This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• Matt Wuerker:
  
• Will he go? — Lawrence Douglas interviewed by Sean Illing in Vox: When I was researching the book, I was asking myself, well, what does the Constitution and the federal law do in order to secure the peaceful transition of power? And one of the things that I realized is they don’t secure the peaceful succession of power. They presuppose it. They assume that it’s going to happen. So if it doesn’t happen, well, no one knows ...
• “Totally predictable”: State reopenings have backfired — Brian Resnick in Vox: Many states opened up in early May, hoping the economy would recover while a winning battle against Covid-19 continued apace. Unfortunately, it’s now clear that in the areas where the virus has come roaring back, few gains against it were made in the last month. “We managed to disrupt our economy [and] skyrocket unemployment, and we didn’t control the damn virus,” said Jeff Shaman, an infectious disease modeler at Columbia University.
• Preprint — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
  
• The man who wrote the most perfect sentences ever written — Nicholas Barber on P.G. Wodehouse for the BBC: Maybe you can spot some deeper themes in his books if you look hard enough. At times I can persuade myself that there is something subversive in Bertie’s lack of interest in the conventional status markers of a career and a marriage, and something instructive in his insistence on helping his lovestruck friends, however ungrateful they may be. I can even argue that Wodehouse was revolutionary because his characters didn’t defeat villains in fist fights or shootouts (although they sometimes stole policemen’s helmets on Boat Race night). Perhaps he was teaching us that we can’t all be high achievers, let alone rugged action heroes, but that we can all be kind and generous. In other words, we can live according to the code of the Woosters. But I admit that this is a stretch. As Stephen Fry put it, “You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection: you just bask in its warmth and splendour.”
• How JK Rowling Betrayed the World She Created — Gabrielle Bellot in Literary Hub: That this is the issue she has chosen to focus on in the wake of international protests against anti-Blackness and police brutality—most protests of which contain many LGBTQ people—is all the more absurdly tone-deaf, suggesting her fanatical obsession with trans people. People who deeply despise one group or another—homophobes, racists, transphobes—so often seem unable to let go of those groups, orbiting them like angry moons, scarcely able to function unless we are there for them to denigrate.
• Via Dave Barry: