Vox Sentences: BoJo jus havin a laff innit

Britain to US: You like dysfunctional parties? We’ll show you dysfunctional parties.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

There is only one word to describe this, and that word is "omnishambles"

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

• Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London who was widely considered the likely next prime minister of Britain, will not be the next prime minister. He's not even running.

  [Bloomberg / Robert Hutton]

• Johnson was reportedly betrayed, mere hours before he was to declare his candidacy for head of the Conservative Party (which would bring the PM job with it), by leading Tory Michael Gove — who has since announced his own candidacy.

  [The Guardian / Rowena Mason and Heather Stewart]

• This leadership election is only happening because of PM David Cameron's pending resignation after losing the Brexit vote last week; one of the toughest blows against Cameron was when Gove — a close ally of Cameron's — left him for the pro-Brexit campaign.

• Gove is one of five candidates so far; Home Secretary Theresa May is running as the establishment candidate, having opposed Brexit.

  [BBC]

• The bigger problem with the race, of course, is that the Conservative Party simply doesn't know right now whether it's a pro-EU party (like Cameron) or an anti-EU one (like Gove).

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Lucky for them, though, the Labour Party is also in the midst of an identity crisis: It doesn't know how left-wing it really wants to be. Jeremy Corbyn lost a vote of no confidence badly earlier this week but isn't leaving yet.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• Angela Eagle, a left-leaning MP who's more establishment-friendly and served in Gordon Brown's cabinet, is rumored to be running against him, though she's apparently holding off to give him a chance to resign gracefully before being sacked.

  [BBC]

• As Spectator columnist Freddy Gray put it (in a line that, sadly, only reflects the backgrounds of Gove and Johnson), this is what it looks like when you put journalists in charge.

  [The Spectator / Freddy Gray]

A partial, contested, ambivalent victory (aren't they all?)

Allison Shelley/Getty Images

• Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced on Thursday that transgender Americans will be able to serve openly in the armed forces (once detailed medical protocols and such are put into place between now and October 1).

  [NYT / Matthew Rosenberg]

• The ban on transgender service members was based on the concern that since gender dysphoria is linked to depression and anxiety, it could impede soldiers' ability to serve — a concern that has since been alleviated by science.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• There's still going to be a requirement that enlistees have held a "stable" gender identity for 18 months — which puts a waiting period on those undergoing hormone therapy, drawing objections from some advocates.

  [Slate / Ian Prasad Philbrick]

• But that's not nearly enough for some top generals, who worried that the military isn't ready for the reforms it would have to undergo to accommodate transgender service members (concerns also voiced during the recent debate over women in combat roles).

  [AP / Lolita C. Baldor]

• History is on Carter's side. The military has been ahead of American society on integration as often as it's been behind — most notably with the racial integration of the armed forces under Truman.

  [Stars and Stripes / Ron Jensen]

• Integration to some is assimilation to others: To some queer activists of the left, serving in the military (like getting married) is hardly a queer ideal.

  [The Nation / Laura Flanders]

In the West Bank, lives are never lost one at a time

Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP/Getty Images

• A 13-year-old girl named Hallel Yaffa Ariel was stabbed and killed in her bedroom in the West Bank town of Kiryat Arba on Thursday. The perpetrator, a 19-year-old Palestinian named Mohammed Tarayreh, was shot and killed after the attack.

  [NYT / Diaa Hadid and Myra Noveck]

• It's the latest in a wave of stabbing attacks against Israelis stretching back to last October, when an argument over use of the Temple Mount (or Noble Sanctuary) sparked several stabbings in Jerusalem.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Since then, 34 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians — and 139 Palestinians have been killed attempting to attack Israelis.

  [Washington Post / Ruth Eglash, William Booth, and Darla Cameron]

• Some of those Israelis, though — including Hallel Yaffa Ariel — also hold American citizenship.

  [BBC]

• The Ariels are among the 60,000 US citizens who have joined the West Bank "settler movement" — something they see as a continuation of the American dream (but that critics might call a perpetuation of manifest destiny).

  [USA Today / Michele Chabin]

• As always in Israel, attacks beget escalation. In response to Ariel's death, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already announced he'll revoke the work permits of Tarayreh's family — and the IDF has moved in to close off their village.

  [Times of Israel / Judah Ari Gross]

MISCELLANEOUS

DC policymakers decided that if we ever get statehood, the new state should be called "New Columbia," because apparently a state acronym that isn't already taken is too much to ask for. [Washington Post / Fenit Nirappil]

• Why do women tennis players still wear skirts? It's not because it makes for better play — if that were true, men would do it as well.

  [Slate / Christina Cauterucci]

• All the geographically impossible journeys of Game of Thrones, mapped.

  [The Verge / Loren Grush and Kaitlyn Tiffany]

• Expanded school lunches are great news for children but bad news for researchers trying to measure poverty in schools.

  [Brookings / Matthew Chingos]

• The most unequal metro area in America? Jackson, Wyoming.

  [CityLab / Eillie Anzilotti]

VERBATIM

"The French commonly buried young children in the backyard like Americans bury pets today. Colonial Americans called newborns 'it' or 'little stranger.'" [Priceonomics / Alex Mayyasi]

• "There are many places in D.C. to commune with statues of great U.S. presidents, but there is only one spot where you can see all of the mediocre ones too: Madame Tussauds (punctuationally challenged) wax museum."

  [Express / Sadie Dingfelder]

• "Recently I discovered that Google is more in touch with my emotions than I am. … When I scrolled again to the bottom of her email … Gmail suggested a computer-generated response that was shorter, clearer, and, I realized, all I really wanted to tell her: 'I miss you so much.'"

  [NY Mag / Ben Crair]

• "If there were a prize for the busiest language, then a language like Kabardian, also known as Circassian and spoken in the Caucasus, would win. In the simple sentence 'The men saw me,' the word for 'saw' is sǝq’ayǝƛaaɣ^wǝaɣhaś (pronounced roughly 'suck-a-LAGH-a-HESH')."

  [The Atlantic / John McWhorter]

• "Nearly every time a nuclear plant has been closed, its energy production has been replaced almost entirely with fossil fuels."

  [NYT / Michael Shellenberger]

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