The Evolutionary Importance of Grandmothers

Trump's Trip Was a Catastrophe for U.S.-Europe Relations

David Frum

Angela Merkel has served formal notice that she will lead the German wandering away from the American alliance.

Seven years after the end of the Second World War, on the 10th of March 1952, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the newly established Federal Republic of Germany received an astounding note from the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union offered to withdraw the troops that then occupied eastern Germany and to end its rule over the occupied zone. Germany would be reunited under a constitution that allowed the country freedom to choose its own social system. Germany would even be allowed to rebuild its military, and all Germans except those convicted of war crimes would regain their political rights. In return, the Allied troops in western Germany would also be withdrawn—and reunited Germany would be forbidden to join the new NATO alliance.

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.

Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s

Olga Khazan

A new study finds that people today who eat and exercise the same amount as people 20 years ago are still fatter.

There’s a meme aimed at Millennial catharsis called “Old Economy Steve.” It’s a series of pictures of a late-70s teenager, who presumably is now a middle-aged man, that mocks some of the messages Millennials say they hear from older generations—and shows why they’re deeply janky. Old Economy Steve graduates and gets a job right away. Old Economy Steve “worked his way through college” because tuition was $400. And so forth.

We can now add another one to that list: Old Economy Steve ate at McDonald’s almost every day, and he still somehow had a 32-inch waist.

A study published recently in the journal Obesity Research & Clinical Practice found that it’s harder for adults today to maintain the same weight as those 20 to 30 years ago did, even at the same levels of food intake and exercise.

Nati Harnik / AP / 21kompot /Katie Martin / The Atlantic

The Disappearance of Virtue From American Politics

Emma Green

In his new book, Ben Sasse has identified the right project for America: rehabilitating a shared moral language.

In just two short years, Senator Ben Sasse has gone from Capitol Hill newbie to digital president puncher, tweeting about Donald Trump’s affairs and the Midwestern dumpster fires he found more appealing than 2016’s Oval Office contenders.

Yet, on his breaks from Twitter, Sasse managed to craft a serious new book, The Vanishing American Adult. It advances a thesis that’s at once out of place at this political moment and almost too on-the-nose for the Trump years: He believes Americans have lost their sense of personal integrity and discipline. For the country to deal with the troubles ahead—including automation, political disengagement, and the rise of nativist, huckster politicians, he says—people must recover their sense of virtue. The republic depends on it.

How Trump Is Torturing Capitol Hill

Molly Ball

As Republicans in Congress try to fend off the flurry of scandals, they are haunted by a question: Is this as good as it’s going to get?

The speaker of the House strode to his lectern on a recent Thursday to confront another totally normal day on Capitol Hill: health care, tax reform, a president under investigation, rumblings of impeachment.

“Morning, everybody!” Paul Ryan chirped. “Busy week!”

It was indeed: Less than a day had passed since the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Russia’s involvement in the presidential campaign; just a few hours since President Trump angrily tweeted that the investigation was “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”; and only minutes since the Russia-linked former national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, had begun defying congressional subpoenas. A few days prior, the president had been accused of revealing sensitive intelligence information to the Russian foreign minister.

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.”

How to Sleep

James Hamblin

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, I worked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

The Upcoming Votes Republicans Are Really Dreading

Russell Berman

In the next two months, Congress will have to raise the debt ceiling and pass a budget. GOP leaders don’t know how they’re going to do either of them.

There’s nothing that united Republicans more tightly during the Obama years than their shared criticism of all the debt that racked up under the president’s watch. They raised political hell every time Democrats needed to raise the debt ceiling, and in 2011 they brought the country to the brink of default by insisting on spending and reforms in exchange for their votes.

This year, however, it’s all on them.

Trump administration officials told lawmakers this week that the Treasury Department would need authority to issue more debt earlier than expected this year, urging Congress to act before its traditional summer recess begins in August. Republican leaders initially believed they would have until the fall before the Treasury Department exhausted the “extraordinary measures” it undertakes to buy more time, but Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, testified that tax receipts have come in slower that expected.

Johnny Depp Can't Escape His Own Superstardom

David Sims

Facing reported financial problems and allegations of abuse, the once-bankable star now seems stuck in franchise hell with no obvious exit.

When Johnny Depp sailed onscreen in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl as Captain Jack Sparrow (to this day, a memorable superhero entrance), it was his first-ever appearance in a summer blockbuster. He’d been in surprise wintertime hits (Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow), well-regarded Oscar players (Donnie Brasco, Chocolat), and, of course, many a cult classic (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Ed Wood). But the idea of Depp headlining a big-budget, mainstream franchise film was alarming enough to Disney’s then-studio head Michael Eisner that he protested, on seeing early footage, that Depp was “ruining the movie!”

Fourteen years later, Disney is serving up a fifth Pirates of the Caribbean, this time subtitled Dead Men Tell No Tales, budgeted at a cool $230 million. Since bursting into international superstardom with the first Pirates, Depp has become increasingly reliant on mega-budgeted action films and broad comedies. At the same time, his public profile has collapsed after his now ex-wife Amber Heard accused him of domestic violence during their divorce, and stories emerged of the mega-budgeted lifestyle that had somehow mired Depp in deep financial trouble despite his movie earnings.

A World Without People

Alan Taylor

For a number of reasons, natural and human, people have abandoned many places around the world.

For a number of reasons, natural and human, people have evacuated or otherwise abandoned many places around the world—large and small, old and new. Gathering images of deserted areas into a single photo essay, one can get a sense of what the world might look like if humans were to suddenly vanish from the planet. Collected here are recent scenes from abandoned construction projects, industrial disaster zones, blighted urban neighborhoods, towns where residents left to escape violence or natural disasters, derelict Olympic venues, ghost towns, and more. Updated on May 28, 2017.