This week we learned that Donald Trump likes his steak well-done, and right-wingers scrambled to reassess their tastes according to some absurd ideological-culinary matrix, because nothing in the world—no pleasure or preference, no momentary sensation, no inexpressible quale—now exists untouched by the malevolent clown show that is American politics. In Slate, Christina Cauterucci wandered boldly into the semiotic labyrinth of carnivorous performative masculinity; in Eater, Helen Rosner mapped Trump’s gustatory instincts onto his political ones.
From Slate
- The notorious Tuskegee study—in which black men were given phony syphilis treatments as doctors watched their bodies degrade—had an even more outrageous predecessor, Sushma Subramanian reports. The victims are still waiting for treatment.
- Town hall meetings with congressional representatives are somehow “the best show in America … a viral video factory, a hot ticket, and the latest stage for the awakening on the American left.” Henry Grabar went on the road to find out why.
- Why did venture capitalist Marc Andreessen block Slate’s Will Oremus on Twitter? Oremus paid $20 to find out! Was it worth it? You be the judge! (Probably not.)
- Michelle Goldberg watched Trump’s prime-time speech Tuesday night. “For much of Trump’s address, I worried that it sounded more presidential than usual,” she writes. But “by the end of the speech, [he] was back to being his familiar foul self.”
- Will Jeff Sessions go down on perjury charges? Probably not. (That doesn’t mean there’s no point in an investigation.)
Not From Slate
- “In our lifetime, the gay community has made more progress on legal and social acceptance than any other demographic group in history.” And yet the high rates of depression, loneliness, and substance abuse in the gay community have not fallen. Why?
- Always read the fine print or you might end up renting your dog and paying thousands of dollars for the privilege
- Everyone at Slate cried about this Modern Love column today.
- An obsessive cult has grown up around The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, a dark, melancholy video game from 2000.
- PSA: Do not buy toys that are connected to the internet. “ ‘Exterminate, annihilate, destroy,’ the unicorn-shaped pet toy says.”
Thanks for reading, and have a good weekend, and thank you for your Slate Plus membership, which makes our journalism possible. See you next week!
Gabriel Roth
Editorial director, Slate Plus
