Democrats have been feeling pretty smug. Surely, if we had a lefty equivalent of Donald Trump as our nominee, they say, we’d muster better than the non-repudiations coming from Republican leaders this summer? Not so fast, Seth Stevenson writes, imagining a world in which Sean Penn managed to secure the nomination. “Neither party has a monopoly on shortsighted, tribal behavior,” Stevenson writes. “It’s not difficult to envision Democrats supporting an absurd candidate out of inane partisanship or in hopes (even gossamer hopes) of a precious November win.”
Michael Dukakis has some advice for Hillary Clinton, as he told Isaac Chotiner on the phone on Monday: “We had a very good convention in 1988, and this was a very good convention. But my demise demonstrates pretty clearly that you can have a great convention and get beat.”
The recent outbreak of Zika in Florida is being handled well. Marc Siegel compares it with the much more serious situation in Puerto Rico and asks what could account for the difference: “Here, we tend to imagine the worst and are preoccupied with exaggerated risks. The operative response to a new outbreak of Zika in Florida is irrational fear, whereas in Puerto Rico it is irrational denial.”
Farmworkers picking produce in American fields experience wage theft at a high rate. There’s a Depression-era statute that could help pressure employers to fix this, Gabriel Thompson writes, but “it’s rarely deployed to protect farmworkers, though one would be hard-pressed to find a workforce that needed it more.”
Rumaan Alam sings the praises of Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day, asking children’s book authors to allow diverse protagonists to star in simple, fanciful books that don’t take on hefty social issues. “Must every book featuring black faces force our children to confront the tortures of our past and the troubles of our present?” Alam asks. “To give young readers who are black, brown, or any sort of different only books about their difference is burdensome.”
For fun: One man’s spiraling obsession with Pokémon Go.
Not a pretty picture,
Rebecca
