Vox Sentences: China officially turns its 1-child policy into a 2-child policy

Old and busted: Bush vs. Trump, new hotness: Rubio vs. Cruz; the demographics behind China ending its one-child policy; and another migrant tragedy.

TOP NEWS

Night of the walking Republican dead

(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

• The third Republican presidential debate provided more evidence for a theory gaining ground in DC: The GOP race is going to come down to Ted Cruz versus Marco Rubio.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Sure, Trump and Carson are still leading the polls. But Cruz and Rubio (both of whom have plausible avenues to the nomination) have proved they deserve to sit at the big kids' table.

  [Weekly Standard / Jonathan Last]

• Many of their rivals weren't so lucky. Both the Weekly Standard (above) and National Review (here) have writers openly naming names about who needs to drop out.

  [National Review / David French]

• At the top of the list of the walking Republican dead: Jeb Bush.

• Bush went after Rubio in a last-ditch attempt to shore up establishment support. But he failed. Miserably.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• The problem for Bush: His base is the media-savvy Republican elite — who are all reading articles about how Jeb's dead, and therefore are less likely to help Jeb revive himself. (This is how Washington works: The narrative makes itself the reality.)

  [Slate / Josh Voorhees]

• Bush also managed to distinguish himself by not going after the night's easiest target — CNBC's moderators. Bush's campaign manager chewed out a CNBC staffer outside the venue...

  [Politico / Alex Isenstadt]

• ...while the rest of the candidates, who understand how to appeal to conservatives, attacked the moderators directly for unfair questions and poor time management and were thunderously applauded for it.

  [Washington Post / Amber Phillips]

• Were the moderators really that bad? Sort of, yes. They ran a genuinely amateurish-seeming debate.

  [USA Today / Rem Rieder]

• But more often than not, the questions moderators got blowback for weren't actually unfair. They were tough.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

Two! Two children! Ah, ah, ah!

(Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

• China is officially ending its one-child policy. From now on, all parents will be allowed to have up to two children.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• There's an obvious reason the government's making the switch: China's population is graying worrisomely, and the country's low fertility rate isn't nearly enough to keep up.

  [United Nations]

• But while the one-child policy is ending because of low fertility, the end of the one-child policy probably won't bring fertility back up.

  [The Conversation / Stuart Basten]

• Fertility had already started plunging in China before the one-child policy was instituted, due to economic changes (chief among them: people moving from rural areas to cities).

  [Family Inequality / Philip N. Cohen]

• And those trends have continued, making them much bigger factors in the current fertility rate than policy.

  [Carolina Population Center]

• Most of the families who might want to have more than one child — those in rural areas — are already able to, due to a series of tweaks to the one-child policy in 2013.

  [The Atlantic / Adam Pasick]

• This doesn't take away from the pain that individuals — in particular, parents whose only child was killed — have felt due to the one-child policy. But its end isn't going to signal a transformation at the national level.

  [Washington Post / William Wan]

Winter is coming. So are refugees.

(Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images)

• A wooden ship carrying 280 refugees capsized in the Mediterranean Sea today off the coast of Greece. Most of the refugees were rescued.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Refugee crossings into Europe have traditionally slowed in winter, because it's so dangerous to cross. But this year, Russian airstrikes in Syria could spur as many as 350,000 more Syrians to attempt to emigrate.

  [Middle East Eye ]

• Smugglers — who are great at taking advantage of market opportunities created by the demand to escape — are offering winter discounts that could attract people who don't otherwise have the cash to sail.

  [The Independent / Zia Weise]

• Europe is completely failing to handle the crisis. The latest plan is to start "hotspots" in countries including Greece where asylum processing will be expedited. So far, the hotspots are only causing further delays.

  [IRIN News / Rosie Scammell and Fotini Rantsiou]

• And Sweden — the last country in Europe with a fully welcoming asylum policy — has announced that at the beginning of next year, it will no longer allow refugees to become permanent residents.

  [Reuters]

• It's easy to feel hopeless looking at institutional failures to the crisis. For that, I (Dara) recommend returning to the human level: this terrific New Yorker profile about one Syrian refugee and the people he met along the way.

  [New Yorker / Nicholas Schmidle]

• Often the best hope for survival that refugees have are each other. Several refugees in Berlin have open-sourced a map of helpful locations for future arrivals.

  [TheNextWeb / Abhimanyu Ghoshal]

MISCELLANEOUS

Paul Ryan is officially speaker of the House. This piece by Politico's Jake Sherman is a good look at how he became convinced to run. [Politico / Jake Sherman]

• And this, from artist Dan Lacey, is a painting of Ryan with Ayn Rand except where Ryan's abs are made out of pancakes. We had to see it, and now you do too.

  [Dan Lacey]

• The story of how "vanilla" came to mean "bland."

  [Slate / Amanda Fortini]

• This piece, by the sister of a woman who died by gun suicide, is a powerful illustration of how guns can turn depression into a fatal illness.

  [City Beat / Liz Seymour]

• Yitzhak Rabin was murdered 20 years ago this year. Did any hope of a two-state solution die with him?

  [New Yorker / Dexter Filkins]

VERBATIM

"Göring, who would later be convicted of crimes against humanity, told Richard he was impressed with his integrity." [Deadspin / Shaun Raviv]

• ‘‘Diversity ‘has become a code word for ‘all those other folks.’ ’’

  [Jeff Chang to NYT / Anna Holmes]

• "'Say, "God,’ says the mother. 'God,' the children repeat. 'Bless us when we go out this door.' 'So we can be safe.' 'So we can be safe.'"

  [Washington Post / DeNeen Brown]

• "In the history of the NFL, a game like the duel of the 6-0 Broncos and 6-0 Green Bay Packers only happens once every 24 seasons, on average."

  [Denver Broncos / Andrew Mason]

• "Look, she'd make a great vice president. We're willing to give her more credit than Obama did. We're willing to consider her for vice president. We'll give her serious consideration. We'll even interview her."

  [Bernie Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver on Hillary Clinton, to Bloomberg / John Heilemann]

WATCH THIS

The hallucinogens that might have sparked the Salem witch trials [YouTube / Phil Edwards and Estelle Caswell]

(Vox/Phil Edwards and Estelle Caswell)