Sady Doyle

Last weekend, I was out and about in New York City. I picked up two bottles of nail polish, a cheap teapot from Flying Tiger, and a postcard from the Morgan Library, where I’d gone to see some Emily Dickinson manuscripts. It was only when I got home that I recognized a common theme. Although all of my purchases were theoretically different colors, every single one could reasonably called “millennial pink.”

Over the past year or so, Donald Trump has solidified his image as a fundamentally blue-collar president—a relatable vehicle, despite his personal wealth, for the tastes and concerns of America’s white working class. Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person,” Fran Leibowitz declares in Vanity Fair. “They see him. They think, ‘If I were rich, I’d have a fabulous tie like that. Why are my ties not made of 400 acres of polyester?’ All that stuff he shows you in his house—the gold faucets—if you won the lottery, that’s what you’d buy.” His gauche décor, his blunt and blustering style of speech, his terminal lack of manners—all this, supposedly, helps Trump connect with the little guy.

Carrie Fisher could have made things easy on herself. As the obituaries roll in this week, and slave-bikini photos and “Goodbye, Princess Leia” headlines fill social-media feeds, it’s important to remember: Her role as the young, beautiful heroine in a hit film could have been her only legacy. She could have shined as a starlet, then chosen to quietly fade away.

“A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs,” Samuel Johnson said back in 1791. “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Ohio is supposed to be the land of moderation. It’s a swing state that has gone with the winner of every presidential election in recent memory. Its ideological layout features large, diverse, Democratic cities surrounded by wide, white Republican swaths of rural land, which more or less tend to balance each other out. And it’s governed by Mr. Moderation himself: John Kasich, the gee-shucks, sweater-clad 1950s sitcom dad who supposedly represents all that is reasonable within the Republican party. Kasich is has so much approval from centrists on the left and right that, as per a recent Politico article, he’s the preferred choice of Democratic electoral college members who refuse to vote for Trump.

My husband and I were talking about children. That’s what keeps going through my head. We were standing in a long line outside an elementary school in Brooklyn on Tuesday, waiting to vote.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have very different skill sets. As he demonstrated during the first US presidential debate on Sept. 26, Trump excels at shouting; coming up with nearly incoherent insults; and puffed-up caveman machismo. These traits actually served him pretty well during the Republican presidential primaries. But on Monday, they proved to be no match for the specific (and perhaps specifically female) talents of Democratic nominee Clinton.

Conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health are nothing new. Most of them are vile. More of them are silly. And, until recently, mainstream culture has largely treated them as such.

Everyone loves a comeback story—especially when it comes to Britney Spears. The pop star’s performance at MTV’s Video Music Awards on Aug. 28 was billed as a rebuttal to her lackluster performance back in 2007. Her “disastrous” VMA performance of “Gimme More” nine years ago was regarded at the time as the death knell of her career. That was the year of “Leave Britney Alone;” the year that she shaved her head, wielded an umbrella against a member of the paparazzi and temporarily lost custody of her kids. Critics at the time panned her VMA set. The New York Post wrote, “Spears was stuffed into a spangled bra and hot pants and jiggled like Jell-O as she sleepwalked through the song.” MTV News called her performance a “reeking, outrageous failure.”

A trailer for the new DC Comics supervillain movie Suicide Squad offers a quick summary of each character’s powers. Deadshot: “He shoots people.” Killer Croc: “He’s a crocodile, he eats people.” Enchantress: “Possessed by a witch.” Finally, we land on Harley Quinn, played by Margot Robbie: “She’s just crazy.”

On Tuesday night, I was one of many, many people celebrating the permanent Twitter ban of Breitbart journalist and conservative rage-demon Milo Yiannopoulos. Yet despite my euphoria, something rang hollow.

Kanye West is the unsympathetic narrator of his own life. I admire him for it. In an era overrun by pop stars groomed, polished, and focused-grouped within an inch of their lives, West is resolutely and publicly flawed. He’ll call a sitting US president a racist or jump onstage during an awards show to interrupt America’s sweetheart. These provocations are a big part of his appeal. On a good day, he can seem like the bruised, beating heart of the whole world.

It’s hard to imagine it now. But under most circumstances, the world would never have known about Brock Turner.

Can women speak? In light of a recent video from Just Not Sports, featuring sportswriters Julie DiCaro and Sarah Spain, a large portion of the Internet would seem inclined to vote no.

Of all modern fantasies, there is perhaps none more delicious than the Perfect Quit. You know the one: You stand up, aflame with eloquence, and tell your boss to take this job and shove it with such force and righteousness that the entire company folds out of shame.

It’s hard to remember these days, but just a few years ago, everybody loved Hillary Rodham Clinton. When she stepped down as US secretary of state in January 2013 after four years in office, her approval rating stood at what the Wall Street Journal described as an “eye-popping” 69%. That made her not only the most popular politician in the country, but the second-most popular secretary of state since 1948.

Richard Dawkins is a bestselling author and atheist pundit who’s been credited with “redefining the role of the public intellectual in Western culture.” As recent events have shown, he’s also part of a largely unacknowledged problem with online harassers.