Shadi Hamid

Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, opened today with a statement attacking media reporting on the Trump administration. He singled out six stories for attack.

One of them was retracted by its publisher, CNN—a form of corporate responsibility never seen from a White House notorious for emitting six false statements in a single morning. Another was an opinion piece in New York magazine by Jonathan Chait that did not claim to report news, but instead built known facts into a damning narrative of Donald Trump’s Russia connection. The other four range from the exaggerated to the unverified to the apparently mistaken.

But let’s take a closer look at those errors and what they mean. One of the stories singled out by Nunes was published by BuzzFeed News. That story asserted that Trump had explicitly directed his then–personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow project. Cohen would ultimately testify to Congress that Trump’s direction was implicit, not explicit.

The flight that put the Boeing Company on course for disaster lifted off a few hours after sunrise. It was good flying weather—temperatures in the mid-40s with a slight breeze out of the southeast—but oddly, no one knew where the 737 jetliner was headed. The crew had prepared three flight plans: one to Denver. One to Dallas. And one to Chicago.

In the plane’s trailing vortices was greater Seattle, where the company’s famed engineering culture had taken root; where the bulk of its 40,000-plus engineers lived and worked; indeed, where the jet itself had been assembled. But it was May 2001. And Boeing’s leaders, CEO Phil Condit and President Harry Stonecipher, had decided it was time to put some distance between themselves and the people actually making the company’s planes. How much distance? This flight—a PR stunt to end the two-month contest for Boeing’s new headquarters—would reveal the answer. Once the plane was airborne, Boeing announced it would be landing at Chicago’s Midway International Airport.

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This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

Pity the American children: No one is writing books about how great they are. Instead, praise has lately been reserved for kids overseas, who—according to a profusion of books and articles in the past decade—possess deep stores of resourcefulness and resilience, those sought-after traits that allegedly set kids up for a lifetime of contentment, or at least success.

These thriving children develop under the guidance of parents who are in some cases carefree and in others completely overbearing. In 2011, the author and law professor Amy Chua detailed the strictures—and the payoffs—of a hard-driving “Chinese” (as opposed to “Western”) approach to parenting in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The following year, Pamela Druckerman, an American writer living in Paris, walked American parents through the seemingly effortless child-rearing techniques of the French in Bringing Up Bébé, telling of “a fully functioning society of good little sleepers, gourmet eaters, and reasonably relaxed parents.”

1. The Disappearance

At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator.

This article was updated at 2 p.m.

Mike Pompeo tried to stay out of it. He tried to block certain State Department officials from testifying in the House impeachment inquiry. He didn’t admit for days that he had listened in on the phone call at the heart of that inquiry, in which President Donald Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a domestic political rival. He’s referred to the hearings as “noise” and been out of town a lot—both abroad and in Kansas.

Today that effort fully collapsed.

In explosive public testimony on Wednesday, Gordon Sondland, Pompeo’s own ambassador to the European Union, put the secretary of state right in the middle of the scandal. Sondland confirmed not only that the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani insisted on a quid pro quo with the Ukrainians—a White House visit by Zelensky in exchange for announcing investigations into Burisma, a company where Joe Biden’s son served on the board, and into the 2016 election—but that Pompeo himself was fully in the loop the whole time.

Marie Kondo has had a few bouts of American fame. Around 2015, the Japanese cleaning guru’s best-selling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up inspired untold closet clean-outs and garage declutterings. In 2019, her Netflix series, Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, performed a similar trick, emptying overstuffed American homes by teaching their harried owners her joy-prioritizing “KonMari” method.

Now Kondo is back for her third act. Instead of imparting further organizational wisdom or deepening her theories of domestic joy, though, she’s trying something new: selling $275 distressed-brass vases and other housewares and wellness products to fill up all that newly empty space.

Earlier this week, Kondo announced a new online shop on her KonMari website. She has been selling a line of storage boxes for her tidying methods since 2018, but this new venture is different. Much of its inventory is mundanely minimalist, such as dove-gray bath linens and food-storage containers in neutral shades. (Even KonMari obsessives have leftovers.) The store ships only to the United States, but sells many high-end Japanese tools, such as handmade matcha whisks and hand-whittled shiatsu sticks.

“Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret.”

Those are the two most important sentences in today’s opening statement by Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union. Sondland’s public testimony was the most hotly anticipated of the impeachment inquiry, and even before Sondland uttered a word this morning, he’d lived up to his billing.

In a blistering statement, Sondland testified that the president had personally directed American efforts to extort Ukraine’s president into announcing two investigations that would aid Donald Trump in his 2020 reelection effort.

“I know that members of this committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a quid pro quo?” Sondland said. “The answer is yes.”

In a darkened classroom at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, a half-dozen people peeked through the blinds to watch the sight of true desperation: People dressed in black raced up a highway ramp in a frantic chase for freedom.

“Like ants,” remarked one young man who watched with me as we sat in the room. He asked that he be identified only by his last name, Tsang, for fear of arrest. Some others had escaped via ropes dropped from a highway overpass to motorcycles humming below; still more people tried to scramble through sewer pipes. But to run in the open, where most anyone, including photojournalists and police, could see you?

Then again, escape routes were few. For months, pro-democracy demonstrators have marched and rallied across this city to win greater freedoms and end police abuse. Now a few hundred people were hunkered on an urban university campus, armed with bricks and Molotov cocktails, isolated and encircled by police.

The Democratic Party knows it needs the energetic support of black voters to win the 2020 presidential election. Near the end of last night’s debate in Atlanta, the question that arose—indirectly but unmistakably—was whether it needs a black candidate to turn them out.

The candidate who has surged into the lead in recent polls of Iowa and New Hampshire, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, has registered virtually zero support among African American voters. The candidates he overtook, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, don’t have a whole lot more. And the candidate who does have the most support among black Democrats, former Vice President Joe Biden, has a decades-long record on criminal-justice policies and school busing that is out of step with the views of many black voters, especially younger ones.