R.I.P.: If it was rock music, shapeshifter Tom Petty could rock it, Chris Molanphy writes. Willa Paskin celebrates Petty’s excellent road trip music, and Gabe Roth argues Petty wrote the best first lines ever. His biographer Warren Zanes remembers the purity of Petty’s devotion to music and his refreshing lack of pretension.
We just don’t know: Hospitals have to rely on anecdote and word of mouth to figure out how to handle influxes of casualties from mass shootings. This is the gun lobby’s fault, Jeremy Samuel Faust writes.
The right case: The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Gill v. Whitford today. If any case is going to meet Justice Kennedy’s stated requirements for a decision breaking up partisan gerrymandering, it’s going to be this one, Perry Grossman and Dahlia Lithwick write. (Mark Joseph Stern reports on Justice Gorsuch’s steak-seasoning woes and other conundrums raised in oral arguments.)
A tradition to break: Nobel Prizes should be given to fields, not to individuals, Devang Mehta writes. The idea that individuals—or even duos or trios—“make” scientific discoveries is wildly outdated.
For fun: Get your nametags, men.
A good idea,
Rebecca
