In an interesting, interactive piece, Opinions graphics reporter Youyou Zhou presents the evidence that online dating increases the rate of interracial matches, which increases social cohesion.
It’s personal for her; she’s Asian, and she met her White boyfriend when the apps got her looking for partners outside her “overwhelmingly Asian social milieu.”
But she’s very much not alone. A huge chunk of partners meet online these days (I won’t tell you exactly how many — Youyou has you guess), and internet-introduced couples are interracial far more often than the IRL crowd.
So the next time an online dater finds themself discouraged, they might find some solace in the idea that they’re making the country better, one swipe at a time.
Chaser: Post Grad writer Renee Yaseen has been discouraged from online dating, and so have many of her Gen Z peers. A column this summer explained why.
Gather round the fire here and prick up your ears. Closer, closer now. This is the tale of the haunting of the Capitol Hill House.
The yarn of congressional dysfunction that Alexandra Petri tells is even scarier than the classic Shirley Jackson story it riffs on, because Alexandra’s version is bone-chillingly (and basically) true.
“The leadership was a ghost ship,” she writes, “and the figure of the adult remained absent from the chair. There was a bow tie there, but that was all.”
An awful energy imbues the halls of the House, entering its third week without a speaker. But — “who had unearthed it and brought it to malignant life?”
Dana Milbank reports that speaker-turned-political-ghost Kevin McCarthy blames the Republicans who ousted him for summoning the chaos; Dana writes that Rep. Jim Jordan had a hand in the incanting, too, “kneecapping” as he did the GOP’s first choice for McCarthy’s successor. Maybe the culprits also include the gang threatening to remove elected the speaker pro tempore, Patrick McHenry, thanks to whose presence House order hangs by a thread.
Alexandra’s gothic formulation lays the blame most clearly: “Enough people were sent to Congress who believed it was not possible to govern … and by their very belief, they made it impossible!”
E.J. Dionne peered into the darkness, too — and managed to see a potential happy ending. He predicts that across-the-aisle action is the only way to end the speaker battle and observes that already “normal progressives and normal conservatives, in alliance with politicians closer to the center, are discovering a shared interest in keeping the nihilist right far from the levers of power.”
Bipartisanship, once thought dead on the slab, might soon be galvanized back to life.
Chaser: Cartoonist Edith Pritchett’s pie chart of Republican infighting is full of laughs, but it’s a horror story all the same.
From the Editorial Board’s call for the FDA to begin regulating lab-developed diagnostic tests to make sure they work correctly. Currently, the government does not oversee the multibillion-dollar industry.
There’s an FDA proposal to this effect that’s in the works, and the board calls it “hardly burdensome.” If labs’ tests are already working right, it shouldn’t be hard to prove that to the FDA; the only issue will be with tests that don’t work right, which we don’t want anyway.
Most Americans will be misdiagnosed at least once in their lives, the board reports. Regulating tests is the first step toward reversing that.
Ted Johnson isn’t a Republican, but he’ll play one for the primaries. He writes in a column that since he lives in Virginia, he gets to decide which party’s primary he’ll vote in for each election cycle. He always goes for the more competitive one, and this year, that’s the GOP’s.
He’s still figuring out whom to pick — and even how to pick. It’s hard work, he writes, but in a world where the general election is frequently all too easy to decide, it’s “the good kind of hard.”
- Drug companies are trying to wriggle out of negotiating lower prices. Don’t let them, write researchers C. Joseph Ross Daval and Aaron S. Kesselheim.
- Help is finally coming to a collapsing Haiti, but Lee Hockstader worries that the United States will not be involved enough for the country to achieve long-term stability.
- Jen Rubin explains why lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, a co-defendant in Donald Trump’s Georgia case, cut a deal with prosecutors — and what it might mean for the former president.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … the Bye-Ku.
With an app match is better
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
