Vox Sentences: Chaos at the convention (but not where you’d expect)

In Cleveland, in Turkey, and on Snapchat: You gotta live with the bad blood now.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Failed coup

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• Welcome to Donald Trump's Republican National Convention! Vox's Tara Golshan has your guide to the next four days.

  [Vox / Tara Golshan]

• The convention hasn't exactly started on the right foot for Trump. Monday afternoon was marked by a chaotic floor fight, as anti-Trump delegations from a handful of states mounted a last-ditch attempt to unbind Trump's delegates.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• The coup was unsuccessful. But anti-Trump conservatives (including Sen. Mike Lee and former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli) are not ready to make nice: Lee called the convention "coercion masking as unity."

  [Politico / Kyle Cheney]

• It's not exactly a surprise that the convention is kind of a mess so far. After all, the final schedule wasn't released until Sunday night — and, in lieu of the star athletes and celebrities Trump promised he'd attract, there are a whole lot of members of the Trump family.

  [Washington Post / Ed O'Keefe]

• For primetime coverage Monday night, the convention's theme will be "Make America Safe Again" — covering everything from Obama-era national security scandals (or "scandals") like the VA and Benghazi to Trump's bread-and-butter issues of immigration and crime.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• Trump has begun calling himself the candidate of "law and order." His campaign chair, Paul Manafort, says the reference to Richard Nixon in 1968 is intentional. You should expect more of this sort of theme after the convention.

  [Huffington Post / Howard Fineman]

• Ironically, the protests outside the convention aren't nearly as unruly as the goings-on inside. So far, protests have been peaceful.

  [NYT / Yamiche Alcindor and Matt Flegenheimer]

• But inside ... well, let's just say the ceremonial gavel is literally falling apart.

  [Timothy Burke via Twitter]

Failed coup

Dilek Mermer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has successfully retained power, putting down the coup attempt from a faction of the country's military Friday night.

  [NYT / Tim Arango and Ceylan Yeginsu]

• As coup expert Naunihal Singh explains to Vox's Zack Beauchamp, a successful coup depends a lot on generating the perception of success — and the coupists in Turkey couldn't manage to project inevitability.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• In this respect, the internet helped Erdogan a great deal, despite the fact that, as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci writes in the New York Times, Erdogan kind of hates (or at very least fears) the internet.

  [NYT / Zeynep Tufekci]

• Erdogan is taking a strong stance against the coup plotters. He's blamed the events on followers of Fethullah Gülen — a cleric living in exile in the Poconos — and demanded the US extradite Gülen.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• He's detained thousands of soldiers for participating in the coup, and fired huge numbers of judges.

  [FT / Mehul Srivastava and Erika Solomon]

• And he's calling for the legislature to reinstate the death penalty so he can execute the coup's planners.

  [The Guardian / Patrick Kingsley and Jennifer Rankin]

• The EU has warned Erdogan that if he reinstates the death penalty, Turkey's bid for EU membership is kaput.

  [CNN / Angela Dewan and Ralph Ellis]

• But as Andrew Finkel writes for the Guardian, Erdogan was already consolidating power in a "slow-motion coup" before Friday. After successfully resisting the coup, it's hard to imagine he won't go as far as he can.

  [The Guardian / Andrew Finkel]

Uprising, success TBD

Larry Busacca/Getty Images

• Kim Kardashian and her husband Kanye West, two of the most famous people on Earth, have just escalated their feud with Taylor Swift, another one of the most famous people on Earth — and it looks like Kimye have finally gained the upper hand.

  [Vox / Alex Abad-Santos]

• To rewind (at least a little): Kanye's latest album featured a song that joked about him sleeping with Swift, and said he "made that bitch famous." Swift was understandably offended and dedicated a Grammy acceptance speech to subtweeting Kanye on pseudo-feminist grounds.

  [Vox / Alex Abad-Santos]

• Turns out, though, that — at least according to an interview Kim did with GQ — Kanye had called Taylor in advance and gotten her to approve the lyrics. And Kim and Kanye had that conversation on tape.

  [GQ / Caity Weaver]

• Over the course of the weekend (including on a Taylor-centric episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians), Kim slowly teased clips from the tapes — culminating in a Snapchat story Sunday night posting excerpts that prove Taylor did, in fact, hear at least some of the lines about her (though it's not clear whether she heard the word "bitch").

  [The Daily Beast / Amy Zimmerman]

• This doesn't just matter because it's a clash of the titans. It's about types of fame. Kim Kardashian's fame is fully contrived, and she knows it — and owns it. It's impossible to read Caity Weaver's GQ profile and not see that. That makes it difficult to unmask her — how do you take down a woman who's famous because of a sex tape?

  [GQ / Caity Weaver]

• Taylor Swift's image, on the other hand, is built around genuine warmth and friendship — her BFFs get as much Instagram love as her lovers (which is a lot).

  [The Atlantic / Megan Garber]

• This, too, is contrived. But pointing out it's contrived spoils the magic. Her current romance with Tom Hiddleston is spawning conspiracy theories left and right because it's been so poorly stage-managed that the artifice is obvious.

  [Vox / Caroline Framke]

• And if it comes out that Taylor really is more mean girl than "mom-safe" BFFAE? That could seriously damage her brand.

  [BuzzFeed News / Anne Helen Petersen]

MISCELLANEOUS

Being cold does not increase your odds of catching a cold. Really. [NYT / Aaron Carroll]

• The idea that carrots help you see in the dark was popularized by British propagandists in World War II as a ruse to confuse the Germans.

  [Smithsonian / K. Annabelle Smith]

• The Strand bookstore makes job applicants take this 50-question quiz matching famous books and authors. Can you beat it?

  [NYT / Jordan Harvey-Morgan and Junninho Thomas]

• The Great Rehoboth Pool Battle of 2015 had everything: municipal zoning regulations, "Swift-Boat Realtors," cornhole games shaped like toilets, even former House Democratic whip Tony Coelho.

  [Washingtonian / Britt Peterson]

• In praise of Blink-182, the never-cool, always-pandering band behind some of the best pop-punk songs of the late '90s.

  [New Yorker / Kelefa Sanneh]

VERBATIM

"Chili’s may be one of the most the most politically neutral restaurants in the United States." [Slate / Helaine Olen]

• "Her brother may have strangled her, but the viewers who declared her worthy of a humiliating death every single day were his might. The scholars who incited violence against her on TV were his might."

  [BuzzFeed / Imaan Sheikh]

• "She is both symbol and forerunner of a range of modern mathematicians (Cantor, Einstein, Heisenberg, Gödel) whose discoveries have displaced certainties and unsettled a lay populace that knows enough to know that the rug keeps getting pulled out from under them."

  [New Yorker / Brad Leithauser]

• "Nussbaum said that she discovered her paradigm for romance as an adolescent, when she read about the relationship between two men in Plato’s Phaedrus and the way in which they combined 'intense mutual erotic passion with a shared pursuit of truth and justice.'"

  [New Yorker / Rachel Aviv]

• "Her objective, as she has described it, is 'to make an argument by telling a story about dead people.'"

  [Columbia Journalism Review / Michael Rosenwald]

WATCH THIS

Turkey's failed military coup, explained [YouTube / Matteen Mokalla, Joss Fong, Christophe Haubursin, and Joe Posner]

Evrim Aydin/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

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