Vox Sentences: The Iranian crisis that wasn’t

Why you shouldn't have panicked about Iran; the state of our union is Paul Ryan's failed poker face; congratulations on not winning the Powerball!

TOP NEWS

A very brief crisis in Iran

Marwan Naamani/AFP/Getty Images

• This morning, Iran released 10 US sailors who had floated into Iranian waters Tuesday due to a navigational error.

  [Reuters / Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Phil Stewart]

• Iranian state television released a video of one of the sailors apologizing, which seems fairly anodyne (despite contradicting a claim from Vice President Joe Biden that there was "no apology"), but which will seem symbolic of Obama administration weakness toward Iran to those inclined to look at it that way.

  [CNN / Barbara Starr, Tom LoBianco, Holly Yan, and Jim Sciutto]

• If you are, or at any point were, freaked out about this, please read this post by Dan Drezner at the Washington Post, which is the definitive case against panic.

  [Washington Post / Dan Drezner]

• As Drezner points out, British sailors have been detained and then freed by Iran on two occasions in the past decade — and both of those detentions lasted for several days.

  [Telegraph (UK) / Thomas Harding, George Jones and David Blair]

• Furthermore, if the Bush administration's policy against "high-level contacts" with Iran had remained in effect under Obama, it's unlikely the issue would have been resolved as quickly as it was.

  [Los Angeles Times / Ali Gharib]

• Besides, international relations research shows that people tend to interpret other countries' actions the way they want to. So if you make your foreign policy based on shows of "strength," you might not convince anyone.

  [Voz / Zack Beauchamp and Robert Farley]

Donald Trump won the State of the Union

Evan Vucci - Pool/Getty Images

• In a stunning turn of events, it turns out that the state of our union is strong.

  [Medium / The White House]

• If you're looking for the policy synopsis of last night's speech, it's here. But policy wasn't the point.

  [Vox]

• At a time in Obama's presidency when he could have given his 2015 speech and it would have held up okay — this Huffington Post writer actually watched that one, thinking it was live — he chose instead to make some bigger-picture remarks about American politics and society.

  [Huffington Post / Maxwell Strahan]

• At its weakest — or at least its smuggest — this looked like a series of extended subtweets of Republican candidates for president.

  [Slate / Christina Cauterucci]

• (This did not help Paul Ryan's heroic, but ultimately futile, efforts to keep a poker face throughout the speech.)

  [Huffington Post / Amber Ferguson]

• At its strongest, it was a deeply moving call for Americans to reorient how they think about terrorism — and thus make themselves harder to terrorize.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• The surprise of the night was Nikki Haley. Not only did the governor of South Carolina not suck at the Republican response (a genre that is traditionally impossible not to suck at), but she issued a compelling rebuke of Donald Trump wrapped in a rebuke of protest culture.

  [PBS NewsHour via YouTube]

• Unsurprisingly, this has sent many Trump supporters after Haley. But prominent conservatives have come out to defend her.

  [The Resurgent / Erick Erickson]

You're not going to win the Powerball

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

• Tonight's multi-state Powerball lottery jackpot is up to $1.5 billion (if paid out in annuities).

  [Washington Post / Niraj Chokshi]

• The short answer to whether you should buy a Powerball ticket is no. The longer answer (with charts!) is ... probably still no, but it's closer than you think.

  [Business Insider / Walter Hickey]

• Or you could get together with a group of people and buy tickets for every single possible Powerball combination.

  [The Atlantic / Andy Kiersz]

• If you have bought a ticket, the best advice is not to buy another one. Lotteries — especially the smaller-payout ones — prey on the poor.

  [Deseret News / Sam Turner]

• And Charles Dickens agreed.

  [NPR / Nina Martyris]

MISCELLANEOUS

Here's what you're most likely to die from at your current age (assuming you die soon, which you hopefully won't) [Flowing Data / Nathan Yau]

• Massively multiplayer online games enable people to build vast, intricate universes. So what happens to those universes when the game itself shuts down?

  [The Atlantic / Will Partin]

• You may know the Atlantic's James Fallows for his trenchant reporting from China, his prescient warnings of quagmire in Iraq, or his writings on aviation. But do you know about his war against the use of two-stroke leaf blowers in DC?

  [Washington Post / Perry Stein]

• For decades, conservatives have led a concerted effort to control state-level policymaking through state think tanks, policy coordinating groups like ALEC, and the like. Liberals are only now trying to catch up.

  [NYT / Thomas Edsall]

• The total value of all real estate in Manhattan is the same as that of all of Michigan. Queens is about as valuable as Louisiana.

  [Washington Post / Ana Swanson]

VERBATIM

"This idea inverted the whole carrot-growing business" [Tim McCorkle via Washington Post / Roberto Ferdman]

• "At this point we remain opposed to any and all changes."

  [Maryland police lobbyist Frank Boston, to Baltimore Sun / Erin Cox]

• "For several months, users have been reporting that they’re stuck in an uncomfortable, illegal position, since the app has been designating a very small age range of people they’re allowed to connect with, and that range happens to be teenagers who are not able to vote—or, in many states, legally consent to sexual relations with non-minors."

  [Vanity Fair / Emily Jane Fox]

• "When I reminded her that it was my job to try to find independent confirmation of some of her claims, she understood my own disciplinary needs and was forthcoming, if slightly begrudging, in helping me out. But at one point, when I pressed her on one of these issues, she wrote back that I seemed to be saying, 'The way to validate the claims in the book is by getting officials who are white men in power to corroborate them.'"

  [NYT Mag / Gideon Lewis-Kraus]

• "White nationalists look at recent American history and see, from their perspective, a series of insults, some well-known, others obscure … They even point to the moment, in 2009, when Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Awards to say that the award should have gone to Beyoncé. It was, in their view, one in a series of turning points."

  [New Yorker / Evan Osnos]

WATCH THIS

Obama's 2016 State of the Union, in 4 minutes [YouTube / Liz Scheltens, Carlos Waters, and Sarah Turbin]

Evan Vucci - Pool/Getty Images