Vox Sentences: “My party has gone bat**** crazy”

Chris Christie endorses Donald Trump; an Oscars notable for its absences; Sanders and Clinton compete for black voters.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Local blowhard endorses local blowhard

Tom Pennington/Getty Images

• New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — whom you may remember as one of the many Republicans who failed to win the "establishment lane" in the 2016 primary — endorsed Donald Trump today.

  [Reuters / Emily Stephenson]

• The move stunned a lot of people, but it's actually not surprising. Christie and Trump are personally close, and Christie made a point of not going after Trump during the primaries.

  [Yahoo / Jon Ward]

• Trump also picked up the endorsement of Maine Gov. Paul LePage, whom you may remember as the man who complained that men named "D-Money" and "Smoothie" were coming to Maine to sell heroin and impregnate white women.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• The endorsements underscore one of the most important facts about Trump's support: It's stronger in the Northeast than anywhere else.

  [NYT / Nate Cohn]

• South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has a different explanation: "My party has gone batshit crazy."

  [Vox / German Lopez]

#OscarsSoSunday

20th Century Fox

• The Oscars are Sunday! Here is Vox culture editor Todd VanDerWerff's — which is to say, the definitive — assessment of the nominees.

  [Vox / Todd VanDerWerff and Sarah Frostenson]

• The Revenant, which the New Yorker's Richard Brody describes as "the Donald Trump" of movies, is likely going to win Best Picture, because it's 2016 and that's what happens to the Donalds Trump of things.

  [The New Yorker / Richard Brody]

• It's not guaranteed to win. Slate makes the (probably motivatedly reasoned) case for The Martian.

  [Slate / Julia Turner, Dan Kois, and Jacob T. Swinney]

• There are apparently Oscars awarded in other categories too. Todd VanDerWerff explains the difference between "sound mixing" and "sound editing," and many other of the lesser-known awards.

  [Vox / Todd VanDerWerff]

• But this year's Oscars are mostly about who won't be onstage: people of color. The nominees are super white. The voters, as this updated census from the LA Times proves, are also super white.

  [LA Times / Rebecca Keegan, Sandra Poindexter, and Glenn Whipp]

• This is not the first time this has been pointed out. Esther Breger has a good retrospective of the 1996 "Hollywood Blackout" protesting this exact same problem.

  [The New Republic / Esther Breger]

• Then again, maybe this is just part — as the New York Times compiles in this pretty devastating feature — of "what it's really like to work in Hollywood if you're not a straight white man."

  [NYT / Melena Ryzik]

Finally, a state with black voters

Mark Makela/Getty Images

• The South Carolina Democratic primary will be held tomorrow. Hillary Clinton is expected to win it.

• Mother Jones's Tim Murphy, on the trail with "the moms of Black Lives Matter" stumping for Clinton, makes the case that her alliance with the group is more than window dressing.

  [Mother Jones / Tim Murphy]

• Clinton is still facing questions about her support for the 1994 crime bill. But as Mark Kleiman as written, it's not fair to blame her for the bill, and it's not fair to blame the bill for mass incarceration.

  [Washington Monthly / Mark Kleiman]

• (While we're at it, Bernie Sanders actually voted for the crime bill — though, as Vox's German Lopez explains, it's complicated.)

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• At the end of the day, black voters might split the same way voters of every other race have: Young Democrats support Bernie. Old Democrats support Hillary. Old Democrats vote more.

  [BuzzFeed News / Darren Sands]

MISCELLANEOUS

The Massachusetts state government wants to create a rattlesnake island, and honestly it sounds pretty awesome. [New England Public Radio / Karen Brown]

• 74 people produced the songs currently in the Billboard Top 40 this week. 71 of them are men.

  [Fusion / Kelsey McKinney]

• Adam Smith insisted that before currency, we had a barter economy of people trading goods and services directly. The problem is there's no evidence that barter economies ever existed.

  [The Atlantic / Ilana Strauss]

• If you don't count prisoners, the unemployment rate for black men ages 25 to 54 is 11.4 percent. If you do count incarcerated people, it's 18.6 percent.

  [Washington Post / Jeff Guo]

• People with mental illnesses are much likelier to marry other people with mental illnesses than mentally healthy people are.

  [Medical Daily / Samantha Olson]

VERBATIM

"No, Ted Cruz is not the Zodiac killer." [Washington Post / Philip Bump]

• "[Jennifer Garner] refuses to claim responsibility for the midlife-crisis tattoo—the rising phoenix—that takes up her estranged husband’s entire back, as seen in photographs. 'You know what we would say in my hometown about that? "Bless his heart." A phoenix rising from the ashes. Am I the ashes in this scenario?' Garner says with a wink."

  [Vanity Fair / Krista Smith]

• "We barely finished the lab on time and headed out... My partner was in the elevator, but he didn't see me. He was too busy talking with a friend of his, explaining how [upset] he was about barely finishing the lab and debugging the circuit for so long. I guess his friend saw that I was his partner (without seeing me in the elevator) because he said, ‘Well that's what you get for working with a girl. These kinds of labs aren't really their thing.’ My partner just laughed and said, ‘Yeah, fucking sucks.’"

  [Anonymous in "The Status of Undergraduate Women at MIT" / Caroline Chin and Kamilla Tekiela]

• "Six years ago I submitted a paper for a panel, 'On the Absence of Absences' that was to be part of an academic conference later that year—in August 2010. Then, and now, I had no idea what the phrase 'absence of absences' meant."

  [American Prospect / Peter Dreier]

• "As we say goodbye to one another, we return to the world like sexual MacGivers, armed with the knowledge that pretty much everything could be a tool for a better blow job."

  [DCist / Rachel Kurzius]

WATCH THIS

It's not you. Bad doors are everywhere. [YouTube / Joe Posner and Roman Mars]

Vox / Joe Posner

Explanatory journalism is a public good

At Vox, we believe that everyone deserves access to information that helps them understand and shape the world they live in. That's why we keep our work free. Support our mission and help keep Vox free for all by making a financial contribution to Vox today.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$95/year

$120/year

$250/year

$350/year

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $120/year

Yes, I'll give $120/year

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