos of the first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Chris Kirk, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Gabriel Roth offer a list of 141 things Donald Trump has said and done that should render him unfit for the presidency. You can downvote and upvote to shift particular items’ position on the list; currently, “Said he would force the miltary to commit war crimes” and “Said about women, ‘You have to treat ‘em like shit’ ” are battling it out for 1 and 2.
Where is Mike Pence’s faith? Craig Fehrman asks how the once-openly-evangelical governor has come to bury his Christianity. “Pence’s religious beliefs still shape his politics,” Fehrman writes. “But he has alloyed his faith with political expediency, keeping his evangelicalism at the center of his worldview, even as he’s become ever less willing to discuss it.”
Philosopher of language Ian Olasov has an intriguing explanation of how the once-harmonious slogans “All Lives Matter” and “Black Lives Matter” came to carry opposite meanings. It’s all about normative versus descriptive uses of language, Olasov argues.
Rosa Li helps us understand why a recent study about racial bias in police shootings could deliver results diametrically opposed to previous research in the field. In short: It’s all about the data. “Right now, there is no comprehensive official federal database documenting shootings by U.S. law enforcement officers,” Li writes. “With incomplete and imperfect datasets, researchers are limited in the analyses that they can perform.”
In the years after the release of the first Ghostbusters in 1984, writes Dan Engber in a delightful exploration of a vanished bit of culture, “green ectoplasm was its breakout star.” Slime “oozed into the mainstream and remained on top for half a decade. Then, as quickly as it came to us, prime slime time slipped away. Whither all that goo?”
For fun: Watch Stephen Colbert crash the stage at the RNC.
Just one person laughing,
Rebecca
