The House Gets One Step Closer to Scrapping Dodd-Frank

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.

Trump Bans Transgender Americans From Serving in the Military

Emma Green

The president’s move reverses the Obama-era plan to phase in their participation.

President Trump has announced that transgender Americans will not be allowed to serve “in any capacity” in the U.S. military. On Wednesday morning, he tweeted that the U.S. military “must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow......
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2017

....Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming.....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2017

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.

Gelpi / Shutterstock / Paul Spella / The Atlantic

The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube

Adrienne LaFrance

Surprise eggs and slime are at the center of an online realm that’s changing the way the experts think about human development.

Toddlers crave power. Too bad for them, they have none. Hence the tantrums and absurd demands. (No, I want this banana, not that one, which looks identical in every way but which you just started peeling and is therefore worthless to me now.)

They just want to be in charge! This desire for autonomy clarifies so much about the behavior of a very small human. It also begins to explain the popularity of YouTube among toddlers and preschoolers, several developmental psychologists told me.

If you don’t have a 3-year-old in your life, you may not be aware of YouTube Kids, an app that’s essentially a stripped-down version of the original video blogging site, with videos filtered by the target audience’s age. And because the mobile app is designed for use on a phone or tablet, kids can tap their way across a digital ecosystem populated by countless videos—all conceived with them in mind.

John McCain gives a speech to the Senate. — Reuters

John McCain's Incongruous Speech

David A. Graham

The Arizona senator delivered an impassioned critique of partisanship, haste, and win-at-all-costs legislation, just moments after casting a vote to debate a bill that exemplifies all three.

It was a day of contradictions for John McCain: Returning from his own sickbed, he flew into Washington to vote to open debate on a bill that could strip others of their coverage. Met with a standing ovation on the Senate floor, he was also denounced fiercely for his vote in favor of debate, which allowed the bill to move forward after Vice President Pence broke a 50-50 tie.

And then there was the speech he delivered immediately after the vote. It was a surreal moment: a stemwinder denouncing fight-for-every-inch gamesmanship, hasty procedures, closed-door wrangling, and legislation that puts partisan gain over helping citizens, delivered moments after McCain cast the deciding vote to forward a bill that embodied every one of those tendencies.

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.

What Christopher Nolan Gets Right About Netflix

David Sims

The Dunkirk director has been loudly dismissive of the company’s policy on theatrical releases—but he’s really just arguing for a different streaming model.

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is not what you’d call a typical summer blockbuster in 2017. It’s a sober, intense World War II epic, starring a total unknown (Fionn Whitehead), with no potential as a franchise. It’s not a story of triumph, but rather an edgy chronicle of soldiers surviving by the skin of their teeth (it also features only British troops; at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, America hadn’t even entered the war). In the current Hollywood landscape, which shunts such “prestige” pictures to the fall or winter to try and curry Oscar favor, Dunkirk’s July 21 release was extremely unusual, and its broad success (a $50 million opening weekend, well above tracking numbers) was a relative surprise.

Trump's Mistake at the Boy Scout Jamboree

Yoni Appelbaum

The president addressed the quadrennial gathering like a campaign rally—talking to a group devoted to service as if it valued self-interest.

Donald Trump continued his ongoing tour of cherished American institutions on Monday night, delivering yet another jarringly partisan speech to an apolitical audience—this one, comprising tens of thousands still too young to vote.

During the campaign, his performance at the Al Smith dinner—where presidential candidates roast their rivals and themselves every four years—devolved into overt attacks on his opponent. Shortly after his election, he stunned CIA employees by delivering a campaign-style stump speech before the agency’s Memorial Wall. On Saturday, he surprised the crowd of uniformed personnel at the commissioning of the USS Gerald R. Ford by imploring them to lobby Congress in support of his agenda.

A Syrian couple presents their newly issued German registration documents. — Wolfgang Rattay / Reuters

Why Germany's New Muslims Go to Mosque Less

Alice Su

Far from trying to “Islamicize” the country, some Syrian refugees find its version of Islam too conservative for their taste.

Germany has welcomed more than a million refugees and asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries since 2015, more than any other European country. The issue of their integration has provided fodder for far-right voices in German politics, who used incidents like the 2016 attack at Berlin’s Christmas market and New Year’s sexual assaults in Cologne to suggest that Muslim newcomers are a threat to Western society. At the height of Europe’s refugee crisis, the extremist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) polled at 15 percent, drawing heavily on fear of refugees and rhetoric against the “Islamicization” of Germany.

But this isn’t the first time Germany has experienced a large Muslim influx. Before 2015, Germany was already home to some 4 million Muslims, mostly Turks who came 60 years ago to help rebuild the country after World War II. Many are poorly integrated into German society, living in social enclaves within big cities where they speak more Turkish than German and attend mosques run by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), an organization linked directly to Turkey’s government authority for religious affairs.

A sign advertising the voter-fraud commission outside of its first meeting — Andrew Harnik / AP

What's the Real Goal of Trump's Voter-Fraud Commission?

Vann R. Newkirk II

A conversation with Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of three Democrats advising the president on “election integrity”

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity had its first official meeting last week, launching its agenda amid widespread controversy about Vice Chair Kris Kobach’s request for all 50 states’ individual voter data, and while facing seven federal lawsuits related to that request.

Although the stated mission of the group, as outlined in President Trump’s May executive order, is to “study the registration and voting processes used in federal elections,” the public outcry against the commission has come from fear that it would use overblown charges of voter fraud to encourage or even create widespread voter-suppression programs. The first meeting went roughly the way detractors expected it would: Voter fraud was the center of discussion among the most prominent attendees, though several state elections officials there expressed concern about less sensational issues, like voting equipment and automatic registration. (There is no proof of widespread in-person voter fraud or noncitizen voting.)