Vox Sentences: You can’t fight in here! This is the dissent channel!

Fifty diplomats tell Obama he's wrong on Syria; the "pockets of resistance" against Donald Trump; why it's so cool scientists can detect gravitational waves now.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

POTUS: GTFO, kthxbai, XOXO

The White House / Pete Souza

• Fifty-one State Department officials sent an open letter to the Obama administration Friday, urging the US to use airstrikes against Syria's Bashar al-Assad — something President Barack Obama has basically ruled out.

  [WSJ / Maria Abi-Habib]

• The diplomats weren't calling for regime change in Syria; rather, the logic is that strikes would put more pressure on Assad to come to the table in peace negotiations with rebel groups.

  [Associated Press / Bradley Klapper]

• It's not as odd for State Department officials to openly dissent from administration policy as you might think. It's known as the "dissent channel" — and it's something diplomats are, in theory, encouraged to use.

  [American Foreign Service Association / Amelia Shaw]

• But that doesn't make it not awkward. The number of signatories is unusual, for one thing. So was the apparent decision to classify the memo after drafts of it were leaked to the press.

  [CNN / Elise Labott]

• The war in Syria is a sore spot for this administration. Obama still feels that not intervening earlier in the civil war was the right idea, but the interventionist DC foreign policy establishment appears to disagree.

  [The Atlantic / Jeffrey Goldberg]

• So far, the administration appears to be holding steady.

  [Reuters / Arshad Mohammed and Matt Spetalnick]

• But President Hillary Clinton might be more open to the diplomats' point of view.

  [U.S. News / Joseph P. Williams]

"Pockets of resistance"

AFP / Jim Watson

• Remember when Donald Trump was going to "pivot" to become a conventional candidate during the general election?

• Yeah, about that. A month after sewing up the GOP nomination, it hasn't happened. At this point, it seems likely it never will.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• That means no respite for elected Republicans left to scramble in Trump's wake every time he says something outrageous.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• It also appears to mean Trump's never going to step up the conventional campaign operations he lacked in the primary, but will need in the general — like field organizers. (The Trump campaign, the AP reported Friday, has only 30 full-time staff.)

  [AP / Thomas Beaumont and Steve Peoples]

• With a month before the convention, is this what Republicans need to put together a coup? Paul Ryan's advice to caucus members to "vote your conscience" might be one clue, if you were looking for it…

  [CNN / Eugene Scott]

• …and the nascent "pockets of resistance" among GOP delegates themselves, some of whom are trying to figure out how they can vote against Trump at the convention, would be another.

  [Washington Post / Ed O'Keefe]

• But — as the campaign managers for Trump's defeated primary opponents can tell you — unseating Trump means coalescing around an alternative.

  [Huffington Post / Sam Stein]

Making waves

LIGO / T. Pyle

• Astronomers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory have announced that they've detected a second set of gravitational waves caused by the collision of two black holes. (The first detection was announced in February.)

  [Vox / Brian Resnick]

• The collision confirmed this week actually took place before the one whose detection was announced first — but it was smaller, so the gravitational wave was only detected by sensitive technological analysis after the fact.

  [Washington Post / Rachel Feldman]

• The detection of gravitational waves opens up whole new frontiers for scientists. For one thing, it's powerful evidence in favor of Einstein's theory of general relativity — which predicted that since black holes are so huge, the collision of two of them would cause a ripple in the fabric of spacetime.

  [LIGO]

• At the same time, it disproves — or at least offers strong evidence against — other theories of black holes, like the idea that they emitted bursts of radiation when they collided.

  [Forbes / Ethan Siegel]

• And it offers scientists the opportunity to look for the rumored black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

  [Phys.Org / Mariëtte Le Roux and Laurence Coustal]

• Gravitational waves ultimately promise, as an astronomer explained to Vox's Brian Resnick, the opportunity to see further back in time than the universe can show on the visible-light spectrum. That's freaking cool.

  [Vox / Brian Resnick]

MISCELLANEOUS

A new lawsuit seeks to prove that "This Land Is Your Land" does, in fact, belong to you and me. [NYT / Niraj Chokshi]

• Four women — one making a million dollars a year, one just above the poverty line, the rest in between — explain how they spend their money.

  [Esquire / James Thilman]

• New York Mayor Bill de Blasio needed to perform hundreds of vasectomies on Staten Island deer. Anthony DeNicola was just the man he needed.

  [SI Live / Anna Sanders]

• The case for abolishing sex offender registries — yes, even for Brock Turner.

  [Quartz / Noah Berlatsky]

• AR-15s have, quite understandably, become the face of mass shootings in America. Jon Stokes explains why he owns one, and what its critics miss.

  [Medium / Jon Stokes]

VERBATIM

"Fritz’s career change from Egyptology student to Stasi Museum chief was unusual. But his reappearance as an auto-parts executive a few years later was stranger still." [The Atlantic / Ariel Sabar]

• "I didn’t come out as gay, I came out as I don’t really believe in gender … At least they put in that my girlfriend is a supermodel."

  [Eliot Sumner to NY Mag / Lizzy Goodman]

• "Much like the drawing that can be seen either as a rabbit or as a duck (depending on how one’s eyes first settle on it), radically different camps look at [universal basic income] and see it as something that matches surprisingly close with their ideological priors, often to the exclusion of any other interpretation."

  [Foreign Policy / Samuel Hammond]

• "One of the most tiring pursuits in popular culture right now is trying to figure out how clever James Franco thinks he's being and how many layers of irony he thinks there are in things like his run on General Hospital and remaking Mother May I Sleep With Danger. You hear a lot of references to his entire career as a sort of performance art, but performance art doesn't just mean 'making bad things with a straight face.'"

  [NPR / Linda Holmes]

• "The concept of a society which is built on moral values is, in my view, too promising to be extinguished by inhuman market forces."

  [Socialist Register / Rudolf Meidner]

WATCH THIS

The Oxford comma's unlikely origin [YouTube / Phil Edwards]

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