Vox Sentences: Last one to put his finger on his nose has to be Speaker of the House

The House GOP explodes into total, seemingly endless chaos; Russia kills a bunch of cows in Iran; and a Belarusian journalist wins the Nobel in literature.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Benghazighazi

Alex Wong/Getty Images

• Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was supposed to be elected Speaker of the House today. Instead, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is dropping out of the speaker's race entirely.

  [Vox / Jonathan Allen]

• This was...not expected. Reporters were shocked. Members of Congress were reportedly crying in the House cloakroom out of confusion and stress.

  [Washington Post / Robert Costa]

• We don't yet know exactly why McCarthy dropped out. His comments last week, implying the point of the House's Benghazi investigative committee was to hurt Hillary Clinton in the polls, probably didn't help.

  [Huffington Post / Amanda Terkel and Sam Stein]

• Neither did an eyebrow-raising letter sent by Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), which strongly implied McCarthy was having an affair.

  [The Daily Beast / Tim Mak and Betsy Woodruff]

• Or maybe McCarthy simply wasn't comfortable with the demands the far-right House Freedom Caucus was making for their support. Without the Freedom Caucus, McCarthy would have needed Democrats to vote for him for speaker on the House floor.

  [Rolling Stone / Tim Dickinson]

• Both McCarthy and outgoing speaker John Boehner want Paul Ryan to run. But the question is whether he can be persuaded to — and whether the Freedom Caucus will accept him.

  [Bloomberg View / Ramesh Ponnuru]

• This raises the question: why not just elect a Speaker with Democratic and moderate Republican votes? That's how everything else happens in the House…

  [Vox / Lee Drutman]

• Then again, it's unclear why Democrats would go along with that — and what moderate Republicans would have to gain.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• What the GOP might do instead is elect a "caretaker" speaker temporarily while it figures its ish out.

  [Rep. Bill Huizenga via Twitter]

• The core problem is that Speaker of the House is basically the worst job in DC.

  [Vox / Jonathan Allen]

• It's hard not to feel a little bad for John Boehner, who presciently dreamed last night, "I was trying to get out, and I couldn't get out."

  [Huffington Post / Jason Linkins]

• For more, see Tim Lee's comprehensive explainer on the whole speaker election catastrophe.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

Russia bombed a bunch of Iranian cows

Alexei Nikolsky/AFP/Getty

• At least four Russian cruise missiles, targeting Syrian rebels, missed Syria and crash-landed in Iran instead, according to US officials.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Both Russia and Iran are aligned with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and conservative Iranian media have Russia's back: they called the reports of a missile crash "psychological operations by the US against Moscow."

  [BBC ]

• One Iranian TV station, however, did report an explosion after an "unidentified flying object" crashed near the city of Takab. "A number of cows," Thomas Gibbons-Neff reports, "were killed in the ensuing blast."

  [Washington Post / Thomas Gibbons-Neff]

• There's no tactical reason for Russia to use cruise missiles at all — they're typically not used when your ally has the air force. The consensus is that Russia was just trying to show off the missiles.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Instead, it inadvertently showed off how crummy the missiles are and how far behind the Russian military really is, which is one big reason its intervention in Syria is unlikely to turn the tide of the civil war.

  [Washington Post / Andrew Roth and Thomas Gibbons-Neff]

Let us now celebrate Svetlana Alexievich

Maxim Malinovsky/AFP/Getty

• For the first time in over 50 years, the Nobel Prize for Literature has gone to a writer whose work is mostly nonfiction: Belarusian historian/journalist Svetlana Alexievich.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Alexievich's best known works are investigations of events that people would rather forget, like the Chernobyl explosion. This piece is a good look at her methods.

  [New Yorker / Masha Gessen]

• You can read an excerpt of Alexievich's best-known book, Voices from Chernobyl, on the NPR site.

  [NPR / Svetlana Alexlevich, trans. Keith Gessen]

• Yesterday, meanwhile, the chemistry Nobel went to three scientists who discovered how fragile DNA molecules are — and how they get repaired.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• Derek Lowe of Science Translational Medicine explains that failures in these DNA-repair mechanisms are common in cancer cells — a good reminder of how important it is that they work normally.

  [Science Translational Mechanism / Derek Lowe]

MISCELLANEOUS

This, by John Judis, is the best article I (Dylan) have read to date on Donald Trump's supporters, and the trend they represent in American politics. [National Journal / John B. Judis]

• Texans are getting thrown in jail for not being able to afford traffic tickets.

  [BuzzFeed / Kendall Taggart and Alex Campbell]

• What if "runner's highs" are more like marijuana than like opiates?

  [NYT / Gretchen Reynolds]

• For decades, women in the US worked more than women in Japan. Recently, that's changed.

  [Washington Post / Danielle Paquette]

• You really owe it to yourself to hear, or at least read, Kai Ryssdal try in vain to get Ben Carson to say if he'd raised the debt ceiling.

  [Marketplace / Kai Ryssdal]

VERBATIM

‘‘Why would a grown-ass woman thrive off drama?’’ [Nicki Minaj to NYT Mag / Vanessa Grigoriadis]

• "It is unacceptable that the Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the UK are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians. That is not good for anybody."

  [FBI director James Comey via The Guardian / Mark Tran]

• "We’re all becoming one another. Well, we are. And we’re not."

  [NYT / Wesley Morris]

• "The truly regrettable thing about Washington in 2014 isn't that it's become prosperous. It's that it's become so exclusive."

  [Dezeen / Matt Yglesias]

• "Here’s where immigration controls in liberal democracies and apartheid in South Africa after 1948 share some similarities."

  [LSE / Chandran Kukathas]

WATCH THIS

Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless [YouTube / Joseph Stromberg and Estelle Caswell]

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