The Green Party’s Jill Stein and a few other progressives have recently been trumpeting a tantalizing idea: Wouldn’t it be awesome if the government decided to forgive all student loan debt? Alas, read Jordan Weissman and weep: No, it would be expensive, regressive, and pretty ineffective. Not only would it cost enough to fund 78 years of welfare programs, Weissmann writes, “Forgiving all student loan debt in one giant swoop would hand a five- or even six-figure windfall to all those well-educated professionals, and much less to the struggling dropouts.”
From crushing debt to crushing defeat: “What was in my mind was, I had to get a gold medal. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground.” That’s what Shaunae Miller of the Bahamas had to say after her dive across the finish line of the 400-meter Olympic final Monday night, which helped her narrowly edge out Team USA’s Allyson Felix for the win. The jury’s still out on whether diving is a smart strategy for sprinters, but it certainly made for an exciting race.
Then there’s Amazon’s golden girl, Jill Soloway. She “only want[s] to write about somewhat unlikable Jewish women having really inappropriate ideas about life and sex,” and that’s what she delivers in I Love Dick, a new TV pilot from Amazon. Willa Paskin points out that “Soloway, the creator of Transparent, is Amazon’s most important creative asset. If you are a network, you give her what she wants, including another show.”
You only have a couple more days to enjoy the singular voice of Larry Wilmore on The Nightly Show, which will air its last episode Thursday. Comedy Central’s cancelation of the show leaves late night with only one nonwhite host. “On the plus side,” Wilmore said in Monday night’s episode, just hours after the cancelation was announced, “our show going off the air has to only mean one thing: Racism is solved.”
For fun: The South Korean golfer whose father dropped a suitcase on one of her rivals.
Fore!
Heather Schwedel
