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The Failure of Welfare Reform

If you want a sense of how thoroughly America’s welfare system has decayed thanks to the reforms Bill Clinton signed into law two decades ago, consider Arizona.

Your State on Welfare

In the two decades since welfare reform, the number of poor families receiving cash welfare has plummeted by more than half. In 2014, just 23 out of every 100 poor families received cash welfare. Compare that with 1996, when 68 of every 100 poor families received cash welfare. So how do states spend their welfare dollars? Marketplace crunched the numbers:

Your Self-Driving Car Cheat Sheet

Key Players:

Should Humans Turn In Their Driver’s Licenses?

Apparently self-driving cars are actually happening? I read that Ford patented a movie screen that projects onto the inside of windshields. And apparently experts are convinced that people are going to have tons of sex in driverless vehicles? Is this stuff for real?

Anything for Love

Mallory Ortberg, aka Dear Prudence, is online weekly to chat live with readers. An edited transcript of the chat is below. (Sign up below to get Dear Prudence delivered to your inbox each week. Read Prudie’s Slate columns here. Send questions to Prudence at [email protected].)

Hear My Ántonia

In conjunction with our Slate Academy series A Year of Great Books, Audible is giving Slate Plus members a special gift: a complimentary audiobook of Willa Cather’s masterpieceMy Ántonia, read by Jeff Cummings. Claim your audiobook here.

The Angle: Another Canon Edition

Declaring “It’s time to fight the canons that be,” Aisha Harris and Dan Kois assembled a super-team of critics, filmmakers, and scholars to pick the 50 best films by black directors. You can browse them by tag or title, watch a video supercut, or argue for your neglected favorites on Twitter.

Hang Up and Listen: The Three Is Worth More Than Two Edition

Listen to Hang Up and Listen with Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

Are Skim Drinkers Milking It?

Listen to Episode 508 of Slate’s The Gist:

Dear Prudence Live Chat

Need help getting along with partners, relatives, co-workers, and people in general? Ask Dear Prudence! Mallory Ortberg takes your questions on manners, morals, and more. Please keep your questions succinct (recommended max. length is around 150 words). Submit yours ahead of time below:

Freaking Out About the Trump-Clinton Polls? Here’s a Better Way to Read Them.

Early general-election polls have been released, and liberals are freaking out. Donald Trump is almost dead even with Hillary Clinton in the RealClearPolitics average of national surveys, upending assumptions that the race wouldn’t be close. Some Democrats are denouncing the polls as skewed. Others are sinking into panic or fatalism.

How Much Do You Really Know About Drones?

This May, Future Tense has been interrogating supposed creepiness of drones as part of our ongoing project Futurography, which introduces readers to a new technological or scientific topic each month. Now’s your chance to show how much you’ve learned.

Tell Us What You Think About Drones

Over the past month, we’ve published a host of articles about drones as part of our fifth installment of Futurography—a project from Future Tense in which we explore a different technological issue each month. We’ve seen experts exploring legal ambiguities, challenging common misconceptions, and investigating the best metaphors to help us understand what these things actually are.

Um, Erm, Well …

Storm Chasers, Stay Home

Last week, the National Weather Service tallied more than 120 tornado reports across 10 states. All in all, that means it’s been a pretty average week in late May in the heartland—this is peak tornado season, after all.

Don’t Be Upset About Harambe

The Cincinnati Zoo’s decision to shoot a 17-year-old gorilla named Harambe to save a 4-year-old child who fell into the enclosure Saturday has generated lots of channels of outrage. Primatologists are debating just how agitated the gorilla looked (pretty agitated). People who have most likely never taken care of several small children at once are arguing about just how negligent the boy’s mother was (probably not negligent). And animal rights activists are surfacing in great numbers to demand justice for the gorilla.

Are the Kochs Really Sitting This One Out?

Donald Trump’s shake-up of the Republican Party has not only changed the GOP’s public posture, but also caused a stir behind the scenes. Charles and David Koch—the either infamous or heroic Koch Brothers, depending on your politics—have decided to play a much smaller role in this year’s presidential campaign. As the National Review recentlyreported, the brothers plan to pull back on investing in Trump vs. Clinton, as well as other national races, in part because of a strong distaste for the presumptive Republican nominee. (Charles Koch even allowed that it is “possible” Hillary Clinton would make a better president than Trump.)

The Media Finally Figured Out How to Rattle Donald Trump

Donald Trump, to his credit, makes himself readily available to the press. This does not always mean that the press always makes the most of Trump’s availabilities or that Trump uses the time to offer thoughtful responses. At his not-infrequent press conferences, Trump typically babbles about his greatness and the weakness of his opponents, and the press laughs along with the shtick, gets its quotes, and moves along.

The Heroes Golden State Needs

At the start of the fourth quarter of Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals, TNT’s David Aldridge asked Warriors coach Steve Kerr how his team had wrested the lead from the Thunder. “We started trusting each other. We made a couple threes, but more importantly we started moving the ball,” Kerr said. “I thought [third-string center Anderson] Varejao made a couple of brilliant plays for us.”

Are You Nervous?

To listen to this episode of Trumpcast, use the player below:

How to Pull Off a Bar Mitzvah for Your Atheist Son

For May 26’s Slate Plus bonus segment, Mom and Dad Are Fighting invites Slate’s DoubleX Gabfest host Hanna Rosin to talk about a recent “triumphant failure” in her life: her teenage son’s bar mitzvah. Listen to Hanna’s struggles with forcing her atheist son to go through the ceremony, and how the whole thing turned out to be an unexpected success.

Why Are So Many Swear Words Monosyllabic?

Listen to Lexicon Valley Episode No. 86:

Should the Statute of Limitations Apply to the Bill Cosby Case?

On May 24, a Pennsylvania judge ordered Bill Cosby to face criminal trial for sexual assault charges filed against the celebrity. In the May 26 edition of the Political Gabfest’s Slate Plus bonus segment, hosts David Plotz, John Dickerson, and Emily Bazelon debate the statute of limitations on the Cosby case. Should it apply to a crime that occurred 12 years ago? Does rape warrant the same statute of limitations as murder? And what’s next for the man known for his iconic sweaters and his family TV show? The Political Gabfest takes on these questions and more—so stay tuned!

Is America Really in an Anti-Establishment Rage?

The great cliché of the 2016 presidential election is that there’s an anti-establishment mood in the electorate. That Americans just aren’t going to take it anymore. It’s why Republicans have picked Donald Trump to lead their party—and their country—for the next four years and why millions of Democrats have lined up behind Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in his strong primary challenge to Hillary Clinton.

Uncertainty, Unpredictability, Chaos

This year’s admissions headlines covered selectivity rates, surviving the process, getting into the dream school, and Costco. On the whole, the headlines were fairly predictable. But next year?

Like Ants, Only Cuter

In the video above, scientists at Stanford University experiment to see if low-powered robots can be coaxed into acting as a team, and what they might be able to accomplish together. What they found is kind of startling.