John McPhee, writing in the New Yorker:

Do I remember when I had my first drink? Absolutely. We were playing football at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Murray Place. I was ten years old. We’re talking whiskey. I have no idea what kind. This was pickup, sandlot, no-pads, tackle football on a vacant lot that was owned by Princeton University. We played there often. One day, somebody showed up late, carrying a bottle he had discovered in a building on the college campus.

He was one of us—our age, our pal, our teammate—but he had an advanced sense of the people up the street who were no longer in grade school. The bottle was three-quarters full. The football game went into a long time-out.

It annoys me how good of a writer he is.

Nicholas Kristof, at The New York Times:

There are crackpots who believe that the earth is flat, and they don’t deserve to be quoted without explaining that this is an, er, outlying view, and the same goes for a crackpot who has argued that climate change is a Chinese-made hoax, who has called for barring Muslims and who has said that he will build a border wall and that Mexico will pay for it.

We owe it to our readers to signal when we’re writing about a crackpot. Even if he’s a presidential candidate. No, especially when he’s a presidential candidate.

The Washington Post:

Critics dubbed it the “monster” law — a sprawling measure that stitched together various voting restrictions being tested in other states. As civil rights groups have sued to block the North Carolina law and others like it around the country, several thousand pages of documents have been produced under court order, revealing the details of how Republicans crafted these measures.

A review of these documents shows that North Carolina GOP leaders launched a meticulous and coordinated effort to deter black voters, who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. The law, created and passed entirely by white legislators, evoked the state’s ugly history of blocking African Americans from voting — practices that had taken a civil rights movement and extensive federal intervention to stop.

This article makes my blood boil.

Rebecca Traister, New York Magazine:

Here’s what it’s not: political news.

And yet, on what was surely one of the dumbest days of this whole campaign season — a high bar! — some in the media tried to fluff it into a scandal that has something to do with the American presidency. Which again: It does not.

Trump, of course, dove right in with a falsely congratulatory statement about how Abedin would be better off without Weiner. This was before he suggested that he was worried “for the country in that Hillary Clinton was careless and negligent in allowing Weiner to have such close proximity to highly classified information … Who knows what he learned and who he told? It’s just another example of Hillary Clinton’s bad judgment. It is possible that our country and its security have been greatly compromised by this.”

Vox:

The video went viral almost immediately — but not because of UT pride. References to the “creepy” sound of all these women chanting, the doors to the sorority house serving as some kind of portal to hell, and the inherently basic nature of all those white women in a room together, having the audacity to bond and say words at the same time, ran rampant across the internet.

The original tweet was quickly deleted, but it wasn’t long before the media picked up the meme. Over the next several days, several major news outlets covered the Alpha Delta Pi video. New York magazine called the video “deranged,” insisting, “Their screams will haunt you, but not as much as their wiggling fingers, their manic chants, and the disembodied arms clapping in the background.”

But as anyone who’s lived on a major university campus in the fall can probably tell you, all sororities have chants. This house cheerleading is a basic, routinized component of sorority recruitment, and learning the chant is an easy way to bond with potential sorority sisters. In the annals of sorority house chants, the Alpha Delta Pi one is easy to learn and good to use in a recruitment video, to teach any potential recruit the chant before they show up to the event. And the way the chant plays out, with a sorority “door stack” behind those grandly opening doors, is a longstanding tradition among sorority houses:

Was it just this particular video that rubbed the internet the wrong way? Of course not. As sororities have moved online, incidents involving the public shaming of sorority girls have increased. Here’s a brief look at the many ways sororities and their members have taken heat on the internet.