Vox Sentences: All the young dudes carry the news

The Supreme Court might be about to gut public-sector unions. (Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing we can do.)

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Why unions are worried about SCOTUS

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

• The Supreme Court heard oral arguments today in a case about a California teachers' union that has a lot of progressives very nervous.

  [Huffington Post / Cristian Farias]

• The case raises the question of whether public employees whose pay is negotiated by a union, but aren't themselves members, should still have to pay fees to cover bargaining costs.

  [SCOTUSblog / Lyle Denniston]

• The teachers suing the union argue that, because labor conditions for government workers are an inherently political topic, asking for negotiating fees is no different from asking non-members to pay for political lobbying.

  [WSJ / Harlan Elrich]

• Public-sector unions are the last bastion of labor strength in America. So a decision to outlaw mandatory fees could be very bad not just for government unions, but for American labor in general.

  [Bureau of Labor Statistics]

• The case will likely be 5-4. But the swing vote isn't Anthony Kennedy. It's Antonin Scalia.

  [On Labor / Catherine Fisk]

• The worst sign for the union at today's oral arguments, however, came from the court's liberals — who were less focused on the question of whether mandatory fees were wrong than on whether, even if mandatory fees are wrong, the Court needed to hold to previous decisions on the question anyway.

  [SCOTUSBlog / Amy Howe]

Sean Penn's heart of darkness

Alfredo Estrella/AFP

• Over the weekend, Rolling Stone published an article by Sean Penn about meeting and interviewing notorious (and recently recaptured) Mexican cartel boss "El Chapo" Guzman. Vox explains.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• You should not read the actual article. It is terribly written. Seriously. Don't. Okay, if you insist, here it is.

  [Rolling Stone / Sean Penn]

• Penn has a history of writing overly-credulous articles about morally dubious Latin American figures. This 2008 takedown of an article he wrote about Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro could have just as easily been written about this weekend's piece.

  [New Yorker / George Packer]

• The Mexican government, which just recaptured Chapo on Fridaty, is now claiming that Penn led them to the drug lord. That may not be true. But actual security experts say that Penn's operational security definitely left something to be desired.

  [Fusion / Kashmir Hill]

• The interview is making a lot of journalists mad. Some are annoyed that Rolling Stone allowed Guzman to approve the final draft. Others contrast Penn's bonhomie with the killings of Mexican journalists who report on the cartels.

  [NPR / Colin Dwyer]

• Guzman's lust for publicity has backfired on occasion. Apparently his determination to line up stars and crew for a biopic — all requiring his approval, of course — might have helped lead to his downfall.

  [New Yorker / Patrick Radden Keefe]

David Bowie belonged to everyone

Jean-Luc Ourlin

• Rock icon David Bowie died Sunday night at the age of 69 from an unspecified form of cancer.

  [BBC]

• I (Dara) have noticed that a lot of people over the age of 40 assume no one under the age of 40 knows from Bowie. That is wrong.

• Many of us have reached for songs he's written throughout his career — right up until the album he released Friday, 48 hours before he died.

  [The Verge]

• Some were enthralled by his dedication to personae — and the subsequent reminder that you can always make something new and no less real of yourself.

  [Will Wilkinson]

• To generations of lonely LGBTQ kids in particular, Bowie's sexual ambiguity — and the way he made it beautiful — was an inspiration.

  [Chase Whiteside via Facebook]

• There's also his impact on history. Bowie didn't knock down the Berlin Wall, but he certainly created one of the most powerful cultural moments in a divided Berlin.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• His late-1990s "Bowie bonds" weren't just a gimmick — they were the first efforts to turn intellectual property into a financial security (a practice which has now spread to other industries).

  [Bloomberg Business / Alistair Marsh]

• And he predicted the collapse of the recording industry in 2002, saying, "You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left."

  [Fast Company / John Paul Titlow]

MISCELLANEOUS

DuPont has poisoned people and livestock with a chemical called PFOA for decades — and it took a longtime chemical corporation defense attorney to take them down. [NYT Mag / Nathaniel Rich]

• Kevin Drum makes a very powerful, very personal case for California's new right-to-die law.

  [Mother Jones / Kevin Drum]

• Remembering Joshua Braam, whose beating at the hands of his biological father led to one of the uglier Supreme Court rulings in recent memory.

  [NYT / Linda Greenhouse]

• Courts are making it very hard to regulate corporations effectively. But Congress can step in to fix that.

  [Democracy / Aziz Huq]

• Get your Leslie Knope on with this list of LA's tiniest parks.

  [LA Times / Kyle Kim]

VERBATIM

"In 1912, an un­named Wash­ing­ton Post re­port­er asked Pau­line Wayne, Pres­id­ent Taft’s cow, if she was milked by a stranger without her con­sent, as had been re­por­ted. 'It is true, Miss Wayne?' the re­port­er asked the 1,500-pound bovine." [National Journal / Brian Resnick]

• "He is not alone in his increasing distaste for a life that many married men would say they envy. With the freedom has come certain costs: isolation, regret and the feeling that, although you may still feel 25 in your heart, your knees are starting to ache and the years are slipping by fast."

  [NYT / Sridhar Pappu]

• "Introducing Knife: the start-up that's a knife."

  [McSweeney's / Lev Novak]

• "In the proud tradition of stupid internet toys before it, Lunchbot evolved into a real business."

  [The Verge / Casey Newton]

• "When asked before a speech in Keene, N.H., what he would say to reassure the Bloomberg Businessweek readers who work on Wall Street, or have millions of dollars, or run a hedge fund, and might be afraid he wants to tax them back to the Carter Age, Sanders puts down the manila folder containing his talk, which he delivers without a TelePrompTer.'"I’m not going to reassure them,' he says. 'Their greed, their recklessness, their illegal behavior has destroyed the lives of millions of Americans. Frankly, if I were a hedge fund manager, I would not vote for Bernie Sanders. And I would contribute money to my opponents to try to defeat him.'"

  [Bloomberg Businessweek / Joel Stein]

WATCH THIS

The poison-eating heroes who helped make food safe [YouTube / Phil Edwards]

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