What’s happening, Plus? Some children were in the Slate New York office today, recording something for our corporate sibling the Panoply podcast network, and so we were instructed by H.R. not to consume any alcohol in any of the main office areas for most of the work day. It was … fine, actually, because who does that? But now they’re gone and it’s Friday evening, which is when we crack open a cold one and enjoy some thinkpieces. Such as:
From Slate
- Fred Kaplan’s review of Trump’s U.N. address: “the most hostile, dangerous, and intellectually confused—if not outright dishonest—speech ever delivered by an American president to an international body.”
- The wealth gap between black and white Americans is vast—and, most frighteningly, it’s growing.
- From Always Right, our new pop-up blog about customer service: Benjamin Frisch on the challenge of selling people drawings of themselves, and Rachel Withers on the surprising value of the weak ties between service employees and regular customers.
- I loved this Laura Miller essay on the state of the female-friendship novel.
- Why is Best Buy surviving the e-commerce boom while Toys R Us is dying? The answer has to do with the limits of private equity.
- Slatepitch of the week: Meteorological forecasting is actually really good.
Not from Slate
- Why antitrust reform is moving to the top of the Democratic agenda—and how it could win.
- If you’ve ever posted a Snopes.com link to debunk fake news on Facebook, you should read Michelle Dean’s piece on the site’s surprisingly murky history.
- Most delightful personal essay of the week: Emily Gould’s memoir-cum-taxonomy of domestic goddesses, from Nora Ephron through Nigella Lawson.
- A close reading of Hillary Clinton’s “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of business” gaffe, and what it says about coverage of the 2016 campaign.
- Carl Zimmer’s talk on science and science journalism is an exemplar of clear thinking about the threat to democratic institutions.
- If you were wondering what conversation sounded like in Julia Turner’s childhood home, here’s a transcript.
I hope your weekend is full of delights and that you’re not one of the people who goes to see Mother! and then gets really mad about it. Thank you for your membership.
Gabriel Roth
Editorial director, Slate Plus
P.S. If you do go see Mother!, don’t miss our critics’ discussion on the resurrected Slate Spoiler Special podcast.
