Vox Sentences: Welcome to the post-antibiotic dystopian future

France's labor protests are getting hardcore even for France; Sanders vs. Trump in 2016's greatest kvetch-off; pan–drug resistant bacteria are here and we're all gonna die.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

French PM: "Good grief!"

Murat Unlu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

• Ongoing protests in France over reforms to the country's labor laws are getting hostile. On Thursday, during a nationwide day of strikes, protesters vandalized banks and injured 15 police officers, while police retaliated with tear gas.

  [BBC]

• The reforms, which were passed by France's lower legislative house earlier this month after some slight adjustments to make them more labor-friendly, would make it easier for companies to hire and fire workers by eliminating permanent job contracts.

  [The Guardian / John Henley and Philip Inman]

• The French government, which is both socialist and extremely unpopular, claims it can't make further reforms to the bill — and won't withdraw it.

  [Wall Street Journal / William Horobin and Inti Landauro]

• Protests against the law appear to be getting smaller: Fewer people marched Thursday than had in previous months' protests.

  [Reuters / Brian Love and Ingrid Melander]

• But they're getting more entrenched. One leftist labor union is working to cut off the country's energy supply, in part by supporting strikes at oil refineries, a tactic that appears to be succeeding.

  [Financial Times / Michael Stothard and Anne-Sylvaine Chassany]

• That would be bad for the French economy. It would also be an embarrassment — and a logistical disaster — for the French government if it isn't resolved soon: France is hosting the Euro 2016 soccer tournament in two weeks.

  [The Guardian / Angelique Chrisafis]

• You can understand why French Prime Minister Manuel Valls let out this cry of frustration earlier this week: "Good grief, are people patriots or not in these times?"

  [Wall Street Journal / William Horobin and Inti Landauro]

LOUD NOISES

Getty Images

• After a day of will-they-won't-they back and forth, it appears as of this writing that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have agreed in principle to debate with each other. Trump says he'll agree to do it for $10 million, which he would then donate to "women's health."

  [USA Today / Paul Singer and Eliza Collins ]

• The backstory here: Sanders was supposed to debate Hillary Clinton in California ahead of the primary there in June. Clinton pulled out; Trump, apparently, is stepping in.

  [CNN / Dan Merica and Brian Stetler]

• This can't be welcome news to Clinton. Sanders already appears to be tightening the race in California, meaning she's stuck in yet another cycle in which her path to the nomination is still all but inevitable but her opponent's supporters feel galvanized by his "momentum."

  [Politico / Steven Shepard]

• And now he's going to be presented side by side with the man who, as of Thursday, has officially clinched the Republican presidential nomination.

  [AP]

• Maybe a Sanders-Trump debate will be great for America. Maybe they'll hash out what, exactly, a "workers' party" (as Trump said Thursday he thinks the GOP will become) in America ought to look like.

  [The Atlantic / David A. Graham]

• But for my (Dara's) money, it's slightly more likely that it would just be a couple of old guys yelling past each other.

  [Know Your Meme]

Slow clap for humanity

Shutterstock

• A "truly pan–drug resistant bacteria" has been found in the United States, both in a human and, separately, in a slaughtered pig.

  [National Geographic / Maryn McKenna]

• The bacteria are resistant to the antibiotic colistin, which had until previously been the "antibiotic of last resort" — the only one to which bacteria had not evolved resistance.

  [Washington Post / Lena H. Sun and Brady Dennis]

• This is bad. It has also been coming for a very long time. Overuse of antibiotics has been a problem for a century, and the "half-life" of antibiotics — the time between the discovery of a drug and the discovery of resistance to it — has been shrinking.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• Indeed, scientists and epidemiologists have been thinking for a while about what will happen in a "post-antibiotic" future.

  [Medium / Maryn McKenna]

• The lesson here isn't that we know what comes next. It's that this was an entirely preventable development. And it just didn't get prevented.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

MISCELLANEOUS

You know those yellow "Planet Aid" clothing collection bins you sometimes see by convenience stores? Turns out they're run by a strange Danish cult whose leader is currently on the run from law enforcement, likely at a mysterious Mexican compound. [Reveal News / Matt Smith, Amy Walters, and Kandani Ngwira]

• A new theory of Alzheimer's argues it's the result of "toxic remnants" from the brain's attempts to ward off infection.

  [NYT / Gina Kolata]

• Every terrible hat from Gilmore Girls, in order.

  [Mashable / Laura Vitto and Nicole Gallucci]

• Every one of Jerry's girlfriends from Seinfeld, in order (including Lorelai Gilmore!).

  [Fusion / Molly Fitzpatrick]

• Bill Clinton got into a half-hour argument about his domestic spending record with a 24-year-old Sanders supporter, because of course he did; that is a very Bill Clinton thing to do.

  [BuzzFeed / Ruby Cramer]

VERBATIM

"My preferred brand of bottle is Deer Park because the shape of the bottle is best for flipping." [National hero Mike Senatore to NY Mag / Madison Malone Kircher]

• "The idea that hashtags, even progressive and non-sexist ones, might determine plot points of movies is a little chilling."

  [AV Club / Jesse Hassenger]

• "America’s nuclear arsenal depends on a surprising relic of the 1970s that few of us may recall: the humble floppy disk."

  [Washington Post / Brian Fung]

• "The Sanders movement has become impervious to reality. Some have even called into question the nature of reality itself: 'Bernie Sanders’ "political revolution" is political only inasmuch as thought is political,' a self-described 'metamodernist creative writer' named Seth Abramson wrote in the Huffington Post a few days ago. 'By the very nature of things—we might call it perceptual entropy—the impossible, once perceived, enters a chain of causation whose natural conclusion is realization.' By this logic, Abramson reasons, Sanders is actually winning."

  [The Atlantic / Molly Ball]

• "I personally think dat boi does borrow from African-American Vernacular English, but as was mentioned in one of the final threads concerning dat boi: 'This meme exists in a vacuum.' It is a frog on a unicycle."

  [Tamia Thompson to Paper / Sandra Song]

WATCH THIS

Our sterile homes might be giving us seasonal allergies [YouTube / Liz Scheltens and Gina Barton]

Getty Images

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