'Modern Family': How to Give a Middle School Graduation Speech

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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., is yet to respond.

France's President Defies Trump at the UN

Uri Friedman

“If the world’s major powers can’t agree on what the UN is for, what does that mean for its future?”

Since the Second World War, American presidents have repeatedly gone before the United Nations General Assembly and made a similar argument: The United States has national interests just like any other country, but in the modern era those interests are increasingly international in scope and shared by people around the world, requiring more of the multilateral cooperation that the UN was founded to foster.

John F. Kennedy argued that nuclear weapons necessitated “one world and one human race, with one common destiny” guarded by one “world security system,” since “absolute sovereignty no longer assures us of absolute security.” Richard Nixon spoke of a “world interest” in reducing economic inequality, protecting the environment, and upholding international law, declaring that the “profoundest national interest of our time” is the “preservation of peace” through international structures like the UN. In rejecting tribalism and the walling-off of nations, Barack Obama asserted that “giving up some freedom of action—not giving up our ability to protect ourselves or pursue our core interests, but binding ourselves to international rules over the long term—enhances our security.” These presidents practiced what they preached to varying degrees, and there’s long been a debate in the United States about the extent to which America’s sovereign powers should be ceded to international organizations, but in broad strokes the case for global engagement was consistent.

President Donald Trump is shown on a large screen. — Eduardo Munoz / Reuters

A Presidential Misunderstanding of Deterrence

Ankit Panda

Trump’s bellicosity undermines his ability to deter the Kim regime’s nuclear weapons and missiles programs.

How are we to make sense of the president of the United States—a man with unitary launch authority for over a thousand nuclear weapons—going before the United Nations General Assembly and threatening to annihilate a sovereign state? That’s exactly what President Donald Trump did on Tuesday, halfway into a long, winding speech on everything from sovereignty to UN funding. “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” Trump read carefully from his teleprompter. In one breath, he touted the virtues of the nation-state and sovereignty and, in another, promised the utter destruction of a sovereign state.

The Real Losers of the Graham-Cassidy Health-Care Bill

Vann R. Newkirk II

The bill would take funding from governments facing public-health crises to provide a short-term boon to a smaller number of states that have refused to expand Medicaid.

“Obamacare, for whatever reason, favors four blue states against the rest of us.” So South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, in a floor speech on Monday, defended the central rationale of his Obamacare replacement, the Graham-Cassidy bill. In that speech and other statements, Graham has cast his bill as a redistribution, taking federal Obamacare money poured into the liberal bastions of California, New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland, and giving some of it to cash-strapped red states that have been left out, and whose sicker populations have languished. In this telling, Graham is Robin Hood, and his co-sponsors Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Dean Heller of Nevada, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin are his merry men.

President Donald Trump steps up to deliver his address to the United Nations General Assembly. — Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

A Radical Rebuke of Barack Obama's Foreign Policy Legacy

Peter Beinart

Donald Trump used his first address at the United Nations to redefine the idea of sovereignty.

Donald Trump’s first speech to the United Nations can best be understood as a response to his predecessor’s final one. On September 20, 2016, Barack Obama told the UN General Assembly that “at this moment we all face a choice. We can choose to press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration. Or we can retreat into a world sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict, along age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion.”

Three hundred and sixty-four days later, Trump delivered America’s answer: Option number two. His speech on Tuesday turned Obama’s on its head. Obama focused on overcoming the various challenges—poverty, economic dislocation, bigotry, extremism—that impede global “integration,” a term he used nine times. Trump didn’t use the term once. Obama used the word “international” 14 times, always positively (“international norms,” “international cooperation,” “international rules,” “international community”). Trump used it three times, in each case negatively (“unaccountable international tribunals,” “international criminal networks,” “the assassination of the dictator's brother using banned nerve agents in an international airport”) Obama warned of a world “sharply divided… along age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion.” Trump replied by praising “sovereignty” or invoking “sovereign” no fewer than 19 times. And while he didn’t explicitly defend divisions of “tribe and race and religion,” he talked about the importance of nations “preserving the cultures,” which is a more polite way of saying the same thing.

‘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.

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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.

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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.

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'Modern Family': How to Give a Middle School Graduation Speech

About the Author

Most Popular

The Anger of Jimmy Kimmel

The First White President

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous

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

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

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

France's President Defies Trump at the UN

A Presidential Misunderstanding of Deterrence

The Real Losers of the Graham-Cassidy Health-Care Bill

A Radical Rebuke of Barack Obama's Foreign Policy Legacy

‘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

'Modern Family': How to Give a Middle School Graduation Speech

Latest Video

How Just Six Words Can Spark Conversation About Race in America

About the Author

Most Popular

The Anger of Jimmy Kimmel

The First White President

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous

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

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

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

France's President Defies Trump at the UN

A Presidential Misunderstanding of Deterrence

The Real Losers of the Graham-Cassidy Health-Care Bill

A Radical Rebuke of Barack Obama's Foreign Policy Legacy

‘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