A time to be seen: In 2017, Pride can mean any number of things, but the common thread is visibility: “LGBTQ people need to be seen to be respected,” writes J. Bryan Lowder. Join Slate’s Outward as it spends the week re-examining the long-standing values of the LGBTQ movement, and exploring what it means to be queer and visible.
“A special cruelty”: Senate Democrats have settled on a single word to describe the health care bill their Republican colleagues unveiled yesterday: meaner. Jordan Weissmann unpacks whether the Dems are on point.
The fear defense: Jamelle Bouie breaks down the powerful narrative that police officers who kill black people are successfully using to get acquitted: fear. “If, in America, fear of black people is prima-facie reasonable, then the police who kill them will always find a sympathetic ear, a juror or jurors who agree that a ‘reasonable officer’ would have been afraid,” Bouie writes.
Stroking nostalgia: Franz Nicolay, former keyboardist from the Hold Steady, reviews Meet Me in the Bathroom, an oral history recounting the Strokes-led rock renaissance that took over New York City in the early 2000s. Nicolay’s experiences only minimally overlap with the author’s, but he still devoured the book for its “juicy gossip and catty score-settling.”
For fun: Don’t blame him for being honest: Sam Adams loved the new Transformers.
Now transforming into weekend mode,
Chau
