Vox Sentences: The British prime minister did what with a pig?!?

An embarrassing rumor about a college ritual, a dead pig's head, and the UK Prime Minister; an antibiotic goes from $13.50 to $750 overnight; and Scott Walker is out of the presidential race.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

#piggate: the British elite embarrasses itself again

WPA Pool/Getty Images

• An unauthorized biography of UK Prime Minister David Cameron (written by a jilted donor) alleges that in college, Cameron once stuck his penis into the mouth of a dead pig.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• This wouldn't be illegal: as Stephen Bush writes (in a crucial explainer), "the mouth of a dead pig is a legal no-man's-land." But legal ramifications aside, it's embarrassing for the prime minister to have irrumated a pig.

  [New Statesman / Stephen Bush]

• The "Piggate" incident might not be true, but it's part of a familiar genre: half-confirmed stories of secret-society initiations among the UK's poshest schools. (Another club to which Cameron belonged reportedly asks initiates to light a 50-pound note on fire in front of a beggar.)

  [Daily Mirror / Tom McTague]

• Much more so than in the US, the boys making drunken fools of themselves at 19 in these societies tend to wind up running the country decades later — and they all know each other.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• That means that when one of them spurns another — say, by not giving a major donor a major Cabinet position (which is what Cameron did to the author of this biography) — there's a lot of dirt to expose.

  [BBC]

• The author, Lord Ashcroft, also makes some serious allegations about what Cameron knew about Ashcroft's tax dealings — but that's getting less attention so far than the pig thing.

  [BBC]

• Weirdly, the British collective unconscious appears to be familiar with this "Prime Minister being intimate with a pig" thing. It featured in the first episode of the BBC dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror...

  [The Guardian / Leo Benedictus]

• And the Welsh band Los Campesinos! designed a T-shirt last year depicting Cameron giving a pig a big, wet, sloppy kiss.

  [Vice / Emma Garland]

Is public pressure going to slow hikes in drug prices?

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• The company that owns a drug to treat toxoplasmosis (a serious bacterial infection) is being heavily criticized for raising the price of the drug from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill.

  [New York Times / Andrew Pollack]

• The pill, called Daraprim, has been manufactured by one company or another since the 1950s. But when Turing Pharmaceuticals (run by former hedge-fund manager Martin Skhreli) acquired the drug in August, they hiked up the price.

• Skhreli claims that unlike other companies, they're doing research and development to improve Daraprim — and that this justifies the high prices. (R&D is usually cited as a reason for high drug prices, but it's not clear that Daraprim needed to be improved.)

  [Bloomberg TV]

• Skhreli also responded to his critics on Twitter this morning by virtually flicking them off, so he's an easy villain to seize on.

  [Martin Skhreil via Twitter]

• The problems here are systemic. This is a product of the same prescription drug development process that, as this Sarah Kliff feature explains, gave us a $1,000 Hepatitis C pill last year.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• But it looks like companies are beginning to feel public pressure. In the wake of the Daraprim article, an anti-tuberculosis drug that had also been acquired and repriced was quickly returned to its former owner (and its former price).

  [New York Times / Andrew Pollack]

• The Daraprim story also inspired a chiding tweet from Hillary Clinton — which was apparently enough to convince some investors to sell stocks in biotech in advance of feared future regulation.

  [Bloomberg / Robert Langreth and Drew Armstrong]

Walker into the sunset

Steve Pope/Getty Images

• Scott Walker, who was supposed to be in the top tier of presidential candidates, is instead the second to drop out of the Republican primary.

  [AP]

• Walker's collapse is astoundingly sudden. He'd been leading in the polls in Iowa for most of the campaign (through early August). It seems impossible that this piece, written in late July, would describe a man who'd be out of the race three months later.

  [RealClearPolitics / Rebecca Berg]

• According to donors, Walker was dropping out for money reasons: namely, he didn't have enough to keep running a top-tier campaign, and didn't want to "limp into Iowa."

  [New York Times / Alexander Burns, Patrick Healy and Trip Gabriel]

• It is rather ironic that a man who tried to distinguish himself from his opponents because he could "fight and win" is dropping out of the race even though he could stay in, just because he didn't want to "limp."

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• That lack of toughness was basically a verbal tic, as Betsy Woodruff laid out in one of the best pieces of the 2016 campaign so far: Scott Walker says "yes" to every question he is asked, even when he doesn't believe it.

  [Daily Beast / Betsy Woodruff]

• Weirdly, Walker's concession speech was less conciliatory than his campaign. He sharply criticized front-runner Donald Trump and basically called on more Republicans to drop out so the party could rally behind a single anti-Trump candidate.

  [AP]

• That message is extremely good news for the one career politician doing decently in the polls right now: Marco Rubio.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

MISCELLANEOUS

"Hamilton" is the best musical of the 21st century so far, and the cast recording is streaming on NPR's site. [NPR ]

• Why conservatives should care about inequality: much of it is produced by anti-free market policies.

  [National Affairs / Steven Teles]

• Meet Xiao Jiguo, China's leader Barack Obama impersonator.

  [Wall Street Journal / Laurie Burkitt and Olivia Geng]

• Which cities are heavy on apartments, which are heavy on rowhouses, and which are heavy on detached homes, in one chart.

  [Washington Post / Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham]

• Jamelle Bouie argues that Ben Carson is the most extreme candidate in the presidential race.

  [Slate / Jamelle Bouie]

VERBATIM

"Give more unconditional cash transfers. The questions should always be asked: ‘why not cash?’ and ‘if not now, when?’" [Report of the High Level Panel on Humanitarian Cash Transfers]

• "Methylene chloride, which triggered similar deaths dating as far back as the 1940s, could be bought barely diluted in products on retail shelves. It still can. And it’s still killing people."

  [Center for Public Integrity / Jamie Smith Hopkins]

• "Arthur Krock … worried in his Memoirs about whether he might have been compromised by orbiting the Kennedy family for decades. He had written glowingly of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.; helped polish for publication the senior thesis of young John F. Kennedy; and, later, even recommended the man who became the President’s valet."

  [New Yorker / Thomas Mallon]

• "Let me tell you what I did when a time-use expert told me I had 30 hours of leisure time every week: I stopped breathing. I sat in my chair, phone to my ear, jaw open, and utterly frozen in disbelief."

  [Daily Life / Brigid Schulte]

• "Densely packed into an earthenware vase"

  [New Yorker / Blythe Roberson]

WATCH THIS

This is Cuba's Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify – all without the internet [YouTube / Johnny Harris]

Vox / Johnny Harris

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