Vox Sentences: "I don't belong to any organized political party, I'm a Democrat"

The Democratic convention gets off to a messy start; Yahoo comes to an ignominious end; Donald Trump threatens to leave yet another international institution.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Wasserman Schultz Agonistes

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

• Happy Democratic National Convention, day 1! The festivities kicked off today at 4 pm Eastern time.

  [Vox / Tara Golshan]

• Tonight's big speakers are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Michelle Obama. Notably not speaking is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigned as DNC chair on Sunday and opted not to gavel in the proceedings today, letting outgoing Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake do the honors instead.

  [CNN / Jeff Zeleny, MJ Lee, and Eric Bradner]

• Wasserman Schultz was under fire due to the DNC hacked email scandal, in which WikiLeaks-released correspondence seems to confirm Bernie Sanders supporters' suspicions that the DNC was in the tank for Hillary Clinton.

  [NYT / Michael Shear and Matthew Rosenberg]

• The ugliest finding of the hacked emails was that DNC staffers wanted to use Sanders's religion (or alleged lack thereof) against him, but that attack was never actually made. All the same, the incident played into Bernie fans' fears, rooted in past incidents like the handling of Nevada delegate allocation and debate scheduling.

  [Vox / Jeff Stein]

• The DNC actually apologized to Sanders supporters on Monday, saying, "These comments do not reflect the values of the DNC or our steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process."

  [Zeke Miller]

• Wasserman Schultz did address a breakfast meeting of Florida delegates in Philadelphia — only to be jeered by a crowd of Sanders supporters with signs saying, "We Don’t Want Cheaters In Our Party Anyway" and "EMAILS."

  [NYT / Jason Horowitz]

• On the floor of the convention, Sanders delegates were openly lashing out against Clinton, chanting, "Lock her up!" just as RNC delegates did last week.

  [Betsy Woodruff]

• Sanders himself had to send out a text begging supporters not to protest on the floor of the convention. His plea has thus far gone unheeded.

  [Nancy Cordes]

• While he's on damage control now, arguably he bears responsibility for the chaos in Philadelphia, by selecting these delegates and encouraging them to rage against the "establishment."

  [Jonathan Bernstein]

• The email mishegas is clear evidence that Sanders backers aren't ready for party unity yet. But let's not exaggerate the scale of the problem, either. Polling suggests that about 90 percent of Sanders supporters plan to vote for Clinton in the general election, whereas only 79 percent of Republicans who opposed Trump in the primary support him in the general.

  [Washington Post / Philip Bump]

• It's still early going, but it appears the DNC hack was committed by the Russian government, playing into fears that the Kremlin is trying to damage Democrats and benefit Donald Trump.

  [Washington Post / Ellen Nakashima]

excite@Yahoo

Cindy Ord/Getty Images

• Verizon is buying Yahoo's core businesses — the search engine, the fantasy sports, the email service, Tumblr, etc. — for a cool $4.8 billion.

  [Bloomberg / Alex Sherman and Matthew Townsend]

• That's a pretty dramatic fall from the company's late-'90s peak. At its height, in January 2000, Yahoo was valued at $140 billion.

  [Priceonomics / Rohin Dhar]

• The sale costs way less than the company's $36 billion value market capitalization because it excludes the two most valuable parts of Yahoo: its shares in Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, the company's way more successful Japanese counterpart.

  [Vox / Tim Lee]

• So what's left is a rump company (appropriately renamed RemainCo) owning the outside shares, at least some of which it's expected to sell off. Whether it'll hold on to others, or whether it'll sell itself to another company (like Alibaba itself) that wants the shares, remains to be seen.

  [Bloomberg / Jing Cao]

• Verizon bought AOL last year (and along with it sites like Huffington Post and TechCrunch) and will have the opportunity (and challenge) of integrating it and Yahoo's content offerings, hopefully bringing the latter to profitability.

  [NYT / Vindu Goel]

• As for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, she's expected to stay on for the next six months, at least. If she leaves after that, she'll get at least $57 million in severance, bringing total compensation for her four-year stint at the company above $200 million.

  [Quartz / Joon Ian Wang]

• So what went wrong? Basically, Yahoo was trying to be both a tech company and a media brand, and wasn't great at either. So its search engine and other services weren't successful enough to compete with Google and Facebook for ad dollars, and its media products weren't enough to bring in revenue either.

  [Vox / Tim Lee]

So what's new in Trump world? Oh.

Sara D. Davis/Getty Images

• Donald Trump's convention might be over, but he sure seems determined to counterprogram the hell out of the Democrats' big week. For one thing, he's doing a Reddit AMA on Wednesday night, the same night Bill Clinton is scheduled to speak.

  [Emma Roller]

• He also sat down for a very characteristic Meet the Press interview, in which he not only stood by his proposal for a Muslim entry ban but also proposed banning entry from countries "compromised by terrorism," which he implied included France and Germany.

  [Vox / Caleb Lewis]

• Trump also told MTP host Chuck Todd he might pull the US out of the World Trade Organization, which would dramatically increase tariffs against US goods worldwide (but make it much easier for the US to impose big tariffs in turn, like Trump wants).

  [WSJ / William Mauldin]

• If that makes you nervous, then get a load of the post-convention polling that shows Trump slightly ahead nationally. Big caveat: Polling during conventions is very, very noisy, and it's normal for candidates to get a slight bounce after their event.

  [Vox / Jeff Stein]

• The strangest new campaign subplot has to be allegations that the Russian government hacked the DNC to help Trump — a charge that Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook is openly making. There's evidence that Russia did the hack, but that they did it to help Trump has not been firmly established.

  [NYT / David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth]

MISCELLANEOUS

Finally, a worthwhile use of Virtual Reality: getting to play Legends of the Hidden Temple as an adult. [CNET / Mike Sorrentino]

• You may not have heard of Marni Nixon, who died Sunday at 86, but you've probably heard her voice — dubbing for Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.

  [NYT / Margalit Fox]

• Voter registration was invented as a way to keep immigrants from voting — and has been used as a way to restrict suffrage ever since.

  [FairVote / Alexander Keyssar]

• A gang of raccoons broke into former New York City mayoral candidate Bill Thompson's Harlem house and ate his turtle.

  [DNAinfo / Dartunorro Clark]

• There's not actually any evidence that delaying kindergarten entry helps kids — and it might increase their risk of dropping out of high school.

  [Brookings / Michael Hansen]

VERBATIM

"It’s a common observation on the left, but it’s an observation that a lot of us on the right genuinely believed wasn’t true — which is that conservatism has become, and has been for some time, much more about white identity politics than it has been about conservative political philosophy." [Former Romney adviser Avik Roy to Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• "In some remote southern regions of Malawi, it's traditional for girls to be made to have sex with a paid sex worker known as a 'hyena' once they reach puberty. The act is not seen by village elders as rape, but as a form of ritual 'cleansing.'"

  [BBC / Ed Butler]

• "As a proud American, a father who lost his own dad in a senseless act of violence, and a black man, I have been deeply troubled by the deaths of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement and angered by the cowardly and hateful targeting and killing of police officers."

  [The Undefeated / Michael Jordan]

• "Yes, yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking — that’s simplified, that’s not so unusual, the intersection of the individual and history, that’s just becoming an adult. And here’s what I’m suggesting to you: It is unusual for that process to start with 9/11 and end with a global financial crisis, and perhaps we in our late twenties are on the seams of change in the United States in a way that others are not."

  [BuzzFeed / Katherine Miller]

• "The reasons people commonly give for hating Clinton now are almost the exact opposite of the reasons people gave for hating her in the 1990s. Back then, she was a self-righteous ideologue; now she’s a corrupt tool of the establishment. Back then, she was too rigid; now she’s too flexible."

  [Slate / Michelle Goldberg]

WATCH THIS

How LSD and shrooms could help treat anxiety, addiction, and depression [YouTube / Christophe Haubursin, German Lopez, and Estelle Caswell]

Vox / Christophe Haubursin and Estelle Caswell

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