#HTE

The Angle: USA Slay All Day Edition

It’s me, copy editor Heather Schwedel, back again for another Angle. On to today’s stories!

How did cage-free eggs become animal welfare activists’ cause célèbre? “Not so long ago, the abuse of chickens barely registered as a worthy target for animal-welfare campaigns,” Daniel Engber writes. That was until a few animal lovers realized they could get more bang for their buck by focusing on the billions of chickens—“60 slaughtered birds for every single cow or pig”—that are killed in factory farms each year. Engber reckons with the idea of “strategic pragmatism” in this piece, asking if eating chicken in the first place makes us all a bunch of “species-ists.”

Another –ist not to be: elitist. In her probe into the #firstsevenjobs hashtag game that took over Twitter last week, L.V. Anderson criticizes the way listing early jobs like babysitting and retail romanticizes the American ideal of working your way up: “[I]t seems designed to make people feel smug about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, even though their career success probably had more to do with luck than with hard work or determination.” She suggests #myparentsjobs instead.

Speaking of American dreams, let’s just say it: Leslie Jones has been one of the best parts of watching the Olympics. Hiring her may have been a cynical move on NBC’s part, David Canfield argues, but damn is she making the network’s coverage better. While “regular contributors on NBC’s Olympics team have shown little interest in departing from the network’s standard narratives,” Jones “has been delivering NBC’s messages with the kind of authenticity and energy that the network had been otherwise unable to muster.”

Things are going much less swimmingly for Ryan Lochte, who’s now in a whole mess of trouble for allegedly lying about being robbed and held up at gunpoint at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Here’s everything we do and don’t know about Lochte’s bizarre Brazilian misadventure. And here’s a video of what his police interrogation might have looked like, with a little help from Hollywood.

For fun: You know, it’s high time that gymnastics reconsider its bar terminology. Horizontal bar can’t be the name for an event when they’re all horizontal bars!

Tutor, cashier, help desk worker, research assistant, intern, intern, intern,

Heather

http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.slate.com%252Farticles%252Fnews_and_politics%252Fthe_angle%252F2016%252F08%252Fanimal_welfare_activists_choose_chickens_the_firstsevenjobs_twitter_hashtag.html%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8