Slate Voice

On the scale between unbridled enthusiasm for smart speakers and technophobic paranoia, I fall in the ambivalent middle area. I’d read about the potential for these devices to be hacked or gamed by advertisers or to simply make expensive mistakes, and I’d heard others gush of the ways it had radically transformed their homes for the better. But I had never pictured myself having one, and so I didn’t do any real research or form any real opinions.

MOBILE, Alabama—As she sped around the oak-draped streets here on Sunday morning, in a Suburban piled with weeks of campaign detritus, Christian Smith explained that we were in one of the four counties that could decide the state’s next U.S. senator. “Mobile’s not as red as you might think,” she said. “It’s 50-50. It’s winnable.

Hannibal Buress, the comedian whose 2014 stand-up routine about Bill Cosby was, in many ways, the opening bell for the current wave of sexual harassment scandals in entertainment, was arrested early Sunday morning in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, the Miami Herald reports. According to the police report, Buress approached an officer standing on a street corner and asked him to call him an Uber.

In 2014, a researcher in France revealed a disturbing fact about the published scientific literature: At least 120 computer-generated manuscripts had made their way into academic conference proceedings, according to his analysis. Those robot-written papers, containing little more than strung-together buzzwords, had been created with a piece of software known as SCIgen, originally written on a lark by a trio of MIT graduate students in 2005.

Monday morning, a man tried to explode what has been preliminarily described as a pipe bomb at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. The “low-tech device,” as Gov. Andrew Cuomo described it, may have gone off prematurely. A second device he was carrying failed to detonate. The would-be bomber, identified as a Bangladeshi man, was injured and taken to the hospital.

At a rally in November 2015, Donald Trump heralded, “If I become president, we’re all going to be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again, that I can tell you.” Of all his empty guarantees, the president has perhaps fulfilled none better than a counterstrike in the War on Christmas, and no battalion has fired more rooty-toot artillery for him than the Hallmark Channel.

I started using the app Strava to track my rides before I’d even purchased my first road bike. I was competitive. After downloading it and getting my first taste of landing on the leaderboards, I was hooked. I never got on my bike without it. In a matter of months, my bike-riding addiction had become a bike-racing addiction. I started donning a heart-rate monitor to quantify my efforts and recovery and after my first year of racing added a power meter to my activity-tracking collection too.

Did Roy Moore write an inscription in the 1977 high school yearbook of Beverly Nelson, who says he forcibly groped her? That’s the question skeptics are asking after Nelson acknowledged Friday, in an ABC News interview and a press conference, that she wrote notes below the inscription.

Michael Idov’s wry, rueful piece from 2005 about his stint owning an unsuccessful NYC coffee shop has stuck with me over the years, perhaps because I, too, have occasionally indulged in my own New York foodservice fantasies. (My latest idea: A Steely Dan–themed pop-up bar called “Doctor Wu’s.

Fifty-one senators and 227 members of the House of Representatives have already voted in favor of Republicans’ tax overhaul. It makes sense, then, to assume the House and Senate conferees will successfully put the finishing touches on a final bill and pass it through both chambers again. But this week has shown that the conference committee and Republican leaders have far more work to do than just dotting i’s and crossing t’s.

Big corporate mergers in the health care industry tend to work out poorly for customers. When hospitals combine, they raise prices. When insurers get together, premiums can leap. But when pharmacy giant CVS announced last week that it planned to buy Aetna, the nation’s third largest insurer, in a deal worth $69 billion, some experts were cautiously optimistic.

In the real world, you can wave, hug, or high-five your friends hello, and soon you may have a similar range of nonverbal options on Facebook. The social network is testing a new “Greetings” feature that will let users send digital salutations in the form of a wave, high five, wink, hug, or—this will sound familiar—poke. The feature, which the Next Web spotted and appears to be rolling out to some users in the U.K.

A month ago, when Roy Moore was accused of having pursued teenage girls while in his 30s, he equivocated. “Do you remember dating girls that young?” Sean Hannity asked him. Moore hedged: “Not generally, no. If I did, you know, I’m not going to dispute anything, but I don’t remember anything like that.” Hannity asked Moore about Debbie Gibson, who said she had dated Moore when she was 17 and he was 34.

Jimmy Kimmel is taking the week off to spend time with his family after his son’s surgery, but Jimmy Kimmel Live! has continued to air new episodes with a roster of celebrity guest hosts filling in. On Tuesday, Tracee Ellis Ross took the reins and used the opportunity to talk about sexual harassment in the news. “First of all, let’s start with the fact that it isn’t a sex scandal. It isn’t a Hollywood scandal,” she said. “It isn’t even a scandal.

In October, the California Senate passed a new law adding a third gender—nonbinary—to state-issued identification. The Gender Recognition Act (SB 179) additionally removes the requirement that petitioners present a physician-signed affidavit that they have undergone “clinically appropriate treatment for the purposes of gender transition” in order to change their gender marker.

Minnesota Sen. Al Franken announced on Thursday his plan to resign “in the coming weeks” after a series of allegations that he groped women and kissed them without consent. “There is a big part of me that will always regret having to walk away from this job with so much work left to be done,” Franken said in somber remarks on the Senate floor. “But I have faith that the work will continue because I have faith in the people who’ve helped me do it.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development this week reports that homelessness has ticked up by just under 1 percent, to 553,742 Americans sleeping outside or in shelters. It’s the first national increase in nearly a decade, driven almost entirely by individuals living on the streets of California cities like Los Angeles, where homelessness rose 26 percent since last year. Family homelessness, by contrast, fell by 10,000, and has fallen 10 percent in two years.

The word “dreams” in the subtitle of Caroline Fraser’s new book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, is plural for a reason.

Remember “when they go low, we go high?” Yep. So do I. I remembered it in the fall of 2016, when Senate Republicans and then-candidate Donald Trump first made it irrevocably clear there would be no hearing for anyone Barack Obama nominated to the Supreme Court, ever, even though Obama had put up a moderate, centrist nominee who was once acceptable to Senate Republicans. I remembered it when Trump won, and we realized that that seat would stay stolen.

Trump’s decision was all about placating his base. There is no other strategic rationale for taking this step now, which is why the president’s advisers have struggled in background briefings to explain how it is in the United States’ security interest. And even the domestic politics for Trump are not very compelling: Sure, he promised to move the embassy during the campaign, but this was not a central tenet of his platform.