Encyclopedia Britannica's Animated Guide to Drugs (1951)

White People 101

Spencer Kornhaber

MTV’s documentary points out some facts about race that might seem obvious until you realize that for many Americans they’re not.

The new documentary White People opens with the journalist Jose Antonio Vargas approaching white people on the street and telling them he’s “doing a film for MTV on what it means to be young and white.” Each person giggles a bit. To them, the premise, on its face, seems funny.

But it was groans, not giggles, that greeted the news in November that MTV had put out a casting call that asked questions like “Are you being made to feel guilty because you’re white?” and “Are you having a problem with race on social media?” It sounded like a Breitbart.com reporter fishing for a follow-up to the Shirley Sherrod story—an attempt to make it seem as though white people were victims of an increasingly diverse nation, even as headlines keep reminding Americans that race divisions still harm the same people that they have always harmed in this country.

Roughly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism

Conor Friedersdorf

Exceptional nonfiction stories from 2014 that are still worth encountering today

Each year, I keep a running list of exceptional nonfiction that I encounter as I publish The Best of Journalism, an email newsletter that I send out once or twice a week. This is my annual attempt to bring some of those stories to a wider audience. I could not read or note every worthy article that was published last calendar year and I haven't included any paywalled articles or anything published at The Atlantic. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention and engagement.

Art of the Personal Essay

BUZZFEED / Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500 by Drew Philp

"After college, as my friends left Michigan for better opportunities, I was determined to help fix this broken city by building my own home in the middle of it."

Chris Brown's Neverending Philippine Tour

Matt Schiavenza

The controversial R&B singer is the latest star to encounter problems in the country.

On Wednesday, one day after performing a concert in Manila, the American R&B singer Chris Brown was scheduled to fly to Hong Kong, where he was to play that evening. The Philippine government, however, had other ideas.

Iglesia ni Cristo, a powerful religious organization, has filed a fraud complaint against the rapper and his manager for failing to appear at a show scheduled for last New Year’s Eve. The group charges that Brown took $1 million in payment for a show that never happened. Brown says his absence resulted from a misplaced passport. Nevertheless, he remains barred from leaving the Philippines until the situation is resolved.

Getting stuck in the Philippines is only the latest high-profile incident in the checkered career of Brown, who pleaded guilty for a felony assault on his then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009 and finished his probation just this year. But Brown is not the first famous Western musician to have problems departing the Philippines. Forty-nine years ago this month, after the Beatles performed a show in Manila during their final international tour, the band was invited by then-First Lady Imelda Marcos to the presidential palace for a luncheon attended by various political and cultural dignitaries. However, no one conveyed the invitation to Brian Epstein, the group’s manager, and instead the musicians spent the day resting on a boat in the Manila Bay. Upon arriving at the airport for their departure, The Beatles were greeted by a throng of outraged fans. Abandoned by their security detail, the group pushed through an angry crowd at the airport to reach the plane on the tarmac. John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and Brian Epstein all sustained minor injuries in the fracas. Soon after their departure, Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos absolved The Beatles of any responsibility for the miscommunication. But the band, shaken by the experience, vowed never to return to the country.

America Is Even Less Socially Mobile Than Previously Thought

Joe Pinsker

And as a result, the policies that would address the situation are even more extreme—and more politically unfeasible.

Sociologists and economists are probably psyched that the work they’ve been doing on inequality and social mobility for decades has finally gotten attention from the average American. But one downside of having your message saturate the media is that people might start to take your findings for granted, which can obscure something that’s true of any data-based endeavor: Researchers are always learning new things, always trying to better map the extent of a phenomenon.

In this spirit, a Pew report out today tells us things about American social mobility that are new—and at the same time all too familiar. Scads of reports have documented how parents’ income dictates how financially successful someone will go on to be. But this report suggests the effects are at the high end of previous estimates. “One might think we’d have nailed it by now, but there was some uncertainty,” says David Grusky, the director of Stanford’s Center on Poverty and Inequality and an author of the report.

The Gaping Hole in the Iran Debate

Peter Beinart

In most discussions of the nuclear deal, the word "Iraq" never comes up. That’s insane.

I have a fantasy. It’s that every politician and pundit who goes on TV to discuss the Iran deal is asked this question first: “Did you support the Iraq War, and how has that experience informed your position?”

For me, it would be a painful question. I supported the Iraq War enthusiastically. I supported it because my formative foreign-policy experiences had been the Gulf War and the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, all of which led me to exaggerate the efficacy of military force and downplay its risks. As Iraq spiraled into disaster, I felt intellectually unmoored. When my sister-in-law was deployed there for a year, leaving her young daughter behind, I was consumed with guilt that I had contributed to their hardship. To this day, when I walk down the street and see a homeless veteran, I feel nauseous. I give some money and a word of thanks, and think about offering an apology. But I don’t, because there’s no apology big enough. The best I can do is learn from my mistake. These days, that means supporting the diplomatic deal with Iran.

Does the Bounty-Hunting Industry Need Reform?

Katie Bo Williams

How the wildly underregulated bounty-hunting industry polices itself—and why that isn’t changing

On June 9, Jackie Shell, a Tennessee bounty hunter, killed the country musician Randy Howard during a shootout. When John Doyle, a bail-recovery agent, heard the news, his first thought was: If the bounty hunter went in alone, he’s an idiot.

The singer had failed to appear in court on a litany of rural-route charges: a handful of DUIs, possession of a firearm while intoxicated, and driving on a revoked license. When Howard failed to appear at a court hearing, the judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest. What happened next was straight out of an Elmore Leonard novel: His neighbor, Terry Dotson, told reporters that when he offered to drive Howard to his appearance, Howard told him he wasn’t going back to jail. Shell approached Howard’s Marion County residence—apparently alone—and Howard opened fire. Shell fired back and both men were shot. Shell was expected to live. Howard died on the scene.

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 U.S. Governor Who Forgot How to Veto a Bill

Russell Berman

The strange saga of Paul LePage, who’s going to court to see if 65 bills he rejected have accidentally become law.

“I’m finally learning how to play the game of a politician,” Maine Governor Paul LePage told reporters in late May, moments after he declared, in a fit of pique over a stalled proposal to cut income taxes, that he would veto every single bill written by a Democrat that passed the state legislature.

LePage may have learned the art of politics in the four-and-a-half years since Maine voters first elected him to the governorship, but it seems he hasn’t yet mastered state law. In a turn of events as incomprehensible as it sounds, the combative conservative apparently muffed the vetoes of 65 bills at the end of the annual legislative session. He is now asking the state’s highest court to rule on whether he successfully rejected the measures, or whether they have in fact become law—as the House and Senate contend—because LePage missed the 10-day window he had to veto them.

The Best Way to Type ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Robinson Meyer

Every time you shrug, you don’t need to Google, then copy, then paste.

Updated, 2:20 p.m.

All hail ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

In its 11 strokes, the symbol encapsulates what it’s like to be an individual on the Internet. With raised arms and a half-turned smile, it exudes the melancholia, the malaise, the acceptance, and (finally) the embrace of knowing that something’s wrong on the Internet and you can’t do anything about it.

As Kyle Chayka writes in a new history of the symbol at The Awl, the meaning of the “the shruggie” is always two, if not three- or four-, fold. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ represents nihilism, “bemused resignation,” and “a Zen-like tool to accept the chaos of universe.” It is Sisyphus in unicode. I use it at least 10 times a day.

For a long time, however, I used it with some difficulty. Unlike better-known emoticons like :) or ;), ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ borrows characters from the Japanese syllabary called katakana. That makes it a kaomoji, a Japanese emoticon; it also makes it, on Western alphabetical keyboards at least, very hard to type. But then I found a solution, and it saves me having to google “smiley sideways shrug” every time I want to quickly rail at the world’s inherent lack of meaning.

The 2016 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet

David A. Graham

Ohio Governor John Kasich’s announcement Tuesday means the Republican field is now complete.

With John Kasich’s announcement Tuesday morning that he’s running for president, the Republican presidential field is now complete. Oh sure, there might be new candidates—former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore seems likely to announce a campaign in August—but every candidate with even a small chance of making it to a debate stage in Cleveland (or past Super Tuesday, for that matter) has already leaped in.

In fact, Kasich might not make the stage, either—even though the first forum is being held in Ohio, the state where he’s governor. Despite a reputation for policy smarts, Kasich seems like a longshot, too moderate and technocratic for a Republican primary electorate, and possibly too peevish to handle voters and donors alike. But he’s a brainy candidate, his super PAC has raised a decent sum, and the fact that he hails from an important swing state will give him an outsize impact.