Slate Plus

100 Days, 100 Nights, to Know a Man’s Heart

The Slate Plus Digest for April 28.

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It’s almost time. Tomorrow, if tomorrow comes, we can all put on those “I Survived 100 Days of the Trump Presidency” T-shirts—including Donald himself, of course. “It’s an artificial barrier. It’s not very meaningful,” Trump protested of that marker this week, shortly before trying to cram in an overhaul of health care (again), a simple but lucrative-for-him tax reform plan, and a brief threat to launch the Great Canadian–American Milk Wars. Not meaningful? Easy for him to say. We had to write about it.

From Slate

Who has kept Trump in check? We put together a list of the people and institutions balancing the executive branch, from King Abdullah II of Jordan to Sally Yates.

Michelle Goldberg hopes you like investigating Trump mischief, because we’re gonna be doing that for a long, long time after these 100 days are over.

Who had the better first 100 days, Trump or William Henry Harrison, who spent most of that period dead? Ben Mathis-Lilley finds it’s a nail-biter!

Great American filmmaker Jonathan Demme died on Wednesday at age 73. Sam Adams wrote about his brilliance, versatility, and generous spirit.

Television conversions of beloved literary best-sellers are 2 for 2 this month: Following the much-praised series based on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods hit this week. Laura Miller says it is “miraculously, just right.”

Emmanuel Macron, 39, slid into first place in France’s first-round presidential election on Sunday and will face right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen in the May runoff. Christina Cauterucci wrote about Macron’s long-lasting May-December love affair with his former high school teacher, Brigitte Trogneux—now his wife—and how differently we’d see that relationship if the gender roles were reversed.

In a blistering Supreme Court dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor took on a now common justification for police shootings of unarmed men of color, writes Mark Joseph Stern: that they were reaching for their waistbands, for weapons they didn’t have.

Not From Slate

Your major Trump 100-day interviews this week include this from the Associated Press (Unintelligible Remix)—plus, here, read Jamelle Bouie’s bonus commentary on how this interview goes straight to the heart of Trump’s insecurity—and this from Reuters (Have I Shown You My Electoral College Map Remix).

Those wacky New Hampshire state legislators! There are approximately a zillion of them, and they get paid almost nothing. That’s how you get politicians like this guy, whom the Daily Beast just figured out is the creator of the notoriously anti-woman Red Pill forum of Reddit. A woolly and delightful long read.

Netflix is doing great with buzz on TV shows. So why, asks Decider, do its feature films tend to sink like stones?

A short but strangely poignant Boston Globe story about people who have no official first names on their birth certificates, reminding us of how much better we’ve gotten at saving babies; parents used to hesitate to name ones they thought they might lose.

A heart-rending Highline profile from the HuffPost (congrats on the new lewk and name, guys) on a valiant gun-wound trauma surgeon, Amy Goldberg, at Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia.

From the Archive

Watch Jonathan Demme and David Byrne talk about one of the greatest concert films ever made, Stop Making Sense.

Have a beautiful weekend, and thanks for your membership.

Amanda Katz
Senior editor