Mormons don’t like Donald Trump, Max Perry Mueller writes—and their dislike is so intense that Hillary Clinton might actually win Utah. “The Mormons know something about being scapegoats,” Mueller observes, describing a history of religious persecution; moreover, the church has so many international members now that a Trumpish policy of isolationism is not to their liking.
Add people who have been trained to handle nuclear weapons to today’s list of those dismayed by Trump. Isaac Chotiner interviewed John Noonan, a former nuclear missile officer and adviser to Republican candidates, about the prospect of Trump’s fingers on the trigger. “I don’t know if he understands the gravity of nuclear weapons enough to take it seriously,” Noonan told Chotiner.
Gabriel Roth always thought his kids would love classic children’s lit: Corduroy, Where The Wild Things Are. Instead, they beg for subliterary stories populated by branded characters from TV and movies. This, he writes, “reflects the tendency of children to slip out from underneath the romantic notions that adults like me have about them. We like to imagine that children embody certain qualities we cherish in ourselves: our sensitivity, our curiosity, our capacity for wonder. But real kids are cruder and hungrier than our quaint little inner children.”
The Olympics are awful, and Brazil is particularly unprepared for these Olympics. Justin Peters recognizes these to be true facts. But he can’t help it: He just loves the Summer Games. “There is no grace without sin, after all,” Peters writes. “It is possible to love the player while hating the game, as noted sports commentator Ice-T put it, and there are a lot of players to love at this—and every—Olympics.”
Looking at Tuesday’s Associated Press piece casting doubt on the necessity of flossing, Annie Behr writes that the research is just too incomplete for us to know whether we should keep on faithfully threading food out of our teeth every night. No closure here! Alas.
For fun: A comedian wrote up a script for a hypothetical post–9/11 Seinfeld episode.
It’s pretty great,
Rebecca
