Vox Sentences: The 2015 MacArthur grant winners you haven’t heard of, but should

Predicting the breakout stars from this year's MacArthur "genius" grant winners; Donald Trump's tax plan is not populist but is lame; and remember the Taliban? They're back...

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Sorry you got snubbed by the MacArthur Foundation again

(MacArthur Foundation)

• The MacArthur Foundation has introduced its 2015 class of fellows — commonly known as "genius grantees," though MacArthur rejects the term— who will get $625,000, no strings attached, over the next five years.

  [Macarthur Foundation]

• You've probably heard of at least two of them (but they did fun interviews anyway): Ta-Nehisi Coates, America's foremost public intellectual...

  [The Atlantic / Jeffrey Goldberg]

• ...and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer of Hamilton (the best Broadway musical of the 21st century).

  [Grantland / Rembert Browne]

• But as Vox's Dylan Matthews points out, the fellowship isn't supposed to be for people you've heard of — it's supposed to help people break out, giving them the financial freedom to do great work.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• So here are some MacArthur fellows you might be hearing about more in the future:

• Peidong Yang is one of several researchers focusing on artificial photosynthesis; he's produced a synthetic "leaf" that generates liquid fuels and gives off oxygen.

  [Los Angeles Times / Deborah Netburn]

• Patrick Awuah founded a university in Ghana that's become a model for African higher education.

  [Swarthmore Magazine / Ken Maguire]

• Marina Rustow is conducting cutting-edge research into how medieval Jews in Egypt lived under the Muslim caliphate.

  [New York Times / Jodi Rudoren]

• LaToya Ruby Frazier is a terrific portrait photographer who's used her own family to tell the story of African Americans in the Rust Belt.

  [NPR]

• And Juan Salgado's organization, which provides job training and citizenship aid for low-skilled immigrants, is a case study in how to do immigrant integration right.

  [Think Progress / Esther Yu-Hsi Lee]

A yuuugely disappointing tax plan

(Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

• Some wonks — yes, Vox staffers included — were legitimately excited for Donald Trump's tax plan, since he'd been promising to break the GOP's cardinal rule and hike taxes on the rich.

  [Boston Globe / Tracy Jan]

• Sadly, no dice. The plan is out, and it cuts taxes on the rich even more than Jeb Bush's does.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews and Javier Zarracina]

• It's a missed opportunity. Trump could have exposed a real rift between the GOP and its base on policy. Instead, he appears to be content to appeal to voters' racial grievances while not being any more responsive to their economic positions than other candidates.

  [The Atlantic / Russell Berman]

• Jeb Bush, whose tax plan resembles Trump's, has argued that it's impossible to cut taxes without cutting them mostly on the rich — because the rich pay the most in tax. The second statement is true, but the first one does not follow from it.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Republicans' other argument is that the tax code ought to be "simpler." NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben takes a hard look at whether that's a good idea, and what simplification would really look like.

  [NPR / Danielle Kurtzleben]

Taliban, Tali-back

(STR/AFP/Getty Images)

• The Taliban captured Afghanistan's fifth-largest city on Monday. This is a bad, bad sign.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Not only is Kurduz the first provincial capital the Taliban has seized since losing control of Afghanistan after the 2001 US invasion, but it's not even in the regions the group's traditionally been strong in (southern and eastern Afghanistan).

  [Wall Street Journal / Michael Kugelman]

• The fighting underlines existing serious problems with the Afghan defense forces; among other issues, the country hasn't had a defense minister for over a year.

  [Afghanistan Analysts / Thomas Ruttig]

• Soldiers are being supplemented by local "police," whom the International Crisis Group has described as "cheap but dangerous" — and who do terrible things like drag village elders to death behind pickup trucks.

  [AFP ]

• The worse Afghanistan gets, the more refugees flee — often to Europe. There are more unaccompanied child refugees coming to Europe from Afghanistan than from any other country.

  [Christian Science Monitor / Howard LaFranchi]

MISCELLANEOUS

Bosses are getting better at measuring which workers are productive and which aren't — and it's driving up inequality. [Technology Review / Tyler Cowen]

• The neuroscience of anxiety, explained in one great interactive cartoon.

  [Nicky Case]

• No, the White House did not block the Twitter account of a 13-year-old conservative.

  [Washington Post / David Weigel]

• Prosecutors are beginning to charge friends of heroin addicts with murder for providing them with drugs they OD on. Somehow Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, hasn't been charged.

  [Vice / Daniel Denvir]

• Meanwhile, in Canada, a goat was arrested by Mounties after refusing to leave a Tim Horton's in Saskatchewan.

  [Global News / Thomas Piller]

VERBATIM

"People say rape is serious and you should report it, but look what happened to me: I reported my rape, and they told me it never happened." [Lara McLeod to BuzzFeed / Katie JM Baker]

• "This is why the residents of Springfield are such ideal targets for the Movementarians. While this is usually played for laughs, a crucial trait of the townspeople is how empty their lives are and how close most of them are to utter despair."

  [AV Club / Alasdair Wilkins]

• "If those who oppose opening up our borders want to make their case, they should do it in the shadow of a simple fact: that closed borders means people will die."

  [Josh Oldham]

• "We might do well to look more closely at the way autobiographical readings have become the unexamined default way of thinking about pop in general and female artists in particular."

  [JSTOR / Rachel Greenhaus]

• "If people irrationally fear annuities because they seem like a gamble on one's own life, history suggests that they irrationally loved tontines because they see tontines as a gamble on other people's lives."

  [Washington Post / Jeff Guo]

WATCH THIS

Tricks for eating less, from a behavioral scientist [YouTube / Joe Posner, Joss Fong, Julia Belluz]

(Vox/Joe Posner, Joss Fong)

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