Vox Sentences: And then there was Trump

Where were you when you realized Donald Trump would be the Republican presidential nominee?

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

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#EverTrump

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• Donald Trump is the last remaining candidate for the 2016 Republican nomination for president. This is horrifying. It is okay to be horrified.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• The first question is whether, and how much of, the GOP will reconcile itself to Trump. There's a case to be made that the party is facing inevitable civil war.

  [Mischiefs of Faction / Seth Masket]

• But many Republicans are already coming around. Even moderate Republicans from swing states are making overtures suggesting they'll support Trump (like Maine Sen. Susan Collins) or outright saying they'll support him (like Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval).

  [Politico / Nolan D McCaskill]

• At the local level, many party stalwarts are getting downright psyched about Trump; they've convinced themselves that he's really growing the party and can win the White House.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• They are, so far as we can tell, totally wrong. As it stands right now, Donald Trump is tremendously unlikely to beat Hillary Clinton in November.

  [Slate / Jamelle Bouie]

• (Yes, it's easy to say that no one thought Trump could win the nomination either. But the polls said he totally could. They're saying he totally can't win the general.)

• Clinton herself has no intention of letting voters forget how disliked Trump is. Her campaign put out a pretty hard-hitting ad, using Trump's own party members' comments against him.

  [Hillary Clinton via Twitter]

• If all that doesn't work? Don't worry. Trump may have promised to totally overhaul American policy in the first 100 days of his presidency, but he's also promising that won't make the country "unstable" or anything.

  [NYT / Patrick Healy]

Ted Cruz was right: the world (or at least Canada) is on fire

Lynn Daina/AFP/Getty Images

• 80,000 Canadians have been evacuated from the Alberta town of Fort McMurray, where wildfires have destroyed 18,500 acres and are anticipated to spread to nearly 25,000 acres by Wednesday night.

  [NBC News / Erik Ortiz, Jacquellena Carrero, and Matthew Johnson]

• Fort McMurray is the epicenter of Canada's oil sands mining industry. Needless to say, the wildfire is limiting the ability to mine oil.

  [Wall Street Journal / Chester Dawson]

• This isn't great news for the town, which had already been hit hard by the slumping price of oil over the past year (and will now have to deal with selling less oil at lower prices).

  [Reuters / Rod Nickel]

• Then again, if the burning of fossil fuels like oil hadn't created so much anthropogenic global warming, it's entirely possible that the wildfire menacing Fort McMurray wouldn't be quite this bad.

  [Scientific American / Brian Kahn]

• This is the thing about climate change: It is already forcing humans to change where they live. The US, for its part, is already working to resettle its first community of permanent "climate refugees."

  [NYT / Coral Davenport and Campbell Robertson]

Ease his pain

Matt Kent/WireImage

• After weeks of speculation, reports have finally confirmed that Prince was on the verge of entering treatment for addiction to painkillers at the time of his death. (The son of the Los Angeles doctor who'd agreed to treat him was one of the people who discovered the body.)

  [Minneapolis Star-Tribune / David Chanen]

• In a probably related development, the US Attorney's Office announced Wednesday that it and the Drug Enforcement Agency will be joining the investigation into Prince's death, to lend their "expertise" into cases of inappropriate prescription drug use.

  [Time / Cady Lang]

• The reports appear to confirm that Prince was one of the millions of Americans addicted to painkillers; according to one recent study, more than 40 percent of Americans say they've known someone with an opiate addiction (prescription drugs or heroin).

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• But the term "addiction" should be used with caution. As this outstanding Slate piece from Jerrold C. Winter points out, there's a big difference between psychological addiction and physical dependence — which is not a good thing, but might be necessary for people who are suffering from intense and chronic pain.

  [Slate / Jerrold C. Winter]

• Even psychological addiction isn't that clear-cut a term. It's usually thought of as a moral failing, or as a disease. But longtime drug activist and writer Maia Szalavitz argues for a third way: thinking of addiction as a learning disability.

  [NPR / Alva Noé]

MISCELLANEOUS

More than 80 percent of bi people end up in relationships with people of the opposite sex. Why? [Slate / Kristina Marusic]

• The 2016 campaign's focus on "free college" has distracted from a more important issue: how to get people who've started college to finish.

  [NYT / David Kirp]

• One sign the tech bubble may be popping: Ping-pong table sales in Silicon Valley are falling.

  [WSJ / Zusha Elinson]

• How ranked-choice voting could've stopped Donald Trump.

  [NYT / Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen]

• Have you ever thought, "I like Burning Man, but is there a version that's more posh and insufferable?" Well, then, welcome to Further Future, my friend.

  [The Guardian / Nellie Bowles]

VERBATIM

"We have only recently begun to understand morality independently of constraints on moral inquiry imposed by deference to ancient religious texts." [Effective Altruism / Jeff McMahan]

• "Borderer town-naming policy was very different from the Biblical names of the Puritans or the Ye Olde English names of the Virginians. Early Borderer settlements include – just to stick to the creek-related ones – Lousy Creek, Naked Creek, Shitbritches Creek, Cuckold’s Creek, Bloodrun Creek, Pinchgut Creek, Whipping Creek, and Hangover Creek. There were also Whiskey Springs, Hell’s Half Acre, Scream Ridge, Scuffletown, and Grabtown."

  [Slate Star Codex / Scott Alexander]

• "Gut bacteria has been shown to influence what a person eats and Michael, Zayner’s friend-turned-stool-donor, has a serious sweet tooth: he can consume an entire a box of Oreos in one sitting. Before the transplant, Zayner was never one for cookies. 'Now I crave them,' he said."

  [The Verge / Arielle Duhaime-Ross]

• "When I discovered BASIC programming as an 11-year-old, it wasn’t like, this is a cool practical skill — even though it had been a dream to create my own video games, and now I could finally do that. It was more of an intellectual revelation, like finding out where babies came from. I thought: so this is what it means to understand something. It means that you know how to express it in these lines of code, how to make a computer do it."

  [Scott Aaronson to Scientific American / John Horgan]

• "I was working at Planned Parenthood — at the time, it was like a babe space. One time my co-worker gave me a pap smear during a meeting. It was just a weird commune mentality, so it didn’t occur to me, honestly, that it might be a problem. Why wouldn’t you be totally comfortable with your co-worker swabbing your cervix?"

  [Jessa Crispin to NY Mag / Boris Kachka]

WATCH THIS

Why Donald Trump can't become "moderate" [YouTube / Ezra Klein, Carlos Waters, and Christophe Haubursin]

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