Vox Sentences: Russia and Saudi Arabia want to cap oil production. One problem: Iran.

A (probably doomed) plan to cap oil exports; Democrats belatedly realize not all of their voters are white; Kendrick Lamar robbed again.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

OPEC to Iran: Eh, oil's not so great

David Hecker/Getty Images

• At an OPEC meeting, Saudi Arabia and Russia reached an agreement to cap oil production at their levels from January, in the hopes of getting other countries to agree.

  [CNBC / Huileng Tan]

• If an agreement could be reached, it might halt a slide in oil prices that's crippled the Saudi oil industry and cost a lot of young Saudi men their "cushy" jobs.

  [New York Times / Ben Hubbard]

• The problem is that Saudi Arabia and Russia aren't responsible for most of the increase in supply that's driven prices downward.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• And one of the countries that is responsible for the supply surge — Iran — has no interest in agreeing to a production cap, since it's just emerging from years of economic sanctions after its nuclear deal with the US and EU was signed. (And, arguably, it signed that deal to get access to oil exports.)

  [Reuters / Rania El Gamal and Tom Finn]

• So while news of the Saudi-Russian pact initially drove oil prices up, Iran's lack of interest caused investors to cool off a bit. Sorry, Saudis.

  [MarketWatch / Mark DeCambre, Sara Sjolin, and Jenny W. Hsu]

Primaries of Color

Andrew Burton/Getty Images

• You may have forgotten after Iowa and New Hampshire, but it turns out a lot of Democratic voters aren't white. And the next two states — Nevada and South Carolina — will be a test of whether Hillary Clinton still has a lock on nonwhite voters.

  [Washington Post / Greg Sargent]

• The Clinton campaign is worried, particularly about Nevada. Their bizarre way of managing expectations is to claim that Nevada is actually a super-white state.

  [Washington Post / Jon Ralston]

• This is dumb and wrong. But there is definitely reason to suspect Latino turnout in Saturday's caucuses will be low — and that will be bad for the state.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• In South Carolina, the African-American vote is paramount, and both Clinton and Sanders have been courting endorsements that can help them with that demographic. Bernie Sanders released a powerful ad with the daughter of Eric Garner, killed by a New York cop in 2014; Hillary Clinton was endorsed by Garner's mother.

  [CNN / Brianna Kellar]

• But it's Clinton who's turning up the volume on racial issues the most. She's taken to calling Sanders a single-issue candidate and asking audiences, "If we broke up the banks tomorrow, would that end racism? Would that end sexism?"

  [Washington Post / David Weigel]

• That strategy seems to be working, at least in South Carolina; a new CNN poll found her beating Sanders 65 to 28 percentage points among black voters there, while Sanders won whites 54 to 40.

  [Twitter / Alex Seitz-Wald]

• This effort to court black voters might end up influencing the party beyond this campaign. On Tuesday, Clinton delivered a speech in New York that might be the most honest reckoning a white Democrat has made with systemic racism in a long time.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate

Larry Busacca/Getty Images for NARAS

• For the second time in three years, Kendrick Lamar was robbed of a Grammy, as his To Pimp a Butterfly lost Best Album to Taylor Swift's catchy but hardly innovative 1989.

  [Fusion / Kelsey McKinney]

• You may remember Lamar as the person Macklemore texted a very long apology to in 2014, after Lamar's Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City lost Best Rap Album to Macklemore's catchy but hardly innovative The Heist.

  [CBS News / Jessica Derschowitz]

• Lamar won Best Rap Album this year. And his live performance won the night — even though CBS, which broadcast the awards, came under some (not entirely deserved) flak for censoring him.

  [The Fader / Jordan Darville]

• Swift, for her part, used her acceptance speech for 1989 to subtweet Kanye West, violating both the spirit and the letter of the lead single from the album, "Shake It Off."

  [Vox / Alex Abad-Santos]

• Her win was also a blow against sexism — she's the first woman to win Album of the Year twice — and an illustration of it: She was the only woman onstage when she won.

  [Janet Mock via Twitter]

• In somehow less dramatic news, the live performance from the cast of Hamilton went well, creator Lin-Manuel Miranda's acceptance rap when the soundtrack won a Grammy went better, and tickets for the show will now not be affordable until sometime during the second term of the Blue Ivy Carter administration.

  [Vox / Alex Abad-Santos]

MISCELLANEOUS

For able-bodied people, the minimum wage is $7.25. For people with disabilities, wages can go lower than $1 an hour, and it's completely legal. [Washington Post / Lydia DePillis]

• That'swhatshesaid is a brutal work of experimental theater that sharply critiques women's lack of voice in many widely produced plays. It also quotes liberally from those plays. Is that theft, or fair use?

  [American Theatre / Nicole Serratore]

• Most people know what to do when a friend gets a cut or a scrape. But what do you do when they're in a mental health crisis?

  [The Atlantic / Meagan Morris]

• TIL Bernie Sanders's preferred walk-off music is "Starman" by David Bowie.

  [NYT / Jason Horowitz]

• Women's mosques are opening up in Denmark, LA, and the UK, but they got their start in a surprising place: China.

  [Atlas Obscura / Jessie Guy-Ryan]

VERBATIM

"I’ve written two books, which has surprised a lot of people, particularly up East, who didn’t think I could read, much less write." [George W. Bush via NYT / Ashley Parker and Maggie Haberman]

• "Almost exactly nine years ago, in 2007, I was that person—an intern, standing enthralled in the back of a Chinese restaurant as Bernie Sanders ate green beans straight from the buffet and said f-words while Hillary Clinton delivered canned lines in a speech celebrating Senator Charles Schumer’s book about selling Democratic policies to Middle America."

  [New Republic / Elspeth Reeve]

• "Where does the Cruz campaign store the $29,093 worth of flags they bought in Utah?"

  [Atlas Obscura / Cara Giaimo]

• "Sex among dwarf chimpanzees is in fact the business of the whole family, and the cute little ones often lend a helping hand when they engage in oral sex with each other."

  [Petter Boeckman to NewsMedical]

• "As bees vanish, bee heists multiply."

  [Washington Post / Jenny Starrs]

WATCH THIS

Astronaut ice cream is a lie [YouTube / Phil Edwards, Johnny Harris, and Gina Barton]

Gina Barton/Vox

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via