Aglaia Kremezi

On Sunday afternoon, Attorney General Bill Barr presented a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusions that contained a few sentences from Mueller's final report, one of which directly addressed the question of collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” In a footnote, Barr explained that Mueller had defined “coordination” as an “agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump campaign and the Russian government on election interference.”

Mueller’s full report has not been made available to the public yet, so it’s not clear whether it  sets forth everything the special counsel’s office learned over the course of its nearly two-year investigation—including findings about conduct that was perhaps objectionable but not criminal—or whether it is more tailored and explains only Mueller’s prosecution and declination decisions. But national security and intelligence experts tell me that Mueller’s decision not to charge Trump or his campaign team with a conspiracy is far from dispositive, and that the underlying evidence the special counsel amassed over two years could prove as useful as a conspiracy charge to understanding the full scope of Russia’s election interference in 2016.

Updated at 3:34 p.m. ET on March 25, 2019.

In March 1997, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Jehovah’s Witnesses, sent a letter to each of its 10,883 U.S. congregations, and to many more congregations worldwide. The organization was concerned about the legal risk posed by possible child molesters within its ranks. The letter laid out instructions on how to deal with a known predator: Write a detailed report answering 12 questions—Was this a onetime occurrence, or did the accused have a history of child molestation? How is the accused viewed within the community? Does anyone else know about the abuse?—and mail it to Watchtower’s headquarters in a special blue envelope. Keep a copy of the report in your congregation’s confidential file, the instructions continued, and do not share it with anyone.

LONDON—“There is a complete meltdown going on here,” Stephen Castle, a U.K. correspondent for The New York Times and a veteran journalist who has been based in Brussels and London for more than a quarter century, told me during another hectic week in Brexit Britain. “It’s a very slow-motion and incremental one, and that makes it harder to bring to light.”

For even the most seasoned analysts and reporters, Brexit has proved to be a political labyrinth. It’s a tumultuous moment for Britain—perhaps the most tumultuous to befall the country since World War II. Britain’s decision to leave the European Union is rife with extreme political and economic consequences. And yet, nearly three years of complications, crunch weeks, and crises later, Brexit remains seemingly impossible to understand. For the journalists tasked with covering this story, decoding and untangling Brexit has been particularly challenging. Keeping it comprehensible for audiences, both within the United Kingdom and around the world, has proved even harder.

In a letter to Congress on Sunday, Attorney General William Barr declared that while Robert Mueller’s report found evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and did not exonerate President Donald Trump, it also did “not conclude that the president committed a crime.” And so the special counsel’s months-long investigation into Trump’s dealings with Russia ended with an inconclusive conclusion: No smoking gun would result in Trump’s hasty removal from office.

Not just Democratic lawmakers had been banking on a final blow to the Trump administration. Pundits, commentators, and opportunistic entrepreneurs had all held up Mueller as a hero for their cause—and, in the process, constructed a cottage industry of Mueller-pegged media content and accessories.

In hindsight, there were plenty of indications over the past decade that American politics were headed toward the partisan sniping and low-stakes media obsessions that crowd the news cycle today. Take Arugulagate. In 2007, Barack Obama was in Iowa, speaking as a presidential hopeful to a group of farmers who were worried about the stagnation of their crop prices while America’s grocery bills continued to rise.

In his speech, Obama referred to the inflated cost of arugula at Whole Foods, which was a small gaffe: Iowa didn’t have a Whole Foods, and the leafy vegetable wasn’t then familiar enough to be name-checked in a broad point about American grocery costs. But political media turned arugula into its own news cycle, with conservatives charging Obama with elitism. Around the same time, lattes were also being slandered. It was a big moment for food as proof of one’s true ability to govern.

Dear Therapist,

My wife and I recently discovered she's about six weeks pregnant. This is devastating news for both of us. We have a 17-month-old daughter and we planned on having only one child. The birth control we had been using failed. I tried to have a vasectomy nine months ago and my wife objected at the doctor's office without citing reasons. She said she would get an IUD instead, but she was unable to get the IUD, because doctors had to remove a fibroid first. She learned about the pregnancy at the doctor's office during a consult on removing the fibroid.

Since hearing the news, I have been honest with her about my feelings. I reminded her that we simply cannot afford a second child and we can kiss our joint career aspirations goodbye if we have another baby. She agrees with me. More important, I said our marriage will be over in the sense that we will just be co-parents rather than lovers because I will resent her, and the baby will always be a reminder of my career sacrifice and our indebtedness.

Ten days ago, Cyclone Idai, one of the most devastating storms to hit Africa in decades, made landfall in Mozambique with sustained winds of 120 mph (195 kph), damaging or destroying thousands of structures. The tropical storm then moved inland, bringing heavy rain and flooding to more parts of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. More than 750 deaths are attributed to Idai so far, while thousands remain stranded in remote rural areas. International aid is starting to reach the region, while workers struggle to repair roads, restore power, and care for the survivors—with special attention toward preventing cholera outbreaks.

BEIRUT—If you’re looking to transfer money here, there’s a chance you will be directed to Abu Shawkat. He works out of a small office in a working-class suburb of the Lebanese capital, but won’t give you its exact location. Instead, he’ll direct you to a nearby alleyway, and whether he shows up depends on whether he likes the look of you.

Abu Shawkat—not his real name—is part of the hawala system, which is often used to transfer cash between places where the banking system has broken down or is too expensive for some to access. If he agrees to do business, you’ll set a password and he will take your cash, then provide you with the contact information of a hawala broker in the city where your money is headed. Anyone who offers that specific password to that particular broker will get the funds. Thus, cash can travel across borders without any inquiry into who is sending or receiving it, or its purpose.

Updated on March 22 at 9:06 p.m. ET.

Two years ago, Desmond Hughes heard so many of his favorite podcasters extolling AirPods, Apple’s tiny, futuristic $170 wireless headphones, that he decided they were worth the splurge. He quickly became a convert.

Hughes is still listening to podcasters talk about their AirPods, but now they’re complaining. The battery can no longer hold a charge, they say, rendering them functionally useless. Apple bloggers agree: “AirPods are starting to show their age for early adopters,” Zac Hall, an editor at 9to5Mac, wrote in a post in January, detailing how he frequently hears a low-battery warning in his AirPods now. Earlier this month, Apple Insider tested a pair of AirPods purchased in 2016 against a pair from 2018, and found that the older pair died after two hours and 16 minutes. “That’s less than half the stated battery life for a new pair,” the writer William Gallagher concluded.

The justice system cannot please everyone, but it at least aims to provide some sort of closure. That’s why one of the least satisfying outcomes of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the election, as summarized by Attorney General William Barr, is its approach to the question of whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice.

Though this message was delivered in a very different way, it is reminiscent not of Watergate or any of the other past presidential standards that have become common analogues, but instead of former FBI Director James Comey’s 2016 recommendation that Hillary Clinton not be charged with a crime in connection with her use of a personal email server while secretary of state. In both cases, Justice Department officials found evidence both for and against a crime. In both cases, they determined that prosecuting a case wasn’t tenable. And in both cases, the outcome is likely to enrage nearly half of the American electorate, splitting the country rather than providing a reconciliation.