Meet the Malcolm X of Mauritania
Each week, Roads & Kingdoms and Slate publish a new dispatch from around the globe. For more foreign correspondence mixed with food, war, travel, and photography, visit their online magazine or follow @roadskingdoms on Twitter.
Trump’s Attack on Judge Curiel Is Not Only Racist
Let’s start by agreeing on this: No truly sane person can defend Donald Trump’s vile, racist slander against Gonzalo Curiel. The Southern California federal district judge is currently presiding over two class-action lawsuits filed by former students against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s Trump University. The “University” and Trump are on the hook for allegedly using predatory marketing practices to sell worthless real estate classes. Last week, Curiel ordered documents containing damaging statements from former Trump University employees released to the public. The documents were damning. Grifters gonna’ grift.
Where’d She Learn That?
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].)
A Shocking Electric Eel Myth, Confirmed
At the turn of the 19th century, German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt was exploring South America when he hired a group of local fishermen to collect electric eels for him. Humboldt had been experimenting with creating batteries, and was eager to find what he called “living electric apparatuses.”
The Supreme Court Needs to Settle Birthright Citizenship
Soon, the Supreme Court will decide whether to take a case of astounding constitutional importance. Its outcome could alter the rules governing citizenship, equal protection, and the power of the federal government. And it centers around a tiny chain of islands that you probably cannot find on a map.
Crazy Party
This article appears in slightly different form in the Financial Times.
Hang Up and Listen: The Great, Greater, Greatest Edition
Listen to Hang Up and Listen with Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:
Muhammad Ali’s Peaceful Passing Is His Final Victory
The death of Muhammad Ali has been described by his family spokesman as “a very peaceful passing.” To a doctor’s ears, that’s code for “he wasn’t coded.” No chest compressions, no artificial breathing machines. After leading a most exceptional life, Ali’s dignified encounter with death makes him, in this doctor’s eyes, a champion yet again. Far too few of our sickest and most frail patients die with such dignity, surrounded by their caring families rather than a team of doctors and nurses pounding on a frail chest in vain attempts to restart a heart.
Should I Sit Out of the Trump Takedown?
In Thursday’s editionthe June 2 edition of the Political Gabfest’s Slate Plus bonus segment, hosts David Plotz and Emily Bazelon are joined by New York Times Magazine columnistAdam Davidson to talk about a question a lot of journalists have been wondering lately: “How objective should I stay when it comes to Donald Trump?” None of the hosts want to see Trump win the 2016 presidential election, but how do their views line up when it comes to speaking out against him? The Political Gabfest talks Trump takedown tactics and journalistic limits—so stay tuned!
The Fed Had 51 “Cyberbreaches”
On Wednesday, Reuters reported that the Federal Reserve detected 51 cyber breaches between 2011 and 2015, according to documents that the news organization obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The report prompted panicky headlines: “Fed records show dozens of cybersecurity breaches,” “Fed records show over 50 cybersecurity breaches: report,” “Fed Had Many Cyber Breaches in Recent Years, Reuters Reports,” “Federal Reserve under attack by hacker spies.”
Dispatches From the Front
When I learned I had cancer, my first inclination—after I called my mother and collapsed against my girlfriend—was to write. My disease was, I would explain on my blog, a small thing, a malignant nodule on my thyroid so tiny I was surprised my endocrinologist had detected it at all. And yet, minuscule as it was, the mere knowledge that it was there shattered me.
Game of Thrones Podcast
In this edition of Slate’s Game of Thrones podcast, a members-only TV Club, Dan Kois and Willa Paskin recap Episode 7 of Season 6.
The Great Masterpiece of Human Civilization
There was once a time, not very long ago, when you went on the internet. You went on it, that is, in more or less the same spirit as you went on a Ferris wheel at a carnival, or a trip to the seaside: You went on it, you stayed on it for a bit, and then you went about your business again. This seems an improbably quaint idea now, when being online is more an existential condition than a thing you might or might not choose to do with your free time. (Consider the terms logging on and logging off, which read now as weird linguistic curios of an era long passed, when to fire up your modem was to undertake a kind of notional passage, a voyage into something called cyberspace.)
Drone Ballet
In “Sky Magic,” from Japanese advertising company MicroAd, 20 drones with LED lights attached to them dance in a choreographed light show against the backdrop of Mount Fuji. Shamisen players serve as their orchestra.
When Muhammad Ali Took on America
A version of this essay was originally published in the magazine Reconstruction in 1994 and is reprinted here with permission.
The Sports Writer Who Hated Muhammad Ali
Stefan Fatsis told a version of this story on Slate’s sports podcast Hang Up and Listen in 2014. An adapted transcript of the audio recording is below, and you can listen to his essay by clicking on the player beneath this paragraph and fast-forwarding to the 56:12 mark.
Free Speech in Peril
In Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, Timothy Garton Ash has written an expansive yet precise book on a concept he believes to be in grave danger. Garton Ash, who teaches European studies at Oxford University, made his name covering Central and Eastern Europe in the years before the fall of the Soviet Union. His latest work is an attempt to explain why he thinks advocates for free speech have found themselves on the defensive in so many countries, as well as his opposition to hate-speech laws and those that forbid Holocaust denial. (Last year, he called for the reprinting of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons after the attack on the newspaper’s office.)
The Ethical Quandary of Self-Driving Cars
Imagine the beginning of what promises to be an awesome afternoon: You’re cruising along in your car and the sun is shining. The windows are down, and your favorite song is playing on the radio. Suddenly, the truck in front of you stops without warning. As a result, you are faced with three, and only three, zero-sum options.
“I Was Thinking About Blackness in America”
Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, arrives this month with the sort of pre-release hype that is only heaped on several books per year. First there were the stories about the high price (at least $1 million) that Knopf paid to acquire the book last year from then–25-year-old Gyasi. And now comes the massive promotional campaign, with advance press in themajor newspapers and a long, generous blurb form Ta-Nehisi Coates that appears on both the front and back covers.
“I Agreed That He Should Sign It”
This article is part of the series “Welfare Reform: 20 Years Later,” a collaboration between Slate and Marketplace. You can listen to Marketplace’s podcast on welfare, The Uncertain Hour, here.
Tomorrow’s Test
If you want to know what America will look like in a generation, look at its classrooms right now. In 2014, children of color became the new majority in America’s public schools. Over the last 20 years, the number of Hispanic public schoolchildren has more than doubled, and the number of Asians has swelled by 56 percent. The number of black students and American Indians grew far more modestly—but the number of white students fell by about 15 percent.
Welcome to America. Pack a Parka.
ANCHORAGE, ALASKA—Until the summer of 2014, 16-year-old Florence Mbabazi had spent all of her short life in northern Rwanda’s Gihembe Refugee Camp, a humming sprawl of more than 3,000 mud houses with sheet metal roofs. Her parents, who had been farmers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, fled to the camp in 1997 after civil war tore apart their country. Florence didn’t love all the rules at the camp’s school—students had to wear uniforms, and even the girls had to shave their heads—but she was mostly happy. At least there were always things to do.
The Color of School Reform
NEW ORLEANS—Throughout her first year at KIPP Central City Academy, Raven Foster heard the kind of compliment every educator loves to receive from students: that she was their favorite teacher. The reason, however, wasn’t because her kids loved her science class, or because they liked her sarcastic sense of humor, or because they appreciated her no-nonsense attitude. One after another, they told her they liked her because she’s black.
Let the Slate Anti-Marathon Begin!
Maybe running a marathon is a terrible waste of time, but I sure hope it isn’t. I start my training for the New York City marathon this week, which means that the Slate Anti-Marathon launches as well.
Hang Up and Listen: The Understanding Ali Edition
Listen to Hang Up and Listen with Stefan Fatsis and Josh Levin by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:
Muhammad Ali Was Not a Saint, and He Was Not a Teddy Bear
In 1964, a young New York Times sports writer named Robert Lipsyte was assigned to cover, as he later put it, “the dismemberment” of the fighter then known as Cassius Clay at the hands of heavyweight champion Sonny Liston. After Clay shocked the world, Lipsyte covered the boxer for the next three years as he changed his name to Muhammad Ali and helped redefine sports in American society. And Lipsyte continued to write about Ali through his death on Friday. “An agile mind, a buoyant personality, a brash self-confidence and an evolving set of personal convictions fostered a magnetism that the ring alone could not contain,” Lipsyte writes in his obituary of Ali in the Times. “He entertained as much with his mouth as with his fists, narrating his life with a patter of inventive doggerel.”
Not the Greatest
As a boxer, Muhammad Ali is best remembered for his epic trilogy of fights against Joe Frazier. Upon Frazier’s death in 2011, Robert Lipsyte described the Philadelphia fighter as “the shadow in the Muhammad Ali epic.” Lipsyte wrote that Frazier never forgave Ali for calling him a “gorilla” and an “Uncle Tom,” hurtful slurs that he “could never understand.” The piece is reprinted below.
The King of the World
“The king! The king!” the crowd shouted, swarming the famous American as he sat in an open-top cream-colored convertible.
The Eccentric Genius of Muhammad Ali’s Boxing Style
Muhammad Ali was so much more than just a boxer. “I came to love Ali,” two-time foe Floyd Patterson told David Remnick for his book King of the World. “I came to see that I was a fighter and he was history.” Ali was a political, social, and religious activist, as divisive a figure as any celebrity during the turbulent 1960s. He was the godfather of trash talk. He was a master media manipulator. He was, simply, the most famous man on the planet. Then he became the public face of Parkinson’s and perhaps the most convincing argument for future generations of kids not to pursue boxing. He was, until the end on Friday night, as widely beloved a human as the world knew.
The Best Stories Ever Written About Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali died on Friday at age 74. Here are the greatest stories ever written about the greatest of all time. (Many thanks to Alex Belth, who published several of these pieces on Deadspin’s archive of classic sports journalism, The Stacks.)
35 Miles Underground Through the Gotthard Base Tunnel
Welcome to the longest and deepest train tunnel in the world. The Gotthard Base Tunnel finally opened this week in Switzerland, where it travels underground for 35 miles and takes passengers 1.4 miles beneath the surface. It’s part of a series of projects aimed at improving trade routes and reducing pollution from trucks traveling through Europe.
The Time Muhammad Ali Stopped a Man from Leaping to His Death
On Oct. 2, 1980, Larry Holmes humiliated Muhammad Ali in a matchup billed as “The Last Hurrah.” Though the 38-year-old Ali had flunked a pre-fight neurological exam, the Nevada State Athletic Commission licensed him anyway. Ali’s corner stopped the fight after 10 rounds; Holmes cried in an interview afterwards, seeming to regret the beatdown. “All the people involved in this fight should of been arrested. This fight was an abomination, a crime,” said Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s former ring doctor. “Tired, punched, and punchless, Muhammad Ali ran out of miracles last night,” said ABC’s Dick Schaap.
The Limited Means Edition
Listen to Episode No. 108 of Slate Money:
How Should America Resist a Fascist?
After Donald Trump claimed the Republican presidential nomination, neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan wrote an essay for the Washington Post that made a simple but provocative claim: Trump, now a stone’s throw from the White House, was a vector for fascism. That, in running a campaign of threat and intimidation—against political adversaries, against foreign countries, against nonwhites and religious minorities—Trump had opened the door to the worst passions and darkest urges of American society.
The Angle: Her Own Attack Dog Edition
Hillary Clinton’s Thursday afternoon foreign policy speech in San Diego was extremely satisfying for Fred Kaplan. “On each point, she contrasted his flimsy prejudices not only with her own experience and thought-out views but also with the long-standing, bipartisan traditions of American diplomacy,” Kaplan writes. “The all-but-inevitable Democratic nominee showed that she’s fit to be her own attack dog, mauling her ill-matched Republican foe to shreds without getting muddy in the process.”
The Best of Slate Podcasts
In this edition of our members-only podcast digest, listen to the best segments of the week:
Tim Heidecker Is Tired of Being Meta
Listen to Episode 511 of Slate’s The Gist:
“Developing”? Nay! Shun!
This article originally appeared in Zócalo Public Square.
Mexicans, Muslims, Cubans, Blacks: Donald Trump Is a Serial Exploiter of Prejudice
On Thursday, Donald Trump said that Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge hearing a fraud case against Trump, is biased because Curiel belongs to an association of Latino lawyers and is “of Mexican heritage.” According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump explained: “I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.”
The Untold Story of America’s Opioid Addiction
We learned Thursday that Prince died of an opioid overdose—specifically from fentanyl, a synthetic opioid often prescribed to people who have built up a tolerance to oral opioids. (Fentanyl is more potent than powerful drugs like OxyContin and is most commonly administered via a patch.) While the toxicology report has not yet been made public—and may never be—it’s possible that Prince, who had a reputation for living substance-free but also suffered from debilitating hip and knee pain, got his drugs from his doctor, not a dealer. Why would the legendary recording artist have been prescribed a drug that put his life at risk?
You’ve Got Questions. We’ve Got Questions as Well.
Is Donald Trump going to win? What if he wins and the GOP gets a congressional majority? Do the anti-Trump rioters hurt Trump or help him? Is this whole thing really about “the establishment”? Or is it about racism? What should ambitious Republicans do about it? Has Hillary Clinton figured out how to rattle him? How about the press? What does the Trump University scam tell us about the campaign? About ourselves? About the housing crash? About life?
Never Trump vs. Trump Forever
One by one, the #NeverTrump dominoes are falling. Having denounced Donald Trump in the harshest possible terms on the campaign trail, Marco Rubio now tells us he will release his delegates to Trump and that he will cheer him on in his race against Hillary Clinton. Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House and conservative darling, has made his distaste for Trump plain. For weeks after it became clear that Trump would be the Republican presidential nominee, Ryan maintained that he wasn’t ready to pledge his support. But now, in anop-ed in his hometown paper, Ryan says he will indeed be voting for Trump this fall. Why now? Ryan explains that he’s had long conversations with Trump about the policy agenda he intends to introduce in the House, and he’s concluded that as president, Trump “would help us turn the ideas in this agenda into laws to help improve people’s lives.” In other words, Ryan wants us to believe that he’s not the one who has caved—that rather, it’s Trump who’s had to get on board with the Ryan agenda. We’ll see if Trump feels the same way.
Why Can’t Never Trumpers Just Admit They Prefer Hillary?
Republicans make it halfway to a principled stand when they say they cannot support their own party’s presidential nominee because he is, by some distance, the least-qualified nominee from either party in modern history. David French does not get them the rest of the way. Never Trump Republicans like Bill Kristol, and whoever else would rally behind French’s potential third-party candidacy, do not take the presidency as seriously as they claim to: If they did, they’d admit that they find Hillary Clinton to be a better choice than Donald Trump.
Will Violent Resistance Only Help Donald Trump?
The violence that broke out Thursday night in San Jose, California, during and after a Donald Trump rally has raised fears that the next five months will see increasingly heightened confrontations between Trump protesters and admirers. It’s also led to the frightening thought that violent resistance to a candidacy based on the promise of violence might in some quarters be considered a rational strategy.
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