Vox Sentences: A Tuesday so super no one can agree on what to call it

Another round of primaries; the Obama administration scraps plans to allow drilling off the Atlantic coast; Myanmar elects its first nonmilitary president in more than 50 years.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Super, thanks for asking

John Sommers II/Getty Images

• In a Tuesday so super that no one can even agree what to call it anymore, residents of North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois voted in the presidential primaries today. This link will be updated as results come in.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• Of course, the real question is what effect tonight has on the delegate leads of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, respectively. On the GOP side — as this fun-to-use delegate simulator makes clear — it looks like Trump could gain enough to make him all but unbeatable going forward.

  [Wall Street Journal / Randy Yeip and Stuart A. Thompson]

• If you're still having trouble taking Trump seriously, read this NYT piece about just how long he's been preparing to get more seriously involved in politics; it looks like the GOP establishment underestimated him for not months but years.

  [NYT / Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns]

• If you're in panic mode, this is the most exhaustive guide yet to how the Republican Party could use convention rules in Cleveland this summer to keep Trump from winning the nomination.

  [Bloomberg / Sasha Issenberg]

• Tonight's election signals the end (practically, if not officially) of the Marco Rubio campaign. Rubio is expected to lose his own home state. He's been limping to the finish so long that the postmortems have already started — this, from BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins, is the best.

  [BuzzFeed News / McKay Coppins]

• On the Democratic side, we're likely to see a repeat of the last two nights of primaries: Hillary Clinton expands her delegate lead, but high-profle state wins for Bernie Sanders keep his supporters energized.

  [Vox / Jeff Stein]

• But the real fun for Dems is in down-ballot races. In Florida, Democrat Alan Grayson — an angry, loose-cannon populist who's polling way behind the Republican candidate — is leading in the August primary for Rubio's Senate seat, beating a way more electable contender.

  [The Atlantic / Michelle Cottle]

• And in Illinois, State's Attorney Anita Alvarez — a tough-on-crime prosecutor criticized for protecting police who shoot unarmed civilians — is being challenged by Kim Foxx (the subject of this good, if fawning, Chicago Reader profile).

  [Chicago Reader / Micah Uetricht]

Surprise!

Shutterstock

• The Obama administration announced Tuesday that it's scrapping plans to lease oil and gas drilling rights off the coasts of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• The decision means that leasing rights won't be available in the region until 2022 at the earliest.

• The administration is still planning to sell drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico, though, as well as the Arctic.

  [Department of the Interior]

• Why the reversal? Partly it's a matter of local politics — state capitals were enthused about attracting energy sector jobs, but coastal communities were worried about the impact of a disaster like 2010's Deepwater Horizon spill.

  [NYT / Coral Davenport]

• Partly the administration is caving to pressure from the Pentagon, which was concerned about the effects drilling would have on "readiness" activities conducted offshore.

  [Washington Post / Darryl Fears]

• And partly, of course, it's a victory for environmental activists.

  [ThinkProgress / Samantha Page]

Friends in high places

STR/AFP/Getty Images

• Myanmar's parliament just elected Htin Kyaw to the presidency — the first time in 53 years a nonmilitary man has held the position.

  [The Guardian / Oliver Holmes]

• Myanmar's military junta dissolved in 2011. But since then, the president has been a general named Thein Sein.

  [Council on Foreign Relations]

• The military still retains a substantial role in government. It's guaranteed 25 percent of seats in parliament. (Many of the rest were taken in November by Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party.)

  [BBC]

• And it was essentially guaranteed a position in the executive: Former general Myint Swe, who led a crackdown on Buddhist monks in 2007, has been given one of the two vice presidential slots.

  [Sydney Morning Herald / Lindsay Murdoch]

• Essentially, though, the presidential election is a victory for Suu Kyi. Htin Kyaw is a relative newbie to politics, but he's a longtime Suu Kyi ally.

  [The Guardian / Poppy McPherson and Aung Naing Soe]

• Since the country's constitution bans Suu Kyi from running the country herself, it's expected that she'll be using Htin Kyaw as a proxy.

  [Reuters / Hnin Yadana Zaw and Antoni Slodkowski]

MISCELLANEOUS

Kids who were born around when Facebook started are preteens now, and they are not pleased with how much their parents have posted about them. [NYT / KJ Dell'Antonia]

• Regular BMI screenings in schools are supposed to help tackle obesity. But they seem to be more effective at causing eating disorders.

  [PS Mag / Carrie Arnold]

• Barry Massey was sentenced to life in prison without parole when he was only 14. Now he's 42, released after nearly 30 years, and he has to learn how to be a free adult for the first time in his life.

  [Seattle Times / Nina Shapiro]

• For years, Westerns and historical dramas have lionized Confederate troops. Enter Free State of Jones, whose hero is a Confederate deserter in an interracial marriage who formed a mixed-race community in Mississippi.

  [Smithsonian / Richard Grant]

• Many Silicon Valley observers assumed the end was near for Dropbox. So the company did something radical: It stopped relying on Amazon.

  [Wired / Cade Metz]

VERBATIM

"DiMatteo, Rubio's one-time operative, has already voted. For Trump." [Tampa Bay Times / Alex Leary]

• "All of us, whether we are ignorant of philosophy or professors of philosophy, find it easier to follow dogma than to think. What Hilary Putnam's life offers our troubled nation is, I think, a noble paradigm of a perpetual willingness to subject oneself to reason's critique."

  [Huffington Post / Martha Nussbaum]

• "Neil deGrasse Tyson strides onto stage to say that actually the Earth orbits the sun, that actually living beings gain their traits through evolutionary processes, that actually your hand has five fingers, that actually cows go moo, that actually poo comes out your bum – and you are then supposed to think yes, I knew that, and imagine someone else, someone who didn’t know it already, some idiot, and think: I’m better than that person, I’m so much smarter than everyone else."

  [Sam Kriss]

• "The highest discrepancy we saw is in the Ted Cruz campaign, where male employees make an average of $20,000 more than female employees."

  [Jezebel / Joanna Rothkopf]

• "It is one of history’s cheekier pranks that the first architect ever to appear on television was that thirty-year-old prodigy with the movie-star face, Albert Speer."

  [New Criterion / Michael J. Lewis]

WATCH THIS

Stop taking antibiotics to treat your cold [YouTube / Julia Belluz, Carlos Waters, and Sarah Turbin]

Vox / Carlos Waters, Sarah Turbin

CORRECTION: This article originally implied the Democratic primary for Florida's Senate race was today. It's in August. We were wrong and are sorry.

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