Vox Sentences: The American egg industry puts an end to chicken gendercide

Obama misses chance to declare himself president for life; great news for chickens; humankind’s most mysterious, hobbitiest ancestor gets more mysterious and hobbitier.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Some tweets are endorsements

Hillary for America

• President Obama endorsed Hillary Clinton for president today, surprising approximately no one.

  [@HillaryClinton via Twitter]

• The endorsement was released shortly after a meeting with Bernie Sanders (who gave another speech afterward in which he didn't drop out but sounded like he was talking himself into it)...

  [Reuters]

• ...but according to assiduous tie-based detective work, Obama actually recorded the endorsement video Tuesday, when Clinton amassed a majority of delegates.

  [CBS News / Rebecca Shabad]

• How much do endorsements matter? It's hard to tell. In the most optimistic assessment, Oprah WInfrey got 1 million votes for Obama in 2008 — but president or no, Obama isn't Oprah.

  [Kellogg Insight / Craig Garthwaite and Timothy Moore]

• This particular endorsement might be helpful in winning over Bernie Sanders supporters, who like Obama much more than they like Clinton.

  [Vox / Jeff Stein]

• But as Elizabeth Warren (who's expected to endorse Clinton Thursday night) has learned, endorsing Clinton can turn some Sanders fans against even the most committed progressive.

  [Mother Jones / Pema Levy]

• And then there are the voters (who knows how many of them there really are; so far this is a "some guys in Brooklyn"–level trend) who are determined to vote for Donald Trump to tear the facade off the system, heighten the contradictions, and hasten the eventual revolution.

  [The Daily Beast / Christopher Ketcham]

#NotAllMaleChicks

Shutterstock

• In the best news for chickens in decades, United Egg Producers announced today that it will stop "culling" male chicks born at its hatcheries.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• "Culling" is a euphemism for mass killing of day-old male chicks, for the simple reason that they can't lay eggs.

  [The Independent (UK) / Heather Saul]

• Since United Egg Producers is responsible for 95 percent of egg production in America, that's a huge win for animal welfare: Millions of eggs will be destroyed at the embryo stage (essentially aborted) rather than being killed after birth.

  [The Humane League]

• Culling is just one of the ways in which industrial egg production is simply terrible for animal welfare. Eating eggs causes a lot of suffering.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• But the Humane League, which orchestrated the egg agreement (and has worked with several other corporations on animal welfare issues), appears to be making real progress.

  [Open Philanthropy Project]

Come to think of it, staying in the same place for 600,000 years is something a hobbit would do

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

• A new paper in the journal Science has offered new information about the early hominid species Homo floresiensis — generally called "the hobbits" — who were discovered in Indonesia a dozen years ago.

  [National Geographic / Adam Hoffman]

• The original hobbit specimen was less than 100,000 years old. But the new fossils are 700,000 years old — making it clear that the hobbit was, in fact, its own species and not a diseased version of Homo sapiens.

  [The Atlantic / Ed Yong]

• The current theory is that the hobbits branched off of human ancestor Homo erectus — who was much bigger. That means they would have gotten very small, very quickly (over less than 100,000 years).

  [The Verge / Alessandra Potenza]

• (There are doubters. It's also possible that an even earlier prehuman lineage, Australopithecus, migrated all the way from Africa to Indonesia — which raises its own questions.)

  [Smithsonian / Maya Wei-Haas ]

• The most fascinating part of the discovery, though? The tools that the hobbits were using 700,000 years ago are similar to the ones discovered with the younger specimen, indicating that their culture changed little over 600,000 years...

  [The Atlantic / Ed Yong]

• ...but there are more sophisticated tools found in older rock layers, raising the strange possibility that the hobbits got less culturally complex after a long time on the island.

MISCELLANEOUS

This account of physical and psychological abuse at a renowned Chicago theater is disturbing and important — not lest because some of the abuse occurred onstage, with the public watching. [Chicago Reader / Aimee Levitt and Christopher Piatt]

• Exit polls might systematically underestimate how many white people vote. That's great news for Trump.

  [NYT / Nate Cohn]

• Affluent people love to rag on McDonald's, but in many low-income neighborhoods it's a vital community space.

  [The Guardian / Chris Arnade]

• The US has lower poverty than the UK, Germany, or France — before taxes and social programs. The difference is entirely about redistribution.

  [Boston Globe / Evan Horowitz]

• Man, these Overwatch plays-of-the-game are super impressive.

  [Daily Dot / Jay Hathaway]

VERBATIM

"A seagull turned bright orange after it fell into a vat of chicken tikka masala." [The Guardian / Press Association]

• "They replaced horses, didn’t they? That’s how the late, great economist Wassily Leontief responded 35 years ago to those who argued technology would never really replace people’s work."

  [NYT / Eduardo Porter]

• "No successful relationship was ever born from a situation in which one person strung the other along until — in a moment of epiphany — he realized everything glorious and noble and luminescent was in front of him all along."

  [NY Mag / Jason Chen]

• "And then at some point, it sort of occurred to me that suppose the stupid people were right, what would it look like? … Now I notice that that's kind of what we did see."

  [Petersen Institute / Larry Summers]

• "I also feel pity for them because they’re so bad at anti-Semitism."

  [The Atlantic / Jeffrey Goldberg]

WATCH THIS

Shut up about the y-axis. It shouldn’t always start at zero. [YouTube / Johnny Harris and Matt Yglesias]

Vox / Johnny Harris