Bloggingheads With Brad DeLong

Flowers are pictured on the grave of Sergei Magnitsky at the Preobrazhensky cemetery in Moscow. — Mikhail Voskresensky / Reuters

Bill Browder's Testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee

Rosie Gray

“I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests,” Browder writes.

The financier Bill Browder has emerged as an unlikely central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney Browder hired to investigate official corruption, died in Russian custody in 2009. Congress subsequently imposed sanctions on the officials it held responsible for his death, passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government retaliated, among other ways, by suspending American adoptions of Russian children.

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who secured a meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, was engaged in a campaign for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act, and raised the subject of adoptions in that meeting. That’s put the spotlight back on Browder’s long campaign for Kremlin accountability, and against corruption—a campaign whose success has irritated Putin and those around him.

This Is the Way the College ‘Bubble’ Ends

Derek Thompson

Not with a pop, but a hiss

For the past few decades, the unstoppable increase in college tuition has been a fact of life, like death and taxes. The sticker price of American college increased nearly 400 percent in the last 30 years, while median household income growth was relatively flat. Student debt soared to more than $1 trillion, the result of loans to cover the difference.

Several people—with varying degrees of expertise in higher-ed economics—have predicted that it’s all a bubble, destined to burst. Now after decades of expansion, just about every meaningful statistic—including the number of college students, the growth of tuition costs, and even the total number of colleges—is going down, or at least growing more slowly.

John McCain gives a speech to the Senate after being diagnosed with brain cancer. — C-SPAN2 via AP

John McCain Makes His Choice

James Fallows

The vote he cast, more than the speech he gave, will help define his legacy.

The effort to repeal Barack Obama’s health-care bill is not over, and neither presumably is the public career of John McCain. But each crossed an important threshold yesterday, and Senator McCain gave us a clearer idea of who he is and what he stands for.

The repeal effort isn’t over, because debate and further voting is now under way to determine whether the bill will pass and, more basically, to define what it would actually do. McCain will have more votes to cast, on this measure and others, and it’s possible that in the end he will turn against this bill because of its provisions (whatever they turn out to be) or because of the rushed and secretive process that led to it. Just this afternoon, McCain voted No on a “straight repeal” bill that would eliminate Obamacare without any replacement.

The Skinny Repeal Gets a Score

Vann R. Newkirk II

The Congressional Budget Office offered an estimate of Republicans’ last-ditch attempt to roll back Medicaid.

With eight hours left of debate in the Senate reconciliation process, it appears all of the Republicans’ chances of repealing (or replacing) Obamacare will come down to a single option: the “skinny repeal.”

Not much is known about the skinny repeal, however. At the end of Wednesday’s debate session, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for keeping the text of the bill secret, and promised that Democrats would offer no further amendments until the secret plan was revealed. What is known about the ace up McConnell’s sleeve is that it would likely eliminate Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates, along with some of its taxes, but the specifics and the broader impacts of such a bill are as of yet unknown.

Conservative Groups Fume Over Failed Repeal Votes

Elaine Godfrey

Activists on the right have been pushing to repeal the Affordable Care Act since 2010—only to see some Republicans defend the law once they got the power to get rid of it.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Senate failed to pass legislation that would have repealed major parts of the Affordable Care Act, including the law’s individual and employer mandates, the Medicaid expansion, tax credits, and taxes. It was the same measure that passed the Senate through reconciliation in 2015 and was ultimately vetoed by President Obama.

After failing to pass the Obamacare replacement plan during a vote late on Tuesday night, the Senate moved on to the repeal-only vote. This time around, repeal could only afford to lose two senators, and it did. Actually, it lost seven, including three who had voted for repeal bill in 2015. Conservative groups see the vote’s failure as the ultimate political hypocrisy—but Republican senators maintain that they’re representing their constituents’ best interests.

A Breville toaster with the "A Bit More" button — Breville

Why a Toaster Is a Design Triumph

Ian Bogost

The “A Bit More” button doesn’t reinvent the appliance’s form. It finds its soul instead.

Last year I fell in love with a toaster.

It looks like most others. A brushed, stainless-steel housing. Four slots, to accommodate the whole family’s bread-provisioning needs. It is alluring but modest, perched atop the counter on proud haunches.

But at a time when industry promises disruptive innovation, Breville, the Australian manufacturer of my toaster, offers something truly new and useful through humility rather than pride.

The mechanism that raises and lowers the bread from the chassis is motorized. After I press a button atop the frame, the basket silently lowers the bread into the device to become toast. On its own, this feature seems doomed to mechanical failure. But the risk is worthwhile to facilitate the toaster’s star ability: the “A Bit More” button. That modest attribute offers a lesson for design of all stripes—one that could make every designed object and experience better.

The 2017 Man Booker Longlist Is Announced

Sophie Gilbert

Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, and George Saunders are among the authors in contention for the British literary prize.

The 13 novels longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, were announced Thursday morning. Among them are some of the biggest names in fiction (Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, Paul Auster, Colson Whitehead, George Saunders) as well as two first-time novelists: Fiona Mozley, a 29-year-old from northern England, and Emily Fridlund, a Cornell professor whose coming-of-age tale History of Wolves was released earlier this year.

Roy’s inclusion on the list comes 20 years after her first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Man Booker in 1997. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, her long-awaited follow-up, was released earlier this year. Writing for The Atlantic, the critic Parul Sehgal called it a “fascinating mess,” a “hulking, sprawling story” about two characters, a trans woman living in Delhi, and an architect-activist. “Roy is a champion at waking the neighbors, at getting our attention, and as an offering, this book is a beautiful act of witness,” Sehgal writes. “But harnessing our attention—getting us to see as well as to look—that is perhaps a different, and more intricate, matter.”

The Mystery of Why Japanese People Are Having So Few Babies

Alana Semuels

Many point to unromantic 20-somethings and women’s entry into the workforce, but an overlooked factor is the trouble young men have in finding steady, well-paid jobs.

TOKYO—Japan’s population is shrinking. For the first time since the government started keeping track more than a century ago, there were fewer than 1 million births last year, as the country’s population fell by more than 300,000 people. The blame has long been put on Japan’s young people, who are accused of not having enough sex, and on women, who, the narrative goes, put their careers before thoughts of getting married and having a family.

But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the U.S.: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to.

The Ohio State Fair around the time of a ride malfunction on July 26, 2017. — Bruce Lamm / Reuters

One Dead, Many in Critical Condition After Ohio State Fair Accident

Aria Bendix

A ride malfunction caused multiple passengers to be ejected around 20 to 30 feet in the air.

A ride malfunction at the state fair in Columbus, Ohio resulted in the death of at least one passenger on Wednesday. Locals officials report that at least seven others were wounded, with five of them in critical condition and two others expected to recover. The incident occurred at around 7:24 p.m. local time when passengers on the Fire Ball ride were ejected around 20 to 30 feet into the air at a high speed, before falling to the ground. Witnesses have since reported that a passenger row detached from the ride while in motion—an account that is corroborated by online video footage.

In a statement released on Twitter, Ohio Governor John Kasich said he had ordered a full investigation into the incident and asked for all of the fair’s rides to be shut down pending additional safety inspections. “I am terribly saddened by this incident,” Kasich said. At a press conference on Wednesday, he again lamented the loss of life and declared that “we will get to the bottom of this.” “The fair is about the best things in life and then tonight, with this accident, it becomes a terrible, terrible tragedy,” Kasich said.

Jeff Flake’s Gamble

McKay Coppins

The Arizona Republican is betting his Senate seat on the political appeal of decency—but can that pay off in Trump’s America?

The constituents filing into the Mesa Convention Center one evening in mid-April for the Republican senator Jeff Flake’s town hall had a decidedly un-Republican look. Tattoos and political T-shirts abounded. Activists stood near the entrance distributing stickers, flyers, and other paraphernalia of the resistance and urging attendees to get loud. While chants of “No stupid wall!” and “Health care for all!” echoed through the auditorium, a young woman in a chicken costume wandered the perimeter, clucking and posing for selfies in an act of protest whose meaning remained mysterious to me even after I asked her about it (“Jeff Flake is George Dubya’s chicken,” she said).

Flake couldn’t see any of this from backstage, but he knew that a hostile crowd likely awaited him. The early months of the Trump presidency had inflamed the grassroots left, and Republican lawmakers across the country had lately found themselves standing awkwardly in rooms like this one while liberal voters berated them. Flake is up for reelection next year, and some of his campaign advisers—wanting to avoid the kind of contentious scene that might end up in an attack ad—had suggested that he skip public forums for a while, as many of his colleagues were doing. But he insisted on going ahead.