China Soft-Power Watch, Chapter 29,167

A man looks through eclipse glasses. — Yannis Behrakis / Reuters

The Eclipse Conspiracy

James Hamblin

Something doesn’t add up.

The scientists are all talking like it’s a sure thing.

On August 21, the “moon” will pass between the Earth and the sun, obscuring the light of the latter. The government agency NASA says this will result in “one of nature’s most awe-inspiring sights.” The astronomers there claim to have calculated down to the minute exactly when and where this will happen, and for how long. They have reportedly known about this eclipse for years, just by virtue of some sort of complex math.

This seems extremely unlikely. I can’t even find these eclipse calculations on their website to check them for myself.

Meanwhile the scientists tell us we can’t look at it without special glasses because “looking directly at the sun is unsafe.”

Standing behind a man in a helmet, a woman holds a flag at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — Chip Somodevilla / Getty

The Women Behind the 'Alt-Right'

Caroline Kitchener

The overwhelmingly male crowd at the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville shouldn’t be seen as an absence of women in the movement overall.

Last Friday night, the white nationalists who marched on Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park all looked strikingly similar. They were almost exclusively white, of course. But they were also relatively young. And with a handful of exceptions, they were men.

While the “Unite the Right” rally brought together white nationalists of all stripes, including traditional white supremacists like Neo-Nazis and the KKK, and other racist groups that have united under the banner of the new, internet-oriented “alt-right.” The rally was violent and bloody—one of the white supremacist attendees is being charged with deliberately ramming his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring more than a dozen others.

The Myth of the Kindly General Lee

Adam Serwer

The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. This year, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

Tina Fey, Colin Jost, and Michael Che during 'Weekend Update: Summer Edition' — Will Heath / NBC

'Let Us Eat Cake': The Tina Fey Effect in 2017

Megan Garber

The aftermath of Charlottesville has brought up important questions about who should be speaking, and who should be listening.

In a 2012 article published in the Public Opinion Quarterly, a group of researchers shared the results of a study they had done in the aftermath of the 2008 U.S. presidential election. The researchers, based on panels with young voters, found that the impression of Sarah Palin that Tina Fey had made famous on Saturday Night Live—“I can see Russia from my house!”—had changed the public’s feeling about the actual vice-presidential candidate. Fey’s jokes, the researchers suggested, had proven comedy’s power, especially in times of question and perhaps also in times of crisis, to shape people’s sense of the world. The jokes had woven themselves into the workings of American democracy. The researchers called it the Fey Effect.

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.”

Erik Prince's Plan to Privatize the War in Afghanistan

Rosie Gray

President Trump is meeting with his aides on Friday at Camp David—and some unorthodox ideas are on the table.

Erik Prince thinks he can turn around the war in Afghanistan, and he’s got a PowerPoint deck to explain the whole thing. The Blackwater founder brought it with him to the Corner Bakery on North Capitol Street in Washington last Thursday, printed out and placed in a presentation binder. He’s been shopping it around D.C. And on Friday, when President Trump huddles with his advisers at Camp David to plot a way forward, it will be in the mix.

The 16-year-old war in Afghanistan has become a central point of conflict in the White House as the administration passes the half-year mark without having settled on a new strategy. Trump has so far rejected the proposals brought to his desk. The troop increases favored by his generals, Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, are strongly opposed by his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and the president himself is skeptical of such approaches.

A woman talks to a dog. — baobao ou / Getty

Why Do Humans Talk to Animals If They Can’t Understand?

Arianna Rebolini

The tendency to converse with dogs, cats, and hamsters ultimately says more about people than it does about their pets.

“Do you think it’s weird that I tell Nermal I love her multiple times a day?”

My sister’s question was muffled, her face stuffed in the fur of her six-month-old kitten (named for the cat from Garfield). We were sitting in the living room of her apartment and, as always, Nermal was vying for our attention—pawing at our hair, walking along the couch behind us, spreading across our laps and looking up at us with her big, bright eyes. She’s almost aggressively cute, and inspires the kind of love that demands to be vocalized. I’d find it weirder if my sister weren’t doing so.

The question made me think about my own two cats, and our many and varied interactions throughout the day. I work from home and find myself narrating my tasks to them (“Okay, Martin, no more Twitter”) or singing impromptu songs (“It’s treat time / Time-to-eat time”). I tell them I love them; sometimes I ask them if they know how much I love them. On days spent away from my apartment, I return home and greet them by asking how their day was. It’s not like I expect them to understand or respond; it just sort of happens. I’d never really given it much thought. I don’t think I’m weird for talking to my pets like they’re human beings, if only because so many other pet-owners do the same. But why do we do it? I got the anthrozoologist and professor of psychology at Western Carolina University Hal Herzog on the phone to talk it out.

The Rise of the Violent Left

Peter Beinart

Antifa’s activists say they’re battling burgeoning authoritarianism on the American right. Are they fueling it instead?

Since 1907, Portland, Oregon, has hosted an annual Rose Festival. Since 2007, the festival had included a parade down 82nd Avenue. Since 2013, the Republican Party of Multnomah County, which includes Portland, had taken part. This April, all of that changed.

In the days leading up to the planned parade, a group called the Direct Action Alliance declared, “Fascists plan to march through the streets,” and warned, “Nazis will not march through Portland unopposed.” The alliance said it didn’t object to the Multnomah GOP itself, but to “fascists” who planned to infiltrate its ranks. Yet it also denounced marchers with “Trump flags” and “red maga hats” who could “normalize support for an orange man who bragged about sexually harassing women and who is waging a war of hate, racism and prejudice.” A second group, Oregon Students Empowered, created a Facebook page called “Shut down fascism! No nazis in Portland!”

Arlington House overlooking the Arlington National Cemetery — National Park Service

The Nation's Official Memorial to Robert E. Lee Gets a Rewrite

Russell Berman

Days after the events in Charlottesville, the National Park Service quietly changed its description of Arlington House, the Virginia mansion that Congress formally named in honor of the Confederate general.

Of the many statues of Robert E. Lee that still decorate American cities, towns, universities, and even the United States Capitol, the vast majority have been designated by state legislatures and other local councils and organizations. But the Confederate general also has the honor of an official national memorial, bestowed by Congress in 1955.

“Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial” was the general’s home before the Civil War and overlooks Arlington National Cemetery, the military burial ground built as a final resting place for Union army members that Lee fought to defeat.

The National Park Service now runs the site as a museum, which will soon close to the public while it undergoes a major rehabilitation funded by a $12.35 million donation from David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group and a philanthropist who has written large checks to a number of American historical sites. Yet while President Trump has staunchly defended honoring Lee and other Confederate figures, officials at the Park Service decided to rewrite the description of the Lee Memorial on its homepage in the days following the demonstrations by white supremacists in support of a statue of the general in Charlottesville, Virginia. The change was made without publicity or explanation, flagged only by a notation that the page had been “updated on August 14, 2017.”

The New Full-Frontal: Has Pubic Hair in America Gone Extinct?

Ashley Fetters

Carrie Bradshaw, Hugh Hefner, and Barbie have all helped construct a new generation's ideal woman, who is athletic, alluring, ... and waxed.

Meet Sophia Pinto: the 21st century's standard-issue, all-American perfect 10.

The 5-foot-5 Minnesota native -- a sly, funny, 22-year-old natural blonde who spends every summer bikini-clad on the shores of Lake Minnetonka -- works out five days a week. Her slim waist and megawatt smile hearken back to the polyvinyl glamour of the original Barbie doll.

In fact, if Mattel were to redesign Barbie based on the new millennium's ideal woman, she would likely resemble Pinto. Healthy, athletic, alluring, and smart (Pinto will graduate early this month from Northwestern University), she's both a role model and a sex symbol.

And if you were to undress Pinto, you'd find she embodies yet another trademark characteristic of the plastic glamour girl-turned-careerwoman: Like Barbie, Pinto has no pubic hair.