Molly Ball suspects the political consulting is largely a scam; James Fallows cannot imagine what will happen when Hillary Clinton and Don John of Astoria meet in a televised debate; Iraq War advocate Peter Beinart can explain public distaste for Iraq War advocate Hillary Clinton only by accusing most of the country of misogyny; Jeffrey Goldberg hopes that President Hillary Clinton will send her husband to charm the Israelis and Palestinians into making peace (a result that can apparently be achieved without any substantial change in US policy, let alone in the neoliberal world order; all it takes is personal charm, and a little persistence, and the Palestinians willingness to pretend that this is the country from which they have been living in exile); Derek Thompson claims that American business is becoming less innovative because of the growth of monopolies.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, reviewing the TV documentary series O. J. : Made in America, reminisces about the O. J. Simpson murder case. As a college student attracted to militant black nationalism, Mr Coates had been exasperated by the support so many African Americans showed for Mr Simpson, a man who had never shown the slightest interest in any form of the African American freedom struggle. Here’s an interesting paragraph:

Two things, it seemed to me, could be true at once: Simpson was a serial abuser who killed his ex-wife, and the Los Angeles Police Department was a brutal army of occupation. So why was it that the latter seemed to be all that mattered, and what did it have to do with Simpson, who lived a life far beyond the embattled ghettos of L.A.? I vented in the school newspaper. “Since Simpson’s practices show he clearly has no interest in the affairs of black people,” I wrote, “the question becomes why do blacks have any interest in him?” In those days, I conceived of African Americans as a kind of political party, which needed only, in unison, to select the correct strategy in order to make the scourge of racism disappear. Expending political capital on O. J. Simpson struck me as exactly the opposite of the correct strategy. Looking back, I realize what eluded me. I had lived among black people all my life, but somehow I had come to see them as abstractions, not as humans.

Mr Coates goes on to discuss the way in which the case and its aftermath brought a strange unity to African Americans, not the unity of a political party but a unity with political implications. Putting the case in its historical context as the next major event in race relations in southern California after the Rodney King matter, he says:

The beating of Reginald Denny was vengeance for the beating of Rodney King. And vengeance for King played a role in Simpson’s acquittal, according to one of the jurors, Carrie Bess. But revenge only partly explains Simpson’s last great escape. What I couldn’t fathom in 1994 was a reality that black people around me likely sensed and that Made in America brings into deeply discomfiting focus: that Simpson may well have murdered his ex-wife and her friend, and that the jury got it right in declaring him not guilty.

At the time, I thought that Mr Simpson had certainly murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and that the jury was probably right in acquitting him. The investigation was botched at a hundred points, and, after all, the only question a jury has to answer is whether the case the prosecution has presented is adequate to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the accused is guilty of the charge. I didn’t believe that the evidence and argumentation the prosecution gave the Simpson jury met that standard, and the acquittal seemed right to me for that reason.