Slate Voice

Jerry Falwell made his living finding gay people where they didn’t belong. “Remember… homosexuals do not reproduce,” the televangelist and activist warned his followers in 1981. “They recruit!” He claimed to have confronted President Carter about why he employed “practicing homosexuals” in the White House in 1980. When Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom character came out of the closet in 1997, he called her “Ellen Degenerate.

In the good old days of 2009, when public figures felt (slightly) less shame about warmly embracing sexual predators, a number of filmmakers and celebrities came forth to say that Roman Polanski deserved lenience in part because of his artistic contributions. Apparently revolted by this obscene logic, the comedian and radio host Sam Seder tweeted, “Don’t care re Polanski, but I hope if my daughter is ever raped it is by an older truly talented man w/a great sense of mise en scene.

Donald Trump Jr. has all the obvious traits of his father: He’s belligerent, dim, and mired in everlasting childhood. But the president’s firstborn is a work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. He is to Donald J. Trump as a postcard of the Mona Lisa is to the actual Mona Lisa—the image of the thing, absent its original aura. Don Jr. may be as privileged and petty as the president, but his indistinctness prevents him from commanding our gaze the way his dad does.

Johnny Hallyday, the singer whose French-language covers of American songs helped bring rock ’n’ roll to France, has died of cancer at the age of 74, Variety reports. He had been ill for several months. Hallyday, whose real name was Jean-Phillipe Smet, was born in Paris. An Elvis movie inspired him to start studying music and performing, and he released his first single, “Laisses les Filles,” in the spring of 1960.

FREMONT, Nebraska—The past few years in this Nebraska town of 26,000 have been unusually fraught. “My neighbor is on the City Council. His wife does not wave to me,” explained John Wiegert, as he made his way to a political meeting at the public library this summer. “I could be on fire in the front yard, and she wouldn’t put me out with a garden hose.

When I was 23 years old, my boss would look down the gap at the waistband of my jeans when he walked past my desk. I was an entry-level fact-checker at my first magazine job, and he was an older and more powerful editor. My career, at the time, was in his hands. Once, when we had finished working on a story together, he suggested we get a drink to celebrate. It was a Friday night, and I remember feeling extremely nervous as we sat across from each other in a dark bar.

Is Twitter now such a rough-and-tumble place that even a man as manly as Armie Hammer can’t survive there? On Monday, after calling a BuzzFeed piece about him “bitter AF,” Hammer peaced out of the social network. He’s hardly the first person to have fled the platform—the Twitter hiatus has been a certifiable Thing this year, the online equivalent of a juice cleanse—but his reasons for fleeing seem a little less admirable than the usual ones.

Late Friday night, Senate Republicans passed a hastily crafted $1.5 trillion overhaul of the tax code on a party line vote of 51–49. Only Bob Corker of Tennessee broke ranks to vote against the bill, whose final draft was introduced hours before voting with handwritten amendments scribbled in the margins by lobbyists. This plan, centered on a large corporate and upper-income tax cut, has clear winners and losers, with most of the American public falling in the latter category.

NBC fired Today host Matt Lauer on Wednesday morning following a complaint by a colleague describing “inappropriate sexual behavior,” noting in the statement that “the first complaint about his behavior in the over twenty years he’s been at NBC News, we were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident.

Judging from the coverage surrounding this week’s blockbuster case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, it might seem that the legal clash between religious liberty and discrimination in public spaces is a modern controversy that the Supreme Court is just catching up to. But more than 50 years ago, John W.

A decade later, Jill Harth met Trump when she and then-boyfriend George Houraney collaborated with him on a beauty pageant production in Atlantic City. According to Harth’s testimony in a 1996 deposition, Trump told Houraney, in front of Harth, that he was going to try to sleep with her. The next night, Harth says, Trump groped her under the table at dinner.

For a lot of us, Instagram is there to prove that celebrities aren’t so different after all. They too take mirror selfies of their OOTDs. They too share photos of brunch tables that look haphazardly set but are actually entirely staged. And when we follow a celebrity’s feed, their ’grams are seamlessly shuffled in with the posts of our friends, making “them” feel a little bit more like “us.” I am not convinced this is a good thing.

Finally, we know why sexual harassment happens! Peggy Noonan and an unnamed “aging Catholic priest” she quotes secondhand in her latest column seem to believe that harassment is a product of the sexual revolution, and especially of the availability of contraception and abortion.

What would we do without Slate? No, I don’t mean Slate Magazine. I mean Jenny Slate, actress, comedian, and—today at least—queen of our hearts. In a week of news ranging from the gross to the harrowing, Slate has gifted us with not one but two pieces of objectively good news.

We talk a lot these days about how the United States has sorted itself into two distinct media bubbles, and all the ways in which those bubbles become self-reinforcing and reality-denying. But there is another way in which the perfect epistemic closure that characterizes this moment continues to play out. On Friday, former national security adviser Michael Flynn agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

The last days have brought plenty of reasons for schadenfreude. Many of my friends seem to be seized by a mood of dizzy excitement. I get why. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn faces time in jail. Donald Trump may have incriminated himself with yet another impulsive tweet. Impeachment, though still a distant prospect, looks a lot closer now than it did a few weeks ago. If this is not yet the beginning of the end, it may, one day, come to be seen as the end of the beginning.

One of its biggest surprises comes in the first chapter: In 1969–70, when Ellsberg was spending his nights Xeroxing the Pentagon Papers, a copy of which was in his safe at the RAND Corporation, he was also—he reveals here for the first time to anyone besides a handful of friends and loved ones—making copies of everything in his safe, including the top-secret-and-beyond documents from his nuclear studies.

In Tony Earley’s remarkable memoir “Somehow Form a Family,” he interweaves stories from his childhood in small-town North Carolina with stories from the TV shows he and his sister Shelly watched at the time: All in the Family, The Wonderful World of Disney, The Three Stooges, and above all The Brady Bunch. And by “interweaves” I don’t mean that he tells a story from his childhood and then tells a story from the TV.

The conceit of “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland,” the New York Times' profile of Tony Hovater—a neo-Nazi who helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, a white nationalist group—is that there’s something incongruent in Hovater’s ordinary Midwestern life and his virulently racist and anti-Semitic beliefs.

One might call Melodrama—Lorde’s critically acclaimed, Grammy-nominated sophomore album—high art. The album is not just an aural splendor but a visual one too, with a moody, blue-lit painting of Lordeby Brooklyn-based artist Sam McKinniss on the cover. One fan, it seems, definitely does.