The Angle

The Angle: Actor-Botanist Edition

Slate’s daily newsletter on arts-shaming, NBC’s terrible Commander-in-Chief Forum, and the miracle of the AirPod.

Artist at Work
Minnetta Good, “Artist at Work,” 1935–43.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

NBC News’ Wednesday night Commander-in-Chief Forum was a “debacle,” Will Saletan writesModerator Matt Lauer let Trump play “his usual tricks,” and in his responses to several questions about ISIS, the candidate “proudly underscored his authoritarian ambitions.” Siri Hustvedt, on the other hand, detected a “subtle variation of the misogyny illness” that’s plagued the campaign this year in the way Lauer questioned Hillary Clinton, “continually interrupting” her “sharp, specific answers” to his questions.

With an ill-advised promotional campaign, Wells Fargo recently joined a growing group of voices shaping education in the liberal and fine arts into a scapegoat for American unemployment. That’s a shame, Helaine Olen writes; this problem is much bigger than the arts, and it’s not fixable by the widespread earning of STEM degrees. “The issue isn’t what people are studying in college,” Olen argues. “It’s that the workforce remains so unstable while, at the same time, students need to borrow so much to study anything at all.”

Apple AirPods—$159 wireless headphones meant to pair with Apple products—have been roundly mocked since the company’s Wednesday announcement that it would be getting rid of the classic headphone jack in its next generation of phones. Will Oremus, for one, would like to stand up for the AirPod, which he calls “the company’s first ear computer”—full of features that might convince you they’re worth the price tag.

Laura Miller, professional book critic, loves looking at amateur book reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. “If you’re willing to escape your bubble, the internet can teach you the infinite variety of ways that a person can experience a book,” Miller writes. “The novel I regard as brilliant never quite wins the audience I feel it deserves, while the one I wave away as mawkishly overwritten strikes the reading public as wonderful. This happened before the internet, of course, but now, thanks to reader reviews, I stand a better chance of finding out why.”

For Samantha K. Smith, whose father, an NYPD officer, spent eight months searching the pit at ground zero for remains of first responders, the word “hero” doesn’t quite work. Smith writes about her family’s experience, musing: “I’ve never understood the improbable weight that word puts on the shoulders of men like my father. Is there space within the hero to also be a man, a father, and a husband—one who suffers just like anyone else would when confronted with so much death and destruction?”

For fun: The New York Times has some pretty choice egg on its face.

Hey, we’re all human,

Rebecca