The Angle

The Angle: Mythical Pivot Edition

Slate’s daily newsletter on the resets that weren’t, the sport that could, and the dorm rooms that shouldn’t.

Beach volleyball: pro or con? Kerri Walsh Jennings playing in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday.

Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images

Rebecca Onion is on vacation. Your substitute Angle writer today is L.V. Anderson.

It’s become clear that voters will never see “the most mythical of creatures: the Trump campaign reset, aka the general election pivot, aka the overdue electoral reinvention,” writes Josh Voorhees. In case you’ve forgotten how many times Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee have promised a more disciplined, less crazy candidate, Voorhees revisited the very long history of “pivots” and “interventions” that didn’t take.

Watching Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross serve, pass, and dig on the sands of Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, you may have found yourself wondering: Is beach volleyball good? To help you decide, Slate pitted Justin Peters against Jacob Brogan for a written debate. Peters, arguing in favor of beach volleyball, writes, “It is easy to understand. The players are very fit. It takes place on a beach, which means I do not have to worry about the combatants skinning their knees when diving for a ball.” Fair points. “If you’ve seen one Olympic beach volleyball match, you’ve seen every Olympic beach volleyball match,” retorts Brogan. There’s only one way to settle this, boys.

The Get Down, Baz Luhrmann’s new Netflix show about the early days of hip-hop, is “garish, cacophonous, tonally bonkers, frequently ridiculous, and occasionally thrilling”—but it completely botches the history it purports to tell, writes Jack Hamilton. Hamilton details a few of the show’s unforced errors, the most baffling of which involves overdubbing Daveed Diggs, an accomplished rapper, with Nas’ voice. “[T]he show’s slapdash flailing at authenticity might alienate what should have been its most enthusiastic audience: viewers who care about hip-hop, which in 2016 is quite a lot of people,” writes Hamilton.

That picture of a gorgeous, color-coordinated, ultra-luxurious Ole Miss dorm room that has taken over the internet this week? An abomination, says Christina Cauterucci. “This room, and others like it, make the living spaces of my college career look like dumpsters full of moth-eaten Ed Hardy T-shirts,” Cauterucci writes, before asking the hard questions: “Where are the embarrassing poetry books and piles of toiletries? Why is there a tiny curtain to camouflage the microwave? Where do all those throw pillows go when the girls have to go to sleep?”

For fun: When a Roomba goes up against animal poop, no one wins.

Garish, cacophonous, and tonally bonkers,

L.V. Anderson