New study: 150,000 deaths in Iraq since the invasion

Trump's Moral Holiday

David Frum

The permissiveness of Republican leaders who acquiesce to violence, collusion, and corruption is encouraging more of the same.

In the annals of the Trump era, May 25, 2017, will deserve a special mark. Four remarkable things happened on Thursday, each of which marks a way that this presidency is changing the nation.

The first remarkable thing was President Trump’s speech at the NATO summit in Brussels. Many European governments had hoped—which is a polite way to say that they had suggested and expected—that Trump would reaffirm the American commitment to defend NATO members if attacked. This is the point of the whole enterprise after all! Here’s how it was done by President Obama at the NATO summit after the Russian invasion of Crimea:

First and foremost, we have reaffirmed the central mission of the Alliance. Article 5 enshrines our solemn duty to each other—“an armed attack against one … shall be considered an attack against them all.” This is a binding, treaty obligation. It is non-negotiable. And here in Wales, we’ve left absolutely no doubt—we will defend every Ally.

All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family

My Family’s Slave

Alex Tizon

She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.

The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4. But a new clinical approach offers hope.

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.

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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.”

The Lesser Part of Valor

Adam Serwer

Preston Brooks, Greg Gianforte, and the American tradition of disguising cowardice as bravery.

You wouldn’t say that Preston Brooks sucker-punched Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber in 1856—but only because he used a cane. Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, began bludgeoning Sumner, the anti-slavery Massachusetts Senator, while Sumner wasn’t looking, and beat him unconscious as Sumner was still bent under his desk trying to stand up.

Brooks and his supporters in the South saw the incident as an act of great valor, as the historian Manisha Shinha writes. Brooks bragged that “for the first five or six licks he offered to make fight but I plied him so rapidly that he did not touch me. Towards the last he bellowed like a calf.” The pro-slavery Richmond Enquirer wrote that it considered the act “good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequence.” Other “southern defenders of Brooks,” Sinha writes, praised Brooks for his “manly spirit” and mocked Sumner for his “unmanly submission.” It would have been manlier for the unarmed Sumner not to have been ambushed.

The Trump Organization Says It's 'Not Practical' to Comply With the Emoluments Clause

Russell Berman

The president’s business tells lawmakers it is too difficult to track all its foreign revenue in accordance with constitutional requirements, and it hasn’t asked Congress for a permission slip.

Days before taking office, Donald Trump said his company would donate all profits from foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury, part of an effort to avoid even the appearance of a conflict with the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

Now, however, the Trump Organization is telling Congress that determining exactly how much of its profits come from foreign governments is simply more trouble than it’s worth.

In response to a document request from the House Oversight Committee, Trump’s company sent a copy of an eight-page pamphlet detailing how it plans to track payments it receives from foreign governments at the firm’s many hotels, golf courses, and restaurants across the globe. But while the Trump Organization said it would set aside all money it collects from customers that identify themselves as representing a foreign government, it would not undertake a more intensive effort to determine if a payment would violate the Constitution’s prohibition on public office holders accepting an “emolument” from a foreign state.

Maine's former governor John Baldacci, left, serves spaghetti at a fundraising event to benefit the Preble Street Resource Center, an agency that helps the homeless, in 2010. — Robert F. Bukaty / AP

The People Left Behind When Only the ‘Deserving’ Poor Get Help

Annie Lowrey

Maine attached work requirements and time limits to its safety net, intensifying poverty in the state.

ORLAND, Maine—In the eyes of the state of Maine, Laurie Kane is an able-bodied adult without dependents, and thus ineligible for most forms of government support. In her own eyes, it is hard to see how she is going to find housing, work, and stability without help.

Kane is struggling to put her life back together amid a spell of homelessness that has lasted for three years. She has a severe anxiety condition, along with other health problems, and had suffered a panic attack on the day I met her. But she had not managed to sign up for MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program, because she cannot get a doctor to certify her as being disabled. That’s not because a doctor has evaluated her and found her to be fine, but because she’s been unable to get a doctor’s appointment. “I was denied MaineCare because I’m considered an able-bodied person,” she told me. “A lot of people say, ‘Well, you can just get free care.’ They say, ‘You can go to a clinic with a sliding-fee scale, which would be $20 a visit.’ But what if I can’t come up with $20?”

Hillary Clinton delivers the commencement address at Wellesley College on May 26, 2017. — Brian Snyder / Reuters

Hillary Clinton’s Wellesley Homecoming

Anna Diamond

Returning to her alma mater to celebrate the class of 2017, she acknowledged her defeat—and offered a vision for the next generation of women leaders.

On Friday morning, along with the families of graduating seniors, hundreds of Wellesley College alumnae flocked to the school’s suburban Massachusetts campus in order to see Hillary Clinton, class of 1969, take the stage. Local alum groups hosted watch parties, starting early on the West Coast, and thousands of alums across the country live-streamed the event at their desks (myself included).

Long before some Americans took comfort in Clinton spottings in the woods, Wellesley alums have been known to track her spottings on campus, including her reunion visit in 2014, when her 2016 presidential bid was still just a rumor, and more recently at a private event in March when she spoke with students about activism and organizing.

Armed police block a road near to the Manchester Arena in central Manchester, England, on May 23, 2017. — Rui Vieira / AP

ISIS's Perverse, Bloody Interpretation of Ramadan

Amarnath Amarasingam and Charlie Winter

“What of the person who spends the sacred month ... oppressing people and killing innocents?”

For the overwhelming majority of Muslims, Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, is a time of prayer and atonement. In addition to fasting for its duration and praying five times per day (as normal), many Muslims add special readings from the Koran to their daily worship, so that, by the end of the holy month—which, this year, begins today and ends on June 24—the text has been read in its entirety.

Sadly, in recent years, Ramadan has been marred by increased terrorist violence around the world, as the Islamic State has attempted to transform it into a month of unparalleled bloodshed. To some extent, it appears that its supporters are willing to help it do so.

On June 23, 2015, six days into Ramadan, then-ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani called for attacks to commemorate the holy month. Three days later, a Shia mosque in Kuwait was hit by an ISIS suicide bomb that killed 26 Muslim worshippers. Later that same day, a tourist resort near the city of Sousse in Tunisia came under fire, with the attacker killing 38 people and injuring dozens more. On May 21, 2016, about two weeks before the start of Ramadan, Adnani made another speech. “Get prepared, be ready,” he said, “to make it a month of calamity everywhere for nonbelievers.” He argued that the targeting of civilians in the West was not only permissible, but desirable, and that as long as coalition forces were at war with ISIS there were no “innocents.”

First He Became an American—Then He Joined ISIS

Seamus Hughes and Bennett Clifford

When the FBI discovered a network of Bosnian-Americans giving support to terrorists, they also discovered Abdullah Ramo Pazara, a U.S. citizen and a battalion commander in Syria.

Abdullah Ramo Pazara had a craving for packets of instant hot cocoa. The Bosnian-American former truck driver was, at the time, a commander of an Islamic State tank battalion in Syria. Apparently, even foreign fighters who reject their former lives in Western countries for a chance at martyrdom for ISIS sometimes long for the creature comforts of their previous homes.

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In 2013, six Bosnian immigrants in the United States allegedly sent money, riflescopes, knives, military equipment, and other supplies to jihadists in Syria and Iraq through intermediaries in Bosnia and Turkey. According to the U.S. government’s allegations, individual ISIS fighters would make specific requests—mostly for money and military equipment—and the group would then raise funds and send supplies to Syria. The requests included what was surely an unexpected revelation of nostalgia—packets of Swiss Miss hot cocoa. By sending the cocoa mix and other supplies, federal prosecutors argue, these U.S.-based Bosnians provided what is known as “material support” to terrorists, in violation of the Patriot Act.

Pirates of the Caribbean 5
Is a Sinking Vessel

Christopher Orr

The latest installment in the flagging franchise, Dead Men Tell No Tales, offers a dreary, imitative voyage.

The subtitle of the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie is “Dead Men Tell No Tales.” The moral of the movie, alas, is that the same cannot be said of dead franchises.

The first Pirates film was an unexpected success: wildly overlong and over-plotted yet kept afloat by a wicked, bravura, and utterly original performance by Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, a swishily swaggering mélange of rum, eyeliner, and impudence. As is customary, the sequel was a pale imitation, and the third installment of the presumed trilogy went a bit trippy and meta.

Which would all have been well and good enough. But money makes people do silly things. The half-hearted and wildly unnecessary fourth movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was one such thing. It will surprise no one to learn that the latest installment in the franchise is another. At least On Stranger Tides had the decency to be a standalone movie; with Dead Men Tell No Tales, there is talk of that most pernicious of cinematic gambits, the “soft reboot.”

A New Understanding of the Childhood Brain

Nicolas Pollock

Uncovering the link between early trauma and lifelong illness

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Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Paul Rosenfeld

A wealthy white lawyer has spent 16 years and millions of dollars turning the Whitney Plantation into a memorial to the nation's past.

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Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

Tynesha Foreman and Nicolas Pollock

New data and analysis from PRRI and The Atlantic suggests that it was cultural anxiety more than economic distress that fueled white, working-class support for Trump.

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New study: 150,000 deaths in Iraq since the invasion

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About the Author

Most Popular

Trump's Moral Holiday

My Family’s Slave

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

The Lesser Part of Valor

The Trump Organization Says It's 'Not Practical' to Comply With the Emoluments Clause

The People Left Behind When Only the ‘Deserving’ Poor Get Help

Hillary Clinton’s Wellesley Homecoming

ISIS's Perverse, Bloody Interpretation of Ramadan

First He Became an American—Then He Joined ISIS

Pirates of the Caribbean 5 Is a Sinking Vessel

A New Understanding of the Childhood Brain

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

Pirates of the Caribbean 5
Is a Sinking Vessel