Vox Sentences: Would you rather be "trapped by wealth" or killed by poverty?

Where being poor is a recipe for early death; David Cameron's Panama Papers omnishambles; Ted Cruz is running circles around Donald Trump in delegate organizing.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Poverty kills

Health Inequality Project

• A new paper from a team of economists led by Stanford's Raj Chetty has found that Americans in "the 1%" live 10 to 15 years longer than their counterparts in the bottom 1 percent of the income distribution.

  [Journal of the American Medical Association / Raj Chetty et al.]

• The US's richest men live longer than men anywhere else; its poorest have similar life spans to men in Sudan.

  [CityLab / Tanvi Misra]

• The paper builds on a growing body of research about the health effects of inequality, including a study from last year finding that death rates are rising for middle-aged white Americans even as they decline for every other group.

  [NYT / Gina Kolata]

• But the disparity isn't inevitable. Chetty and his colleagues found that how long poor Americans live depends hugely on where they live. The Californian poor live longer than the Southern poor.

  [Washington Post / Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham]

• The authors suspect that state and local policies play a role in protecting the poor from death — especially paternalistic public health policies like smoking bans.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• But they didn't find that access to health care and health insurance were correlated with how long the poorest Americans lived.

  [WSJ / Harriet Torry]

He'll never live like common people

Carl Court/Getty Images

• Among the many revelations in last week's Panama Papers data leak: The father of UK Prime Minister David Cameron was a director for an offshore investment fund run out of the Bahamas as a tax haven.

  [The Guardian / Juliette Garside]

• This raised legitimate questions about whether Cameron himself had benefited from the fund. Cameron replied to those questions very badly — first by saying it was a "private matter" and then by accusing his critics of trying to besmirch his father's memory.

  [The Economist / Bagehot]

• Ultimately, Cameron admitted he'd had a stake in the fund. He also took the unprecedented step of releasing six years of tax returns, in an attempt to prove that he wasn't illegally or unethically dodging taxes.

  [Quartz / Joon Ian Wong]

• Those returns raised more questions than they answered. In particular, Britons are wondering why the heck Cameron got a £200,000 cash gift from his mother in 2011.

  [BBC]

• The whole episode makes Cameron look, if not corrupt, certainly politically inept. His defenders are reduced to arguing that he's been trapped by his wealth into not understanding what common people do.

  [The Telegraph / Charles Moore]

• Of course, Iceland's disgraced former prime minister — and the officials in other countries where the Panama Papers threaten to create a full-blown political crisis — would kill for such problems.

  [Vox / Tara Golshan]

Outhustled

Bryan Thomas/Getty Images

• On Saturday, Ted Cruz completed a sweep of Colorado's district presidential conventions. Donald Trump basically fell on his face.

  [Politico / Eli Stokols and Kyle Cheney]

• The Trump campaign embarrassed itself. At one convention, the campaign urged supporters to vote for delegates who weren't on the ballot — then, trying to correct the error at the last minute, screwed it up again.

  [Washington Post / Ed O'Keefe]

• It's not just Colorado. Cruz's campaign is outhustling Trump's in states from Iowa to South Carolina, grabbing up remaining delegates even in states Trump crushed.

  [MSNBC / Benjy Sarlin]

• Trump's response has been to complain that the rules are unfair and to float the idea of challenging the Colorado delegation at the convention.

  [Denver Post / John Frank]

• It is perhaps not surprising that this is the response of a candidate of whom staffers said (according to one former staffer in March), "Mr. Trump doesn't understand how delegates work."

  [Huffington Post / Samantha-Jo Roth]

• Make no mistake: Donald Trump is still winning the Republican presidential campaign.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• All of the scrambling for delegates only matters if you believe that should Trump not win an outright majority of delegates before the convention, he'll lose a bunch of support after the first ballot and open the door to a brokered convention.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Harry Enten]

MISCELLANEOUS

Eric and Ivanka Trump forgot to register in time for the New York primary. Sad! [NY Mag / Eric Levitz]

• The phrase "it was as if an occult hand" has been showing up in newspaper stories for years, as if an occult hand were trying to sneak an inside joke past the copy desk.

  [Wikipedia]

• In praise of Outlander, the show with the best, most interesting sex on television.

  [NY Mag / Jennifer Vineyard]

• Would you like to buy an entire English village? Well, if you have $28.5 million to spare, you're in luck.

  [BBC Radio 4]

• Good news, a mystery planet is NOT going to lob comets at Earth and kill us all.

  [Slate / Phil Plait]

VERBATIM

"Touching her, I felt no fear, but what I did immediately feel was that something very serious had happened to me, something I had better fight — that I couldn’t let myself in for a life of being helped up and down staircases." [Adrienne Rich via New Republic / Michelle Dean]

• "What the French like to call the guerre des vins has broken out again."

  [The Guardian / Kim Willsher and Alistair Dawber]

• "The Syrians determined that the pictures showed 'no beating marks, no traces of torture,' and that the boy had been killed by gunfire, 'most probably by his fellow-terrorists.' The investigation also found that a doctor who had reported that the boy’s penis had been cut off 'had misjudged the situation in an earlier examination.' Caesar’s collection contains six images of Hamza al-Khateeb’s body. His eyes are swollen shut, and his head is a deep purple, from being beaten. His penis is missing."

  [New Yorker / Ben Taub]

• "Brazil’s impeachment saga took a bizarre twist on Monday after Vice President Michel Temer released a tape in which he discusses the outlines of a Temer administration in the event that Dilma Rousseff loses a crucial impeachment vote this weekend. … Temer’s office said the audio was sent to a group of lawmakers by accident."

  [Bloomberg / Anna Edgerton and Raymond Colitt]

• "Hey holy shit hello, you are at McDonald's, and I am begging your patience."

  [Josh Raby]

WATCH THIS

The pneumatic tube's strange 150-year journey [YouTube / Phil Edwards]

Toronto Star Archives/Toronto Star via Getty Images

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