Vox Sentences: Brazil calls backsies on its impeachment vote

North Carolina sues the federal government sues North Carolina; Brazil's political crisis hits a new state of quantum chaos; why Facebook's censorship flap matters.

TOP NEWS

Changing stalls

William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images

• Last week, the US Department of Justice told North Carolina that its "bathroom law," HB2, violates the federal government's interpretation of the Civil Rights Act, and therefore that the state risked losing education funding. North Carolina had until Monday to respond.

  [Charlotte Observer / Jim Morrill]

• On Monday morning, the state issued its response. But there's a twist: The response is a federal lawsuit, asking the judge to block any federal punishment by negating the federal government's interpretation of the law.

  [CBS News]

• On Monday afternoon, the federal government countersued the state over its supposed Civil Rights Act violation. (The difference between the two lawsuits is that, unsurprisingly, North Carolina and the feds filed suits with judges who are favorable to their respective sides.)

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• The theory of jurisprudence the Department of Justice is going with here, which includes gender identity and expression as a Civil Rights Act–protected class, might seem intuitive to progressives — but it hasn't actually been held up in court.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, meanwhile, is calling on Congress to "clarify" the Civil Rights Act directly (i.e., to pass a law saying that the federal government doesn't ban discrimination on the basis of gender identity).

  [AP]

• Joining him in this push are Ted Cruz delegates, who appear to have decided that, of all the things they want to push the Donald Trump–led Republican Party to enshrine in the 2016 platform, their top priority should be federal bathroom regulation.

  [NYT / Jonathan Martin]

Brazil... >_>

Igo Estrela/Getty Images

• You may recall that Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was impeached by one house of Brazil's legislature in April, as part of the massive corruption scandal engulfing the country.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• But there's a twist. Last week, the speaker of the house who led the impeachment vote was suspended (due to a separate corruption investigation). And the acting speaker (who's under investigation in the same probe) just announced that he wishes to nullify the impeachment vote.

  [The Guardian / Jonathan Watts]

• The acting speaker claims the impeachment vote was improper because some members "prejudged" the outcome by announcing their votes in advance. (One of those members was the acting speaker himself.)

  [Financial Times / Joe Leahy and Samantha Pearson]

• The nullification is likely to be overturned by the country's supreme court — if it isn't outright ignored by the senate, which is expected to vote on Rousseff's removal from office this week anyway.

  [NYT / Simon Romero]

• And the irrepressible vice president, Michel Temer — last seen when the reluctant "I suppose I'll take the presidency" speech he'd been practicing leaked weeks before the impeachment vote — is still ready to step in. He's been shopping for coalition partners and cabinet members and everything.

  [Reuters / Anthony Boadle]

With great power...

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

• You may be aware of Facebook's Trending Topics section. But there's a twist: As Gizmodo reported last week, what's "trending" is determined not by algorithm but by a rotating squadron of bored would-be journalists.

  [Gizmodo / Michael Nunez]

• Monday, Gizmodo followed up the article with a claim from one former "curator" who said that conservative outlets, and stories that were popular on them, were suppressed from coming up as "trending."

  [Gizmodo / Michael Nunez]

• Conservatives are moderately outraged about this. They're very outraged at the revelation that some topics that weren't actually trending on Facebook — like Black Lives Matter (or the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 in 2014, not that conservatives are angry about that) — were artificially placed in the "trending" box.

  [Breitbart / Allum Bokhari]

• Facebook's apparent promotion of Black Lives Matter is particularly ironic, since in the early days of the movement (in 2014) many social media scholars remarked on the gulf between the prominence of the issue on Twitter and its near absence from Facebook in favor of apolitical, "safe" content.

  [The Message / Zeynep Tufekci]

• Facebook claims it isn't censoring anyone or suppressing any views.

  [The Verge / Nick Statt]

• But the platform's responsibility here goes way deeper than not censoring. Facebook effectively owns the means of distribution of media outlets right now. That gives it both the responsibility to educate its users and the responsibility not to indoctrinate them.

  [Columbia Journalism Review / Emily Bell]

• One good sign: The Gizmodo piece said stories about Facebook were never allowed to trend on Facebook. But this afternoon, the Gizmodo piece itself was trending.

  [Gizmodo via Twitter]

MISCELLANEOUS

The legend of Polybius, the probably fake video game that gave players horrific nightmares and seizures in a government attempt at mind control. [Atlas Obscura / Natalie Zarrelli]

• A crucially important art history question, answered: "Why do all old statues have such small penises?"

  [How to Talk About Art History / Ellen Oredsson]

• Britney Spears has been in a court-approved conservatorship for eight years now, an arrangement usually designed for the aged or infirm. And her conservators are making bank.

  [NYT / Serge Kovaleski and Joe Coscarelli]

• The Americans is fiction, but it's based in part on a real couple: Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley, born Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, who embedded in North America for decades and had two children before being busted as Soviet-turned-Russian spies.

  [The Guardian / Shaun Walker]

• SNL's Vanessa Bayer has the most inspiring Sunday routine imaginable. It involves getting up at 3 pm, ordering bagels for delivery, and watching General Hospital.

  [NYT / Vanessa Bayer]

VERBATIM

"I can summarize the data quite simply by saying that the results indicated that the Internet contains many pictures of happy people hugging what appear to be unhappy dogs." [Stanley Coren via NPR]

• "I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say. The first time I took ecstasy, all of that lifted away."

  [Ira Glass to the Guardian / Ruth Spencer]

• "My dad was a man who built stained-glass lamps and custom homes. He studied philosophy in college, and loved poetry and nature. When I was in middle school, he rowed a canoe with me. And when I was in high school, he killed my stepmother and her lover."

  [Marshall Project / Pamela Brunskill]

• "'They wanted to make us seem as racist as [they] could,' the [KKK Grand] Dragon said."

  [The Daily Beast / Asawin Suebsaeng]

• "Yes, you've worked hard, but you've also been lucky. That's a pet peeve of mine: People who have been successful and don’t realize they've been lucky. That God may have blessed them; it wasn’t nothing you did."

  [Barack Obama, Howard University commencement]

WATCH THIS

Motherhood, explained by the experts: our moms [YouTube / Joe Posner]

Vox / Joss Fong