Happy Friday, Slate Plus!
This week’s Slate cover story is a fascinating and scary piece of reporting by Jennifer Miller on Mercy Multiplied, a network of Christian treatment centers where troubled young women come to believe their mental-health counselors speak for God.
Also in the magazine this week:
- Franklin Foer revealed that Trump adviser Paul Manafort is a more sinister figure than even the phrase “Trump adviser” suggests
- Seth Stevenson found out why this election campaign hasn’t given us a single memorable speech
- Jamelle Bouie reminded us how weird and terrifying it is that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president
- And a crack team of Slatesters assessed Beyoncé’s Lemonade—as an album, a political statement, and an exercise in gossip management.
Not from Slate
“Neil deGrasse Tyson Is a Black Hole, Sucking the Fun Out of the Universe” by Sam Kriss, Wired
Loving “science” doesn’t mean being smarter than everybody else: It means reveling in how much we have to learn. What at first reads as a harsh Neil deGrasse Tyson takedown becomes a heartfelt defense of looking at the world with the wonder, beauty, and curiosity it deserves. —Rachel E. Gross, editorial assistant
“Never Crossing the Botox Rubicon” by Amanda Peet, Lenny
As an aging woman desperate for external validation of her appearance, Amanda Peet was the best thing about HBO’s recently canceled Togetherness. She plays herself in this sharp and funny Lenny essay but explores similar themes—getting older, saggier, and wrinklier; caring a lot about that; and wondering what caring so much is teaching her daughter. Amanda Peet: Just like us. —Allison Benedikt, news director
“Inside ‘Emojigeddon’: The Fight Over the Future of the Unicode Consortium” by Charlie Warzel, BuzzFeed
Internal tensions are boiling over at the Unicode Consortium, the academic group that oversees emojis, which some members believe is forgetting its historic mission. With the help of some very piqued internal emails, Charlie Warzel writes a funny, thought-provoking story that pokes at some big questions about language in 2016. —Jordan Weissmann, senior business and economics correspondent
“Audubon Made Up at Least 28 Fake Species to Prank a Rival” by Sarah Laskow, Atlas Obscura
Almost 200 years ago the naturalist John James Audubon pranked his colleague Constantine Rafinesque, tricking him into recording taxonomic entries on invented animals such as the brindled stamiter and the lion-tail jumping mouse. The incident only came to light recently, and Laskow’s article offers a charming account of why it matters—and some of the silliest drawings you’ll look at this week. —Jacob Brogan, technology and culture writer
Also: The best thing I read this month was this beautiful n+1 essay on Silicon Valley. Jamelle Bouie loved this Jacobin essay about affordable housing. And this magnificent piece on chicken tenders just won a James Beard Award, which is a great opportunity to read or reread it.
Very Short Q-and-A
This week’s personal question is addressed to Slate senior technology writer Will Oremus.
Slate Plus: I recently learned that you are responsible for the Twitter account @The_Death_Of, which you stopped updating in 2014. What was that about?
Will Oremus: I just used it to tweet headlines about “x is dead.” It was partly to make fun of the media’s eagerness to declare things dead that are pretty clearly not dead. I stopped because it was too much work to keep up, for no reward at all.
The most useful thing about it was to remind me just how lonely and pointless Twitter feels when you don’t have a lot of followers, i.e., to the vast majority of people. I’m not saying it was the greatest account in the world, but it got like zero favs and retweets. To me this is Twitter’s single greatest problem—it feels like a losing battle unless you already have some big public platform that will get you lots of followers. I think that’s something that it’s easy for most of us in the media to forget.
Thanks, Will! And thank you for your Slate Plus membership, which makes our journalism possible. See you next week!
Gabriel Roth
Editorial director, Slate Plus
