Vox Sentences: Greece is falling apart. Here's what you should know.

No, really, the Greek debt crisis is a thing finally

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, looking understandably grumpy. (Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)

• It appears that the Greek debt crisis has emerged from the "slowly developing" phase into the "everything is about to be on fire" phase.

  [Vox / Matthew Yglesias]

• For one thing, it has confirmed that it won't make a €1.55 billion ($1.73 billion) repayment to the IMF that's due tomorrow. That isn't technically a default but it's very, very bad.

  [WSJ / Gabriele Steinhauser and Nektaria Stamouli]

• Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras has scheduled a referendum for Sunday, July 5th, over whether to accept the bailout deal its European lenders offered it last week.

  [BBC]

• The deal would have cut pensions by raising the retirement age to 67 and eliminating a special program helping poor retirees; Tsipras and his far-left Syriza party have resisted pension cuts.

  [FT / Peter Spiegel]

• German chancellor Angela Merkel described the deal as "extraordinarily generous"; while it did make some concessions to the Greek government on sales taxes, it overall did little to unwind the austerity policies that have been strangling Greece for years.

  [FT / Stefan Wagstyl, Peter Spiegel, and Kerin Hope]

• European lenders are telling Greek citizens that the referendum is effectively a vote on continued Greek membership in the euro; if the bailout plan is rejected, the argument goes, support from Europe will dry up and Greece will be forced to reintroduce the drachma to pay its bills.

  [FT / Peter Spiegel and Stefan Wagstyl]

• Wolfgang Münchau: it's probably right that Greece will leave the euro if the bailout plan loses. If it wins, though, the plan itself won't still be on the table. Instead, expect Greece to introduce a parallel currency and muddle along with that rather than leaving the euro outright.

  [FT / Wolfgang Münchau]

• Either way the election goes, in other words, Greece is likely to at the very least try a parallel currency, and at worst to leave the euro outright.

• Tsipras's government has limited ATM withdrawals to €60 a day per account, and closed banks until after the referendum, to prevent people from withdrawing all their money, leaving banks insolvent, and causing a financial crisis.

  [The Guardian / Claire Phipps]

• This isn't a hypothetical concern. More than a third of Greek ATMs ran out of cash on Saturday, before the controls took effect.

  [Reuters / George Georgiopoulos and Lefteris Papadimas]

• Adam Posen: this would all go away if Northern Europe sucked it up and paid Greece's bills. That's the best-case scenario. But Germany and its peers aren't willing to do the sensible thing here.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Want to learn more? Read Matthew Yglesias's comprehensive explainer here.

  [Vox / Matthew Yglesias]

• Alternately, if you're in a rush, Timothy B. Lee has boiled the whole dispute down into less than 500 words.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

Tinkering with the machinery of death

An execution chamber. (Joe Raedle/Newsmakers via Getty Images)

• The Supreme Court has, in a 5-4 ruling, upheld the use of the lethal injection drug midazolam.

  [Vox / Dara Lind, German Lopez, and Tez Clark ]

• Midazolam is used as an alternative to sodium thiopental, an anesthetic used in lethal injections that hasn't been available since 2011, due to an anti-death penalty activist campaign. American drugmakers have stopped producing sodium thiopental, and the DC Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked imports.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• It's not clear midazolam even works as an anesthetic. In one famous case, Oklahoma prisoner Clayton Lockett "struggled violently, groaned, and writhed" after getting a lethal cocktail that included midazolam; it took him 43 minutes to die.

  [Vox / Dara Lind and German Lopez]

• The Court's five conservatives ruled that the death row inmates suing in the case hadn't proven that using midazolam constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment" under the Eighth Amendment.

  [Vox / Dara Lind, German Lopez, and Tez Clark ]

• The court's liberals disagreed strongly; Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that death through a cocktail including midazolam "may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake."

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, went ever further, saying that he wanted the court to reconsider whether the death penalty is ever constitutional, and suggesting that the practical problems with executions suggest states can't ever be trusted to regulate them.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Breyer's dissent provoked concurrences from Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas responding to his points. Scalia's was particularly heated, saying that "by arrogating to himself the power" to overturn the death penalty, Breyer "rejects the enlightenment."

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Scalia also claimed that there's good evidence showing the death penalty has a deterrent effect. The honest answer is that it's basically impossible to measure if it does, but Scalia's claim at the very least goes way too far.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Reminder: at least 4 percent of people sentenced to death are innocent.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Want to read more? Here's our full explainer on the case.

  [Vox / Dara Lind and German Lopez]

The revenge of Wendy Davis

Wendy Davis in the State Senate after a (short-lived) filibuster victory in June 2013. (Erich Schlegel/Getty Images)

• The Supreme Court has blocked implementation of two of Texas's recent anti-abortion measures (which then-State Sen. Wendy Davis famously filibustered), suggesting it will consider their constitutionality next term.

  [Supreme Court]

• The two big requirements in the law — called House Bill 2 — being challenged were that (a) abortion clinics have admitting privileges are local hospitals, and (b) abortion clinics be ambulatory surgical centers, meaning they can function as mini-emergency rooms.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• Abortion rights advocates object that the law places huge costs on clinics for no good reason. Case in point: only 0.05 percent of first-trimester abortions have complications that require hospital care.

  [Weitz et al, 2013]

• Other restrictions in the law took effect in 2013, and caused the shuttering of about half the state's abortion clinics. If these provisions take effect, abortion providers estimate another halving.

  [NYT / Adam Liptak]

• Put another way: if the law takes effect, about one in five Texas women of reproductive age will live 150 miles or more away from the nearest abortion clinic.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

Misc.

• Persuasive, powerful argument from my colleague Max Fisher that the odds that we're all going to die in a fiery nuclear holocaust are higher than you might think.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Meet the Ultras: Europe's most intense soccer fans and, in a number of cases, fascist shock troops.

  [New Inquiry / Nathan Eisenberg]

• Andy Greenberg made the core piece of a semiautomatic, untraceable AR-15 rifle. By himself. In his office. At Wired Magazine.

  [Wired / Andy Greenberg]

• Can't get anyone to attend your funeral? If you're in the UK, you should try hiring a "Rent a Mourner."

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• Socialism doesn't appear to be all that bad for innovation: on a variety of metrics, Scandinavia is as innovative if not more so than the US.

  [Vox EU / Mika Maliranta, Niku Määttänen, Vesa Vihriälä]

Verbatim

• "To fashion a new gay culture, we must not let go entirely of the old one. We must continue to embrace the things that made us different and special, the sense of family and support—the unity of purpose—that stitched us together."

  [New Republic / Michael Lindenberger]

• "What do you think? Does Jeopardy! take place in a single dimension that is actually part of a quantum-branching multiverse where good and evil constantly struggle over the fate of mankind?"

  [Clickhole]

• "There’s a study of several decades of census records that found that twice as many people who call themselves white have recent African ancestry as people who call themselves black."

  [Jacobin / Brian Jones]

• "As Columbia University ethnomusicologist Aaron A. Fox has written, if mainstream country comes across as 'bad' music — gauche, sexist, ethnocentric, formulaic, sloshy'—that’s not a coincidence: Outsiders disliking it endears it all the more to its fans, who figure those outsiders probably don’t like them much either."

  [Slate / Carl Wilson]

• "All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary. The best of the best. The worst of the worst … [This] has conditioned us to believe that 'exceptional' is the new normal. And since all of us are rarely exceptional, we all feel pretty damn insecure and desperate to feel 'exceptional' all the time."

  [Mark Manson]

Video of the day

• Anatomy of a makeover movie

  [YouTube]