'Cyrus' at SXSW: When the Camera Upstages the Acting

President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions — Evan Vucci / AP

The Inadvisable President

David A. Graham

Donald Trump is an impossible boss, demanding absolute personal loyalty—even when it conflicts with the law or other key principles—and offering little faithfulness in return.

Maybe it should come as little surprise that a man who, until summer of 2015, was most famous for firing people, is not a good boss. Yet President Trump’s comments Wednesday about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, delivered in an interview with The New York Times, still take one’s breath away.

“Look, Sessions gets the job. Right after he gets the job, he recuses himself,” Trump said. “So Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself. I then have—which, frankly, I think is very unfair to the president. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president.”

Anything They Can Do, Trump Can Do Better

Peter Beinart

No matter what the subject, the president finds someone to compare himself to. And in every comparison, he comes out the winner.

The transcript of Donald Trump’s interview yesterday with the New York Times runs over 7,000 words. But you can boil down its essence to two words: I’m better. No matter what the subject, Trump finds someone to compare himself to. And in every comparison, he comes out the winner.

The Times reporters start the interview by asking Trump about health care, where the Senate—by refusing to even vote on a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare—has handed him a major defeat. Trump doesn’t admit any mistakes. He barely mentions the substance of the bill. Instead, he immediately compares himself to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In the fourth sentence of the interview, he declares that, “Hillary Clinton worked eight years in the White House with her husband as president and having majorities and couldn’t get it done.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gestures while speaking at a July news conference on Capitol Hill. — Andrew Harnik / AP

What the GOP Doesn't Understand About Its Own Voters

Ronald Brownstein

When it comes to health care and entitlements, the party’s policies don't always align with its coalition’s beliefs.

The Senate Republican health-care bill has been repeatedly crushed in a slow-motion collision between the party’s historic ideology and the interests of its modern electoral coalition. Yet congressional Republicans appear determined to plow right through the wreckage.

Even as the Senate’s latest effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act collapsed on Tuesday, the House Republican leadership released a 10-year federal-budget blueprint that points them toward a similar confrontation, between their dominant small-government dogma and the economic needs of their increasingly blue-collar and older white base.

John F. Kennedy famously said that failure is an orphan. But the failure, at least for now, of the GOP drive against the ACA has many parents. One was a distracted and ineffectual President Trump. Even higher on the list sits Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who displayed a blinding hubris that will forever cloud his previous reputation for legislative wizardry. Operating with unprecedented secrecy and insularity, McConnell degraded Senate tradition by refusing to hold any public hearings or committee votes on the legislation. His closed-door process provoked not only unified opposition from Democrats, but also every major medical stakeholder. He sought to pressure dissenting senators with unrealistic vote deadlines—then retreated as they repeatedly called his bluff.

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.

A library at Harvard is shown from afar with the lawn stretching in front of it — Charles Krupa / AP

Why Whites and Asians Have Different Views on Personal Success

Alia Wong

A new study explores why the latter are far more likely to opt for an elite college where they'd struggle than a so-so one where they'd excel.

There’s a saying in China that it’s better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of a phoenix. The premise of the aphorism—it’s better to be over-qualified than under-qualified relative to one’s surroundings—is so widely accepted that similar versions of it exist across cultures. In Japan, they tend to say that it’s better to be the head of a sardine than the tail of a whale. Americans and Brits often declare that it’s better to be a big frog (or fish) in a small pond than a little frog in a big pond.

Extensive research supports these axioms, particularly in the realm of education. Longitudinal studies have consistently shown that high-performing students at less-selective schools feel more competent, have higher GPAs, and have more ambitious career aspirations than low-performing students at more-selective schools.

A woman wearing a burqini walks in the water on a beach in France. — Reuters

The Dilemma of the Burqini

Shadi Hamid

Is there any right way to react to the swimwear?

I didn’t associate Massachusetts beaches with burqinis—or with Muslims, for that matter. But my family and I were on vacation, and there was a woman in the water wearing the full-body swimsuit. Next to me on the beach, two friends were talking somewhat loudly. The woman said, “That’s what they were trying to do in France”—ban burqinis. Her friend responded nonchalantly, as if he couldn’t imagine anyone else thinking otherwise: “Yeah, that’s so culturally insensitive.” He quickly connected this to President Trump, saying that we were becoming a “meaner” country, presumably like France.

I smiled. This was why I liked, and even loved, the modern liberal instinct, however naïve and unsophisticated: It was bad to be mean to people with different beliefs. We don’t necessarily know why, or perhaps we can’t articulate the political theory behind it, but we feel it, especially now that the man some of us dislike so vehemently seems to us to dislike Muslims himself.

A picture of California Representative Dana Rohrabacher. — Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

A Top Rohrabacher Aide Is Ousted After Russia Revelations

Rosie Gray

Paul Behrends, a controversial staffer associated with the California congressman’s pro-Russia stances, was pushed out of his role on a subcommittee after questions were raised about a recent trip to Moscow.

Paul Behrends, a top aide to Representative Dana Rohrabacher, has been ousted from his role as staff director for the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that Rohrabacher chairs, after stories appeared in the press highlighting his relationships with pro-Russia lobbyists.

“Paul Behrends no longer works at the committee,” a House Foreign Affairs Committee spokesperson said on Wednesday evening.

Behrends accompanied Rohrabacher on a 2016 trip to Moscow in which Rohrabacher said he received anti-Magnitsky Act materials from prosecutors. The Magnitsky Act is a 2012 bill that imposes sanctions on Russian officials associated with the 2009 death in prison of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who had been investigating tax fraud. Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian attorney and lobbyist who met with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower last year, reportedly brought up the Magintsky Act during the meeting.

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.

Marion Tinsley, the world's greatest checkers player — AP / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

How Checkers Was Solved

Alexis C. Madrigal

The story of a duel between two men, one who dies, and the nature of the quest to build artificial intelligence

Marion Tinsley—math professor, minister, and the best checkers player in the world—sat across a game board from a computer, dying.

Tinsley had been the world’s best for 40 years, a time during which he'd lost a handful of games to humans, but never a match. It's possible no single person had ever dominated a competitive pursuit the way Tinsley dominated checkers. But this was a different sort of competition, the Man-Machine World Championship.

His opponent was Chinook, a checkers-playing program programmed by Jonathan Schaeffer, a round, frizzy-haired professor from the University of Alberta, who operated the machine. Through obsessive work, Chinook had become very good. It hadn't lost a game in its last 125—and since they’d come close to defeating Tinsley in 1992, Schaeffer’s team had spent thousands of hours perfecting his machine.

Bruce Willis, star of <i>The Fifth Element</i> — Columbia / Gaumont

How The Fifth Element Subverted Sci-Fi Movies

David Sims

Twenty years ago, Luc Besson’s visually stunning film hinged its story not on action or violence, but on love.

The most radical element of Luc Besson’s 1997 space opera The Fifth Element is not the absurdly opulent future-costumes designed by Jean Paul Gaultier. It isn’t the bizarre Southern twang of the Hitler haircut-sporting villain Zorg (Gary Oldman), nor is it Chris Tucker’s performance as an intergalactic sex symbol who hosts a radio show. It’s that Bruce Willis cries at the opera. In budget, in scale, and in casting, The Fifth Element feels like any other big Hollywood sci-fi movie, featuring popular English-speaking actors running around a high-concept world, complete with lavish sets and CGI effects. But not many blockbusters would let its male star weep at a musical performance.

That set piece comes in the middle of the film as Willis’s character, Korben Dallas, a gun-wielding space cowboy with spiked, peroxide-blonde hair, takes in a show by the blue alien singer Diva Plavalaguna (Maïwenn). Besson’s film has, up until now, been a relentless blitz of action, as Korben follows the mysterious Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) across the galaxy to help retrieve mystical stones that will help her save the world from a great, encroaching evil. But for a second, the movie grinds to a halt, letting Korben take in the extraterrestrial songstress’s solo with tears in his eyes.