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In today’s edition:
WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight- How the debt deal shook out, and where to go from here
- Forgiving a mother for the shame she passed down
- Non-churchgoers run the GOP now
- Silicon Valley will never change
Super-size debt deal synopsis
With a last-minute skrrrrrrrrt to a stop just before plunging over the mesa edge, it turns out the U.S. economy is more Road Runner than Wile E. Coyote after all.
After the dust settles from this past weekend’s “agreement in principle” between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Biden, columnist Catherine Rampell writes that we will end up with a debt ceiling plan awfully similar to what would have been worked out even without all the, y’know, corrosion of norms and humiliation on the world stage.
“The proposed legislation might not be great,” Catherine writes, “but it’s probably fine.” In other words: the divided-government special. (Contributing columnist Jim Geraghty says this is exactly what Americans should have expected all along, and if they want different, they can “pick new dealmakers in November 2024.”)
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So what now?
Well, first, a little more tussling over control of the narrative.
Columnist Eugene Robinson writes that, “like a washing machine toward the end of its cycle, we have shifted into the spin phase.” Most Republicans are claiming triumph, and many Democrats are expressing skepticism. Therefore, we can fairly safely infer the opposite to be true, in keeping what Gene calls “the rules of post-negotiation spin.”
(In fact, columnist Jennifer Rubin says that given the GOP’s total retreat from its harshest demands, “it’s hard to conceive of an outcome more favorable” to that doyen of deal-making, President Biden.)
Then — assuming this deal does go through — sometime between the final allocation of credit and blame and our next date with the fiscal cliff in 2025, the country has got to fix this mess. The Editorial Board is, of course, as relieved as anyone else that a temporary fix was found, but it recognizes that the real work begins now: abolishing the debt ceiling and ensuring this loony-tunes mechanism has meeped its last meep.
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Chaser: Columnist George Will saw the compromise coming well in advance. He called the whole fight politics as usual.
What’s in a name?
“I emerged a day early and a penis short,” begins Nigerian American writer May N. Akabogu’s essay on how she grew up reckoning with her gender, her skin color and the mother who gave her both.
It’s a story that starts — obviously! — with Akabogu’s birth and the bestowing of the middle name Nwanyìbúìfé, meaning “female child is important,” despite her mother’s longing for a son. Soon enough, Mama is denying in public that her dark-skinned female child is even hers.
But Akabogu describes a long journey of reconciliation and forgiveness, and she writes movingly on how “resentment, like poison, corrodes the container.”
Annabelle Tometich, a half-Filipina food writer, in 2021 also explained what she had learned about her gender and ethnicity. She came to those lessons a little more unconventionally, though — by pretending to be a White guy for 15 years.
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Her op-ed explains, and it revels in the potential Tometich felt under this guise: “This was power as I’d never known it.”
But here, she had placed herself in a container, and that began to chafe, too. Only after revealing her actual identity did Tometich realize that “belonging, connecting … is true privilege.”
From data columnist David Byler’s analysis of non-churchgoers’ ascendancy in the GOP. He explains how Donald Trump helped bring the non-practicing bloc to the party, and then how that bloc forced the GOP into a more populist platform.
One fascinating tidbit is how the church crowd, long dominant, just molded its own beliefs to go along with things. The trend leads David to conclude that “a new Republican Party might emerge, thick with Christian symbolism, light on religious practice and ecumenical in its culture wars.”
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Chaser: Columnist Paul Waldman looks at another set of poll numbers to see that conservatives in the United States are more averse to change than their global counterparts.
Less politics
If you’re bummed you never really figured out crypto, don’t be, contributing columnist Adam Lashinsky writes. And if you’re bummed you never got the chance to be defrauded by Theranos, really don’t be; you’ll have plenty more chances to get taken for a ride.
As Theranos founder and girl-boss extraordinaire Elizabeth Holmes heads off to prison, Adam writes that Silicon Valley has been about as good at picking out lessons from Holmes’s tale as her machines were at picking out diseases from a drop of blood.
“Silicon Valley, in all its brilliance and arrogance, its paradigm-shifting moonshots and its spectacular failures, just keeps iterating,” Adam writes, “in most ways oblivious to its own shortcomings.”
So no, you won’t have to wait long before it’s someone else’s turtleneck on the chopping block.
Smartest, fastest
- David Von Drehle’s essay on his 109-year-old neighbor resonated with readers of all ages. Here’s what you said in response.
- Turkish society is showing democratic resilience even despite populist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s victory, journalist Asli Aydintasbas writes.
- Journalist Gabriel Pasquini urges Americans not to give in to pessimism and lose sight of the dream that inspires migrants to risk everything to come here.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s… The Bye-Ku.
No longer in church
Republicans start to doubt
Full faith and credit
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
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You’re reading the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In today’s edition:
With a last-minute skrrrrrrrrt to a stop just before plunging over the mesa edge, it turns out the U.S. economy is more Road Runner than Wile E. Coyote after all.
After the dust settles from this past weekend’s “agreement in principle” between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Biden, columnist Catherine Rampell writes that we will end up with a debt ceiling plan awfully similar to what would have been worked out even without all the, y’know, corrosion of norms and humiliation on the world stage.
“The proposed legislation might not be great,” Catherine writes, “but it’s probably fine.” In other words: the divided-government special. (Contributing columnist Jim Geraghty says this is exactly what Americans should have expected all along, and if they want different, they can “pick new dealmakers in November 2024.”)
So what now?
Well, first, a little more tussling over control of the narrative.
Columnist Eugene Robinson writes that, “like a washing machine toward the end of its cycle, we have shifted into the spin phase.” Most Republicans are claiming triumph, and many Democrats are expressing skepticism. Therefore, we can fairly safely infer the opposite to be true, in keeping what Gene calls “the rules of post-negotiation spin.”
(In fact, columnist Jennifer Rubin says that given the GOP’s total retreat from its harshest demands, “it’s hard to conceive of an outcome more favorable” to that doyen of deal-making, President Biden.)
Then — assuming this deal does go through — sometime between the final allocation of credit and blame and our next date with the fiscal cliff in 2025, the country has got to fix this mess. The Editorial Board is, of course, as relieved as anyone else that a temporary fix was found, but it recognizes that the real work begins now: abolishing the debt ceiling and ensuring this loony-tunes mechanism has meeped its last meep.
Chaser: Columnist George Will saw the compromise coming well in advance. He called the whole fight politics as usual.
“I emerged a day early and a penis short,” begins Nigerian American writer May N. Akabogu’s essay on how she grew up reckoning with her gender, her skin color and the mother who gave her both.
It’s a story that starts — obviously! — with Akabogu’s birth and the bestowing of the middle name Nwanyìbúìfé, meaning “female child is important,” despite her mother’s longing for a son. Soon enough, Mama is denying in public that her dark-skinned female child is even hers.
But Akabogu describes a long journey of reconciliation and forgiveness, and she writes movingly on how “resentment, like poison, corrodes the container.”
Annabelle Tometich, a half-Filipina food writer, in 2021 also explained what she had learned about her gender and ethnicity. She came to those lessons a little more unconventionally, though — by pretending to be a White guy for 15 years.
Her op-ed explains, and it revels in the potential Tometich felt under this guise: “This was power as I’d never known it.”
But here, she had placed herself in a container, and that began to chafe, too. Only after revealing her actual identity did Tometich realize that “belonging, connecting … is true privilege.”
From data columnist David Byler’s analysis of non-churchgoers’ ascendancy in the GOP. He explains how Donald Trump helped bring the non-practicing bloc to the party, and then how that bloc forced the GOP into a more populist platform.
One fascinating tidbit is how the church crowd, long dominant, just molded its own beliefs to go along with things. The trend leads David to conclude that “a new Republican Party might emerge, thick with Christian symbolism, light on religious practice and ecumenical in its culture wars.”
Chaser: Columnist Paul Waldman looks at another set of poll numbers to see that conservatives in the United States are more averse to change than their global counterparts.
If you’re bummed you never really figured out crypto, don’t be, contributing columnist Adam Lashinsky writes. And if you’re bummed you never got the chance to be defrauded by Theranos, really don’t be; you’ll have plenty more chances to get taken for a ride.
As Theranos founder and girl-boss extraordinaire Elizabeth Holmes heads off to prison, Adam writes that Silicon Valley has been about as good at picking out lessons from Holmes’s tale as her machines were at picking out diseases from a drop of blood.
“Silicon Valley, in all its brilliance and arrogance, its paradigm-shifting moonshots and its spectacular failures, just keeps iterating,” Adam writes, “in most ways oblivious to its own shortcomings.”
So no, you won’t have to wait long before it’s someone else’s turtleneck on the chopping block.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s… The Bye-Ku.
No longer in church
Republicans start to doubt
Full faith and credit
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
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