The Angle

The Angle: Turn Up the Gaslight Edition

Slate’s daily newsletter on the legacy of Idiocracy, an unfamous baseball star, and Tuesday night’s VP debate.

A young woman photographs flowers left by other visitors at the Berlin Wall memorial, November 9, 2015, in Berlin, Germany. 

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

What happened last night: The vice presidential debate was, for Mike Pence, an exercise in artful gaslighting, Jamelle Bouie writes. Mark Joseph Stern can’t understand why nobody asked Pence about his anti–LGBTQ record; given the paltry amount of time afforded the subject last night, Michelle Goldberg would like us to remember that Trump and Pence are running on a platform of forced birth. Was the moderator, Elaine Quijano, just bad at her job? Isaac Chotiner votes yes.

The unhailed life: The Los Angeles Angels’ Mike Trout is probably the best baseball player we’ve got. So why isn’t he famous? Mike Schur has theories, starting with Anaheim’s epic boringness.

What Plants Crave: The 10th anniversary of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy is upon us, and Sam Adams thinks that the movie—which opened with little fanfare in 2006, and has since been hailed as prescient so often as to render the observation a cliché—is really coming into its own in the age of Trump.

A goodbye: Slatesters Andrew Kahn and Shoh Arieh-Lerer were best friends with the poet Max Ritvo, who died in August at the age of 25. In July, they had a conversation about a poem Ritvo wrote memorializing their friendship; here’s the transcript.

For fun: Happy first birthday to a deliciously bad tweet!

May you remain forever undeleted,

Rebecca