Special relationship: Resident Canadian Chris Berube explains why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can’t criticize Trump, even if it would score him points back home: Canada’s trade relationships with the U.S. are simply too valuable to risk.
The rhetoric of protest signs: Do cutesy protest signs undermine the seriousness of Donald Trump’s transgressions? Katy Waldman posits that maybe these quirky, ironic, sometimes repetitive signs are just what democracy looks like now.
“Legally here”: Mark Stern writes about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ arrest of a 23-year-old Mexican immigrant living in Seattle under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. For DACA beneficiaries, the arrest and detainment send a scary message: that they are no longer welcome here.
Baldwin’s legacy: Ismail Muhammad lays out a theory on how critics have misunderstood James Baldwin’s influence on black nonfiction writers—and how a new documentary gets it right.
Paper or … : According to Henry Grabar, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had some pretty strange reasons for killing a law that would have placed a mandatory 5-cent fee on plastic bag sales.
For fun: NASA’s “Space Poop Challenge.”
See you on Mars,
Heather Schwedel
