Last night, the two candidates for Vice President of the United States, Governor Tim Walz and Senator JD Vance, took the stage for their first and only debate. The event was widely anticipated due to their contrasting personas, but not expected to ultimately move the needle in the broader campaign.
Unsurprisingly, JD Vance repeatedly returned to the theme of immigration and border security, citing undocumented migrants as the primary driver of both crime and inflation in the U.S. Even before the debate, CBS previewed this emphasis from the Trump/Vance ticket.
At one point, moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan clarified the legal status of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian population, prompting a spicy exchange and ultimate muting of the mics:
“Thank you, Senator, for explaining the legal process.”
Walz, on the other hand, got off to a shaky start, misplacing words and pulling obvious punches. (It didn’t help that his first question was about Iran launching missiles at Isreal the previous day.) Arguably his worst moment came in response to a question about him having misrepresented a trip to China in 1989.
The question preceded a question to Vance regarding his past comments about Trump, a fairly absurd false equivalency.
The most memorable moment of the otherwise cordial and policy-heavy debate came over 90 minutes in, when the topic turned to democracy and January 6.
The immediate reaction from online commentators was to declare JD Vance the winner, at least in style if not substance.
On the left, people were frustrated with the politeness of the debate (I lost track of how many times the candidates said they agreed with one another), and with Walz failing to go after Vance’s record and myriad offensive comments.
But when all is said and done, snap polls and focus groups seem to indicate a draw.
Ultimately, at least as far as the general election goes, none of this will really matter in the end.
Because it was so civil, this debate left us with few memes or SNL fodder.
Maybe the most egregious moment of the whole night took place before the debate even started.
Onto the next.
On Monday, Ta-Nehisi Coates visited CBS Mornings to promote The Message, in an interview that went so off the rails I wasn’t sure which of the hundreds of outraged tweets to even include below.
DOKOUPIL: But if you were to read this book, you would be left wondering, why does any of Israel exist? What a horrific place, committing horrific acts on a daily basis.
So, I think the question is central and key. If Israel has a right to exist, and if your answer is “no,” then I guess the question becomes, why do the Palestinians have a right to exist? Why do 20 different Muslim countries have a right to exist?
COATES: My answer is that no country in this world establishes its ability to exist through rights. Countries establish their ability to exist through force, as America did. And so I think this question of right to Israel does exist. It`s a fact. The question of its right is not a question that I would be faced with with any other country.
DOKOUPIL: But you write a book that delegitimizes the pillars of Israel. It seems like an effort to topple the whole building of it. So I come back to the question, and it`s what I struggled with throughout this book. What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place, and not any of the other states out there?
COATES: There`s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state. I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are.
DOKOUPIL: Muslim included.
COATES: I would not want a state where any group of people laid down their citizenship rights based on ethnicity. The country of Israel is a state in which half the population exists on one tier of citizenship, and everybody else that`s ruled by Israelis exists on another tier, including Palestinian Israeli citizens. The only people that exist on that first tier are Israeli Jews. Why do we support that? Why is that okay?
Often “kids these days” articles are nothing but dressed up moral panic, but even if this is only directionally correct, there are ample reasons to be concerned here. (I say this not self-righteously but as somebody who can certainly relate to eroded attention spans…)
But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
But I’m sure there’s no reason to worry, given what’s around the corner…
Unfortunately, this week both the sports world and the theater community lost two greats, far too young.
Basketball player, humanitarian, and my college graduation speaker Dikembe Mutombo passed away from a brain tumor at 58.
Meanwhile, Broadway legend Gavin Creel passed away after a very short fight with cancer at age 48.
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