The Rhetoric And The Violence

What Happens to a Woman's Brain When She Becomes a Mother

Adrienne LaFrance

From joy and attachment to anxiety and protectiveness, mothering behavior begins with biochemical reactions.

The artist Sarah Walker once told me that becoming a mother is like discovering the existence of a strange new room in the house where you already live. I always liked Walker's description because it's more precise than the shorthand most people use for life with a newborn: Everything changes.

Because a lot of things do change, of course, but for new mothers, some of the starkest differences are also the most intimate ones—the emotional changes. Which, it turns out, are also largely neurological.

Even before a woman gives birth, pregnancy tinkers with the very structure of her brain, several neurologists told me. After centuries of observing behavioral changes in new mothers, scientists are only recently beginning to definitively link the way a woman acts with what's happening in her prefrontal cortex, midbrain, parietal lobes, and elsewhere. Gray matter becomes more concentrated. Activity increases in regions that control empathy, anxiety, and social interaction. On the most basic level, these changes, prompted by a flood of hormones during pregnancy and in the postpartum period, help attract a new mother to her baby. In other words, those maternal feelings of overwhelming love, fierce protectiveness, and constant worry begin with reactions in the brain.

Shutterstock / Fotolia / Paul Spella / The Atlantic

When Are You Really an Adult?

Julie Beck

In an age when the line between childhood and adulthood is blurrier than ever, what is it that makes people grown up?

It would probably be fair to call Henry “aimless.” After he graduated from Harvard, he moved back in with his parents, a boomerang kid straight out of a trend piece about the travails of young adults.

Despite graduating into a recession, Henry managed to land a teaching job, but two weeks in, he decided it wasn’t for him and quit. It took him a while to find his calling—he worked in his father’s pencil factory, as a door-to-door magazine salesman, took on other teaching and tutoring gigs, and even spent a brief stint shoveling manure before finding some success with his true passion: writing.

Henry published his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, when he was 31 years old, after 12 years of changing jobs and bouncing back and forth between his parents’ home, living on his own, and crashing with a buddy, who believed in his potential. “[He] is a scholar & a poet & as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree,” his friend wrote, and eventually was proven right. He may have floundered during young adulthood, but Henry David Thoreau turned out pretty okay. (The buddy he crashed with, for the record, was Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

Oregon and the Injustice of Mandatory Minimums

Conor Friedersdorf

Members of America's political left share far more concerns in common with the armed protestors than many apparently realize.

The activists who began occupying government buildings in the Oregon wilderness over the weekend say that they’re protesting how federal authorities treated rancher Dwight Hammond, 73, and Steven Hammond, his middle-aged son.

Federal authorities charged the Hammonds with arson after they set a series of fires that spread to public land. A 2001 fire accidentally burned beyond their property line, according to The New York Times. The Department of Justice says it was set to cover up an illegal deer hunt, while the men say that they were burning away an invasive plant species on their land. Years later in 2006, “a burn ban was in effect while firefighters battled blazes started by a lightning storm on a hot day in August,” the newspaper reported. “Steven Hammond had started a ‘back burn’ to prevent the blaze from destroying the family’s winter feed for its cattle.” It was reported by Bureau of Land Management firefighters in the area, and the Justice Department notes that they “took steps to ensure their safety.” It burned about an acre of public land, causing less than $1,000 in damage. Charged with a number of crimes related to arson, the father was convicted of just one count of arson while the son was convicted of two counts for the wilderness fires. The government used an anti-terrorism statute to secure its convictions.

Obama's Emotional Speech on Gun Control

Marina Koren

The president announced new measures that would tighten regulations on firearms purchases.

President Obama announced Tuesday new measures that he said would curb gun violence across the country.

“People are dying,” the president said. “And the constant excuses for inaction no longer do, no longer suffice. That is why we are here today. Not to debate the last mass shooting, but to do something to prevent the next one.”

Obama said his executive action would leverage existing law that requires all licensed gun sellers to carry out background checks of potential buyers. The president wants to make “anybody in the business of selling firearms” register as a licensed dealer. Such criteria would mean more oversight, particularly for people selling guns over the Internet, which could mean more buyers would be subject to background checks.

All Stories Are the Same

John Yorke

From Avatar to The Wizard of Oz, Aristotle to Shakespeare, there’s one clear form that dramatic storytelling has followed since its inception.

A ship lands on an alien shore and a young man, desperate to prove himself, is tasked with befriending the inhabitants and extracting their secrets. Enchanted by their way of life, he falls in love with a local girl and starts to distrust his masters. Discovering their man has gone native, they in turn resolve to destroy both him and the native population once and for all.

Avatar or Pocahontas? As stories they’re almost identical. Some have even accused James Cameron of stealing the Native American myth. But it’s both simpler and more complex than that, for the underlying structure is common not only to these two tales, but to all of them.

Take three different stories:

A dangerous monster threatens a community. One man takes it on himself to kill the beast and restore happiness to the kingdom ...

Obama's Overblown Moves on Gun Control

Russell Berman

Rip up the Second Amendment? Save thousands of lives? Despite the hype and the dread, the president’s new policies seem too limited to have much effect.

Reading the instant reactions from the right and left to President Obama’s gun announcement on Tuesday, you might have thought—if you were an ardent gun-rights supporter—that the president had walked over to the National Archives, retrieved an original copy of the Constitution, and scrawled a bright red X through the Second Amendment.

“Our president is not a king,” proclaimed Representative Charles Boustany, a Louisiana Senate candidate who simultaneously announced he was signing onto something called the Separation of Powers Restoration and Second Amendment Protection Act. (That’s SOPRASAPA, if you’re into acronyms.) House Speaker Paul Ryan accused Obama of “intimidation that undermines liberty,” while Senator Marco Rubio charged that he was “obsessed with undermining the Second Amendment.” “OBAMA WANTS YOUR GUNS,” read a campaign fundraising pitch from Senator Ted Cruz that featured the president wearing commando gear.

In Defense of Food and the Rise of ‘Healthy-ish’

Sophie Gilbert

A new PBS documentary and Bon Appetit’s January issue espouse a radically moderate approach to eating.

Abstinence, we are usually told around this time of year, makes the heart grow stronger. It’s why Dry January, which started in the green and pleasantly alcoholic land of Britain a few years ago before reaching the U.S., is increasingly being touted as a good and worthy thing to do, and why so many people are currently making plans to remove whole food groups from their diet: carbs, fat, Terry’s Chocolate Oranges. The key to health, books and websites and dietitians and former presidents reveal, is a process of elimination. It’s going without. It’s getting through the darkest, coldest month of the year without so much as a snifter of antioxidant-rich Cabernet.

The problem with giving things up, though, is that inevitably it creates a void in one’s diet that only Reese’s pieces and a family-sized wheel of brie can fill. Then there’s the fact that so many abstinence-espousing programs require spending money on things; on Whole 30 cookbooks and Weight Watchers memberships and $10 bottles of bone broth. For a process that supposedly involves cutting things out, there seems to be an awful lot to take in.

What ISIS Really Wants

Graeme Wood

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

The Eight Causes of Trumpism

Norm Ornstein

However the Republican presidential primary turns out, the conditions that fostered the mogul’s rise have left their mark on the party—and America.

In some ways, the most interesting political story of 2015 was not Donald Trump but the widespread pundit reaction to Trump. Throughout the year, until a different conclusion became unavoidable, the expert consensus was that Trump was a single day or one inflammatory statement away from self-destruction, that his ceiling of support was 25 percent of Republicans at most, and even that was transitory. Another theme was that once Republican primary and caucus voters saw that Trump was anything but a true conservative—given his past support for a single-payer health-care system, his insistence on taxing the rich, and his contributions to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton—he would collapse.

The willful suspension of disbelief by so many political professionals and analysts had multiple roots. One part was a deep belief that history rules—since rogue and inexperienced candidates had always faltered before, it followed that it would happen again. Another was that nothing has changed in a meaningful way in American politics—there has not been real polarization, only natural “sorting,” and the establishment will rule, as it always does. A third was that there are certain characteristics expected of a president—prudence, civility, expertise—that would eventually cause Trump and the other outsiders like Carson, Cruz, and Fiorina to fall by the wayside.

Sexual Assaults in Germany and the Debate Over Refugees

Krishnadev Calamur

The alleged assault of dozens of women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve by as many as 1,000 men of “Arab or North African” origin has sparked outrage.

Outrage is growing in Germany over the reported sexual harassment of and assaults on women in the city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve that police have blamed on as many as 1,000 men of “Arab or North African” background.

The attacks—and robberies—allegedly occurred in Cologne’s historic square, which lies between the city’s main train station and its cathedral. News reports say 90 criminal complaints, including one of rape, were made at the city’s police department. Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, has spoken with some of the women who say they were assaulted.

Wolfgang Albers, the police chief, told DPA, the German news agency, the incidents were “an intolerable situation” for the city of 1 million, which is one of Germany’s most diverse. And Henriette Reker, Cologne’s mayor, said: “We cannot tolerate this development of lawlessness.”