Fancy seeing you here: Clarence Thomas voted with the liberal wing of the Supreme Court on Monday in a decision designating the formation of two congressional districts in North Carolina as racial gerrymandered. Mark Joseph Stern explains that this is just Thomas’ utterly consistent race-blindness, working to our advantage for a change.
Thinking big: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced on Monday that it will expanded the number of districts it plans to target for possible turnover in 2018. Jim Newell explains the DCCC’s optimistic strategy.
Class in the cloud: Looking to boost graduation rates, many schools have turned to something called “online credit recovery,” which lets students take classes online to make up for courses failed IRL. We’re running a series of pieces on this dubious practice, including a first-person account from a 30-year-old who took a few online courses and found them both broad and strangely superficial—not to mention totally boring.
Cardigan remedy: The platform Twitch is airing all of the episodes of the children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Phillip Maciak recommends catching a few. “If, for any particular reason, you’d be interested in watching a show about a man who accepts, embraces, and empathizes with his neighbors, effectively controls his emotions, lives a life imbued with imagination and radical kindness, and teaches us that ‘feelings are mentionable and manageable,’ ” Maciak writes, “then I have a trolley you should catch.”
New series siren: Slate Plus has launched a Conspiracy Thrillers Movie Club, hosted by our Sam Adams. They’ll be talking about The Manchurian Candidate, the Bourne movies, Get Out, and more. Sign up for Plus to follow along.
For fun: Bake a cake that’s a loaf, and also a scone.
If you say so,
Rebecca
