Vox Sentences - A week for the history books

Well, this has been a week for the history books, if the future has history books. Starting last Saturday with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, rocketing through the very Project 2025-y RNC and announcement that noted authoritarian J.D. Vance would be Trump’s running mate, and rounding the corner of Wednesday (only Wednesday!) with President Biden’s Covid diagnosis and reports of growing pressure for him to drop out of the race, I for one am ready for August, or winter, or the abyss. 

It feels like we’ll be unpacking July 2024 for decades to come, but my colleagues across the newsroom, especially on the politics desk, have been hard at work putting all of these events into context. Here are some Vox articles, videos, and podcasts that I found particularly helpful this week, both to understand what’s going on in America at this moment and to try to think about something else. 

—Meredith Haggerty, senior culture editor

Revisiting Hillbilly Elegy, the book that made J.D. Vance

Aja Romano took a hard look at J.D. Vance’s 2016 bestseller this week, and it reads a whole lot different in 2024, now that we know more about the senator/veep nominee. 

A close reading shows that the greatest trick Vance ever played wasn’t really all that great. This book feints toward sympathy (mostly by saying stuff like “I’m not trying to say we deserve more sympathy”), but it’s positively vibrating with contempt. Vance describes the people of Appalachia as a lazy, mistrustful lot, and in doing so puts his own lack of trust front and center. It doesn’t matter if he’s talking about the “welfare queen” neighbor whose work history he claims to have memorized, or some random lady at a gas station in a Yale t-shirt who must be judging him, Vance is all too assured in his paranoid, cruel, and limited fantasies about the lives of others. 

This is how you get escalation

There was no information on the motive of the 20-year-old who attempted to assassinate Trump last weekend, but that didn’t stop many in the GOP — including  Vance — in the hours following the event from trying to blame Joe Biden’s rhetoric, without a shred of evidence. As Zack Beauchamp explains, this is wildly irresponsible. 

What would also be irresponsible, he says, would be Democrats backing off from asserting that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, just because that terrifying prospect might rightfully upset people. As Zack writes, considering the events of January 6 and Trump’s plan for 2025, Democrats in fact “have an obligation to voters to make it the centerpiece of their case.” Because it’s true. 

🎧  Trump just avoided 40 felony counts

Oh yeah, another Trump-y thing that happened this week: The documents case against the former president was thrown out. Trump was looking at prison time for this particular case, which is one of many investigations into his behavior before, during, and after his presidency. 

Today, Explained broke down what the case was, what Trump’s lawyers argued, how the case got tossed, and what it means going forward. A reminder that this all started with a recent commander-in-chief keeping classified information in the spare rooms and showers of his country club home. Ultimately, Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon decided that the special prosecutor in this case shouldn’t have existed in the first place. This decision isn’t exactly open and shut, and to understand the ins and outs here, I heartily recommend this episode. 

📹 Can Paris fix its poop problem before the Olympics?

Time for a hard pivot! As a one-time, never-returning visitor to Paris’s sewer museum on the banks of the Seine (what did I think it was going to smell like??), I appreciated this look at the proposed Olympic waterway. The problem? Swimming there has been banned for a century, thanks to overflow from les toilettes. The Seine is beautiful from the outside, winding through many of the city’s greatest landmarks, but Paris’s goal of cleaning it up in time for world-class athletes to splash around in there seems like a tall order. And that’s all well and good, but what do they plan to do about the sharks?

As Coleman Lowndes explains, the ultimate determination about whether Katie Ledecky et al. are getting down and possibly dirty won’t be made until mere hours before the Games — and it all depends on the rain.

🎧 Is good posture actually good?

On this week’s Unexplainable, Byrd Pinkerton vindicates slouchers like myself. Turns out, the history of sitting up straight is bizarrely racist and scientifically ... made up. Byrd delves deep into the recency of good posture bias and the machinations and aims of the forces that rose up in the previous centuries to promote it. 

Ultimately we have to wonder, does posture mean anything at all?

This email was sent to you. Manage your email preferences or unsubscribe. If you value Vox’s unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring contribution.

View our Privacy Notice and our Terms of Service.

Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.