'The Blind Assassin,' Part III: What's Your Favorite Line?

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.

Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles.

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.”

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

Why American Workers Now Dress So Casually

Deirdre Clemente

The 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.

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.

A victim of domestic violence at a safe house in Nevada County, California — Rich Pedroncelli / AP

Mother, Wife, Slave

Sarah Jeong

Lola and the universality of women’s exploitation

“Having a slave gave me grave doubts about what kind of people we were, what kind of place we came from,” Alex Tizon wrote in his Atlantic essay “My Family’s Slave.”

A thousand objections can be leveled against that piece, and in the few days since it was published, those objections have materialized from all quarters. It’s a powerful story, and its flaws and omissions have their own eloquence. For me, the most important failure is that Tizon seems to attribute Lola’s abuse entirely to another culture—specifically, to a system of servitude in the Philippines—as though he believes, This doesn’t happen in America. But that system is not only in America, it’s everywhere. It ensnares not only immigrants, but everyone.

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.”

Michael Flynn Invokes the Fifth

Matt Ford

President Trump’s former national security adviser won’t comply with the Intelligence Committee’s demand for Russia-related documents, his lawyers said Monday.

Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday he won’t comply with their May 10 subpoena of materials related to the Russia investigation, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

“The context in which the committee has called for General Flynn’s testimonial production of documents make clear that he has more than a reasonable apprehension that any testimony he provides could be used against him,” Flynn’s lawyers wrote in a letter to the committee. “Multiple Members of Congress have demanded that he be investigated and even prosecuted.”

Flynn’s response comes less than a month after the committee issued a formal demand for any documents “relevant to the committee’s investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election.” The committee noted it had asked him to voluntarily turn over the documents in April, but his legal counsel declined.

A boy walks along the side of a passenger ferry docked near Dhaka, Bangladesh. — David Bathgate / Corbis

What Does It Feel Like to Have a Slave?

Graeme Wood

Once, for five days, I found out.

No one thinks the enslavement of Eudocia “Lola” Pulido by Alex Tizon and his parents was morally defensible, but some have condemned the family with greater sympathy than others. Among the more sympathetic is New York’s Jesse Singal, who reads Tizon’s story as a tale of moral luck—one that teaches how a decent person like Tizon becomes implicated in a wicked social arrangement. Among the less sympathetic is Josh Shahryar, a journalist and activist who says Tizon was a monster.

As a former slaveholder myself, I am more inclined to see things as Singal does. For a period of about five days in 1999, I had two child slaves at my disposal. Like Tizon, I did not ask for them. I acquired the use of them by accident, and at the time I didn’t even realize that they were slaves.

President Donald Trump — Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Trump’s Budget Is the Ultimate Con

Derek Thompson

The president’s aristocratic tax-and-spend plan isn’t just a reversal of his campaign promises. It’s also a deeply unpopular blueprint for the country.

President Donald Trump’s first major budget proposal comes out on Tuesday, but many of the details are already public. The budget would reverse several of Trump’s campaign promises—like his pledge to preserve Medicaid and Social Security—by dismantling welfare for the poor and sick, while ensuring that rich Americans keep more of their income.

At this point, the proposal is just that—a proposal, and Congressional Republicans, some of whom have balked at the president’s blueprint, hold the power of the purse. But if followed, the plan would reportedly cut anti-poverty programs by $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years in an attempt to balance the budget, according to the The Washington Post and Axios. In addition to $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid—which comes directly from the House’s Obamacare replacement—the budget would also let states use “work requirements” to limit eligibility and spending on programs like SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as food stamps), CHIP (the Children’s Health Insurance Program), and Social Security Disability Insurance. There is little question that these policies would raise the number of uninsured Americans (the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates suggest by more than 20 million), expose more households to medical bankruptcy, and push more families into poverty.

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.

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.

Watch Video

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.

Watch Video

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.

Watch Video

'The Blind Assassin,' Part III: What's Your Favorite Line?

About the Author

Most Popular

My Family’s Slave

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

Why American Workers Now Dress So Casually

Trump Isn't the President Israel Was Hoping For

Mother, Wife, Slave

How People Decide Whether to Have Children

Michael Flynn Invokes the Fifth

What Does It Feel Like to Have a Slave?

Trump’s Budget Is the Ultimate Con

The Poisoned Generation

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

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

'The Blind Assassin,' Part III: What's Your Favorite Line?

Latest Video

Trump Scandals Are Good for Putin

About the Author

Most Popular

My Family’s Slave

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

Why American Workers Now Dress So Casually

Trump Isn't the President Israel Was Hoping For

Mother, Wife, Slave

How People Decide Whether to Have Children

Michael Flynn Invokes the Fifth

What Does It Feel Like to Have a Slave?

Trump’s Budget Is the Ultimate Con

The Poisoned Generation

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

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