The Area of the Texas Wildfires Versus America's 10 Biggest Cities

The Era of 'The Bitch' Is Coming

Michelle Cottle

A Hillary Clinton presidential victory promises to usher in a new age of public misogyny.

Get ready for the era of The Bitch.

If Hillary Clinton wins the White House in November, it will be a historic moment, the smashing of the preeminent glass ceiling in American public life. A mere 240 years after this nation’s founding, a woman will occupy its top office. America’s daughters will at last have living, breathing, pantsuit-wearing proof that they too can grow up to be president.

A Clinton victory also promises to usher in four-to-eight years of the kind of down-and-dirty public misogyny you might expect from a stag party at Roger Ailes’s house.

You know it’s coming. As hyperpartisanship, grievance politics, and garden-variety rage shift from America’s first black commander-in-chief onto its first female one, so too will the focus of political bigotry. Some of it will be driven by genuine gender grievance or discomfort among some at being led by a woman. But in plenty of other cases, slamming Hillary as a bitch, a c**t (Thanks, Scott Baio!), or a menopausal nut-job (an enduringly popular theme on Twitter) will simply be an easy-peasy shortcut for dismissing her and delegitimizing her presidency.

The Futility of the Workout-Sit Cycle

James Hamblin

In a new statement, the American Heart Association warns that exercise doesn’t seem to undo the health effects of excessive sitting.

In April, the AARP asked me to help moderate an international meeting of 15 exercise scientists in Vancouver. Their goal was to write a consensus statement about how best to use exercise to promote health (specifically “brain health”). What types of exercise are ideal? Is walking as good as running? Does yoga count? How do we measure exercise—as a matter of heart rate, calories burned, or simply of time spent? All or none, of these?

I was blunt about my skepticism. These are huge questions. I’m not convinced that brain health is a thing that can be pursued separately from any other type of health. And I’ve been in enough meetings where scientists try to reach a consensus. It’s fun if you’re into watching people argue.

The Saddest Olympic Celebration

Uri Friedman

What do you do when you’re competing for a country that might disappear? You dance.

There are plenty of ways to celebrate victory at the Olympics: You can do the Lightning Bolt like Usain Bolt. You can do various things with your fingers like Michael Phelps. You can brag on Twitter. But rarely has anyone danced like David Katoatau did this week in Rio. And what’s remarkable about his dancing is that Katoatau didn’t win anything. The weightlifter from the Pacific island nation of Kiribati finished sixth in the men’s 105-kilogram Group B final. He’s dancing because he’s not sure what else he can do at this point to help his sinking, storm-battered country.

Great Olympic Spirit from the dancing weightlifter David Katoatau from Kiribati pic.twitter.com/21L5oULrO7
— Michael Bonner (@IrishGuyinRio) August 15, 2016

Trump Adviser: Hillary Clinton 'Should Be Shot in a Firing Squad for Treason'

Conor Friedersdorf

It’s the latest example of a campaign that indulges in its most destructive and self-destructive impulses.

In “The Exaggerated Claims of Media Bias Against Donald Trump,” I explained how the candidate makes inflammatory remarks that he crafts to generate outraged attention, then attacks the media when they report his words just as he intended. I concluded that Trump is the primary driver of negative Trump coverage.

On Tuesday, Representative Al Baldasaro, a state lawmaker in New Hampshire who co-chairs the Trump campaign’s national veterans' coalition, demonstrated that this self-destructive quality is present in the larger Trump coalition with a shocking statement.

He wants Hillary Clinton shot for treason.

The backstory is useful: Earlier this summer, Baldasaro used a talk-radio interview to declare that the Democratic nominee for the presidency should be violently killed. “She is a disgrace for the lies that she told those mothers about their children that got killed over there in Benghazi,” the New Hampshire Republican said. “She dropped the ball on over 400 emails requesting backup security. Something's wrong there. I wish they'd make the documents public on why Ambassador Anderson was there. In my mind I want to think, were they moving guns? Were they doing something there? How did they know he was even there? Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.”

Will Texas Stick Around for a Hillary Clinton Presidency?

Russell Berman

Three out of five Trump voters in the Lone Star State would back secession if the Democrat wins, a new poll finds.

When politicians accuse their opponents of trying to divide the country, they usually don’t mean it literally. But in Texas, Donald Trump supporters dread a Hillary Clinton presidency so much that three out of five of them would rather the state secede than live through it.

In conducting a rare general-election poll of the Lone Star State, the left-leaning firm Public Policy Polling asked voters a (mostly) hypothetical question: Would you support or oppose Texas seceding from the United States?

Fortunately for Unionists, a clear majority of 59 percent of Texans said they’d rather stick with the Stars and Stripes, while just 26 percent said they wouldn’t. But that number dropped when the pollsters followed up by asking whether voters would support secession if Clinton won the election. Forty percent said they would, including 61 percent of Trump supporters. (While PPP is run by Democrats, it has a solid grade in FiveThirtyEight’s pollster accuracy ratings.)

Trump's Reshuffle

Krishnadev Calamur

The GOP presidential nominee has hired a senior executive from Breitbart News and promoted a senior aide in an attempt to jump-start his foundering campaign.

NEWS BRIEF Donald Trump has hired a senior executive from Breitbart News and promoted a campaign adviser to a top position in an effort to jump-start his presidential campaign, which has been foundering in recent days.

Under the changes announced Wednesday, Stephen Bannon, Breitbart’s executive chairman, will become chief executive of the GOP presidential nominee’s campaign, and Kellyanne Conway, the Republican strategist and pollster, who currently is a senior adviser on the campaign, will become the campaign manager. Paul Manafort, who has come under scrutiny for his reported ties to Ukraine’s former Moscow-backed leader, will retain his title as campaign chairman, though it’s unclear whether he will continue to wield the same kind of influence in the new regime.

The entrepreneur Peter Thiel, photographed at a conference in Washington, D.C., in 2011 — Yuri Gripas / Reuters

Peter Thiel’s Self-Serving New York Times Column

Adrienne LaFrance

The billionaire justified his fight against Gawker with a misleading reference to privacy legislation.

Peter Thiel has no regrets about pouring millions of dollars of his own money into the legal fight that bankrupted Gawker Media. “I am proud to have contributed financial support,” Thiel wrote in The New York Times on Monday, “… and I would gladly support someone else in the same position.”

Thiel says he spent about $10 million to help Terry Bollea—the wrestler better known as Hulk Hogan—sue Gawker for having published, without his consent, a video that showed him having sex with his then-friend’s wife. Hogan ultimately won his case. Gawker, facing a $140 million judgment, filed for bankruptcy.

Many have noted that there are few characters to root for in this saga. Gawker’s decision to publish the Hogan tape is questionable at best, regardless of whether you consider Hogan to be a public figure. The media company is known for its brashness, and has made several widely-condemned editorial decisions in its 14-year history. Thiel references these in his column for the Times, and it’s hard to argue that some of what Gawker has done—like outing Thiel, who is gay—is anything but despicable. But Thiel’s involvement in the Gawker fight is about much, much more than a personal vendetta. (Perhaps I should note here that I wrote a regular column about internet hoaxes for Gawker in 2014, and that the editors I worked with were consistently sensitive, smart, and receptive to even minor concerns about tone and fairness.)

Robert Downey Jr. and the Enhanced Prestige of TV

David Sims

Hollywood’s highest-paid actor is reportedly working on an HBO series—perhaps recognizing that the medium is better for telling smaller-scale stories.

When Robert Downey Jr. joined the cast of Ally McBeal for its fourth season in 2001, many people saw it as a sign of just how far he had fallen: After his promising film career sputtered out because of his imprisonment over multiple drug charges, TV was the only medium that would take him. Fifteen years later, Downey Jr. is a marquee idol, a Marvel superstar, and the highest-paid actor in history. Now, he can work on virtually any project he wants. So what’s next on his agenda? A TV show.

Variety reports that Downey Jr. is joining HBO for a series written by True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto that will be rooted in the classic show Perry Mason (to which Downey Jr. owns the rights). Around the same time, it was announced that the Jack Ryan franchise, a film series that’s spanned three decades, will be revived for Amazon with Jon Krasinski in the lead role. Together, these two cases offer the latest evidence of the increasingly blurred line between film and television. Fifteen years ago, it was a coup for Ally McBeal to cast Downey Jr., even though he’d just left prison. Now, it’s a coup for the superstar just to work with HBO.

Hollywood Has Ruined Method Acting

Angelica Jade Bastién

Jared Leto’s turn in Suicide Squad is the latest reminder that the technique has become more about ego and marketing than good performances.

Of all the stories surfacing about the new DC Comics film Suicide Squad—from the dismal reviews to the box-office reports—the most disconcerting are the ones that detail how Jared Leto got into his role as the Joker. Leto was reportedly so committed to the part that he gifted the cast and crew with a litany of horrible items: used condoms, a dead pig, a live rat. To get into the character’s twisted mindset, he also watched footage of brutal crimes online. “The Joker is incredibly comfortable with acts of violence,” he told Rolling Stone. “I was watching real violence, consuming that. There’s a lot you can learn from seeing it.”

Watching Leto tell one disturbing tale after another makes one thing abundantly clear: Method acting is over. Not the technique itself, which has fueled many of cinema’s greatest performances and can be a useful way of approaching difficult roles. But Leto’s stories show how going to great lengths to inhabit a character is now as much a marketing tool as it is an actual technique—one used to lend an air of legitimacy, verisimilitude, and importance to a performance no matter its quality. Leto’s Joker is the latest evidence that the prestige of method acting has dimmed—thanks to the technique’s overuse by those seeking award-season glory or a reputation boost, as well as its history of being shaped by destructive ideas of masculinity.

John Steinbeck on Falling in Love: A 1958 Letter

Maria Popova

The Nobel Prize Winner and author of 'The Grapes of Wrath' on the importance of waiting for love

Nobel laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968) might be best-known as the author of East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men, but he was also a prolific letter-writer. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters constructs an alternative biography of the iconic author through some 850 of his most thoughtful, witty, honest, opinionated, vulnerable, and revealing letters to family, friends, his editor, and a circle of equally well-known and influential public figures.

Among his correspondence is this beautiful response to his eldest son Thom's 1958 letter, in which the teenage boy confesses to have fallen desperately in love with a girl named Susan while at boarding school. Steinbeck's words of wisdom—tender, optimistic, timeless, infinitely sagacious—should be etched onto the heart and mind of every living, breathing human being.