Garrett Epps

On a Sunday morning in 2017 I took down his picture, and by afternoon it was in the alley with other rubbish awaiting transport to the local landfill for final burial. Hardly a hero’s end.

The painting had no monetary value; it was really just a print of an original overlaid with brushstrokes to appear authentic. But 40 years earlier it had been a gift from a young Army wife to her lieutenant husband when the $25 price (framed) required juggling other needs in our budget.

The dignified likeness of General Robert E. Lee in his Confederate Army uniform had been a prized possession of mine. I’d grown up not far from the Custis-Lee Mansion, and at West Point, Lee, the near-perfect cadet, Mexican War hero, academy superintendent, and, finally, the commander of the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia, cast a long, ever-present shadow. Later, in Army quarters from Fort Benning, Georgia, to Fort Lewis, Washington, the painting reflected my fascination with leadership, and it spoke of duty and selfless service.

Short of an election-eve exoneration by Robert Mueller, it would be hard to imagine a nicer October surprise for Donald Trump than an attempt by thousands of unauthorized immigrants to force the borders of the United States. It dramatizes every one of his themes, but none more spectacularly than this: his claim that his opponents will not defend the borders of the United States.

On Sunday, some thousands of people rafted across the Suchiate River, which separates Guatemala from Mexico. Mexico did not detain or expel them, and soon they were on the move again. Organizers seem to hope that the unprecedented mass of the caravan will overawe Mexican and U.S. authorities.

What it is also doing is testing the U.S. political system.

Conservatives aren’t terribly fond of America’s elite universities. Recent research from the political scientists Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón and Thomas Gift found that while liberals consider elite-educated politicians more competent than those with less illustrious pedigrees, conservatives find them considerably less appealing. Though liberals were just as inclined to back candidates educated at Ivy League universities as those who were not, conservatives were less likely to vote for Ivy Leaguers. It seems that President Donald Trump’s frequent boasts about having attended the elite Wharton School were, to conservative voters at least, less a draw than an obstacle to overcome. And that is as it should be.

Two years ago, I walked downstairs and saw one of my teenage sons watching a strange YouTube video on the television.

“What is that?” I asked.

He turned to me earnestly and explained, “It’s a psychology professor at the University of Toronto talking about Canadian law.”

“Huh?” I said, but he had already turned back to the screen. I figured he had finally gotten to the end of the internet, and this was the very last thing on it.

That night, my son tried to explain the thing to me, but it was a buzzing in my ear, and I wanted to talk about something more interesting. It didn’t matter; it turned out a number of his friends—all of them like him: progressive Democrats, with the full range of social positions you would expect of adolescents growing up in liberal households in blue-bubble Los Angeles—had watched the video as well, and they talked about it to one another.  

There was a moment, some 45 minutes into President Trump’s rally in Houston on Monday night, when it seemed like he wasn’t really going anywhere. The president was running through some of his standard talking points, but as with many of his more recent speeches, there wasn’t a spark.

And then suddenly there was. Trump launched into the darkest, angriest section of his speech, a furious tirade at Democrats, laced with falsehoods. He ran through several areas—health care, entitlements, supposed voter fraud—but the climax was immigration.

“The crisis on our border right now as we speak is the sole result of Democrat laws and activist Democrat judges that prevent us from returning illegal aliens from Central America and all over the world—it’s called catch and release,” Trump said. “They’re killing and hurting innocent Americans. Democrat immigration policies allow poisonous drugs and MS-13 to pour into our country, and Democrat sanctuary cities release dangerous criminals from jail and into your neighborhoods.”

How many times during my childhood did my father tell me that when his grandmother and her sister sailed to America, they had traveled “a class above steerage”? I was a Hula-Hooping child of the atomic age, growing strong on USDA beef and Cocoa Puffs. What did I know about steerage? But I knew my father in the complete and inchoate way that a child knows her parent, and I knew he wanted me to understand something important to him and—somehow—to me. I understood the lesson to be: The Flanagans have been down, but they have not been out.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion once wrote. And we tell them inside our families so that something can live within them, some idea or value, some complicated honoring of an elder. Elizabeth Warren’s family—the Herrings—had a story, of course. A central and important one: Her parents’ love had been so strong that they had defied their elders and eloped. Her mother had been rejected by the Herrings because she was “Cherokee and Delaware,” Warren has said many times, which heightened the family romance and gave it mythic dimensions. It’s one of the central American stories; it’s The Searchers.

Regardless of who issues them, guidelines for health promotion and disease prevention universally recommend diets that are largely plant-based, meaning those that include plenty of fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, and nuts. The U.S. dietary guidelines also recommend foods in the “protein” category. Grains, beans, and nuts are good sources of protein, but the guidelines use “protein” to mean low-fat dairy, lean meats, and fish. Recommended eating patterns include all these foods, relatively unprocessed, but with minimal addition of salt and sugars. Such patterns provide nutrients and energy in proportions that meet physiological needs but also minimize the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other chronic diseases. One more definition: “Patterns” refers to diets as a whole, not to single foods. No one food makes a diet healthful. The healthiest diets include a wide variety of foods in each of the recommended categories in amounts that balance calories.

A whole new world—that is what Ted Cruz wanted to give her.

It was the spring of 2001, and Heidi Nelson was planning her nuptials to the man she’d met just over a year earlier. On Christmas break from Harvard Business School, she’d encountered the cocky and cerebral Cruz in Austin, Texas, where they were both working on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. He was “super-smart” and “really fun” and looked like a “1950s movie star.” “It was love at first sight,” she told me.

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They filled those three weeks with movies and dinners and drives. Then he took her to the airport, where she’d get on a plane back to Boston. Call me every day when your day is done, she instructed him. And he did call her, every day that spring, at about 3 or 4 a.m. Later that summer, Ted gave her a strand of pearls. Probably fake, she still thinks, but they were from Bergdorf Goodman. And this was special: She’d mentioned once that she liked to go to Bergdorf’s, to look at the china and other delicate things behind glass, and he’d listened.

Quick, think of a college athlete. Chances are, the person that comes to mind is a football or basketball player at a powerhouse Division I school like Louisiana State or the University of Kentucky. Maybe the player resembles, say, Joel Embiid, who turned a chiseled, seven-foot frame into a full-ride scholarship at the University of Kansas before ascending to NBA stardom.

But the typical student athlete looks a lot more like Matteo DiMayorca, a Harvard junior  recruited to play offensive tackle on the college’s football team. DiMayorca isn’t angling for a future career in the NFL, and after a nagging string of knee injuries, he’s transitioned into a managerial role on the team. He has been playing football since the fourth grade, but he says he only seriously started considering playing in college as a junior in high school. “With the help of my parents,” says DiMayorca, “I put together a highlight tape, sent out emails, and reached out to a couple of coaches.” That summer, he attended football camps put on by colleges to register on coaches' radar. And then, the offer letters started trickling in: First from Colgate, and then Harvard, where he applied early action.

In 2016, shortly after she was appointed to the position, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos declared American public schools a “dead end.” Instead, DeVos advocates for “school choice,” code for charter schools, vouchers, and other privatization efforts.

Families who have watched their local schools struggle might agree with DeVos, but her characterization is still troubling. It reflects a distrust of education as a communal goal, not just an individual one. That’s a big change from the goal of American public schools during their first two centuries. Far from being a “dead end,” for a long time the public school—particularly the public high school—served an important civic purpose: not only as an academic training ground, but also as a center for community and activity in American cities.