Definition of the Day

Biting the Hand That Fed Him

Ron Fournier

The Republican nominee long used the media to project his fairy tale self-image but now blames the industry for his flailing campaign.

Long addicted to media attention, Donald Trump is like strung-out junkie, blaming heroin for his fall.

He will never recover, because he will never fault himself.

The self-professed billionaire and serial bankruptcy filer built his career on a singular strength: an ability to manipulate the media to project his fairy tale self-image. Never as rich or as smart or as powerful or as respected or (God forbid) as sexual as he projected himself to be, Trump now bashes the industry that made him rather than face the truth.

Like the hero of a Greek tragedy, his strength becomes his undoing.

"If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn't put false meaning into the words I say, I would be beating Hillary by 20%," Trump said Sunday in one of seven anti-media tweets.

Does the First Amendment Protect Deliberate Lies?

Garrett Epps

Donald Trump says the press cannot lie. But the Supreme Court says otherwise: In fact, many falsehoods are protected speech.

“It is not ‘freedom of the press’ when newspapers and others are allowed to say and write whatever they want even if it is completely false!” Donald Trump tweeted on Sunday.

I will refrain from belaboring the contradictions in his concern for the danger of false statements in public life, because the question he raised is an important one.

Does the First Amendment really protect false statements of fact? Does it really protect deliberate lies?

The idea that lies are part of “freedom of speech” or “of the press” seems wrong. Lies—even lazy falsehoods—make finding the truth harder, erode mutual trust, and harm individuals and groups. Some can even lead to private violence or public disorder.

Why would free speech protect them?

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.”

Donald Trump's Invented History of the Iraq War

Alex Wagner

The Republican presidential nominee spun stories about the events surrounding September 11 to demonstrate his mettle. Does it matter that much of it was fiction?

On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump delivered one of his most extended and substantive speeches yet on the subject of foreign policy and national security. In it, he offered a variety of proposals. Some, like coalition-building and cyber security, were fairly old hat, if not decidedly redundant. Others, like the establishment of a Commission on Radical Islam and “extreme vetting” to screen would-be terrorists seeking to enter the country, were alarmingly creative, if not necessarily authorized under the Constitution.

As is very often the case on the stump these days, Trump made several mentions of the attacks on September 11, which took place 15 years ago next month. Without question, the attacks of that day had a profoundly destructive effect on the United States, but less discussed is the fact that they had a remarkably constructive effect, too: September 11 has given rise to a multitude of narratives—about the event, about the country that withstood it, about the character of its people. The practical effect of a useful narrative on foreign policy can’t be overstated (just ask the Bush and Obama administrations), and Trump is a master storyteller, insofar as he is a compelling narrator (if not necessarily a truthful one), and is adept at creating villains and heroes, to the delight of large audiences across the country. Yesterday he, too, established another narrative about September 11, this one to showcase his wisdom, instincts and fiscal savoir-faire.

All Hollowed Out

Victor Tan Chen

The lonely poverty of America’s white working class

For the last several months, social scientists have been debating the striking findings of a study by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.* Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily improving life expectancy. While critics have challenged the magnitude and timing of the rise in middle-age deaths (particularly for men), they and the study’s authors alike seem to agree on some basic points: Problems of mental health and addiction have taken a terrible toll on whites in America—though seemingly not in other wealthy nations—and the least educated among them have fared the worst.

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.

One Issue That Trump and Clinton Agree On

Derek Thompson

They’re both right about the U.S. needing more infrastructure spending. It’s Washington Republicans who are wrong.

It is one of the few things that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton agree on: The U.S. needs to spend more money on itself.

Clinton has proposed $275 billion in new infrastructure spending over the next five years, to go along with another $25 billion in loans and guarantees to support private-sector investments. Trump, a builder by blood, has pledged to double that figure, at least. He has called for spending up to $1 trillion on new roads, bridges, broadband, and more. (And that’s not even counting the fantastical Mexican-financed wall.)

The economic need for more infrastructure is obvious. There is considerable work to be done on the intranational capillaries and arteries and valves that circulate Americans around the country. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that there is more than $3 trillion of infrastructural work to do before 2020 in order repair, reinforce, and rebuild America’s circuitry, including almost two trillion for roads and bridges and several hundred billion more for airports and waterways.

The Leak Prosecution That Lost the Space Race

Ian MacDougall

He was the first whistleblower charged under the Espionage Act—and his trial set the pattern for how the government treats unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

Jack Nickerson watched the papers burn. It was the afternoon of January 2, 1957, and an overnight cold snap had descended on northern Alabama, pushing daytime temperatures to near freezing. His neighbors would think nothing of the smoke wafting from the chimney of the large antebellum colonial he shared with his wife and four children. There weren’t all that many neighbors anyway. The house sat on an isolated corner of Redstone Arsenal, a sprawling Army base in Huntsville. A reservoir surrounded it on three sides.

Nickerson, a colonel, had good reason to avoid attention. For the past three hours, he had scoured his office and home for copies of the documents that now sat stacked next to the fireplace, growing shorter by the minute. The word “SECRET” crumpled and blackened before being consumed by the flames.

When Parks Were Radical

Nathaniel Rich

More than 150 years ago, Frederick Law Olmsted changed how Americans think about public space.

A century and a half ago, city dwellers in search of fresh air and rural pastures visited graveyards. It was a bad arrangement. The processions of tombstones interfered with athletic activity, the gloom with carefree frolicking. Nor did mourners relish having to contend with the crowds of pleasure-seekers. The phenomenon particularly maddened Frederick Law Olmsted. He repeatedly complained of it in his essays and letters, which have been collected by the Library of America in Writings on Landscape, Culture, and Society (a digest of Johns Hopkins University Press’s projected 12-volume set of Olmsted’s papers). A “miserably imperfect form,” Olmsted lamented. “A wretched pretext.” The cemetery problem, he felt, was an expression of a profound, universal desire that cities were neglecting to meet: the desire for public parks.

Will Immigrants Today Assimilate Like Those of 100 Years Ago?

Alexia Fernández Campbell

Two sociologists recently looked into whether the barriers facing people of color in the U.S. make it harder for most new arrivals to build wealth.

One hundred years ago, nearly all immigrants arriving to the United States were poor white Europeans. These newcomers from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe were segregated into urban ghettos, living apart from the mostly Northern Europeans who arrived before them. Within a few generations, though, their families tended to build wealth and pull even with better-off segments of the population.

Now that the vast majority of immigrants are people of color from Asia and Latin America, will that pattern of wealth-building repeat itself?

There’s reason to think that might not be the case. After all, wealth inequality among Americans often comes down to race, with white families having the largest average net worth, followed by Asians, Latinos, and then African Americans. And more specifically, research has shown similar patterns of wealth inequality between native-born black and white Americans as black and white immigrants. Asian immigrants, on the other hand, are more likely to be nearly as affluent as white immigrants.