Mental Health Break

Trump Adviser: Hillary Clinton 'Should Be Shot in a Firing Squad for Treason'

Conor Friedersdorf

It’s the latest example of a campaign that indulges in its most destructive and self-destructive impulses.

In “The Exaggerated Claims of Media Bias Against Donald Trump,” I explained how the candidate makes inflammatory remarks that he crafts to generate outraged attention, then attacks the media when they report his words just as he intended. I concluded that Trump is the primary driver of negative Trump coverage.

On Tuesday, Representative Al Baldasaro, a state lawmaker in New Hampshire who co-chairs the Trump campaign’s national veterans' coalition, demonstrated that this self-destructive quality is present in the larger Trump coalition with a shocking statement.

He wants Hillary Clinton shot for treason.

The backstory is useful: Earlier this summer, Baldasaro used a talk-radio interview to declare that the Democratic nominee for the presidency should be violently killed. “She is a disgrace for the lies that she told those mothers about their children that got killed over there in Benghazi,” the New Hampshire Republican said. “She dropped the ball on over 400 emails requesting backup security. Something's wrong there. I wish they'd make the documents public on why Ambassador Anderson was there. In my mind I want to think, were they moving guns? Were they doing something there? How did they know he was even there? This whole thing disgusts me. How did they know he was even there? This whole thing disgusts me. Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.”

Will Texas Stick Around for a Hillary Clinton Presidency?

Russell Berman

Three out of five Trump voters in the Lone Star State would back secession if the Democrat wins, a new poll finds.

When politicians accuse their opponents of trying to divide the country, they usually don’t mean it literally. But in Texas, Donald Trump supporters dread a Hillary Clinton presidency so much that three out of five of them would rather the state secede than live through it.

In conducting a rare general-election poll of the Lone Star State, the left-leaning firm Public Policy Polling asked voters a (mostly) hypothetical question: Would you support or oppose Texas seceding from the United States?

Fortunately for Unionists, a clear majority of 59 percent of Texans said they’d rather stick with the Stars and Stripes, while just 26 percent said they wouldn’t. But that number dropped when the pollsters followed up by asking whether voters would support secession if Clinton won the election. Forty percent said they would, including 61 percent of Trump supporters. (While PPP is run by Democrats, it has a solid grade in FiveThirtyEight’s pollster accuracy ratings.)

The Futility of the Workout-Sit Cycle

James Hamblin

In a new statement, the American Heart Association warns that exercise doesn’t seem to undo the health effects of excessive sitting.

In April, the AARP asked me to help moderate an international meeting of 15 exercise scientists in Vancouver. Their goal was to write a consensus statement about how best to use exercise to promote health (specifically “brain health”). What types of exercise are ideal? Is walking as good as running? Does yoga count? How do we measure exercise—as a matter of heart rate, calories burned, or simply of time spent? All or none, of these?

I was blunt about my skepticism. These are huge questions. I’m not convinced that brain health is a thing that can be pursued separately from any other type of health. And I’ve been in enough meetings where scientists try to reach a consensus. It’s fun if you’re into watching people argue.

Hollywood Has Ruined Method Acting

Angelica Jade Bastién

Jared Leto’s turn in Suicide Squad is the latest reminder that the technique has become more about ego and marketing than good performances.

Of all the stories surfacing about the new DC Comics film Suicide Squad—from the dismal reviews to the box-office reports—the most disconcerting are the ones that detail how Jared Leto got into his role as the Joker. Leto was reportedly so committed to the part that he gifted the cast and crew with a litany of horrible items: used condoms, a dead pig, a live rat. To get into the character’s twisted mindset, he also watched footage of brutal crimes online. “The Joker is incredibly comfortable with acts of violence,” he told Rolling Stone. “I was watching real violence, consuming that. There’s a lot you can learn from seeing it.”

Watching Leto tell one disturbing tale after another makes one thing abundantly clear: Method acting is over. Not the technique itself, which has fueled many of cinema’s greatest performances and can be a useful way of approaching difficult roles. But Leto’s stories show how going to great lengths to inhabit a character is now as much a marketing tool as it is an actual technique—one used to lend an air of legitimacy, verisimilitude, and importance to a performance no matter its quality. Leto’s Joker is the latest evidence that the prestige of method acting has dimmed—thanks to the technique’s overuse by those seeking award-season glory or a reputation boost, as well as its history of being shaped by destructive ideas of masculinity.

The entrepreneur Peter Thiel, photographed at a conference in Washington, D.C., in 2011 — Yuri Gripas / Reuters

Peter Thiel’s Self-Serving New York Times Column

Adrienne LaFrance

The billionaire justified his fight against Gawker with a misleading reference to privacy legislation.

Peter Thiel has no regrets about pouring millions of dollars of his own money into the legal fight that bankrupted Gawker Media. “I am proud to have contributed financial support,” Thiel wrote in The New York Times on Monday, “… and I would gladly support someone else in the same position.”

Thiel says he spent about $10 million to help Terry Bollea—the wrestler better known as Hulk Hogan—sue Gawker for having published, without his consent, a video that showed him having sex with his then-friend’s wife. Hogan ultimately won his case. Gawker, facing a $140 million judgment, filed for bankruptcy.

Many have noted that there are few characters to root for in this saga. Gawker’s decision to publish the Hogan tape is questionable at best, regardless of whether you consider Hogan to be a public figure. The media company is known for its brashness, and has made several widely-condemned editorial decisions in its 14-year history. Thiel references these in his column for the Times, and it’s hard to argue that some of what Gawker has done—like outing Thiel, who is gay—is anything but despicable. But Thiel’s involvement in the Gawker fight is about much, much more than a personal vendetta. (Perhaps I should note here that I wrote a regular column about internet hoaxes for Gawker in 2014, and that the editors I worked with were consistently sensitive, smart, and receptive to even minor concerns about tone and fairness.)

The Exaggerated Claims of Media Bias Against Donald Trump

Conor Friedersdorf

The negative press the Republican nominee is receiving is mostly his own fault.

Is the news media biased against Donald Trump?

That charge has been aired in recent days not only by the billionaire candidate, who negs CNN, The New York Times, and the press generally at almost every opportunity, but by several thoughtful political commentators who don’t much like him.

These media critics all cited the same example: coverage of the Republican nominee’s controversial statement that President Obama was “the founder of ISIS.”

That coverage was hardly uniform.

Overgeneralizing in a way that obscured the diversity of approaches different journalists took to the story, Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist wrote, “The media immediately decided Trump was claiming that Obama had literally incorporated ISIS a few years back. And they treated this literal claim as a fact that needed to be debunked.”

Helping Children Succeed—Without the Stress

Erica Reischer

Teaching self-control is proven to be much more effective than tutoring and advanced classes.

In the now-famous “marshmallow” experiments, researchers at Stanford tested preschoolers’ self-control and ability to delay gratification by sitting them in a room alone with a tempting treat and measuring how long they were able to wait.

Years later, those kids who resisted temptation the longest also tended to have the highest academic achievement. In fact, their ability to delay eating the marshmallow was a better predictor of their future academic success than their IQ scores.

Further research has shown that self-control also correlates highly with greater stress tolerance and concentration abilities, as well as increased empathy, better emotion regulation, and social competence. This is true across the age spectrum: From preschoolers to teenagers, kids who can regulate their own feelings and behavior are better able to stay focused on their goals and maintain positive connections with others.

From Whitewater to Benghazi: A Clinton-Scandal Primer

David A. Graham

Newly released emails show the complicated nature of ties between the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton-led State Department—and the high risk of conflicts of interest.

Old scandals never die, and it’s unclear whether they ever fade away, either. At this point, most (though certainly not all) of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails have been released, and the Department of Justice has announced it won’t press charges against Clinton for mishandling classified information.

But House Republicans are looking for a way to resuscitate the legal case against the Democratic nominee—and, in turn, to make it into a bigger political problem for her. There were two developments on that front on Tuesday.

Fox News reported that in July, the Republican chairmen of the Oversight and Judiciary Committees sent a letter to the acting U.S. attorney for D.C., arguing that Clinton committed perjury during an October 2015 hearing, during which she told members that “there was nothing marked classified on my emails, either sent or received.” When FBI Director James Comey announced the results of his findings, however, he said that a few emails were marked (c) for “confidential,” which is the lowest level of classification. (Overall, Comey said that Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless” in their handling of emails, but did nothing that rose to the level where he would recommend prosecution or expect to win a case.)

Marion Post Wolcott / Library of Congress

The Original Underclass

Alec MacGillis and ProPublica

Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has.

Sometime during the past few years, the country started talking differently about white Americans of modest means. Early in the Obama era, the ennobling language of campaign pundits prevailed. There was much discussion of “white working-class voters,” with whom the Democrats, and especially Barack Obama, were having such trouble connecting. Never mind that this overbroad category of Americans—the exit pollsters’ definition was anyone without a four-year college degree, or more than a third of the electorate—obliterated major differences in geography, ethnicity, and culture. The label served to conjure a vast swath of salt-of-the-earth citizens living and working in the wide-open spaces between the coasts—Sarah Palin’s “real America”—who were dubious of the effete, hifalutin types increasingly dominating the party that had once purported to represent the common man. The “white working class” connoted virtue and integrity. A party losing touch with it was a party unmoored.

Four Reasons Curt Schilling Might Not Want to Run for Office

David A. Graham

The retired Red Sox ace is making noises about challenging Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2018. Let’s take a look at the oppo file.

Like many Americans, Curt Schilling has struggled during the Obama years.

The former Red Sox ace retired in spring of 2009, shortly after Barack Obama’s first inauguration. In 2012, his video-game company defaulted on millions of dollars in government backed loans and went belly-up. In 2016, he was fired from his job as an analyst at ESPN after posting anti-transgender memes to his Facebook page. So now Schilling is casting around for his next gig, and one possibility is politics. In particular, he told a talk-radio station in Boston he’d like to run against Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2018.

“I would like to be one of the people responsible for getting Elizabeth Warren out of politics,” Schilling said. “She’s a nightmare. The left’s holding her up as the second coming of Hillary Clinton, Lord knows we don’t need the first.”