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All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family

My Family’s Slave

Alex Tizon

She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.

The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4. But a new clinical approach offers hope.

This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

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At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

What Defenders of Trump's Right to Fire Comey Are Missing

David Frum

The question isn’t whether a president can directly control the bureau—it’s whether other institutions, and the public, are going to let him get away with it.

Donald Trump is leading this country into new and dark places. At each new reveal, administration critics ask their version of the question satirically posed by Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che playing NBC’s Lester Holt: “Did I get him? It’s all over?” But no, as the punchline confirms, it’s not over—and a fascinating Friday Twitter exchange shows why not.

I eagerly await the flood of experts explaining why Donald Trump firing Comey to obstruct justice is not obstruction of justice. 😐
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) May 19, 2017

Because a president has the unreviewable authority to fire the Director for any reason. https://t.co/i5GtW1mqye
— Alan Dershowitz (@AlanDersh) May 19, 2017

Famed defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz has emerged as one of Donald Trump’s most full-throated defenders first in the Russia matter, then in the Comey firing. In so doing, he has devised a bold argument, already rapidly being taken to heart by other Trump defenders: an astonishing and novel claim of the president’s absolute personal control over the FBI.

Trump Isn't the President Israel Was Hoping For

Gregg Carlstrom

Instead, the Netanyahu government is nervous about the new administration.

In Tel Aviv on Monday, Donald Trump will not receive a gleaming gold medal or join a boisterous sword dance. But his 28-hour stop in the Holy Land should have been the highlight of his first foreign tour as president of the United States. Israel’s ruling right-wing greeted his election with glee, and for good reason: The new president seemed ready to fulfill its deepest wishes.

During Trump’s campaign and transition, he vowed to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. (The United States, like most countries, keeps its mission in Tel Aviv to avoid wading into the dispute over the contested holy city.) He nominated a U.S. ambassador, bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman, who supports Israeli settlements—not only in his words, but as the president of a foundation that donated millions to Beit El, an ideological settlement outside of Ramallah. Trump said he would be open to a one-state solution, a statement that seemed to casually discard decades of bipartisan U.S. policy. Several hawkish lawmakers even started drafting a bill to annex large chunks of the West Bank, a step that would permanently foreclose a two-state outcome. “The era of a Palestinian state is over,” Naftali Bennett, the leader of the pro-settler Jewish Home party, cheered at the time. “Obama is history. Now we have Trump,” Miri Regev, Israel’s populist culture minister, declared.

How People Decide Whether to Have Children

Olga Khazan

A guide for those on the fence

Isabel Caliva and her husband, Frank, had already “kicked the can down the road.” The can, in their case, was the kid conversation; the road was Caliva’s fertile years. Frank had always said he wanted lots of kids. Caliva, who was in her early 30s, thought maybe one or two would be nice, but she was mostly undecided. They had a nice life, with plenty of free time that allowed for trips to Portugal, Paris, and Hawaii.

“I wasn’t feeling the pull the same way my friends were describing,” she told me recently. “I thought, maybe this isn’t gonna be the thing for me. Maybe it’s just going to be the two of us.”

At times, she wondered if her lack of baby fever should be cause for concern. She took her worries to the Internet, where she came across a post on the Rumpus’ “Dear Sugar” advice column titled, “The Ghost Ship that Didn’t Carry Us.” The letter was from a 41-year-old man who was also on the fence about kids: “Things like quiet, free time, spontaneous travel, pockets of non-obligation,” he wrote. “I really value them.”

洛拉：我家的奴隶

Alex Tizon

她与我们家人一起生活了五十六年。她带大了我和我的兄弟姐妹，从早到晚做饭做清洁，从来没有工资。十一岁的我，一个典型的美国孩子，意识到她其实是我们家的奴隶。

她的骨灰装满了一个黑色塑料盒子，如烤面包机一般大小，重三磅半。去年七月，我用一个帆布口袋把这个盒子包起来，装在行李箱里，横越太平洋，飞去了马尼拉。我要从那里坐车去一个小乡村，去把这个在我家为奴五十六年的女人的骨灰交出去。

The Poisoned Generation

Vann R. Newkirk II

The story of a decades-long lead-poisoning lawsuit in New Orleans illustrates how the toxin destroys black families and communities alike.

Casey Billieson was fighting against the world.

Hers was a charge carried by many mothers: moving mountains to make the best future for her two sons. But the mountains she faced were taller than most. To start, she had to raise her boys in the Lafitte housing projects in Treme, near the epicenter of a crime wave in New Orleans. In the spring of 1994, like mothers in violent cities the world over, Billieson anticipated the bloom in murders the thaw would bring. Fueled by the drug trade and a rising scourge of police corruption and brutality, violence rose to unseen levels that year, and the city’s murder rate surged to the highest in the country.

Four hundred and twenty four people were slain in New Orleans in 1994, a murder rate that may have been the highest ever in any American city. Rival drug dealers killed each other while cops killed witnesses and whistleblowers in plain sight. Almost 1 percent of all young black men in the city were killed that year. Many of those murders were committed in the yards and units near where her sons, Ryan and Ronnie—then aged 5 and 3 years old—played or stayed with relatives and friends. Even as a Bill Clinton-led federal government used popular fears of “superpredators” to redouble the nation’s commitment to mass incarceration, Billieson attempted the superhuman task of trying to provide her children with a way out of Lafitte.

An Apple employee poses with a personal computer in 1986. — Corbis Historical / Getty

How Business Casual Became a Thing

Deirdre Clemente

The American office was, until a few decades ago, the last stronghold of fashion formality. Silicon Valley changed that.

Americans began the 20th century in bustles and bowler hats and ended it in velour sweatsuits and flannel shirts—the most radical shift in dress standards in human history. At the center of this sartorial revolution was business casual, a genre of dress that broke the last bastion of formality—office attire—to redefine the American wardrobe.

Born in Silicon Valley in the early-1980s, business casual consists of khaki pants, sensible shoes, and button-down collared shirts. By the time it was mainstream, in the 1990s, it flummoxed HR managers and employees alike. “Welcome to the confusing world of business casual,” declared a fashion writer for the Chicago Tribune in 1995. With time and some coaching, people caught on. Today, though, the term “business casual” is nearly obsolete for describing the clothing of a workforce that includes many who work from home in yoga pants, put on a clean T-shirt for a Skype meeting, and don’t always go into the office.

The Punishing Reality of White House Investigations

Russell Riley

Firsthand accounts from the Clinton White House during Kenneth Starr’s inquiry may offer a preview of what’s to come for President Trump’s staff.

If Donald Trump’s staff thinks that life in the White House has been hard the last four months, they ain’t seen nothing yet.

From Watergate to the Valerie Plame affair, the layering of a major independent investigation on top of the normal travails of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has always added an excruciating set of complications to one of the world’s most challenging work environments. Now that former FBI Director Robert Mueller has taken over the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, current White House staffers are joining this exclusive, if undesirable, club. Perhaps the best way to see how the administration’s inner life will look in the coming months is to reflect back on a presidency that was practically defined by such investigations: Bill Clinton’s.

So, What Was the Deal With the Orb?

Krishnadev Calamur

An image of the president inaugurating a counterterrorism center with the Saudi and Egyptian leaders went viral.

President Trump’s visit this weekend to Saudi Arabia was largely hailed as a success: He appeared to enjoy himself on his first foreign trip as president; he announced billions in Saudi investment in the U.S.; and his speech on terrorism was well received. But it was one photograph Sunday that got much of the attention online:

#Trump's encounter with glowing orb sets social media alight https://t.co/XRQbrnWYyi pic.twitter.com/jYakYVLmNz
— The Straits Times (@STcom) May 22, 2017

In the image, Trump, Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz, and Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi have their hand on an orb that lit up upon their touch, an image that immediately drew humorous comparisons online with comic-book villains, Star Wars protagonists, and Star Trek mind control—not to mention references to the Illuminati and Lord of the Rings. Saudi news reports set the record straight, saying the illuminated orb was, in fact, a globe, and that by placing their hands on it, the three leaders “officially activated the” Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology in Riyadh, a facility that will monitor extremist messaging in real time.

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Paul Rosenfeld

A wealthy white lawyer has spent 16 years and millions of dollars turning the Whitney Plantation into a memorial to the nation's past.

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Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

Tynesha Foreman and Nicolas Pollock

New data and analysis from PRRI and The Atlantic suggests that it was cultural anxiety more than economic distress that fueled white, working-class support for Trump.

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Church Militant: A Right-Wing Media Empire in the Making

Daniel Lombroso

A Catholic news outlet is fighting to save Americans from sin, while its founder grapples with his own complicated past.

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Just Like Music

About the Author

Most Popular

My Family’s Slave

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

What Defenders of Trump's Right to Fire Comey Are Missing

Trump Isn't the President Israel Was Hoping For

How People Decide Whether to Have Children

洛拉：我家的奴隶

The Poisoned Generation

How Business Casual Became a Thing

The Punishing Reality of White House Investigations

So, What Was the Deal With the Orb?

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

Church Militant: A Right-Wing Media Empire in the Making

Just Like Music

Latest Video

Trump Scandals Are Good for Putin

About the Author

Most Popular

My Family’s Slave

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

What Defenders of Trump's Right to Fire Comey Are Missing

Trump Isn't the President Israel Was Hoping For

How People Decide Whether to Have Children

洛拉：我家的奴隶

The Poisoned Generation

How Business Casual Became a Thing

The Punishing Reality of White House Investigations

So, What Was the Deal With the Orb?

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

Church Militant: A Right-Wing Media Empire in the Making