The End Of The MSM?

All illustrations by Kristian Hammerstad

The Adultery Arms Race

Michelle Cottle

Technology has made cheating on your spouse, or catching a cheater, easier than ever. How digital tools are aiding the unfaithful and the untrusting—and may be mending some broken marriages.

Jay’s wife, Ann, was supposed to be out of town on business. It was a Tuesday evening in August 2013, and Jay, a 36-year-old IT manager, was at home in Indiana with their 5-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son when he made a jarring discovery. Their daughter had misplaced her iPad, so Jay used the app Find My iPhone to search for it. The app found the missing tablet right away, but it also located all the other devices on the family’s plan. What was Ann’s phone doing at a hotel five miles from their home?

His suspicions raised, Jay, who knew Ann’s passwords, read through her e-mails and Facebook messages. (Like others in this story, Jay asked that his and Ann’s names be changed.) He didn’t find anything incriminating, but neither could he imagine a good reason for Ann to be at that hotel. So Jay started using Find My iPhone for an altogether different purpose: to monitor his wife’s whereabouts.

Hope Is What Separates Trump Voters From Clinton Voters

Andrew McGill

Donald Trump's supporters haven’t necessarily lost a job to globalization. But they’re afraid they’re next.

It’s pretty clear who Donald Trump wants to help, because he names them at every rally. Miners. Steelworkers. Guys on the assembly line, whose jobs are either being stolen by the Chinese or strangled to death by Obama’s regulations. If globalization has put your livelihood in jeopardy, Trump wants you on his side. And given his sky-high popularity among white men without a college degree, I’d argue this pitch is gaining traction.

But here’s the weird thing: Folks in hard-hit industrial towns aren’t voting for Trump. When Michigan Republicans went to the polls in March, economists expected to see huge Trump turnout in areas with the most shuttered factories. Instead, they got the opposite: Trump’s support was strongest in towns that had gained manufacturing jobs. He did about 20 percentage points worse in areas where layoffs were most intense. It was completely the opposite of what everyone expected.

The Era of 'The Bitch' Is Coming

Michelle Cottle

A Hillary Clinton presidential victory promises to usher in a new age of public misogyny.

Get ready for the era of The Bitch.

If Hillary Clinton wins the White House in November, it will be a historic moment, the smashing of the preeminent glass ceiling in American public life. A mere 240 years after this nation’s founding, a woman will occupy its top office. America’s daughters will at last have living, breathing, pantsuit-wearing proof that they too can grow up to be president.

A Clinton victory also promises to usher in four-to-eight years of the kind of down-and-dirty public misogyny you might expect from a stag party at Roger Ailes’s house.

You know it’s coming. As hyperpartisanship, grievance politics, and garden-variety rage shift from America’s first black commander-in-chief onto its first female one, so too will the focus of political bigotry. Some of it will be driven by genuine gender grievance or discomfort among some at being led by a woman. But in plenty of other cases, slamming Hillary as a bitch, a c**t (Thanks, Scott Baio!), or a menopausal nut-job (an enduringly popular theme on Twitter) will simply be an easy-peasy shortcut for dismissing her and delegitimizing her presidency.

Trump Has to Choose: Lose Like Dukakis, or Like Goldwater

David Frum

If the Republican nominee is defeated in a landslide, the party may be powerless to influence Clinton's agenda and administration.

The days are shortening, the back-to-school sales are starting—and Donald Trump is approaching his last chance to turn a catastrophic campaign into an ordinarily unsuccessful campaign: to rise from Goldwater debacle to respectable Dukakis defeat.

Such hope seems to have inspired Trump’s speech in North Carolina yesterday: Its remarkable language of solidarity and its unprecedented—for Trump anyway—expression of regret for words that caused pain.

The difference between a Goldwater and Dukakis outcome is the difference between holding a Republican majority in at least one chamber of Congress and a down-ballot deluge that would open the way to a new bout of Democratic legislative activism. For conservatives, it is the difference between mitigating the excesses of the Affordable Care Act and driving onward to government-run health insurance; between another burst of tax increases and the opportunity to bargain for tax cuts; between influence over Supreme Court appointments and being powerless as the justices are replaced; between outright amnesty for immigrants who are in the country illegally and stopping people from coming over U.S. borders.

Swimmer Ryan Lochte at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials. — Reuters

What Happened to the U.S. Olympic Swimmers in Rio?

Krishnadev Calamur

The last of the four swimmers involved in a bizarre tale of robbery at gunpoint has paid $10,800 to resolve the case, for which Ryan Lochte and the U.S. Olympic Committee have apologized.

Updated on August 19 at 10:31 a.m. ET

NEWS BRIEF The bizarre case involving four American swimmers who said they’d been robbed at gunpoint in Rio appears to be at an end, with the sole remaining Olympic gold medalist agreeing to pay an equivalent of $10,800 to resolve the dispute over their account.

James Feigen will pay the money as a donation to an unnamed charity, his attorney, Breno Melaragno, was quoted as saying.

“After this donation is done, his passport will be given back to him, and he will be free to return home.”

The other three swimmers involved in the controversy, Ryan Lochte, Jack Conger, and Gunnar Bentz are all back in the U.S. Brazilian authorities pulled Conger and Bentz off a U.S.-bound flight on Wednesday, but they have since been allowed to leave. Lochte left Rio soon after the controversy erupted and apparently before a Brazilian judge ordered his passport seized over his account, and those of his three fellow swimmers, of being robbed at gunpoint.

How Democrats Become the Conservative Party

Peter Beinart

In the era of Trump, Clinton and co. want to preserve the status quo, while their Republican opponents want radical change.

By any reasonable definition, Democrats are now the more conservative of America’s two parties. They are more interested than Republicans in conserving America’s international relationships, cultural norms, and political and economic institutions as they are.

This is evident among the party’s leaders. On Thursday, The New York Times profiled Steve Bannon, the new chief executive of Donald Trump’s campaign. “As the American financial system collapsed in the fall of 2008,” the Times explained, “Stephen K. Bannon began to fantasize about destroying something else: the elite economic and political establishment.” Essentially, Bannon entered the political arena to blow it up. Which makes sense given that he’s working for a candidate who has suggested scrapping NATO, defaulting on America’s debt, imposing massive tariffs on China, and using nuclear weapons. Trump’s election would immediately create more turmoil than the election of any president in modern American history.

Introducing the Trump News Channel—Coming in 2017?

Conor Friedersdorf

If Trump loses, his consolation prize may be a whole new right wing media juggernaut.

Most political observers are skeptical that Donald Trump has helped his chances of winning the presidency by entrusting his campaign to the executive producer of Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon; or by hiring Roger Ailes, who left his position atop Fox News amid a sexual harassment scandal; or by pitching his rhetoric to Sean Hannity viewers and Drudge Report readers, rather than more typical Americans; or by spending so little of the money he has raised on television commercials; or by appearing to care so much about the ratings his Republican National Convention speech got and so little that its viewers were turned off, not turned on.

There is so much about the Trump campaign that doesn’t make sense so long as one assumes that its purpose is to propel the candidate to victory at the ballot box. But what if those involved now perceive a more attractive––or at least plausible–– endgame? Atop the campaign, there are three men whose past behavior suggests both a powerful desire to attract the eyeballs of a mass audience and a talent for doing so.

Where Stranger Things Loses Its Magic

Lenika Cruz

Despite its charms, Netflix’s 1980s throwback series errs in how it treats its most important young character.

This post contains spoilers for the first season of Stranger Things.

It’s impossible to talk about Stranger Things, the eight-episode Netflix sci-fi drama series released this month, without talking about all the ’80s references. Like the J.J. Abrams film Super 8, Stranger Things is an homage to all things Spielbergian—broken families, kids having secret adventures on bikes, supernatural beings, government conspiracies, heartfelt endings. After the series debuted, journalists began publishing comprehensive guides to its many, many allusions, a testament to the show’s dedication to authentically reconstructing the past.

But even if you’ve never seen E.T. or The Goonies, or lived through the 1980s in suburban America, Stranger Things has plenty to offer. Set in a small Indiana town, the story centers around the mysterious disappearance of a young boy named Will, the search effort that ensues (led by his mother, played by Winona Ryder), and the arrival of an odd young girl with strange powers. In the hands of its directors, the Duffer Brothers, Stranger Things is at turns touching (when it explores teenage love and friendship) and harrowing (when it follows the creature that turns out to be terrorizing the town).

Leaving Academia to Become a First-Generation Farmer

Adrienne Green

Chris Holman gave up on a Ph.D. in world languages to start a farm in Wisconsin.

From farm-to-table restaurants to farmer’s markets, there has been a push among a certain class to be more aware of where their food comes from. Many Americans’ increased consciousness about eating locally has drawn their attention back to the land, such that farming has come to be seen as a much more noble profession. Modern Farmer, a publication that was born in this particular cultural context, describes the vision that some city-dwellers have of becoming farmers as a “modern seduction” in which “making a living from the earth salves the psychic wounds of a day job, and acts as an antidote to urban malaise.”

Given that seduction, many people have contemplated a career change, some more seriously than others: While the number of farmers in the U.S. continues to decrease drastically, a quarter of those that remain are “beginning farmers” who have less than 10 years experience. Currently, these early-career farmers control 16 percent of farmland and 25 percent of all organic sales in the U.S. Beginning farmers are younger on average, and face challenges that most veteran farmers don’t; for instance, it’s expensive to start a farm from scratch and open, arable land can be hard to come by.

Why Isn’t There a U.S. Synchronized Swimming Team in Rio?

Vicki Valosik

Americans once completely dominated the sport—but that hasn’t been the case since last century.

Karensa Tjoa didn’t have Olympic ambitions in 2006 when she first joined the Santa Clara Aquamaids, the most elite synchronized-swimming club in the United States. “To be honest I didn’t have much talent at the beginning,” she told me, but the team’s head coach Chris Carver, also a longtime Olympic coach, thought otherwise and took Tjoa under her wing. Tjoa’s ambitions grew, and at the age of 15 she opted to trade high school for a combination of online classes and homeschooling so she could spend more time training. She called the decision the “tipping point” that helped her make the U.S. Senior National Synchronized Swimming Team.

Over the next year, Tjoa trained for up to 10 hours a day while wrangling a freshman course load at U.C. Berkeley. After a semester of being pulled in two directions, she decided to take some time off from college. Then, in 2015 she received an email from USA Synchro, the governing body of the sport in the United States, letting her know they wouldn’t be sending a team to the Olympic qualifiers in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. The short reason? Not enough athletes. The long reason? It’s complicated.