Trump’s sycophant, Sean Spicer, has written a memoir. I haven’t read it and won’t read it, but I bet it is full of ass-kissing shit. Can’t this lickspittle just go away? No one wants to read a lying-ass book.

Jia Tolentino:

“Coco” is also a definitive movie for this moment: an image of all the things that we aren’t, an exploration of values that feel increasingly difficult to practice in the actual world. It’s a story of a multigenerational matriarchy, rooted in the past—whereas real life, these days, feels like an atemporal, structureless nightmare ruled by men. It’s about lineage and continuity at a time when each morning makes me feel like my brain is being wiped and battered by new flashes of cruelty, as though history is being forgotten and only the worst parts rewritten. It feels like myth or science fiction to imagine that our great-great-grandchildren will remember us. If we continue to treat our resources the way we are treating them currently, those kids—if they exist at all—will live in a world that is ravaged, punishing, artificial, and hard.

Read the article, especially the second half, at The New Yorker.

Karen Chee:

Always look beautiful, for one never knows if one may be seen by one’s father that day.

Read “More Chinese Proverbs by Ivanka Trump” at The New Yorker

The Vietnamese government proposed a 99-year lease to Chinese investors in the three economic zones in the north-east, south-east, and south-west of the country. A 99-year lease is a beginning of a takeover. No wonder the people opposed to this crazy-ass proposal.

It took the Vietnamese people a thousand years to get rid of the Chinese. Now the Vietnamese leaders are inviting them back for 99 years. Let’s not allow history to repeat itself. Stay strong, Vietnam.

Rebecca Mead on Ali Wong’s latest Neflix special:

Perhaps the most radical thing about “Hard Knock Wife” is that nowhere in her routine does Wong mention the obvious fact that, once again, she is pregnant. One way of interpreting her silence is as a bold gesture of liberation—the freedom not to mention her condition, as if it necessarily modified her words. But another way to look at the omission would be that Wong ignores her pregnancy and its implications because, in so many ways, the structure of our society, in its scandalous lack of support for new mothers, persists in doing exactly the same.

Read her comment on The New Yorker.

David Remnick on John McCain:

But even if you never would have voted for him—and I didn’t and wouldn’t—McCain cannot fail to leave a deep impression. His efforts, with John Kerry, to revive diplomatic relations with Vietnam; his leadership on campaign-finance reform; his moral opposition to torture; his vote against the first real effort to repeal Obamacare—these were stands that were, in large measure, reviled in his party and among many of his constituents in Arizona.

Read Remnick’s “John McCain, Honor, and Self-Reflection” on The New Yorker.

Nguyễn Thanh Việt:

Vietnamese-Americans are now part of the “model minority” who believe they earned their success, relying on little or no government assistance. They are not so different from Mr. Kelly, the descendant of Irish and Italian immigrants who included unskilled laborers speaking little English. Convenient amnesia about one’s origins is an all-American trait, since we believe ourselves to be the country in which everyone gets a new beginning.

What some of us also forget is that at nearly every stage of our country’s history, the people who were already established as American citizens found convenient targets to designate as unable to assimilate: the indigenous peoples; conquered Mexicans; slaves; or the newest immigrants, who were usually classified as nonwhite.

Just because we have become American citizens, we should never forget that we were immigrants too. Nguyễn Thanh Việt has written a compelling case in The New York Times.

John Cassidy opens:

School shootings are now as American as apple pie, and Friday’s tragedy at Sante Fe High School, in Sante Fe, Texas, followed the usual recipe.

He closes:

But the only way things will change in Washington, D.C., is if, come November, the voters elect a very different Congress.

Read his thoughts on The New Yorker

Ten more lives had been gunned down. This time’s in Santa Fe, Texas. It’s tragic, but not surprising at all. Again and again, nothing has been done to prevent these horrific school shootings. This nation has chosen gun over people. More kids will die and our leaders will just stand by. More thoughts, more prayers, and more checks from the NRA.

Evan Osnos:

Midway through its second year, Trump’s White House is at war within and without, racing to banish the “disloyals” and to beat back threatening information. Bit by bit, the White House is becoming Trump’s Emerald City: isolated, fortified against nonbelievers, entranced by its mythmaker, and constantly vulnerable to the risks of revelation.

Read the full article at The New Yorker.