Comic Belief

Boys Are Not Defective

Amanda Ripley

Girls in the Middle East do better than boys in school by a greater margin than almost anywhere else in the world: a case study in motivation, mixed messages, and the condition of boys everywhere.

Jordan has never had a female minister of education, women make up less than a fifth of its workforce, and women hold just 4 percent of board seats at public companies there. But, in school, Jordanian girls are crushing their male peers. The nation’s girls outperform its boys in just about every subject and at every age level. At the University of Jordan, the country’s largest university, women outnumber men by a ratio of two to one—and earn higher grades in math, engineering, computer-information systems, and a range of other subjects.

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

In fact, across the Arab world, women now earn more science degrees on a percentage basis than women in the United States. In Saudi Arabia alone, women earn half of all science degrees. And yet, most of those women are unlikely to put their degrees to paid use for very long.

How the Rest of the World Heard Trump's UN Speech

Krishnadev Calamur

Even Iran, with its abysmal human-rights record, feels comfortable criticizing the U.S.

Updated on Thursday, September 21, at 7:08 a.m.

In his sovereignty-centric speech Tuesday to the UN General Assembly, President Donald Trump threatened to “totally destroy North Korea”; called Iran “a corrupt dictatorship” whose “chief exports are violence, bloodshed, and chaos”; and said Venezuela’s government “has inflicted terrible pain and suffering on the good people of that country.”

The remarks have prompted the expected reactions from Iran, whose foreign minister called it an “ignorant hate speech [that] belongs in medieval times,” and Venezuela’s foreign minister, who countered: “Trump is not the president of the world ... he cannot even manage his own government.” North Korea, whose nuclear-weapons and missile programs have raised tensions with its neighbors and the U.S., called it a “dog’s bark.”

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.”

Jimmy Kimmel interviews Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, about health care, in May — ABC / YouTube

The Anger of Jimmy Kimmel

Megan Garber

On Tuesday, the late-night host once again devoted his show to the politics of American health care. This time, though, he offered indignation rather than tears.

“By the way, before you post a nasty Facebook message saying I’m politicizing my son’s health problems, I want you to know: I am politicizing my son’s health problems.”

That was Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday evening, in a monologue reacting to the introduction of Graham-Cassidy, the (latest) bill that seeks to replace the Affordable Care Act. Kimmel had talked about health care on his show before, in May—when, after his newborn son had undergone open-heart surgery to repair the damage of a congenital heart defect, he delivered a tearfully personal monologue sharing the experience of going through that—and acknowledging that he and his family were lucky: They could afford the surgery, whatever it might cost. Kimmel concluded his speech by, yes, politicizing his son’s health problems: He emphasized how important it is for lower- and middle-class families to have comprehensive insurance coverage, with protections for people with preexisting conditions. “No parent,” he said, speaking through tears, “should ever have to decide if they can afford to save their child’s life. It shouldn’t happen.”

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.

President Trump speaks during the United Nations General Assembly. — Seth Wenig / AP

Trump's Indecisive, Ill-Prepared Debut at the United Nations

Thomas Wright

The meaning of Trump’s fire and fury foreign policy.

Above all else, President Donald Trump wants the world to see him as strong. He has repeatedly described himself as “militaristic,” and his cabinet as a group of “killers.” He relishes saying the supposedly unsayable. When he spoke at the UN General Assembly yesterday, he surely wanted his listeners to be awed by his toughness. Better, as Machiavelli said, to be feared than loved.

Trump’s team loaded his speech with harsh words and phrases. He promised to destroy North Korea if attacked. He called the Iran nuclear deal an embarrassment. He rejected globalism and spoke at length about the benefits of sovereignty, nationalism, and patriotism.

But when one moves beyond the image Trump tries to project and looks at the consequences of his words, things look quite different. His UN speech was one of the least effective, weakest, and indecisive ever given by an American president. It’s not that it failed against some arbitrary standard set by the foreign-policy establishment he despises. It failed on its own terms. And how it failed tells us something important about where his foreign policy is headed.

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous

Gabrielle Glaser

Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in the United States. But researchers have debunked central tenets of AA doctrine and found dozens of other treatments more effective.

J.G. is a lawyer in his early 30s. He’s a fast talker and has the lean, sinewy build of a distance runner. His choice of profession seems preordained, as he speaks in fully formed paragraphs, his thoughts organized by topic sentences. He’s also a worrier—a big one—who for years used alcohol to soothe his anxiety.

J.G. started drinking at 15, when he and a friend experimented in his parents’ liquor cabinet. He favored gin and whiskey but drank whatever he thought his parents would miss the least. He discovered beer, too, and loved the earthy, bitter taste on his tongue when he took his first cold sip.

His drinking increased through college and into law school. He could, and occasionally did, pull back, going cold turkey for weeks at a time. But nothing quieted his anxious mind like booze, and when he didn’t drink, he didn’t sleep. After four or six weeks dry, he’d be back at the liquor store.

Kris Kobach and President Trump at a meeting in July — Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

A Trump Nominee's Illegal Vote Exposes the Voter-Fraud Charade

David A. Graham

Jeffrey Gerrish’s decision to cast a ballot in Virginia isn’t so much a gotcha on him as it is on the president’s voter-fraud commission.

Jeffrey Gerrish made a mistake. Not a big one, although he did break the law. But it’s a mistake many people make, and for the most part, they aren’t called out by the Senate Finance Committee and in the pages of The New York Times.

Most of the people who make the error, however, are not nominees of a president who has alleged that there were 3 to 5 million fraudulent votes cast in the 2016 election, or who empaneled a commission to consider voter fraud that is on a dubious hunt to try to validate that wild, unsubstantiated claim. Jeffrey Gerrish, however, is President Trump’s nominee to be deputy U.S. trade representative, so it happens that investigators realized he cast his vote in the 2016 election in Virginia, even though he had moved to Maryland—a far less competitive state in national elections.

Does Aung San Suu Kyi Still Deserve a Nobel Prize?

David A. Graham

As she presides over the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims, the Burmese leader stands to lose her status as secular saint.

Like most stories out of Burma, the recent spate of ethnic cleansing of a Muslim minority sect would be unlikely to receive much Western attention—were it not for Aung San Suu Kyi, the dissident-turned-de-facto-ruler. But unlike in the past, the stories about her are not so flattering now. In fact, they seem directly at odds with the moral leadership that won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.

That prize, and her quiet perseverance (including years of house arrest) against Burma’s ruling military junta, turned Suu Kyi into something resembling a secular saint. Yet now that she has risen to power, and the Burmese state that she leads appears to be overseeing the bloody removal of Rohingya Muslims, her legacy seems different. What happens when a Nobel Peace Prize winner oversees a government committing atrocities?

How the Hotel Industry Views Its Future (and Airbnb)

Joe Pinsker

A conversation with the editor of Hotels, a trade publication covering full-service and luxury lodging

When Jeff Weinstein stays at a hotel, he is no average guest. Every little detail gets his attention. He notices the finishes on the furniture and scrutinizes the room’s layout. “If I’m having a meal, I might turn over the plate to see what manufacturer they’re using for porcelain,” he says.

Weinstein is cued into such minutiae because it is his job to be. He is the editor of Hotels, a trade publication covering full-service and luxury hotels—think Hilton, not Motel 6.

That industry is a mix of large, big-name companies (like Hyatt and the Four Seasons) and smaller boutique brands. The former are dominant, but, Weinstein says, there is room for upstarts; for instance, the gym operator Equinox is preparing to launch a fitness-themed hotel brand.

‘It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness'

Tynesha Foreman, Nicolas Pollock, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg

Ta-Nehisi Coates explores how the 2016 election was a reaction to Obama’s presidency.

Watch Video

How Just Six Words Can Spark Conversation About Race in America

Nicolas Pollock and Sophia Myszkowski

Michele Norris has created an archive of more than 50,000 stories about race and identity.

Watch Video

When In-Person Conversation Is Better Than Texting

Nicolas Pollock and Brianna Pressey

Sherry Turkle, the Director of the MIT “Initiative on Technology and Self,” discusses the relationship between talking in real life and cultivating empathy.

Watch Video

Comic Belief

About the Author

Most Popular

Boys Are Not Defective

How the Rest of the World Heard Trump's UN Speech

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

The Anger of Jimmy Kimmel

The First White President

Trump's Indecisive, Ill-Prepared Debut at the United Nations

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous

A Trump Nominee's Illegal Vote Exposes the Voter-Fraud Charade

Does Aung San Suu Kyi Still Deserve a Nobel Prize?

How the Hotel Industry Views Its Future (and Airbnb)

‘It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness'

How Just Six Words Can Spark Conversation About Race in America

When In-Person Conversation Is Better Than Texting

Comic Belief

Latest Video

How Just Six Words Can Spark Conversation About Race in America

About the Author

Most Popular

Boys Are Not Defective

How the Rest of the World Heard Trump's UN Speech

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

The Anger of Jimmy Kimmel

The First White President

Trump's Indecisive, Ill-Prepared Debut at the United Nations

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous

A Trump Nominee's Illegal Vote Exposes the Voter-Fraud Charade

Does Aung San Suu Kyi Still Deserve a Nobel Prize?

How the Hotel Industry Views Its Future (and Airbnb)

‘It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness'

How Just Six Words Can Spark Conversation About Race in America

When In-Person Conversation Is Better Than Texting