Kamala Harris announced yesterday that she’s running for president, becoming the third senator expected to enter the 2020 race, alongside Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren.

The problem isn’t that Harris was an especially bad prosecutor. She made positive contributions as well—encouraging education and reentry programs for ex-offenders, for instance. The problem, more precisely, is that she was ever a prosecutor at all. A tempered examination of Kamala Harris’s background, and whether Dems really need to be “tough on crime” to win.

“Plan B is Plan A,” she said. After last week’s defeat in Parliament, Theresa May's new Brexit proposal, essentially the same as the previous one, appears to bet that Parliament or the EU will blink first.

As the BuzzFeed story that says Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress continues to face scrutiny from multiple sides, NYU’s Jay Rosen sums up the current state of the allegations well: “There’s missing information here, and until it comes out having an opinion is hazardous.”

China says the experiments that resulted in gene-edited babies were illegal, and those involved will be investigated.

The Supreme Court allowed Trump’s transgender military ban to go into effect today, as the case continues in the lower courts.

To reduce inequality, target wealth, not income: The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson suggests alternatives to a 70% marginal tax rate.

Hours after killing dozens at an Afghan intelligence base, the Taliban announced it would resume peace talks with American officials.

...in the vast life collapses of the geologic past CO2 was a major operative and thus a patterned back-story to our present situation; climate change extinction is new to humans but not to the planet. It puts a lid on the hubristic belief that Earth exists solely for human use. Annie Proulx recommends books on climate change.

An average view of how Earth looked from space—i.e., ocean currents, cloud cover, etc.—in 2018.

The multibillion-dollar influencer marketing industry is largely unregulated, and ripe for Cambridge Analytica-grade fraud.

There's no evidence that digital detoxes have any effect on well being—or that technology, within reason, is harmful.

New, surreal illustrations by Max Guther.

This interview with Rudy Giuliani by Isaac Chotiner is worth it:

When you brought up St. Peter. About you being dead and it won’t matter and you can bring it up with St. Peter.

I was joking.

I know you were partially joking, but it felt like we were getting somewhere.

Getting somewhere where?

About you and your legacy and how you see yourself.

I don’t think about my legacy. All I think about is doing a good job and what I believe in. When I was mayor, I got criticized for a lot of things I was praised for now. And, I think, when this is over, you are going to see that we are defending an innocent man who has been very unfairly treated. I can’t think of a person who has been as unfairly treated as this, by both the media and, to some extent, the special counsel. Now, maybe he is near the end and is starting to rethink it. I hope.

The Central Park Five? Trying to think of other people treated badly.

OK, unfairly?

Yeah.

OK, time to go.