Stan Lee on the American Idea

An artist's depiction of the K-T impact, which wiped out all nonavian dinosaurs. — NASA / Reuters

The Worst Day in Earth’s History Contains an Ominous Warning

Robinson Meyer

One of the planet’s most dramatic extinctions was caused in part by ocean acidification, which has become a problem in our own era.

The worst day in the history of life on Earth, so far, happened almost exactly 66 million years ago, when an asteroid roughly the size of Manhattan slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula.

You may know the story. The asteroid—which arrived, probably, in June or July—immediately drilled a 20-mile hole into the planet’s surface, vaporizing bedrock and spewing it halfway to the moon. The planet shuddered with magnitude-12 earthquakes, loosing tsunamis across the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the ejected debris condensed in orbit and plunged back to Earth as searing spheres of molten glass, which torched the land and turned forests into firestorms. Other debris remained high in space, where it blocked the sun’s rays and began to chill the surface of the planet.

Where Did Rudy Go?

Todd S. Purdum

He once consoled a shaken nation. Now he’s screaming about conspiracies on cable news.

On September 22, 2001, 11 days after the worst terrorist attack on American soil, then–New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani looked squarely into the Saturday Night Live camera and told a shaken nation, “We will not let our decisions be made out of fear.” Flanked by a somber phalanx of uniformed police officers and firefighters, Giuliani offered stirring and patriotic words: “We choose to live our lives in freedom.”

Paul Simon performed a searing rendition of “The Boxer,” his folkie ode to a battered fighter’s gritty resilience. It was a total tonal shift for television’s longest-running comedy show, in line with the total tonal shift taking place across the country at the time. And then, Lorne Michaels, SNL’s creator and showrunner, appeared and asked Giuliani a sober question: “Can we be funny?” With a Borscht Belt comic’s perfect deadpan timing, “America’s Mayor” replied, “Why start now?”—and in one small, quiet, moving way, life reverted to normal.

Don’t Play the Goose Game

Ian Bogost

Untitled Goose Game is fun. The problem is, all games are also work.

Like games, geese are notoriously annoying. They’re brusque, clumsy, and territorial. If you are a person and one appears on your country estate, the advice recommends avoiding engagement and then standing your ground if it charges. Show the goose who’s boss. A recent, hugely popular video game, Untitled Goose Game, stages this conflict. For some reason, it turns out to be familiar to everyone, even city slickers who have never seen a goose in person.

It’s fun! Being a goose for a while is diverting and surprising, and embodying one in a simulated, pastoral environment speaks to the flexible power of games as a medium. Games turn the world on its head, allowing you to become all the things you are not: a criminal, in Grand Theft Auto; an explorer of alien worlds, in No Man’s Sky; the universe itself, in Everything. You gain a new perspective, having had the opportunity to be something grander than—or just different from—yourself.

A cracked piggy bank — Paul Taylor / Getty

$350,000 a Year, and Just Getting By

Annie Lowrey

Financial confessionals reveal that income inequality and geographic inequality have normalized absurd spending patterns.

The hypothetical couple were making $350,000 a year and just getting by, their income “barely” qualifying them as middle-class. Their budget, posted in September, showed how they “survived” in a city like San Francisco, spending more than $50,000 a year on child care and preschool, nearly $50,000 a year on their mortgage, and hefty amounts on vacations, entertainment, and a weekly date night—even as they saved for retirement and college in tax-advantaged accounts.

The internet, being the internet, responded with some combination of howling, baying, pitchfork-jostling, and scoffing. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York quipped that the thing the family was struggling with was math. Gabriel Zucman, a leading scholar of wealth and inequality, described the budget as laughable, while noting that it showed how much money consumption taxes could raise.

A photo of Little Rock Central High School — Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

An Attempt to Resegregate Little Rock, of All Places

Adam Harris

A battle over local control in a city that was the face of integration shows the extent of the new segregation problem in the U.S.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—When Diane Zook, the chair of Arkansas’ State Board of Education, banged her gavel to bring the afternoon meeting into order on October 10, every seat in the cramped boardroom was filled. Nearly every inch of paint on the wall had been covered by a body before the fire marshal, concerned about capacity, ushered those standing out of the room. The crowd spilled into the overflow areas in a wave. Sixty-two years after the world watched Little Rock struggle to desegregate its schools, history seemed to be repeating itself.

Nearly five years ago, in January 2015, the state of Arkansas assumed control of Little Rock’s public schools. At the time, six of the schools in the district had “chronically underperformed” on state exams regularly for several years; 22 superintendents had passed through the district in 32 years, creating a sense of instability. The state gives a letter-grade assessment to every public school, which is based on a combination of state-exam results and other metrics, such as graduation rates. Because of that instability, and the handful of ‘F’-rated schools, the state believed the best way to steady the district was to take it over.

Nothing Changed on Impeachment, and Everything Changed

David A. Graham

Trump’s base isn’t going anywhere, but that might not matter to his fate.

On October 13, President Donald Trump’s average approval sat at 42.2 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average.

Then came an astonishing week, even by the standards of the Trump administration. A procession of diplomats trekked to Capitol Hill, where they outlined a consistent tale of an administration hell-bent on conspiracy theories, extracting quid pro quos from the Ukrainian government, all headed by a president insistent on placing his personal lawyer at the heart of foreign policy. Turkey’s government rampaged through Syria, attacking American allies, while U.S. forces frantically retreated and Iran and Russia celebrated. Meanwhile, Turkey’s president laughed at Trump’s threats.

The acting White House chief of staff acknowledged a quid pro quo with Ukraine and instructed the nation to “get over it.” In its most brazen profiteering so far, the administration announced that the Group of Seven summit would take place at Trump’s own resort. (Both positions were reversed in short order.) ProPublica turned up new evidence of Trump’s financial chicanery.

Rendering by Patrick White; Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg / Getty

Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan

Franklin Foer

What the Amazon founder and CEO wants for his empire and himself, and what that means for the rest of us.

Where in the pantheon of American commercial titans does Jeffrey Bezos belong? Andrew Carnegie’s hearths forged the steel that became the skeleton of the railroad and the city. John D. Rockefeller refined 90 percent of American oil, which supplied the pre-electric nation with light. Bill Gates created a program that was considered a prerequisite for turning on a computer.

At 55, Bezos has never dominated a major market as thoroughly as any of these forebears, and while he is presently the richest man on the planet, he has less wealth than Gates did at his zenith. Yet Rockefeller largely contented himself with oil wells, pump stations, and railcars; Gates’s fortune depended on an operating system. The scope of the empire the founder and CEO of Amazon has built is wider. Indeed, it is without precedent in the long history of American capitalism.

Democrats Want to Impeach Trump. They Haven’t Decided Why.

Elaine Godfrey

The articles of impeachment could be focused solely on Ukraine—or they could be a broader indictment of the president’s wrongdoing.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave her blessing to an impeachment inquiry three weeks ago, she also laid down a marker: The investigation wouldn’t center on any of the issues that Democrats have obsessed over for the past three years. Not Russian interference, or emoluments, or security clearances, or family separation. Impeachment would be about Ukraine—and only about Ukraine.

But while that decision helped quell years of frantic debate over whether and why and how Democrats might seek to remove the president, it also foreshadowed the coming battle among House Democrats about what the actual articles of impeachment should look like. Democrats seem to have made strides in their investigation in recent weeks, but they still have this major hurdle to resolve—a hurdle that could have significant implications not just for the success of the inquiry, but for Democrats’ ability to keep control of the House in 2020.

The Liberation of Mitt Romney

McKay Coppins

The newly rebellious senator has become an outspoken dissident in Trump’s Republican Party, just in time for the president’s impeachment trial.

Updated on October 20, 2019, at 9:32 p.m. ET

Mitt Romney is leaning forward in his chair, his eyes flashing, his voice sharp.

It’s a strange look for the 72-year-old senator, who typically affects a measured, somber tone when discussing Donald Trump’s various moral deficiencies. But after weeks of escalating combat with the president—over Ukraine, and China, and Syria, and impeachment—the gentleman from Utah suddenly appears ready to unload.

What set him off was my recitation of an argument I’ve heard some Republicans deploy lately to excuse Trump’s behavior. Electing a president, the argument goes, is like hiring a plumber—you don’t care about his character, you just want him to get the job done. Sitting in his Senate office, Romney is indignant. “Are you worried that your plumber overcharges you?” he asks. “Are you worried that the plumber’s going to scream at your kids? Are you worried that the plumber is going to squeal out of your driveway?” I am playing devil’s advocate; he is attempting an exorcism.

Anti-Brexit demonstrators attend a rally in central London. — Henry Nicholls / Reuters

This Is Just the Beginning of Brexit

Tom McTague

Even if Britain leaves the EU at the end of the month, the issue will not go away—much still needs to be resolved.

Such is its devilish complexity, Brexit is often portrayed as a game of 3-D chess, understandable only to the grandest of grand masters. Yet in reality it is far simpler: a tedious game of political tic-tac-toe (or noughts and crosses, for our British readers) in which each side is forever countering the previous move by its opponent but unable to ever triumph. The winner is, then, not a master strategist, but simply the one who is last to make a mistake.

This is how best to understand the series of seismic but impenetrable battles being waged between Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government and his opponents in Westminster this week: battles that are not primarily about what they claim—whether for this motion or that amendment—but rather part of a much larger but simpler game in which each side is trying to ensure that it is not outmaneuvered by the other in a way that will make victory or defeat inevitable.