The Angle

The Angle: What Nice Means Edition

Slate’s daily newsletter on school segregation, stopping the next flu, and the attacks in France.

Indian students take part in a prayer meeting on Friday at the Mahatma Gandhi International School in Ahmedabad, India, in memory of the attack victims in Nice, France.

Sam Panthaky/AFP/Getty Images

After Thursday’s attacks in Nice, France, Fred Kaplan hears theories that “the recent surge of terrorist strikes is a sign of ISIS’s desperation” and impending defeat. But even if ISIS dissolves in Iraq and Syria, Kaplan points out, the new groups that rush into the vacuum may not represent much of an improvement. “If winning wars, making peace, and stopping terrorism were as easy as Donald Trump seems to think, they would have been won, made, and stopped long ago,” Kaplan writes.

Daniel Byman writes that France is stuck in a bad loop. “Unfortunately, the most likely reaction after the Nice attack is also the worst one: more vitriol and hostility toward French and European Muslims,” Byman predicts, “furthering a cycle that makes it harder for European security services to gain the cooperation of local communities and easier for ISIS to gain recruits and score victories.”

Dana Goldstein reports on a new paper that analyzes patterns of school choice, and finds that parents—especially white parents—“preferred high test scores, schools closer to home, and schools where their own child would be alongside more peers of his or her same race and class.” In the end, Goldstein argues, “research—and history—show that left to their own devices, parents won’t desegregate schools.”

We might be able to forestall the next influenza pandemic by altering our diets and modernizing our food-processing systems, writes USAID infectious diseases adviser Daniel Schar. “From the vantage of a newly minted influenza virus today, our livestock production systems, megacities, and their urban sprawl have effectively become untapped rivers, deltas, and great oceans of hosts, with little to no pre-existing immunity,” Schar warns. Eating less meat might help eliminate some of this habitat.

For fun: A late-19th-century dime novel offers advice on when not to marry.

Never wed a dude or a villain,

Rebecca