The Worst Producer on the Mic

A pneumatic-tube station in the Sears, Roebuck & Company mail-order plant in Chicago — Library of Congress

The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing

Derek Thompson

One hundred years ago, a retail giant that shipped millions of products by mail moved swiftly into the brick-and-mortar business, changing it forever. Is that happening again?

Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores. This summer, it bought Whole Foods and its 400 grocery locations. And last week, the company announced a partnership with Kohl’s to allow returns at the physical retailer’s stores.

Why is Amazon looking more and more like an old-fashioned retailer? The company’s do-it-all corporate strategy adheres to a familiar playbook—that of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Sears might seem like a zombie today, but it’s easy to forget how transformative the company was exactly 100 years ago, when it, too, was capitalizing on a mail-to-consumer business to establish a physical retail presence.

Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner, and Khloe Kardashian during the 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians' 10-year-anniversary special — E!

The Sadness of the Kardashians

Sophie Gilbert

E!’s 10-year-anniversary special celebrating its flagship family was surprisingly honest and strangely tragic.

On Friday, as Puerto Rico contended with the aftermath of a hurricane that had left much of the island without power, and North Korea threatened to detonate a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean, the internet-gossip complex grappled instead with the momentous news that an unmarried 20-year-old reality star was pregnant. Kylie Jenner, TMZ reported, the youngest scion of the Kardashian family, had been telling friends that she and her boyfriend, the rapper Travis Scott, were going to have a baby. Unidentified family friends promptly confirmed the news to People. And some fans began to wonder—had Kylie’s mother, Kris Jenner, leaked the news herself to boost the ratings for E!’s Sunday night 10-year-anniversary special of Keeping Up With the Kardashians?

Disconnected by Disaster—Photos From a Battered Puerto Rico

Alan Taylor

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer.

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer. Most of the U.S. territory currently has no electricity or running water, fewer than 250 of the island’s 1,600 cellphone towers are operational, and damaged ports, roads, and airports are slowing the arrival and transport of aid. Communication has been severely limited and some remote towns are only now being contacted. Jenniffer Gonzalez, the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, told the Associated Press that Hurricane Maria has set the island back decades.

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.

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.”

Kneeling for Life and Liberty Is Patriotic

Conor Friedersdorf

NFL athletes are protesting on behalf of America’s founding values––and Donald Trump neither loves nor understands them.

Donald Trump, who has a disturbing history of praising brutal dictators, possesses no better than a Twitter troll’s understanding of what it means to be an American patriot. He spent the weekend trolling the NFL over the players protesting police violence during the national anthem, though any other president would have been attending to the millions of fellow citizens suffering in Puerto Rico; and the NFL athletes who defied him by taking a knee Sunday in solidarity with protests against police killings had the high ground, as good students of American history will understand.

When the Founding Fathers affixed their signatures to the Declaration of Independence, the first act of political courage in United States history, the American flag as we know it did not yet exist. And it would be more than a century before the Star Spangled Banner was adopted as the national anthem. Yet the Founders were not deficient in love of country for lacking the Stars and Stripes. In bravely dissolving political bonds with Britain, Thomas Jefferson set forth the premise of the United States, the core ideas around which his countrymen rallied: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Donald Trump throws a Pittsburgh Steelers "Terrible Towel" at a rally in Pennsylvania in November 2016. — Mark Makela / Reuters

How Trump Turns Unpopular Outbursts Into Political Winners

David A. Graham

The president has already backed down from his most strident attacks on athletes and adopted a less controversial celebration of the American flag.

After spending the weekend picking fights with the two best basketball players in the world, President Trump woke up Monday morning in a more contemplative, jingoistic mood—shifting both his emphasis and his tone.

The issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race. It is about respect for our Country, Flag and National Anthem. NFL must respect this!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 25, 2017

So proud of NASCAR and its supporters and fans. They won't put up with disrespecting our Country or our Flag - they said it loud and clear!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 25, 2017

#StandForOurAnthem
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 25, 2017

These missives fit with the way Trump often handles his many feuds and crises, starting from an extreme position and then slowly groping toward one where he can find popular support. While the fights that the president picks are often comically unpredictable—if you had “Twitter fight with Steph Curry and LeBron James” on your presidential bingo card for the weekend, step up to the table to take your winnings—but the way that he conducts himself, having chosen a fight, seems to display a pattern.

President Trump holds up a New England Patriots jersey during an event honoring the Super Bowl champions at the White House on April 19, 2017 — Joshua Roberts / Reuters

Trump's Red Light Letter to the NFL

Matthew Algeo

The alliance between presidents and sports was perhaps the last fully functioning bipartisan tradition left in Washington. This weekend, Trump blew it up.

It’s hard to imagine Major League Baseball inviting President Trump to throw out a ceremonial first pitch before any World Series games next month. And he definitely won’t be tossing the coin before the Super Bowl next February. Over the weekend, Trump ignited a firestorm in the sports world by harshly criticizing the NFL for failing to punish players who take a knee during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then he withdrew his invitation to Stephen Curry of the NBA champion Golden State Warriors to visit the White House because Curry was “hesitating” about accepting the invitation. Curry’s teammates subsequently announced that none of them would go to the White House but instead would use the team’s February trip to Washington to “celebrate equality, diversity, and inclusion.” On Saturday night, an Oakland A’s catcher Bruce Maxwell became the first MLB player to take a knee during the anthem. On Sunday morning, Trump was back at it, calling on fans to boycott NFL games.

Trump's Shocking Recklessness

James Fallows

The president’s latest comments shouldn’t be surprising—but his deliberate inflammation of tense situations is no less stunning.

During last year’s presidential campaign, I conducted a running feature called the “Trump Time Capsule.” Its purpose was to chronicle the things Donald Trump said or did that were entirely outside the range of previous presidents or major-party nominees. This, in turn, was meant to lay down a record of what was known about this man, as the electorate decided whether to elevate him to presidential power.

By the time the campaign ended, the series had reached installment #152. Who Donald Trump was, and is, was absolutely clear by election day: ignorant, biased, narcissistic, dishonest. As Ta-Nehisi Coates argues in our current issue, everyone who voted for him did so with ample evidence about the kind of person they considered the “better” choice, or even as a minimally acceptable choice for president. Almost nothing Trump has done since taking office should come as a surprise.

Rohingya refugees wait to receive aid in Cox's Bazar. — Cathal McNaughton / Reuters

The Misunderstood Roots of Burma's Rohingya Crisis

Krishnadev Calamur

“This fear is very deeply felt and not understood in the West—and it comes from a real place rooted in history.”

Over the past month, a crackdown by Burma’s military has forced more than 400,000 Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine state to flee to neighboring Bangladesh in what the UN human-rights chief has called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” The military crackdown was prompted by an attack August 25th by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a Muslim militant group with reported links to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, on security outposts.

The international community has condemned the violence unleashed by the Burmese military on Rohingya civilians. It has also voiced sharp criticism of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate and de-facto Burmese leader, for, in the view of her critics, not doing enough to protect the Rohingya, who have been stateless for more than three decades. But where humanitarian groups and Western nations see the world’s most persecuted minority, the government of Burma (also known as Myanmar) and an overwhelming majority of its people see a foreign group with a separatist agenda, fueled by Islam, and funded from overseas. It’s this difference in perception that will make any resolution of the Rohingya issue extremely difficult.