Vox Sentences: 3 weeks to stop Donald Trump

We were so wrong about Nevada; Obama's cunning plot for SCOTUS; you now have a Facebook "threatening to swallow someone" emoji!

TOP NEWS

Grand Trump Party

Ethan Miller/Getty

• Donald Trump crushed his opponents in the Nevada caucuses on Tuesday night, winning 46 percent of the vote amid record high turnout. He's not quite the prohibitive frontrunner for the Republican nomination. But he's close.

  [New York Times / Alexander Burns and Nick Corasaniti ]

• How close? 21 days. That's the amount of time until the March 15 wave of primaries — after which Trump may well have accumulated enough delegates to be effectively unbeatable.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Trump didn't just beat his competitors. He destroyed the theory of the GOP race they'd been operating under, in which candidates could succeed with different "lanes" of voters. Trump won with everybody.

  [CNN / Tom LoBianco]

• The success of Trump doesn't mean the Republican Party didn't try to stop him. It just means that they couldn't.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Coping mechanism 1: Mock the stupidity of Trump supporters, for example with this poll that purports to show (through what's actually pretty dishonest question wording) that 20 percent of them disapprove of the Emancipation Proclamation.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• Coping mechanism 2: Call on Rubio and Cruz to form an anti-Trump Voltron. (Crubio?)

  [National Review / Jonah Goldberg]

• Coping mechanism 3: Embrace the abyss. That's the option being taken by the first members of Congress to endorse Trump: "I don't think Trump wants my endorsement. And that's one reason why I like him."

  [Politico / Nick Gass]

In Obama's America, Republicans obstruct themselves

Win McNamee/Getty Images

• Rumors are swirling that President Obama is considering an unconventional Supreme Court nominee: Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, who is a Republican.

  [NBC News / Halimah Abdullah]

• The credulous explanation for the (highly speculative possible) pick: Sandoval is a moderate, and he's pro-choice and pro-marriage equality. The cynical explanation: Obama just wants to see Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insist he won't take up the nomination of a member of his own party.

  [CNN / Kevin Liptak, Manu Raju, and Tom LoBianco]

• The timing of the leak suggests the latter explanation. It came a day after Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee announced they wouldn't even hold a hearing for an Obama-nominated justice.

  [Wall Street Journal / Siobhan Hughes and Felicia Schwartz]

• Sandoval is a former federal judge who's said he's interested in the position. He's also pretty young (52), which is considered the best quality in a potential SCOTUS nominee these days, if maybe not for one from the opposing party.

  [The Washington Post / Amber Phillips]

• The White House, of course, is offering very little insight into the president's thinking. The closest thing: a column on the nomination, bylined by Barack Obama, posted on SCOTUSblog. Spoiler: The president writes it's "spoiler-free."

  [SCOTUSBlog / President Barack Obama]

Facebook embraces all of the feels — or maybe just six

Facebook

• Facebook rolled out five new buttons for reacting to posts Wednesday. In addition to the iconic "like" button, users can now also select "love," "haha," "wow," "sad," and "angry" for expressing their feelings.

  [NPR / Zhai Yun Tan ]

• Facebook, of course, is not inventing the emoji. Nor is it inventing the "reacji" — the chat platform Slack (popular among tech and media companies) has used reacjis since last year. (Pro tip from Vox: very useful for counting heads when planning how many debate watchers to order dinner for.)

  [The Atlantic / Robinson Meyer]

• The new "Reactions" project began last year when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the "like" button was too limited as a forum for expression on the social media platform. Apparently, the five additional emoji do more to capture the full range of human experience.

  [Wired / Liz Stinson ]

• On the other hand, no one said you have to use the emojis for their intended purpose. The Verge points out that "wow" looks an awful lot like "threatening to swallow someone," while the new "love" button resembles a butt.

  [The Verge / Chris Plante ]

• (This is what you are getting instead of a "dislike" button. Deal with it.)

  [Bloomberg / Sarah Frier]

MISCELLANEOUS

Clarence Thomas has now gone 10 — 10! — years without asking a question at a Supreme Court oral argument. Jeffrey Toobin explains why that's a problem. [New Yorker / Jeffrey Toobin]

• Vaccines work: case file LXXXIII.

  [NYT / Jan Hoffman]

• It's more common for traditionally male names to become mostly female over time than vice versa. Why?

  [Jeff Kaufman]

• Survey: Millennials don't like cereal because cleaning it up is too much work. I (Dylan) personally think this is totally reasonable.

  [Washington Post / Roberto Ferdman]

• This is the story of the dumbest argument in the history of the internet.

  [SB Nation / Jon Bois]

VERBATIM

"Perhaps the best guess of what Trump’s national security policy would look like is that it would resemble your typical sophomore Model U.N. delegation — only this time the other actors and the stakes would be real and nobody would be playing." [Foreign Policy / Peter Feaver]

• "He uses a woodworker’s vise to squeeze more juice out of limes. He stirs peanut butter with a power drill."

  [New Yorker / Nick Paumgarten]

• "'Scientists who use fetal tissue are not necessarily proabortion or antiabortion,' Goldstein says. Scientists regularly use organs from people who have died in car accidents, he notes. But that does not mean that they are 'on the side of auto accidents.'"

  [The Nation / Madeleine Schwartz]

• "Other perks seem to be from a different era, like the Mercedes-Benz GL at the Newark Airport that will drive you, if your connection is tight, from one plane to the next, as though you’re the French ambassador or an especially violent supercriminal."

  [New Yorker / Gary Sernovitz]

• "With Leonardo DiCaprio you think, 'There's no one like him.' But Jennifer Lawrence, you just get someone else. Women all across the board are just not valued."

  [Anonymous Hollywood agent to Cosmopolitan / Jen Chaney]

WATCH THIS

What exactly is a brokered convention? [YouTube / Liz Scheltens, Joe Posner, Carlos Waters, and Sarah Turbin]

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