The Angle

The Angle: Offensive Stagnation Edition

Slate’s daily newsletter on dark mages and dork Olympians.

Peter Thiel delivers a speech during the Republican National Convention on July 21 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Hi! I’m Katy, I’ll be Angling today in Rebecca Onion’s absence. Proper Onion Angling will return next week.

Who’s left to embarrass Silicon Valley now that Peter Thiel has killed Gawker? Will Oremus is genuinely worried, noting that when “the technology industry enjoys unprecedented power over the media,” too few outlets have an incentive to speak snark to power. Oremus places his hope in a ragtag band of misfits—er, a smart and critical crew of working tech journalists—with the guts and insight to hold the Valley’s billionaires to account. (These rebels include Nitasha Tiku, Charlie Warzel, and Zeynep Tufekci.) But there’re not enough of them, Oremus says, and what if Thiel’s lawyers are already closing in? (Meanwhile, other Slate staffers weigh in with a roll call of Gawker favorites.)

Another beleaguered outlaw under pressure, Ryan Lochte, is probably not losing sleep over the press’ diminished ability to make fun of people. Since he fabricated a robbery in Rio de Janeiro last weekend, he’s gone from sex symbol to oaf in one Olympiad flat, writes Heather Schwedel. What was the blue-haired aqua-bro’s first mistake? Was it the diamond-studded grill, the catchphrase (“Jeah”), the boring reality show? After Rio, “we know exactly what the former star of What Would Ryan Lochte Do? would do,” Schwedel concludes. “And we don’t like it one bit.”

Paul Manafort’s career also took an ugly turn today when he announced his resignation from the Trump campaign. That parting holds an unsettling lesson for us, too, argues Lowen Liu. “Had Manafort, a dark mage of political image-making, been successful in reshaping the Trump campaign, we would have declared Trump a clown who got lucky in the primaries and smartly bent a knee to the party apparatus,” Liu writes. “But it seems the correct view now is that an unstoppably destructive force has, in the span of a year, laid waste not only to the brightest lights of the Republican Party, but to the party’s own best attempt to give him the very thing he’s ostensibly running for.”

For fun: This is why the weakest USA basketball squad in recent memory is still a blast to watch.

With a lack of cohesion, defensive lapses, offensive stagnation, and heaps of passive-aggressive shade,

Katy