Slate Voice

Welcome to Should This Thing Be Smart?, a new series. Each month, Justin Peters will examine a new smart object and try to determine whether there is any good reason for its existence—and how likely it is to be used for nefarious reasons. Read the first installment, which looked at a $60 smart fork.

A tax reform process that had been moving with relative ease through Congress got much knottier on Wednesday, as complicated bills tend to do when the flashy debuts have receded and the thorny details begin to emerge. For Senate Republicans that meant defending two tough propositions: the sudden inclusion of a provision to eliminate the individual mandate for health care, and the decision to sunset tax cuts for middle-class families, while allowing corporations to keep them in perpetuity.

Lil Peep, who earlier this year was dubbed the “future of emo rap” by Pitchfork, died on Wednesday at the age of 21. Through his woozy, melancholic songs like “White Wine,” “Girls,” and “Drugz,” he drew from ’00s emo influences like Limp Bizkit and Panic! At the Disco as well as rapper Gucci Mane, while garnering millions of fans on social media and Soundcloud.

Any honest accounting of the cultural legacy of the 1960s has to reckon with Charles Manson, who died Sunday at the age of 83. Manson was a human monster whose sole talent was being able to identify the most loathsome potentials of that decade’s zeitgeist and bend them to his own hideous will.

Last week, the Museum of the Bible opened in Washington, D.C. When the museum was first conceived, it was intended to “inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the Bible,” according to documents filed in 2010. But then, scholarship and dialogue intervened.

Print media has been in decline for more than 15 years, its business model obsolesced by the ubiquity of free online content and the rise of online advertising. But all was not lost: The internet brought with it exciting new opportunities and forms. Eventually, one assumed, it would also bring exciting new revenue structures to replace the ones it had undermined.

Thanks to Donald Trump and his merry band of mall predators, the United States is, of course, still in a class of its own. But the chaos has quickly spread to other countries as well. Britain is hurtling toward a hard Brexit under the leadership of a terminally weakened prime minister.

Donald Trump has made little effort to hide the fact that, as president, he continues to profit off the dozens of properties either that he owns or that bear his name. According to a new report by the anti-corruption organization Global Witness, some of those profits may include money that was laundered by Colombian drug cartels through a Panama property carrying the Trump brand.

Disney released the first official trailer for Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time on Sunday night—that last one was just a teaser—and this time around they’re focusing on the thing we want most from trailers: exposition, and lots of it! The first minute or so of the teaser is built around an explanation of fifth-dimensional travel involving an ant and a piece of yarn.

Our current cultural moment has provoked an unprecedented excavation of the female memory. Recollections of violations large and small, thoroughly traumatizing and mildly annoying, top-of-mind and all but forgotten, have poured onto the internet like a million leaks from an ancient, overfilled vessel. Many have seen themselves in the stories of alleged abuse by Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K.

The Twitter thread, also known as the tweetstorm and the Twitter essay, has had a big year. Virginia Heffernan argued in Politico that the thread is the literary form of 2017. And now TechCrunch confirms that the service is testing a feature that would make it easier to tweetstorm. Twitter’s tradition of following the lead of its users has benefited the service mightily over the years—that’s how we got the hashtag, for example.

The video is said to be graphic. Taken by an officer’s body-worn camera, it apparently shows a man crawling toward the officer, looking confused. The man makes a “quick movement”—maybe it’s a move to pull up his shorts, maybe it looks like he’s about to pull out a gun—and the officer shoots him to death.

Given that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy won a combined 17 Oscars and, when you throw in the three Hobbit movies, grossed nearly $6 billion worldwide, you would think that the entertainment industry might be inclined to leave it way-more-than-well-enough alone.

Clocking 52 hours a week at $9.50 an hour to supplement her mom’s housecleaning income left Arredondo little time for homework throughout her high school years. And it showed. Her grades fell and she almost failed to graduate—just like 52 percent of her classmates. Yet just six weeks after she enrolled in a program that helps children who live in poverty remain in school, Arredondo is giddy with the thought that she will soon don a cap and gown.

In the tradition of those Snapchat filters that give your skin an added glow and FaceApp, the less said about which the better, comes MakeApp, an app that uses artificial intelligence to show you what people—you, your friends, celebrities, anyone—look like without makeup. There are of course plenty of apps that stack various filters in order to self-beautify, and MakeApp offers the option of adding makeup to a face, too.

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer do not often begin their weeks with urgent, joint press conferences. The two congressional minority leaders did this week, though, delivering grave warnings about the Republican tax plan that is currently barreling its way through Congress despite the best efforts of Democrats.

Tomi Lahren, the conservative commentator who lost her job at The Blaze this spring when she came out as pro-choice—only to immediately fail upwards to Fox News—isn’t for everyone. Ideally, she wouldn’t be for anyone, but there will always be a market for upwardly mobile young people assuring downwardly mobile old people that they’re right to be angry. Still, even in that godforsaken genre, her mean-girl sarcasm can be pretty hard to sit through.

On Thursday morning, Los Angeles radio host Leeann Tweeden wrote a disturbing article alleging that Sen. Al Franken sexually harassed her on a 2006 USO tour. According to Tweeden, Franken coerced her into “rehearsing” a kiss for a skit, then forcefully stuck his tongue in her mouth. She also provided a photograph of Franken appearing to grope her while she slept.

In New York, an unemployed mother left her two children in the car, air conditioning on, while she went in LaGuardia Airport for a job interview. The children were fine but told the cop who discovered them they didn’t know where their mom was. Local authorities stepped in, and the mug shot of the mother made its way across the country. Caitlin Mahoney knows the frustration that comes from not being able to find work.

One of the many remarkable things about this cavalcade of comeuppance for sexual abusers and harassers is that it’s taking down men who once seemed untouchable to the media in part because they were on the right team: editors and executives at media outlets beloved by progressives, actors and comedians who were the faces of prestige TV shows, Democratic donors. Having “good” politics, it turns out, isn’t the same thing as having good sexual politics.