Slate Voice

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.

If you’ve been following the goings on at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s a constitutional crisis brewing in Trump’s America.

On Friday, a federal consent decree to stop potential voter suppression by the Republican National Committee—in place since 1982—is set to expire unless further extended by a federal district court in New Jersey. What happens next, with Donald Trump in charge of the Republican Party, will likely not be pretty.

Still, more than half of infants and toddlers in the United States spend some part of their day being cared for by someone other than a parent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And at both the federal and state level, the U.S. spends almost nothing on helping American families care for their collective 3.9 million 2-year-olds.

If you had asked me last month if I spent too much time in front of screens, I would have said, “No way.” Sure, I’m in front of a computer for roughly eight hours a day for work. And looking at my smartphone screen before, during, and after. And in the evening, my TV is playing Netflix or HBO Go until I head to bed. But that seemed normal. I was forced to re-evaluate that sentiment on a Friday in late October. As I started to sit up from bed, someone tipped the world sideways.

The battle within the Republican Party has come down to this: Is it OK for a 32-year-old man to seduce a 14-year-old girl? On one side are the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Speaker Paul Ryan. They have disowned Roy Moore, the party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate in Alabama, over allegations that he targeted, and in some cases molested, minors and other teen girls.

Talk to anyone who worked in book publishing this year and no matter how chipper the conversation may begin, once you’re a few drinks in the talk will turn gloomy. Sales are flat, or down. There have been no market-defining breakout hits, no hot new genres to plump up the annual earnings statement. Everyone blames this on the election and the news.

November on Twitter always comes with a sigh of relief. That’s when all the people who were doing wacky Halloween monikers in the lead-up to Oct. 31 switch back to their normal display names. But this year, we didn’t even make it halfway through November before Twitter upended our nicknameless tranquility. You may not have thought much of it last week when, along with doubling the character limit for tweets, Twitter also expanded the character limit for display names from 20 to 50.

Doug Jones has a chance. Allegations of sexual assault have turned Judge Roy Moore’s already divisive campaign toxic, opening the door to a Democratic Party upset. But to make that happen, the Jones campaign has two major tasks. First, he has to build out his base, i.e., the black voters who form the foundation for Democratic Party performance in the state. Second, he has to win an unprecedented share of white voters.

Thanksgiving! Is there any other word that so perfectly embodies the spirit of Thanksgiving? If there is, we should change the holiday’s name to whatever that word is, probably. But whatever name it goes by, Thanksgiving can only mean one thing: Playing 12 hours of turkey sound effects at increasingly high volume until your family goes home and leaves you in peace.

For the last few weeks, the app HQ Trivia had been riding high, earning praise as “addictive”—in a good way!—and “your new favorite mobile game.” Cut to Tuesday: Its CEO freaked out on a Daily Beast reporter, and then its scheduled 9 p.m. game crashed, eventually starting a half-hour late. HQ Trivia is an interactive game show, with all the cheesy appeal its genre implies. With the app, a host beams live into your phone to ask questions at 3 and 9 p.m.

Puerto Rico still lacks power, millions of children are waiting for Congress to reauthorize a vital health insurance program, and a massive pipeline has leaked more than 200,000 gallons of oil into the American heartland. It’s possible President Trump is focused on these problems, but you wouldn’t know it from his Twitter feed. There, he is again preoccupied with well-known black people and their perceived disrespect.

Law & Order recently experimented with true crime, but the franchise hasn’t given up on their usual practice of taking real news stories and turning them into fictionalized, police procedural entertainment. If anything, it’s almost surprising that it took this long for Law & Order: SVU to announce that an episode addressing the Harvey Weinstein scandal is headed to a TV near you in 2018.

Car crashes are mysteries. Even though roughly 6 million of them happen each year in the United States alone, we seldom learn much. When we do drive by a crash, we often slow down to have a look. But there’s never much to see. Two crumpled cars. Maybe one upside down. An ambulance closing its doors. I usually feel bad—for those who may have gotten hurt (or worse), of course, but also because my rubbernecking contributes to the logjam of cars behind me.

Last week, the Museum of the Bible opened in Washington, D.C. When the museum was first conceived, it was intended to “inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible,” according to documents filed in 2010. But then, scholarship and dialogue intervened.

In 2013, L.V. Anderson wrote this sharp, controversial takedown of a culinary Thanksgiving tradition: Apple pie. Just in time for this year's festivities, we've reprinted the story below. It’s practically a law that in late November, every publication must offer a Thanksgiving guide. This year, I would like to draw your attention to two exceptional ones (other than Slate’s).

A few years ago, I spent most of Thanksgiving dividing up the furniture in the house for when the divorce came. My husband had just walked out the door with a six-pack of beer to hang out with a friend, leaving me with a kitchen explosion of vegetable peels and uncooked dishes, a scatter of recipes and cookbooks, a table yet to be set for 18, and one gigantic, raw bird. He could have that fucking blue-leather couch. To say I was livid would be a gross understatement.

That’s not to say they lack an agenda. Repealing the Affordable Care Act would have reshaped a vast swath of the American economy and transformed the social safety net, not just ending Medicaid but striking a blow against the entire project of public subsidy for health insurance. The tax reform bill passed by the House of Representatives would hike taxes for tens of millions of Americans to provide massive tax cuts for large corporations, the wealthy, their heirs, and the merely affluent.

It’s funny because it’s true: Why should pilots be congratulated for managing to do their jobs without killing hundreds of people? (As Handler once pointed out on Twitter, #thatswhattheyresupposedtofuckingdo.) It’s not just a comedian’s pet peeve; frustration with the idiotic cabin clap appears to be widespread. “Please Don’t Clap When the Plane Lands,” wrote the staff of Condé Nast Traveler in a signed editorial last year.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi sits on one corner of an island calledSaadiyat, a large triangle of desert joined to the capital of the United Arab Emirates by a causeway. Scattered in the sand on Saadiyat Island are a handful of other upscale developments: a golf course, a Park Hyatt and a St. Regis, scores of suburban-style villas, and a campus of New York University.