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Nothing’s Happening

The Slate Plus Digest for April 21.

Cat and dog are friends.

This cat and dog are friends, just like Slate and Slate Plus members.

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Is this post a red-hot take on the Trump presidency or an excuse for Ben Mathis-Lilley to clock off early on a Friday evening? Can’t it be both? Stop trying to force everything into crude binary categories, man.

From Slate

Many scientists have a very unscientific belief that they can change minds by explaining science. Here’s what they should be doing instead.

Leon Neyfakh’s look at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under George W. Bush is a dark preview of what Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump might have in store.

The confusion around the USS Carl Vinson—the aircraft carrier that wasn’t really heading for North Korea—suggests that military chain of command under Trump is dangerously broken.

Henry Kissinger viciously damned Jared Kushner with faint praise in the pages of Time.

Bill O’Reilly’s long career of turning B.S. into “common sense” is over, but his ugly brand of egotism and resentment lives on, in the White House.

More retail workers have been laid off since October than work in the coal industry. Why doesn’t Washington care?

Not From Slate

Medical mystery story of the week: 14 opioid addicts in Massachusetts suddenly lost their memories, and no one knows why.

What’s it like to hike the Appalachian trail, alone, as a black woman?

Adam Gopnik diagnoses the media’s new habit of “willfully substituting, as a motive for Trump’s latest action, a conventional political or geostrategic ambition, rather than recognizing the action as the daily spasm of narcissistic gratification and episodic vanity that it truly is.”

The next king of England is such a dopey little twerp.

Mother Jones had this fascinating look at militant, underground anti-racist groups in the Midwest that advocate fighting back—sometimes literally—against white supremacists and the alt-right.

Leah Finnegan takes on the New York Timesnewest op-ed columnist: “Stephens fancies himself a logical man, a realist, and a recurring theme in his work is that anything he disagrees with constitutes a ‘panic.’ ”

From the Archive

In 2015, Slate books and culture critic Laura Miller read every book in Bill O’Reilly’s odd Killing series:

The Killing books are often said to read like thrillers: short on context and complexity and long on action, crosscutting between multiple storylines, cliff-hangers, and one-sentence paragraphs. Yet the Killing books don’t really resemble any fictional thriller I’ve ever read. They’re Frankenstein productions, with odd and seemingly extraneous bits awkwardly grafted onto the main narrative like a third arm or leg.

She didn’t love them.

Have a good weekend, and thanks for your membership.

Gabriel Roth
Editorial director, Slate Plus