Jennifer Egan: What I Read

A Catfishing With a Happy Ending

Jeff Maysh

Emma Perrier was deceived by an older man on the internet—a hoax that turned into an unbelievable love story.

Emma Perrier spent the summer of 2015 mending a broken heart, after a recent breakup. By September, the restaurant manager had grown tired of watching The Notebook alone in her apartment in Twickenham, a leafy suburb southwest of London, and decided it was time to get back out there. Despite the horror stories she’d heard about online dating, Emma, 33, downloaded a matchmaking app called Zoosk. The second “o” in the Zoosk logo looks like a diamond engagement ring, which suggested that its 38 million members were seeking more than the one-night stands offered by apps like Tinder.

She snapped the three selfies the app required to “verify her identity.” Emma, who is from a volcanic city near the French Alps, not far from the source of Perrier mineral water, is petite, and brunette. She found it difficult to meet men, especially as she avoided pubs and nightclubs, and worked such long hours at a coffee shop in the city’s financial district that she met only stockbrokers, who were mostly looking for cappuccinos, not love.

Trump's Unforced Error

David A. Graham

A series of damaging stories about the president's methods of consoling grieving Gold Star families represent the president’s latest entirely self-inflicted wound.

The question to President Trump on Monday sounded relatively innocuous: “Why haven’t we heard anything from you so far about the soldiers that were killed in Niger? And what do you have to say about that?” It’s certainly not the kind of question that seemed likely to set off several days of heated controversy.

But the hubbub that has ensued, centering on Trump’s response to the deaths of four soldiers in Niger and, more broadly, the way he deals with grieving military families, is yet another example of how this president inflicts crises on himself. This pattern has happened several times since Trump entered office, with the tussle over the size of his crowd on Inauguration Day and his claim that Barack Obama “wiretapped him.” In each case, Trump’s bluster and his seeming obsession with Obama have led him to commit serious unforced errors.

Downtown Chicago pictured at dawn — George Rose / Getty Images

Rich City, Poor City

Ronald Brownstein

An increasing number of American mayors are trying to channel recent economic growth to neglected neighborhoods.

With most big cities’s economies continuing to grow, the most pressing issue they face is how to connect their low-income communities to the opportunities that growth creates. New efforts developing in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Chicago show the many creative alternatives cities are exploring to respond to that challenge—and the obstacles they face.

From 2010 through 2015, all of the 100 largest metropolitan areas added jobs, and 98 of them increased their total economic output, according to calculations by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.

But in most cities, that revival has largely bypassed communities of concentrated poverty, like large swathes of Chicago’s predominantly African-American South Side or mostly Hispanic East Charlotte. Across the country, many cities have fueled their growth by importing streams of young college graduates from elsewhere, while struggling to place their own low-income kids on a track to obtain the education necessary to compete for those same jobs. Compounding the problem, longtime residents and commercial establishments in moderate- and low-income neighborhoods can find themselves pushed out by rising rents as developers pursue young white-collar workers flocking to urban environments.

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Jean M. Twenge

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

The exterior of Stuyvesant High School — Frank Franklin II / AP

Why Parents Make Flawed Choices About Their Kids' Schooling

Gail Cornwall

A new study shows that families act on insufficient information when it comes to figuring out where to enroll their children.

A person trying to choose their next set of wheels might see that car A made it farther than car B in a road test and assume it gets better gas mileage. But that’s only true if the two tanks are filled with the same substance. Putting high-octane gas in one and water in the other, for example, provides little useful information about which car makes the most of its fuel. A new working paper titled “Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?” suggests that parents similarly opt for schools with the most impressive graduates rather than figuring out which ones actually teach best. The study joins a body of research looking critically at what it means for a school to be successful.

Take the work of Erin Pahlke, for example. The assistant professor of psychology at Whitman College saw research showing that girls who attend school only with other girls tend to do better in math and science. The trick, she said, is that those studies didn’t analyze “differences in the students coming into the schools.” As it turns out, those who end up in same-sex schools tend to be wealthier, start out with more skills, and have parents who are more proactive than students who attend co-ed institutions. In a 2014 meta-analysis, Pahlke and her colleagues reviewed the studies and found when examining schools with the same type of students and same level of resources—rather than “comparing [those at] the public co-ed school to [their counterparts at] the fancy private school that’s single-sex down the road”—there isn’t any difference in how the students perform academically. Single-sex schooling also hasn’t been shown to offer a bump in girls’ attitudes toward math and science or change how they think about themselves. In other words, it often looks like single-sex schools are doing a better job educating kids, but they aren't. It's just that their graduates are people who were going to do well at any school. They’re running on high-octane gas.

A portrait of Michael Tubbs, the mayor of Stockton, California — Alexis Madrigal

Free Money at the Edge of the Tech Boom

Alexis C. Madrigal

A 27-year-old mayor is implementing a $1 million experiment in guaranteed income for residents of a poor city just outside the Bay Area.

The latest experiment in a universal basic income will be coming to Stockton, California, in the next year.

With $1 million in funding from the tech industry–affiliated Economic-Security Project, the Stockton Economic-Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) will be the country’s first municipal pilot program. As currently envisioned, some number of people in Stockton will receive $500 per month. That’s not enough to cover all their expenses, but it could help people with rising housing costs, paying student loans, or simply saving for life’s inevitable problems.

Last year, Stockton rents rose more than 10 percent, putting the city’s rental price growth among the top 10 in the nation. This is quite a surprise in what Time called “America’s most miserable city” just three years ago. The average rent remains a modest-by-Bay-standards $1,051, but Stockton has a per-capita income of just $23,046, more than $6,000 less than the U.S. median and a full $8,500 less than the California median. If you made the per-capita income of the city, average rent alone would eat 55 percent of your income.

Cartoonish figures interact with the world through code. — Lynn Scurfield

The Coming Software Apocalypse

James Somers

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

Listen to the audio version of this article:Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone.

The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

Jesse Draxler; Photo: David Hume Kennerly / Getty

The First White President

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.

It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

How Campus Racism Could Affect Black Students' College Enrollment

Melinda D. Anderson

With racial discrimination on the rise, students and parents are watching universities’ responses closely, and some say that these concerns could influence decisions of where to attend.

At American University, a private university in Washington, D.C., the commitment to cultural diversity is an integral part of its marketing and outreach to prospective students. And for Janelle Gray, a black freshman from Northern Virginia, such advertising worked. Information sessions and campus visits emphasized that AU valued racial and ethnic diversity, a feature that Gray said drew her to the school.

In the spring of 2017, two days after accepting AU’s admission offer, Gray learned that bananas hung on rope fashioned into nooses—a symbol of racial terror and intimidation against black Americans—were found in several spots on AU’s campus. The incident coincided with the university’s first black woman student-government president taking office. Gray never reconsidered her decision to attend AU because she was equally drawn to its international-relations program. But she admits she arrived on campus last summer with a lot of uncertainty and fear. Then last month, it happened again: Ten confederate-flag posters with cotton stalks were pinned to AU’s campus bulletin boards. This time Gray was devastated. “I went to sleep that night, feeling like this situation is just so surreal,” she said. “We come here to learn, and we shouldn't have to deal with things like this.”

Gray’s experience, and the racist acts on her campus, is neither rare nor random. The episodes correspond with what the Anti-Defamation League identifies as an unprecedented increase in white supremacist activity on college grounds that began in fall 2016. Since the start of this academic year, black college students have been targeted in a rash of attacks—at an Ivy League university in New York, at a public college in Illinois, at a Catholic college in Pennsylvania, and at a flagship state university in Michigan. With another college-application season starting and a new crop of black students finalizing their selections, an overarching question persists: To what degree will racist incidents on college campuses—and colleges' response to those incidents—affect black-student enrollment? At risk are colleges’ and universities’ reputations as champions of diversity, as well as black students’ academic success.

According to data provided by American University, the percentage of black freshmen accepting AU’s offers of admission increased from 33 percent last year to 38 percent this year, continuing an upward trend for the third consecutive enrollment cycle. Notably, the banana and noose incident occurred in May after many high-school seniors, like Gray, had finalized which college to attend. To date, AU reports applications from black students for the fall 2018 semester are up 6.5 percent from that for the current semester. However, the full impact of last month’s event on black students’ decision to enroll has yet to crystallize.

Luchenko Yana / Shutterstock / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

What Facebook Did to American Democracy

Alexis C. Madrigal

And why it was so hard to see it coming

In the media world, as in so many other realms, there is a sharp discontinuity in the timeline: before the 2016 election, and after.

Things we thought we understood—narratives, data, software, news events—have had to be reinterpreted in light of Donald Trump’s surprising win as well as the continuing questions about the role that misinformation and disinformation played in his election.

Tech journalists covering Facebook had a duty to cover what was happening before, during, and after the election. Reporters tried to see past their often liberal political orientations and the unprecedented actions of Donald Trump to see how 2016 was playing out on the internet. Every component of the chaotic digital campaign has been reported on, here at The Atlantic, and elsewhere: Facebook’s enormous distribution power for political information, rapacious partisanship reinforced by distinct media information spheres, the increasing scourge of “viral” hoaxes and other kinds of misinformation that could propagate through those networks, and the Russian information ops agency.