Vox Sentences: Live every Tuesday like it’s Super Tuesday

What to watch for after the Super Tuesday dust clears; Scott Kelly comes home from the world's weirdest twin study; the European migrant crisis is starting early this year.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

What to look for if you're watching Super Tuesday results tonight

John Moore/Getty Images

• Happy Super Tuesday! Here's your guide to poll closing times and results in the 13 states holding primaries for at least one party.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• Tonight could be the beginning of the end for Bernie Sanders. Here are the states he really, really needs to win.

  [Vox / Jeff Stein]

• This FiveThirtyEight model is a good reference tool to compare Sanders's performance in any given state with how he'd be expected to do there if he and Clinton were tied nationally. (So far in the campaign he has been underperforming.)

  [FiveThirtyEight / Nate Silver]

• Meanwhile, when the dust clears after tonight Donald Trump may have gained a prohibitive lead in the GOP primary — thanks largely to a primary calendar designed to help the party coalesce around a frontrunner. (Well played, GOP establishment.)

  [NYT / Trip Gabriel]

• Substantial numbers of conservatives have taken to loudly proclaiming they'll never vote for Trump; this piece, assembled from emails by many of them, is worth reading.

  [Bloomberg View / Megan McArdle]

• But most Republican voters, including conservative ones, are likely to warm up to Trump once he's nominated. That's one of many reasons there's a real possibility he could win the presidency.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

Twins in Spaaaaaaaaace

NASA

• Astronaut Scott Kelly will return to Earth Tuesday night after spending a year in space. You can watch the live stream here (the descent is scheduled to start at 8:05 pm Eastern).

  [Vox / Brian Resnick]

• A year is a very long time to spend in space, something this New York Times interactive illustrates with some very pretty NASA images.

  [NYT / Kenneth Chang]

• Kelly's voyage is part of a study on how living in "microgravity" for long periods affects the human body. Kelly's results on various tests (and DNA samples) are being compared with those of his twin, fellow astronaut Mark Kelly, who has stayed on Earth.

  [Scientific American / Amy Nordrum]

• Twin studies are a well-established tool in scientific research to discover what traits are linked to genetics. This twin study goes in the other direction — determining the effects of environment.

  [Genetic Science Learning Center]

• Kelly has also learned some straight-up weird stuff. Apparently microgravity does awkward things to your arms and feet.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

"A largely self-induced humanitarian crisis"

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

• 24,000 refugees are homeless and stranded in Greece, putting Europe on the brink of what the UN High Commissioner for Refugees calls "a largely self-induced humanitarian crisis."

  [BBC ]

• More than 130,000 people (many of them from Syria) have arrived in Europe since the beginning of 2016 — almost as many as arrived during the entire first half of 2015.

  [UNHCR]

• Per usual, European countries are responding by hastily closing their borders. Macedonian officials' attempts to close their borders with Greece have led them to tear-gas refugees protesting and trying to get through; 8,500 refugees are currently trapped on the border.

  [The Guardian / Helena Smith and Mark Tran]

• Meanwhile, the government of France is in the process of demolishing the infamous migrant camp at Calais called "the Jungle." It is also being met with protests, because the people there also have nowhere else to go.

  [The Guardian / Peter Walker and Anna Pujol-Mazzini]

• The Jungle was a hellhole. But as playwright (and former refugee) Tom Stoppard wrote after visiting last week, it was also a place worth preserving.

  [The Times (UK) / Tom Stoppard]

MISCELLANEOUS

The case for abolishing algebra II: It's useless in real life, and it's a surprisingly big driver of dropouts in both high school and college. [Slate / Dana Goldstein]

• Why is DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz sticking up for payday lenders?

  [Huffington Post / Zach Carter]

• If a teenager tells her boyfriend to kill himself, is that manslaughter? Or free speech?

  [NY Mag / Marin Cogan]

• A new book argues that we've been playing the tuned taxi horns in George Gershwin's "An American in Paris" wrong for 70 years.

  [NYT / Michael Cooper]

• Remembering Pauli Murray, the black queer civil rights lawyer, feminist theorist, Episcopal priest, and confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt.

  [Boston Review / Kenneth Mack]

VERBATIM

"Let’s not mince words: I killed people who wanted to die." [Toronto Life / John Hofsess]

• "The stigma around abortion prevents Burkhart’s nonprofit from performing many of the everyday transactions essential to businesses. She and other clinic owners have had trouble securing mortgages, medical insurance, contractors, and someone willing to deliver Band-Aids and bottles of water."

  [Bloomberg Businessweek / Meaghan Winter]

• "In a letter apparently written by Osama bin Laden, the late al-Qaeda leader denounced the corporate interests supposedly driving politics in the United States and hailed the courage of the country's Founding Fathers."

  [Washington Post / Ishaan Tharoor]

• "The Temple Guards, Keeli says, 'are the scariest thing imaginable. Nothing is scarier and I will stand by that statement until the day I die.'"

  [SB Nation / Jon Bois]

• "The children in Evicted have hellish lives. 'Tell us about the time that Dad hit you with a bottle and blood was coming out of your head,' a six-year-old girl asks her mother. Even at four, one of the chronically homeless boys seems 'finished with childhood.' He refuses to hold his mother’s hand or sing in preschool. When she faces possible jail time for committing armed robbery, she brings him to court with orders to be stoic 'if they give Momma the punishment.' The mother cries over her fifteen-month sentence, but the boy 'stared back stone-faced, strong, just like his momma had taught him.'"

  [NY Review of Books / Jason DeParle]

WATCH THIS

Primary voters don't really look like America [YouTube / Liz Scheltens, Joe Posner, and Carlos Waters]

Vox / Liz Scheltens, Joe Posner, Carlos Waters

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