Vox Sentences: Peter Thiel 1, Gawker Chapter 11

Elizabeth Warren happens to be really good at one key VP skill; Gawker Media files for bankruptcy; Peru's elections.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Warrenmentum

Alex Wong/Getty Images

• Elizabeth Warren endorsed Hillary Clinton last night. She also gave a humdinger of a speech attacking Donald Trump.

  [Time / Katie Reilly]

• Warren's speech is the best articulation of a theme that a lot of Democrats have been drawn to this cycle (though it has its drawbacks): that Trump is just the Republican Party when it stops being polite.

  [Vox / Jeff Stein]

• Warren has shown that she's uniquely able to get under Trump's skin. That's why he's gone to the trouble of nicknaming her "Pocahontas" (it's a reference to her Cherokee ancestors).

  [Vox / Emily Crockett]

• That ability to deeply annoy Trump is something the Clinton campaign is trying to learn from Warren.

  [Politico / Nancy Scola]

• It also happens to be the traditional role of a running mate — which is one big reason Warren is suddenly the most-discussed potential running mate for Clinton. The two met today, which won't ease the speculation.

  [Washington Post / James Hohmann]

• The biggest concern about Warren: If she won, her state's Republican governor would appoint her successor to the Senate. But Harry Reid says he's figured out a way around that.

  [Boston Globe / Matt Viser]

• That doesn't mean there aren't good reasons for the Clinton team not to pick Warren, though. Especially if, as one of Politico's Mike Allen's anonymous tipsters told him, the two would-be running mates actually hate each other.

  [Politico / Mike Allen]

You win, Peter Thiel, you win

John Pendygraft-Pool/Getty Images

• Gawker Media declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy today, clearing the way for the sale of its assets — including Deadspin, Jezebel, io9, and, of course, Gawker.com.

  [Vox / Timothy Lee]

• The bankruptcy is directly tied to the $140 million judgment against Gawker in the suit brought by Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan), and by extension to the efforts of tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who bankrolled the lawsuit.

  [Forbes / Ryan Mac]

• This is giving some journalists bad vibes. One can imagine this happening to a more sympathetic journalistic outlet — like Mother Jones, which faced a suit designed to destroy it for ideological reasons last year.

  [Mother Jones]

• Gawker isn't dead in any real sense of the word. It's already working with publisher Ziff Davis to sell off many of the sites (though, apparently, not Gawker.com).

  [Recode / Peter Kafka]

• As Vox's Timothy Lee points out, because Gawker's sites were making money before they got into legal trouble, a version of those sites that is better at "coloring inside the lines" could work well.

  [Vox / Timothy Lee]

Peru isn't ready for a '90s revival

Aaron Heredia/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

• Pedro Pablo Kuczynski is officially the next president of Peru, after his opponent Keiko Fujimori (belatedly) conceded Friday.

  [Al Jazeera]

• Fujimori is the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, who ruled Peru as a right-wing dictator throughout the 1990s.

  [WSJ / Ryan Dube]

• He's currently in prison for corruption, which is justified: His government "lost" somewhere between $1.5 billion and $4 billion. But many of Peru's poor still remember him fondly for restoring law and order (by crushing the left-wing guerrillas Shining Path).

  [The Guardian / Dan Collyns]

• Keiko Fujimori, unsurprisingly, ran by putting a softer face on her father's legacy and distancing herself from the corruption bit. Which worked — she was leading in polls — until the DEA started investigating one of her aides for money laundering.

  [Vice / Simeon Tegel]

• Instead, Peruvians elected Kuczynski — a 77-year-old former World Bank economist and the kind of economic liberal the Economist likes.

  [The Economist]

MISCELLANEOUS

This week in #Misandry: An isolated group of honeybees in South Africa has evolved to totally eliminate males. [EurekAlert! / Uppsala University]

• How adding periods to stuff became mean — or, how "Fine." stopped meaning "Fine" and started meaning, "Why don't you die in a fire?"

  [NYT / Dan Bilefsky]

• An excellent profile of the Libertarian ticket, Govs. Gary Johnson and William Weld, the latter of whom "looks like someone whose portrait you might see hanging in a members-only supper club."

  [FiveThirtyEight / Clare Malone]

• Sunspring is a fairly normal sci-fi short film that just happens to have been written entirely by an AI.

  [Ars Technica / Annalee Newitz]

• Tinder is hurting restaurants and bars; more first dates means more drinks-no-food occasions.

  [Food & Wine / Gillie Houston]

VERBATIM

"'Sapokanikan' is a ragtimey encomium to the forces of remembrance, forgetting, accretion, concealment, amendment, erasure, distortion, canonization, obsolescence and immortality." [Joanna Newsom to NPR / Piotr Orlov]

• "On the result­ing conference call with our managers, Kanye was polite and ac­commodating, excited to be making what would be, at the time, the most money he ever made from music: somewhere between $5,000 and $7,500."

  [NY Mag / Jensen Karp]

• "I worked very well with Hillary when she was my colleague in the Senate and when she was Secretary of State. But I do not anticipate voting for her this fall. I’m not going to say never, because this has been such an unpredictable situation, to say the least."

  [Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) to New Yorker / Ryan Lizza]

• "My brother has the smile of poverty, too — neither of us grin too widely."

  [The Establishment / Igeoma Oluo]

• "Sure he may be the underdog of the situation, but being a best friend means always supporting your best friend. Also, clearly your bestie is an amazing goddess and the rando guy/long-term boyfriend she violently stabbed to death was probably a real asshole. Men! They’re the worst! Thank god we ladies have each other."

  [The Hairpin / Lauren Bans]

WATCH THIS

Time travel in Game of Thrones, explained [YouTube / Christophe Haubursin]

HBO

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