Hank Shaw

As they present their findings to the public, House Democrats may find it easier to let President Donald Trump build the case for impeachment himself.

The testimony that Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, delivered to Congress this morning was perhaps as politically damaging to Trump as anything presented during the first day of House impeachment hearings, on Wednesday. In a quiet but firm voice, she described how “a smear campaign” orchestrated by the president’s allies led to her abrupt dismissal as ambassador, and how “the color drained from my face” when she read a transcript of Trump bashing her in a phone call with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky. “It sounded like a threat,” Yovanovitch said, referring to the president’s comment that she would “go through some things.”

Remember these numbers. You’ll be asked about them at the end of the test: 70, 73, 76, and 78.

These are the ages of the leading candidates in the 2020 presidential election: Elizabeth Warren, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders, respectively. In most any other line of work, people in their eighth decade are usually retired. For most of human history—and still in most of the world today—people of this age were usually dead.

Last month, Jimmy Carter, the 95-year-old former U.S. president, said that the office requires a person “to be very flexible with [one’s] mind,” and that by age 80 he wouldn’t have felt able to do the job. He joined the growing ranks of those suggesting they would support an upper age limit for the office, either for purposes of breaking up the gerontocracy or to ensure a person has the physical and cognitive capacity. “You have to be able to go from one subject to another and concentrate on each one adequately and then put them together in a comprehensive way,” Carter said.

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed.

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My colleague Megan Garber spoke up on Wednesday in defense of anger, a quality whose presence in a female presidential candidate gets her branded as hysterical and shrill, and whose absence, paradoxically, marks her as frosty and robotic. (Angry men are just “fired up”; angerless ones are “cerebral.” There are exceptions: Critics penalized Howard Dean for being a rage-monster and Michael Dukakis for being a passionless wuss.) The angry woman in this round is Elizabeth Warren, whose anger—mainly directed at billionaires—is becoming a signature quality.

I have been pessimistic about Warren’s chances, not because of her anger, but because of her apparent lack of a crucial quality that distinguishes successful presidential candidates, namely that they should be completely insane. The stresses of a campaign would be enough to make a normal person quit. Warren is scrutinized literally down to her genome, and the worst people in the world are scheming to defame her. The prize in this contest is the most burdensome job ever devised, one self-evidently worse than that of a tenured law professor at Harvard University. As a Richard North Patterson character put it:

After 30 minutes, the rat should have been dead. Sealed in a capsule-shaped chamber, the animal was breathing pure oxygen at a pressure high enough to cause a normal rat to have a seizure in five to 10 minutes. Dominic D’Agostino, a researcher at the University of South Florida, stood by, ready to flush the chamber with fresh air and rescue the creature at the first signs of a problem. But 30 minutes became 40 minutes, and still the rat appeared unbothered. At an hour, D’Agostino could only gaze at it on a video monitor with wonder. “The rat was just kind of staring back at us and grooming itself,” he says.

Shortly before placing the rat inside the chamber, D’Agostino had injected a new, one-of-a-kind molecule down the animal’s throat. Much of D’Agostino’s work is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Naval Research, and this experiment, which he conducted in mid-2011, was his first test of whether the new molecule could help a rat withstand an onslaught of oxygen. The hope was to one day do the same for Navy divers, who can experience devastating oxygen-toxicity seizures on deep dives.

Yesterday, strong winds and rainstorms pushed water levels in Venice, Italy, to the second-highest levels ever recorded. The high-water mark hit 74 inches (187 centimeters), just short of the record set in 1966. This exceptional acqua alta has flooded businesses and historic structures, sank boats, and been blamed for one death so far.

In the pursuit of new knowledge, some scientists explore other worlds, discover new species, and develop cures for disease. Others film themselves being robbed by a colleague in a King Kong suit, to address a debate that’s been raging for more than 40 years.

Bedecked in ape cosplay, Satoshi Hirata from Kyoto University would grab a stone from his uncostumed colleague, Fumihiro Kano, and hide it under one of two boxes, all while Kano watched in mock indignation. Then, after Kano ducked behind a door, “Kong” would surreptitiously move the stolen stone to the second box. The duo filmed these shenanigans and then showed the videos to several chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans. They wanted to know how what the apes made of the scene. Specifically, when Kano returned and began looking for his stone, which box did the apes think he’d search first?

August 21, 2018, was a low point in the Trump presidency: On the same day—indeed, in the same hour—the president’s former campaign chairman was found guilty of federal crimes, and his former lawyer pleaded guilty in another case. While the president may have weathered the storm of that summer day, this past Wednesday, November 13, presented a similarly ominous double spectacle. In the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., prosecutors provided their closing arguments against the Trump confidant Roger Stone for obstructing the investigation into Russian election interference. At the same time, less than a mile away, the House of Representatives was in the midst of its first public hearing in the impeachment inquiry against the president of the United States.

Suppose that the biblical story of Creation were true: God created the universe in six days, including all the laws of physics and all the physical constants that apply throughout the universe. Now imagine that one day, in the early 21st century, God became bored and, just for fun, doubled the gravitational constant. What would it be like to live through such a change? We’d all be pulled toward the floor; many buildings would collapse; birds would fall from the sky; the Earth would move closer to the sun, reestablishing orbit in a far hotter zone.

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Let’s rerun this thought experiment in the social and political world, rather than the physical one. The U.S. Constitution was an exercise in intelligent design. The Founding Fathers knew that most previous democracies had been unstable and short-lived. But they were excellent psychologists, and they strove to create institutions and procedures that would work with human nature to resist the forces that had torn apart so many other attempts at self-governance.

Images above: A protestor holding a sign that reads “Abortion Is Freedom” and protestors holding anti-abortion signs

In 1956, two American physicians, J. A. Presley and W. E. Brown, colleagues at the University of Arkansas School of Medicine, decided that four recent admissions to their hospital were significant enough to warrant a published report. “Lysol-Induced Criminal Abortion” appeared in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. It describes four women who were admitted to the hospital in extreme distress, all of them having had “criminal abortions” with what the doctors believed to be an unusual agent: Lysol. The powerful cleaner had been pumped into their wombs. Three of them survived, and one of them died.