Clinton: Stop talking. 
 
 Worried woman: It’s 3 a.m. and I think something’s happening. 
 
 Clinton: On it. 
 
 Like most Internet sensations, the “Texts from Hillary” took a winding path from artifact to thing. When the photo first appeared last fall, a blogger from Reuters suggested that it made Clinton look bad: stuck on a plane, overloaded with work, falling asleep in her chair. “Quick quiz,” he wrote. “You realize your job may sort of suck if you . . . are trying to read your PDA with your sunglasses on.” 
 
 But when the photo turned up, inexplicably, on his Facebook feed last week, Adam Smith saw it differently. Smith, 29, who works for a campaign-finance nonprofit in Washington, D.C., reposted the shot on Twitter with a comment along the lines of, “Have you seen how fierce Hillary is in this picture?” 
 
 Last Wednesday at a bar, Smith showed the photo to his friend Stacy Lambe, 26, who works for a D.C. communications firm. “I said, ‘Have you seen this Hillary picture? I think we could make a meme out of it’ ” Smith told me by phone. “And he said, ‘Texts from Hillary.’ And I said, ‘Done.’ ” They went home and started a Tumblr blog, and before long, people were sending suggestions of their own. 
 
 Nearly every contribution falls along the same theme: Hillary’s not beleaguered, she’s in charge. This is the story the photo tells. The frown makes her seem impatient. The sunglasses make her look aloof, but also glamorous. Gone are the man’s-world accessories, the pantsuit and masculine haircut. Secretary Clinton is a woman, comfortably feminine, with long blonde hair, a chunky necklace, a giant broach. 
 
 And, crucially, she’s texting. In an age of impersonal communications, there’s no medium more distant or nonchalant. Texting requires no utterance, no grammar, no coherent thought, and barely any physical effort. (The other day, a friend texted me: “k.” I knew what she meant.) To send a text is to say, “I’m sending you this message with my thumbs. That’s all you get of me.” ||||| So it's week two and we're still talking about Texts From Hillary, the simple-yet-brilliant meme started by D.C.-based communications professionals Stacy Lambe and Adam Smith. 
 
 Here's why it works: Most memes make fun of their subjects. This one is all about respect. As Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal said yesterday, Hillary Clinton is "one of the few people who is in the Obama administration whose reputation from her work there has been enhanced as opposed to roughened." Where Obama, Biden, Gates, Geithner et al have suffered gray hairs and waning enthusiasm, Clinton — who entered the administration as Obama's graying runner-up — has undergone a reinvention and seems more powerful and unflappable than ever. 
 
 Two takes from today: 
 
 Benjy Sarlin, Talking Points Memo: 
 
 Her 2008 campaign, which once seemed a cautionary tale about hubris, looks at least somewhat better with age. Obama touted a unifying national message in his run against Clinton, suggesting that Clinton’s scars from decades of battling Republicans would make it difficult to ever be effective in the White House. Now Obama’s post-partisan vision has given way to a tough dogfight of a general election in which he’s running against the intransigent Republican party’s “thinly veiled social Darwinism.” And Clinton’s popularity — including with Republicans — has never been higher, prompting yet another boomlet of interest in a 2016 presidential run. 
 
 Marin Cogan, GQ's Death Race 2012: ||||| It was the most iconic facial expression from inside the Situation Room during the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, but days after it was photographed, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dismissed it as an allergic reaction. "It was my preventing one of my early spring allergic coughs," Clinton said a year ago, when asked about the photo. "So it may have no great meaning whatsoever." At the time, it sort of felt like she had robbed the country of a legendary—and legendarily human—reaction to an historic event. It turns out now, the excuse was probably not real, thanks to two new follow-up interviews with Clinton and President Obama. 
 
 During last night's hour-long Rock Center with Brian Williams on NBC, the president and secretary of State said the photo depicted the sense of trepidation and concern during the high stakes mission: No mention of pollen. "This picture was taken right as the helicopter was having some problems," President Obama told Williams, in reference to the stealth helicopter that crash landed outside bin Laden's compound. "I remember Hillary putting her hand over her mouth at that point. There's silence at this point in the room." 
 
 Speaking to Williams in a separate interview, Clinton seems to finally give it to us straight. "That's the way I usually look when my husband drags me to an action movie," she said. "What it conjures up is all of the emotions that were running through my and ever other person in that small group. It was just an extraordinary experience." 
 
 Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy 
 
 So why did she say otherwise last year? It's hard to say for sure. But one might suspect that she wanted to avoid appearing weak, as the individual with the most visible appearance of concern in the photograph. As National Journal's Kathy Kiely reported last year, "A colleague who knows her well suspects Clinton might have been a bit irritated over the White House decision to release a photo that looks like the modern day version of something Rembrandt would have painted." Reason being is that "now forever frozen in time, Clinton stands out not just because of her femininity but her lack of impassivity." Kiely wrote, with some elegance, that for women of Clinton's generation, masking her true motivations makes a lot of sense. 
 
 "Women who spent most of their careers being the sole representative of their kind in rooms full of men made a survival strategy of trying to blend in," Kiely wrote. "Because any thought or reaction that set them apart from their male colleagues tended put them at the wrong end of an invidious comparison." You could also add, that Clinton especially, has long made a point of selling her toughness, such as the famous White House 3 a.m. phone call ad or her 2008 claim that she remembered "landing under sniper fire" in the Balkans in 1996 when in fact that never happened. 
 
 In any case, now we know what always made sense from the beginning. She was pretty freaked out, like anyone, man or woman, would be. 
 
 Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at jhudson at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire. 
 
 John Hudson ||||| Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images 
 
 PHILADELPHIA—On June 15, Politico ran a story about Hillary Clinton’s bureaucratic speechwriting process. It describes how she gets input from a handful of staffers, various consultants, and her husband. She tweaks it herself, usually to make it more prosaic. “Clinton is known for taking a draft of a speech and changing it some indelible way to make it more literal and less readable,” the piece said. Created in this fashion, the speeches are comprehensive but lack poetry, a sustained argument, or a narrative arc. 
 
 Michelle Goldberg Michelle Goldberg is a columnist for Slate and the author, most recently, of The Goddess Pose. 
 
 Anyone who expected her to transcend this clunky method was probably disappointed on Thursday night. Her speech was workmanlike, more a series of bullet points than a story. She seemed loosest when she was making fun of Donald Trump: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man you can trust with nuclear weapons.” 
 
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 On Twitter, people complained about her voice. Wrote Steve Clemons, an editor at the Atlantic: 
 
 Instead of lecturing 2 citizens @HillaryClinton needs 2 have conversation w/us. Modulate voice. Tell stories. Set hopes. Smile #DNCinPHL — Steve Clemons (@SCClemons) July 29, 2016 
 
 Tweeted Bloomberg View's Megan McArdle: 
 
 It may be sexist that Clinton’s voice sounds hectoring when it gets loud. It’s also a fact. & that fact will matter https://t.co/dwanmRqFVM — (((Megan McArdle))) (@asymmetricinfo) July 29, 2016 
 
 Both were quickly attacked, but my guess is that a lot of people felt the same way. If you’re a feminist, it’s deeply moving to see a woman in a white suit—one of the iconic colors of the suffragettes—hug her daughter and then accept her party’s nomination for president of the United States. Nevertheless, Clinton is never going to be a great orator. She’s certainly not an entertainer. She clearly prefers listening to others to talking about herself. As she said, “The truth is through all these years of public service, the service part has always come easier than the public part.” ||||| Being on the road with the secretary was my first encounter with the paradoxical pleasure of masochism, my first real taste of thrilling to pain: My body was stiff in some places and sore in others from the countless hours of flying, I was exhausted from traveling through a dozen time zones, and feverish with a bug that worked its way through the back of the plane. Yet there was an undeniable thrill to speeding for miles in motorcades, along highways that had been emptied of all traffic and through the streets of Dhaka, Delhi, and Kolkata, which were lined with throngs of excited onlookers; there was something electric about having entrée to seats of government and to being within arm’s reach of world leaders, and, perhaps most of all, to seeing Clinton in her less-guarded moments. 
 
 
 
 It’s a tradition on these trips for the press corps to invite Clinton and her staff for an off-the-record round of drinks, giving the reporters an opportunity to put down their notepads and the secretary a chance to let down her hair. In Kolkata, she, a few of her advisers, and new U.S. ambassador to India Nancy Powell joined a handful of us in the darkly paneled club lounge of the Taj hotel, where, over a selection of Indian hors d’oeuvres served by a white-gloved waiter, she shared her views on a range of topics, from Syria to Chen. Though news outlets earlier this year used a photograph of Clinton on the dance floor of a Colombian nightclub to portray her as a party animal, she was a cheap date that evening, ordering just one of the hotel’s signature cumin-infused non-alcoholic cocktails. 
 
 
 
 Much has been written about Clinton’s sense of humor, but apart from her good-natured embrace of this spring’s “Texts from Hillary” spoof and a June video of her donning purple cat’s-eye glasses and Mardi Gras beads to swear in an assistant secretary, evidence of her lighter side is in short supply. She has a tendency to batten down the hatches of her personality when she is on the record—or on the spot. But freed of any concern about how her words might be used, Clinton reveals a finely honed sense of irony and sharp comic instinct that are a delightful deviation from the carefully controlled persona she most often shows the world. She can be slightly naughty, but not in a ribald sense, and has a knack for doing impressions to hilarious effect. Perhaps most surprising, for someone who has said more than once that she learned to keep her own counsel from an early age, she is refreshingly open in the way she makes fun of some of the personal challenges she has faced, and lets all of us in on the joke. During a town hall gathering in Kolkata, for instance, in which the moderator warned her that Indians are argumentative, Clinton remarked that she and her husband have a great affection for India, “maybe because we’re a little argumentative ourselves from time to time.” 
 
 
 
 If it were graphed, Clinton’s trajectory over the past two decades could serve as the blueprint for an epic amusement park ride, with heights that thrill and hurtling descents that strike terror. She has gone from being a polarizing figure who was vilified during her husband’s presidency (for, among other things, her failed campaign to provide universal health care) to being named the woman most admired in the world by Americans ten years in a row, according to Gallup polls. Some attribute her popularity to the fact that, in her nonpartisan role as secretary, she has removed herself from politics. “She’s not criticizing Congress anymore, so people have warmed up to her,” says one journalist who follows her regularly, adding, “I like her. She’s the kind of person you’d want to invite to your house for a beer.” Others say her appeal stems from her sheer doggedness in advancing U.S. interests throughout the world and the apparent pleasure she takes in getting into the fray. But whatever the alchemy behind it, her popularity is undeniable and extends well beyond our borders. In Bangladesh, which Clinton visited with her daughter, Chelsea, in 1995, well-wishers lined the dusty roadway from the airport to our hotel in chaotic central Dhaka, and large signs had been posted with greetings such as “Heartiest Welcome to Our Genuine and Lifelong Friend.” There were a couple of photos of students burning a smiling Clinton in effigy in the morning paper, but the majority of local coverage on this three-country trip was overwhelmingly positive—no small feat for a woman who comes to this corner of the world proclaiming a gospel of democracy, human rights, and independence from Iranian oil.
– The latest meme to take the Internet by storm also might just indicate a Clinton renaissance: Texts From Hillary features imagined conversations between Clinton and pretty much anyone—other politicians, Sarah Palin, Mark Zuckerberg, Jay-Z—using a photo of Clinton taken last fall on a flight to Tripoli, in which she looks particularly badass in sunglasses while, apparently, texting. Sample line, from Clinton to John Boehner: "Baby in the room next to me at the hotel wouldn't stop crying last night. Thought of you. LMAO." Interestingly, when the now-iconic photo first appeared, a Reuters blogger noted that it was unflattering to Clinton, reports the Boston Globe, making her look tired and overworked. But when Adam Smith saw it recently, he thought she looked "fierce," shared the photo with a friend, and started the Tumblr account. Now, people are sending in their own suggestions for imaginary conversations, all of them featuring a take-charge Clinton. A few reactions from around the WWW: "More than just an image rebound, Clinton is enjoying a genuine resurgence," writes Benjy Sarlin on Talking Points Memo. Four years ago, her "cold, relentless style was considered one of her biggest vulnerabilities," but now people respect it. In fact, this meme "is all about respect," notes Dylan Byers on Politico. "Where Obama, Biden, Gates, Geithner, et al have suffered gray hairs and waning enthusiasm, Clinton … has undergone a reinvention and seems more powerful and unflappable than ever." "Gone are the man’s-world accessories, the pantsuit and masculine haircut," notes Joanna Weiss in the Globe. "Secretary Clinton is a woman, comfortably feminine, with long blonde hair, a chunky necklace, a giant brooch." The popularity of the meme proves that Hillary could be a contender in 2016, adds Marin Cogan in GQ. Check out the Tumblr in full here.