Alex Rodriguez: Alien →

Jeb Lund, writing for Rolling Stone:

So, tonight, he will not take the field in his final game, apparently too much of a liability for a team trying to convince itself that it's not going nowhere—a team that spent 2014 driving a .256/.304/.313-hitting Derek Jeter around the country in a ceremonial glass float like the Baseball Pope while local burghers at every MLB outpost heaved offertories at him.

A-Rod won't get anything so lavish. After 696 career home runs, he'll get a pregame ceremony, take his at bats, give a curtain call at the dugout and retire – that pre-funeral decades in advance of the real one.

I shield my eyes whenever I hear that small but vocal minority of Yankees fans who never warmed to A-Rod start yapping about “Real Yankees.”

Love the Fig →

Ben Crair, writing for The New Yorker’s Elements blog:

All kinds of critters, not only humans, frequent fig trees, but the plants owe their existence to what may be evolution’s most intimate partnership between two species. Because a fig is actually a ball of flowers, it requires pollination, but because the flowers are sealed, not just any bug can crawl inside. That task belongs to a minuscule insect known as the fig wasp, whose life cycle is intertwined with the fig’s. Mother wasps lay their eggs in an unripe fig. After their offspring hatch and mature, the males mate and then chew a tunnel to the surface, dying when their task is complete. The females follow and take flight, riding the winds until they smell another fig tree. (One species of wasp, in Africa, travels ten times farther than any other known pollinator.) When the insects discover the right specimen, they go inside and deposit the pollen from their birthplace. Then the females lay new eggs, and the cycle begins again. For the wasp mother, however, devotion to the fig plant soon turns tragic. A fig’s entranceway is booby-trapped to destroy her wings, so that she can never visit another plant. When you eat a dried fig, you’re probably chewing fig-wasp mummies, too.

You have no idea how much you never knew about the fig.

Stress Over Family Finances Propelled Hillary Clinton into Corporate World →

Amy Chozick, writing for The New York Times:

Even some of Mrs. Clinton’s allies privately say they are mystified by her choice to make the Wall Street speeches, given the likelihood that they would become an issue in a presidential campaign. And to some of them, her financial moves clash with the selfless Methodist credo to do good for others that she so often says guided her toward a life of public service.

But her longtime friends say the contradiction is rooted in Mrs. Clinton’s practicality and the boom-and-bust cycles that have characterized her life with Bill Clinton.

At no time did those stresses fall more squarely on Mrs. Clinton’s shoulders than in the difficult two-year period in Arkansas when she and her husband found themselves cast out of office, financially strained and deeply uncertain about the future. And the memory of that time shaped her desire to be free from financial burden.

This is almost getting boring at this point, but I really want people to read this entire piece, and then imagine that, instead of a woman at the center of it (I suppose some of you will have to block out the Clinton surname as well), a man is.

Because if HRC were a man, every single campaign speech would begin with this story. The sacrifice. The setting aside of arbitrary principles to protect your family. The buckling down, the survival. It’s the kind of self-made, up-by-the-bootstraps tale that is, frankly, quite Republican.

But, because she’s a woman, and because there is something inherently unsettling to some on the right (and very much so on the left) about a woman in power, making the money, rolling her sleeves up and getting dirty, this story has to be sought out. Discovered.

Hillary Clinton is by no means a perfect candidate. But anyone who tries to boil it down, make it simple, explain it all away in a soundbite? Be careful. They’re probably banking on you not digging too deep.

Why Trump's Crazy Talk About Obama and ISIS Matters

John Cassidy, writing for The New Yorker:

When he’s not tied to a teleprompter, Trump often seems to say the most provocative thing that comes into his head, with little thought for the consequences for his campaign, or for the campaigns of other Republicans. He’s like a small child, trying to be the center of attention, even if that means he has turned himself into an object of outrage and ridicule.

Donald Trump is going to lose in November. That much is becoming clearer every day. But he still has 88 more days to do incredible damage to our country. Make sure you read this one all the way to the end.

What to Remember About the Presidential Election When Donald Trump's Comeback Narrative Begins →

Jon Favreau, writing for The Ringer:

Remember this moment of the campaign.

I say this not to gloat about Donald Trump’s latest meltdown — that’s what Twitter is for — or because I think the race is anywhere close to over. It is entirely possible, even likely, that the polls will tighten again between now and November. Bounces fade. Memories are short. Hillary Clinton could commit some horrible gaffe or become embroiled in some scandal, real or imagined. The unusually high percentage of Republicans who are now telling pollsters they aren’t supporting their party’s nominee could shrink. Trump could show up at the debates with an entirely new personality that makes him a palatable human being for the first time in this campaign. You never know.

Still, even if none of this occurs, the media will eventually grow tired of the “Trump’s finished” story line and move on to the much more clickable “Trump’s comeback” narrative. Any day now, some Quinnipiac poll that shows a tied race in Pennsylvania will force Democrats to lose control of their bladders. A Trump surge in a stray tracking poll will result in a CNN Breaking News Countdown Clock that will tick down the seconds to an emergency panel of 37 pundits. The sheer hysteria of the “How Could She Blow This?” pieces will dwarf the collective freak-out that followed President Obama’s first debate loss in 2012. It won’t be pretty.

And that’s when we’ll all need to stop, take a deep breath, and remember this moment.

Quinnipiac poll results in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania will be released tomorrow morning at 6am.

Donald Trump Sells Out to Trickle-Down Economics →

John Cassidy, writing for The New Yorker:

A plan aimed at the middle class, however, could have complemented Trump’s populist line on immigration and trade, wrong-footed the Democrats, and allowed him to claim he had a three-pronged approach to raising wages and living standards. In short, it would have made him a much more formidable candidate.

The problem was that moving in that direction would have singled that Trump was a genuine populist insurrectionary, rather than a cosseted billionaire who plays one on television.

In less than three days, Trump went from publicly non-endorsing Paul Ryan to kowtowing to his tax plan, reading it (poorly) off of a teleprompter like a hostage crisis script. It should be fun to watch Trump’s supporters flip-flop with him.

The DNC Hack Is Watergate, but Worse →

Franklin Foer, writing for Slate:

We should be appalled at the public broadcast of this minutiae. It will have a chilling effect—campaign staffers will now assume they no longer have the space to communicate honestly. This honest communication—even if it’s often trivial or dumb—is important for the process of arriving at sound strategy and sound ideas. (To be sure, the DNC shouldn’t need privacy to know that attacking a man for his faith is just plain gross.) Open conversation, conducted with the expectation of privacy, is the necessary precondition for the formation of collective wisdom and consensus. If we eviscerate the possibility of privacy in politics, we increase the likelihood of poor decision-making.

The scourge of "Transparency," and the jargonization of it as a concept, is the root cause of this "scandal." What amazes me is how often these nimrods call for transparency out of one side of their mouth, while foaming out of the other side about their privacy.

Who Are All These Trump Supporters? →

George Saunders, writing for The New Yorker:

Early in the evening, a protester about my age asked me, “Where’s your sheet?” Seeing my confusion, he regrouped. “If you’re a Trump supporter, I mean.” Later, I saw him again, shouting to the police that they were all “pigs.” Still smarting over his Klan crack, I asked how he could hold a sign claiming that hate doesn’t work while calling a group of people he didn’t know “pigs.” “They are pigs,” he said. “Every one of them.” His wife was murdered a few years ago, he added, and they did nothing about it.

So there you go. Welcome to America.

The night was sad. The center failed to hold. Did I blame the rioting kids? I did. Did I blame Trump? I did. This, Mr. Trump, I thought, is why we practice civility. This is why, before we say exactly what is on our minds, we run it past ourselves, to see if it makes sense, is true, is fair, has a flavor of kindness, and won’t hurt someone or make someone’s difficult life more difficult. Because there are, among us, in every political camp, limited, angry, violent, and/or damaged people, waiting for any excuse to throw off the tethers of restraint and get after it. After which it falls to the rest of us, right and left, to clean up the mess.

Another entry in the burgeoning Smart Liberals Publicly Trying To Understand How This Trump Thing Actually Happened genre, this time from one of my favorite authors. I read it in the dark, in bed, at 1 in the morning, and while I didn’t really come away with any answers (I just don’t think the answer is as simple as we need to speak more kindly to one another), I was left wondering where all this pent-up energy will go once November comes and Trump loses. Do these millions of disaffected Americans just fade into the backdrop again, waiting to bark and snarl again in another four years?

Inside the Bitter Last Days of Bernie's Revolution →

Edward-Isaac Dovere and Gabriel Debenedetti, writing for POLITICO:

Convinced as Sanders is that he’s realizing his lifelong dream of being the catalyst for remaking American politics—aides say he takes credit for a Harvard Kennedy School study in April showing young people getting more liberal, and he takes personal offense every time Clinton just dismisses the possibility of picking him as her running mate—his guiding principle under attack has basically boiled down to a feeling that multiple aides sum up as: “Screw me? No, screw you.”

Take the combative statement after the Nevada showdown.

“I don’t know who advised him that this was the right route to take, but we are now actively destroying what Bernie worked so hard to build over the last year just to pick up two fucking delegates in a state he lost,” rapid response director Mike Casca complained to Weaver in an internal campaign email obtained by POLITICO.

“Thank you for your views. I’ll relay them to the senator, as he is driving this train,” Weaver wrote back.

Yikes. It’s going to be hard for Bernie to continue to fight from underneath that bus he just got thrown under. And by his own people, no less.

It takes a strange, almost paradoxical mix of bravado and humility to run for president. Bernie has been drinking his own brew for a year now, even longer. It’s going to take him a couple of days to sober-up. I have faith that he will.

Radio Diaries no. 49: Majd’s Diary: Two Years in the Life of a Saudi Girl →

Radio Diaries:

Majd Abdulghani is a teenager living in Saudi Arabia, one of the most restrictive countries for women in the world. She wants to be a scientist. Her family wants to arrange her marriage. From the age of 19 to 21, Majd has been chronicling her life with a microphone, taking us inside a society where the voices of women are rarely heard. She records herself practicing karate, conducting experiments in a genetics lab, and fending off pressure to accept an arranged marriage. In her audio diary, Majd documents everything from arguments with her brother about how much she should cover herself in front of men, to late night thoughts about loneliness, arranged marriages, and the possibility of true love.

I’m not breaking any news by pointing out how awesome Radio Diaries is, but this episode is even more special than usual. In a time when some people want to build walls and close themselves off from the rest of the world, it becomes even more important to listen to something like this. To learn, to educate, to expand your mind, and to better understand what you don’t have experience with.