The fight is only just beginning. Democrats were eager to impress that message upon a crowd that gathered outside the U.S. Capitol on Thursday afternoon after emerging from a sit-in on the House floor demanding action on gun control that lasted more than 24-hours.
“Don’t give up, don’t give in,” the Democratic congressman and civil-rights leader John Lewis said as onlookers waved rainbow-colored signs that read “Disarm Hate.” The crowd began to sing the civil-rights protest anthem “We Shall Overcome,” with lyrics slightly modified to suit moment: “We shall pass a bill someday.” A woman recording a video on her cellphone remarked aloud, “This is history, baby,” to no one in particular.
The sit-in was an unusual moment of protest inside the United States Congress. The willingness to make such a bold, publicity-ready move suggests the Democratic Party feels emboldened to demand action on gun control in the wake of a tragic mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub earlier this month. In the end, however, Democrats did not succeed in securing a vote on the gun-control measures they had hoped for in staging the protest.
Faced with that failure, Democrats insist this is only the beginning. “We’re going to continue to work,” Lewis said in a brief interview outside the Capitol. “Many people are supporting our efforts,” he said. “People all over America and around the world are supporting our efforts to do something about gun violence.”
The sit-in may also indicate that House Democrats are increasingly willing to make use of confrontational tactics to make their voices heard. “It’s not just about guns,” the Democratic congressman James Clyburn said in an interview. “This particular issue is about guns, but this is just the start … I wouldn’t get hung-up on sit-ins, but I would call it activism.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi seemed reluctant to declare that this will be the way Democrats try to get their message on future issues. “No, I think you have to just take it on a day-to-day basis,” she said at Thursday’s press conference. She called the sit-in a reflection of the “the complete insistence that we cannot go through another moment of silence without taking action” on gun violence.
The sit-in seemed to intensify the divide between Democrats and Republicans on guns. House Speaker Paul Ryan denounced the action as a “publicity stunt,” during an interview with CNN. “This is not about a solution to a problem,” he said. “This is about trying to get attention.” House Republicans expressed frustration over the Democrats’ action, describing the event as a political distraction and a way to obstruct the business of legislating.
In an interview, the Republican congressman Mark Meadows said that while it is “certainly within every member’s right to be able to articulate their concerns,” he disagreed with the tactics deployed by Democrats. As Yoni Appelbaum noted, “even having phones switched on, much less snapping photos, tweeting updates, or periscoping the proceedings, is a violation of the rules of the House”—all common sights during the sit-in.“I think it poses a very bad precedent and quite frankly other nations are watching what is happening,” Meadows said.
The Democrats’ agenda faced criticism from progressives as well. Democrats were agitating for a vote on measures to expand background checks for gun purchases and prevent suspected terrorists from buying the weapons. As The Intercept’s Zaid Jilani wrote, the “unusually bold and moving tactic was undercut by the fact that its chief goal is a political gimmick that would do little to stop gun violence, while expanding the use of a deeply flawed anti-terror watchlist.”
In spite of various criticisms, many House Democrats appeared defiant and energetic Thursday afternoon. “The American public has been crying out for help on this issue, for their families, for their kids, and we said ‘We hear you, we’re listening to you and, we’re going to do something about it,’” the Democratic congresswoman Rosa DeLauro said in an interview. “We may leave here today, but everybody is going home to a district where they’re going to take this fight on, and in addition to that we get back on July 5th and nothing changes. We’ve only just begun.”
Other Democrats reveled in the fact that they had been able to broadcast to a wide audience using social media. Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic congressman from Texas who live-streamed the Sit-in on Facebook, said, “In a one-hour period, when I was streaming, we received 10,000 comments.” He pointed to his social-media metrics as evidence of the event’s resonance. “There was obviously a lot of pent-up urgency and excitement about this.”
For now, it seems unlikely that House Democrats will win the votes they seek on gun control. But their agitation on the issue will probably continue, and maybe increase. —Clare Foran
Roll Call photographer Tom Williams tweeted several images of the scene outside the Capitol this afternoon. House Democrats addressed on-lookers after concluding their sit-in at roughly 1 p.m.
.@repjohnlewis @repjoecrowley @Clyburn speak on the East Front after the #NoBillNoBreak sit-in to end #gunviolence pic.twitter.com/MRsqXf5MHr
— Tom Williams (@pennstatetom) June 23, 2016
It was an odd juxtaposition, this sit-in. Led by Representative John Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement, it drew its spirit from the non-violent protests at lunch counters and bus terminals across the South that ignited national interest and eventually led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Throughout the day Wednesday, black Democrats shared stories of people shot and killed in their communities, driving home the point that gun violence is not merely a problem of policy—it is also a matter of race and justice.
But some have pointed out the incivility of the proposal the sit-in supports, the so-called “no-fly, no-buy” bill.
Thanks for sitting in. Let's ditch racist no-fly-buy bill and make this a movement for the real fight against guns. https://t.co/W8geMD6sgJ
— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) June 23, 2016
As the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the Senate version of the “no-fly” bill, argued in a letter, government terrorist watch lists have long been criticized for targeting Muslims with little evidence:
Publicly available information and the ACLU’s experience with people who know or credibly suspect that they have been watchlisted raises serious concerns that the government applies the watchlists in an arbitrary or discriminatory fashion, particularly against American Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities. An internal August 2013 government document, for example, shows that Dearborn, Michigan—home to the country’s largest concentration ofArab-Americans—was second only to New York City in the number of people on the government’s “known or suspected terrorist” watchlist. This was despite the fact that, as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan noted at the time, not a single person from Dearborn had ever been prosecuted for terrorism.
Granted, Democrats also want other things, including stronger background checks and a ban on assault weapons. But while the central chant of “no-fly, no-buy” may incrementally help solve one civil-rights crisis—the slaughter of people of color by guns—some say it unfortunately worsens another.
House Democrats are now hugging, shaking hands, and taking photos on the floor. The sit-in is now over, and they plan to address supporters outside the Capitol in the next few minutes.
Georgia Representative John Lewis, who helped lead the House sit-in, is addressing his fellow members on the floor right now. “We’re gonna win the struggle,” Lewis said, calling for members and constituents to organize. To his colleagues, he said: “You got it out there, you got in the way, you got in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble. So we must never give up or give in. We must keep the faith and come back here on July 5, more determined than ever before."
It sounds like House Democrats might be wrapping up their sit-in. They held a meeting earlier today on steps forward. “We’re going back to our congressional districts...and we will not allow this body to ever feel as comfortable as they have felt in the past silencing our voices,” South Carolina’s James Clyburn just said on the floor. They'll return on July 5, he notes, and “we will be operating on a new sense of purpose."
House Speaker Paul Ryan's disdain for Democrats' sit-in is clear: “I don't think this should be a very proud moment for democracy or for the people who stage these stunts.”
Ryan, speaking at his weekly press briefing Thursday morning, seemed agitated, criticizing Democrats for violating the norms of the House. He told reporters that he was worried about the precedent the sit-in could set, and hit Democrats for sending fundraising missives off the sit-in.
“If this is not a political stunt, then why are they trying to raise money off this—off of a tragedy?” Ryan said.
Social media has played a critical role in the House sit-in. Democrats used platforms, such as Periscope, to live stream from the chamber floor when C-SPAN was unable to air the protests. Similarly, the hashtag #NoBillNoBreak and #HoldTheFloor took off on Twitter. Politico’s Carla Marinucci reports:
Reported by @Twitter: In the last 24 hours, #NoBillNoBreak and #HoldTheFloor have been Tweeted 1.4M times.
— Carla Marinucci (@cmarinucci) June 23, 2016
It appears some Democratic members of the New Hampshire House of Representatives are staging a sit-in of their own in the state capitol. Local reports say about dozen legislators are participating.
In solidarity with our friends in DC, #NHHouseDems are sitting in today in Concord. #DemocraticSitIn #NHPolitics pic.twitter.com/WuAjJkhomE
— NH House Dem Caucus (@NHHouseDems) June 23, 2016
While Periscope was the Democrats' streaming app of choice on Wednesday amid a broadcast blackout, the New Hampshire legislators are recording their broadcast using Meerkat.
The mood inside the House gallery feels subdued this morning as Democrats continue speeches and a sit-in demanding a vote on gun control measures.
It was a long night, and members of Congress who stuck around are clearly exhausted. At least a few lawmakers dozed off, according to Ted Deutch, a Democratic congressman from Florida. “There were definitely some people sleeping,” he said, adding that he wasn’t going to name any names. “I have not pulled an all-nighter in quite a while,” Deutch said. “It’s certainly my first one on the House floor.”
Jan Schakowsky, a Democratic congresswoman from Illinois, said she was stepped on while sitting on the floor. When asked if it was by a Republican, she said yes. “I don’t know if it was intentional, but there certainly was no apology,” she said, though she noted that she wasn’t hurt. “He was in a hurry to get over to his side ... and there was a certain amount of contempt.” Democrats have been “inspired, in part, by the kind of cynicism we saw last night from the Republicans,” she said.
What happens next? “It could be another hour, it could be five hours, ten hours, that I don’t know,” Deutch said. “I really don't know what the plan is,” Schakowsky said, “[but] what I do know is this is really just the beginning.” She added: “We own this issue now. This is now the issue for the Democratic caucus. I don’t know what form it will take…but we are not giving up.”
The look made famous by the platform just doesn’t resonate anymore.
As Instagram has grown to more than 1 billion monthly users, it has ushered in a very particular look: bright walls, artfully arranged lattes and avocado toast, and Millennial-pink everything, all with that carefully staged, color-corrected, glossy-looking aesthetic. Photos that play into these trends perform so well on Instagram that the look became synonymous with the platform itself, then seeped into the broader world. Even if you don’t use the app, you’ve undoubtedly encountered an “Instagram wall,” a pop-up experience like the Museum of Ice Cream, or a brightly patterned restaurant bathroom just made to be photographed.
No one has capitalized on this look’s popularity more than influencers. Some have even started to make thousands of dollars on photo presets that warp anyone’s pictures to fit this mold. But every trend has a shelf life, and as quickly as Instagram ushered in pink walls and pastel macaroons, it’s now turning on them. “Avocado toast and posts on the beach. It’s so generic and played out at this point. You can photoshop any girl into that background and it will be the same post,” said Claire, a 15-year-old who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym because of her age. “It’s not cool anymore to be manufactured.”
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner suggests that stand-up joke telling is an art form whose moment has passed.
Ron Chernow, the best-selling biographer and historian, has agreed to deliver the after-dinner speech at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, to be held Saturday night at the Washington Hilton. If we were to list the potential victims of our present era of post-humor comedy, his name would be near the top.
The WHCD is the event the Washington press corps throws every year to celebrate the Washington press corps. (If we don’t do it, it won’t get done.) It is best understood as a provincial trade meeting—a few hundred people in the same line of work crowd together in the poorly ventilated ballroom of a second-tier hotel to hand one another awards over plates of undercooked chicken. What separates the correspondents’ dinner from, say, the annual awards dinner of the Greater Tri-County Regional Conference of Waste Removal Technicians is that, sometime in the 1990s, people from outside the trade began to take an interest in the event.
“James’s performance, I’m sure, is causing grief for an accountant somewhere.”
Ken Jennings rose to fame after an unprecedented run on Jeopardy 15 years ago: Over the course of 74 episodes, he won a total of roughly $2.5 million.
Recently, a contestant named James Holzhauer has been working toward Jennings’s record at an astonishing pace. After the Friday-evening broadcast of the quiz program, Holzhauer had won about $850,000 over just 12 episodes. If he keeps up that rate, he’ll reach $2.5 million in less than half the time it took Jennings to do so.
Before Holzhauer went on the show, the most money earned in a single episode of Jeopardy was $77,000. During his 12-episode streak, he’s beaten that total not once, but five times, and has set a new record of $131,127. Holzhauer’s success has been attributed not just to his deep trivia knowledge, but also to his aggressive style of play—he homes in on high-value tiles that might contain Daily Doubles, and then often bets enormous sums when he finds them—and his unmatched buzzer-pressing reflexes.
Political candidates only need to seem unscripted.
Does Hillary Clinton really keep hot sauce in her purse? How can Bernie Sanders truly be a socialist if he’s a millionaire? Are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s humble roots, featured prominently in her campaign video, enough to prove her authenticity?
“Be authentic”—there may be no more ubiquitous piece of advice to candidates for office. Yet there’s little agreement on what authenticity actually means, perhaps because the concept is often applied in ways that seem contradictory. An authenticity deficit was widely seen as one of the reasons Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012. Four years later, it contributed to Hillary Clinton’s defeat to Donald Trump. How can the same quality account for the success of two figures as different as Trump and Obama? How can Trump in particular—an inveterate fabricator born to fabulous wealth who poses as the self-made tribune of the working class—come across as so authentic to so many?
Aquariums might seem like underwater wonderlands, but building a new one comes at a cost.
The United States is experiencing a new wave of aquarium enthusiasm. Over the past few years, groups in Detroit; St. Louis; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Memphis; Cape Canaveral, Florida; and New York City have proposed or started construction on large aquariums. Springfield, Missouri, and Shreveport, Louisiana, have recently opened aquariums. Boosters for these spaces are selling them as conservation initiatives that will create jobs and bring in revenue—alternatives to sports stadiums and shopping districts meant to revitalize downtrodden downtowns.
But the history of aquariums tells a different story. In the earliest public aquariums, tanks were sparsely populated with somewhat mundane species. These institutions started as traveling fishery exhibits: The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair contained some of the first tank displays. The state of Pennsylvania fashioned a grotto with glass jewel boxes lining a dark hallway that was illuminated from above. The residents—trout, catfish, and others—had been sent via specialty train.
Scientists have been searching for marsquakes since some of the earliest missions to the Red Planet.
Because we’ve been sitting on the same rock for thousands of years, sometimes our language can tend to be a little Earth-centric. The word earthquake, for example, feels universal, as if it can be applied to any shaking ground. But zoom out beyond our tectonic plates, and the vocabulary shifts.
Mars, for instance, has marsquakes.
They sound too silly to be real, as if a Netflix show about future Mars settlements made up a scary natural disaster. But tremors on Mars are a thing, and right now scientists believe they have detected a quake on Mars for the first time.
Scientists know this because they sent a seismometer to our planetary neighbor. The instrument arrived last year, on board a NASA lander called InSight. The seismometer, small and dome shaped, has sat on the brick-colored surface since, waiting for hints of movement below the surface. On April 6, it caught something, a “quiet but distinct” signal, scientists said. A rumble from the depths.
Since 1972, the giant island’s ice sheet has lost 11 quadrillion pounds of water.
The Greenland Ice Sheet is the world’s second-largest reservoir of fresh water sitting on the world’s largest island. It is almost mind-bogglingly huge.
If Greenland were suddenly transported to the central United States, it would be a very bad day for about 65 million people, who would be crushed instantly. But for the sake of science journalism, imagine that Greenland’s southernmost tip displaced Brownsville, Texas—the state’s southernmost city—so that its icy glaciers kissed mainland Mexico and the Gulf thereof. Even then, Greenland would stretch all the way north, clear across the United States, its northern tenth crossing the Canadian border into Ontario and Manitoba. Kansas City, Oklahoma City, and Iowa City would all be goners. So too would San Antonio, Memphis, and Minneapolis. Its easternmost peaks would slam St. Louis and play in Peoria; its northwestern glaciers would rout Rapid City, South Dakota, and meander into Montana. At its center point, near Des Moines, roughly two miles of ice would rise from the surface.
I was a Trump transition staffer, and I’ve seen enough. It’s time for impeachment.
Let’s start at the end of this story. This weekend, I read Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report twice, and realized that enough was enough—I needed to do something. I’ve worked on every Republican presidential transition team for the past 10 years and recently served as counsel to the Republican-led House Financial Services Committee. My permanent job is as a law professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, which is not political, but where my colleagues have held many prime spots in Republican administrations.
If you think calling for the impeachment of a sitting Republican president would constitute career suicide for someone like me, you may end up being right. But I did exactly that this weekend, tweeting that it’s time to begin impeachment proceedings.
It’s much less scientific—and more prone to gratuitous procedures—than you may think.
In the early 2000s Terry Mitchell’s dentist retired. For a while, Mitchell, an electrician in his 50s, stopped seeking dental care altogether. But when one of his wisdom teeth began to ache, he started looking for someone new. An acquaintance recommended John Roger Lund, whose practice was a convenient 10-minute walk from Mitchell’s home, in San Jose, California. Lund’s practice was situated in a one-story building with clay roof tiles that housed several dental offices. The interior was a little dated, but not dingy. The waiting room was small and the decor minimal: some plants and photos, no fish. Lund was a good-looking middle-aged guy with arched eyebrows, round glasses, and graying hair that framed a youthful face. He was charming, chatty, and upbeat. At the time, Mitchell and Lund both owned Chevrolet Chevelles, and they bonded over their mutual love of classic cars.
For 11 seasons, Todd Ewen fought in almost every game he played. He didn’t live to his 50th birthday.
On January 24, 1987, Todd Ewen, a young right-winger for the St. Louis Blues, knocked the Detroit Red Wings’ notorious tough guy, Bob Probert, unconscious with one bare-knuckled punch to the head. Ewen was a new recruit, just 21 years old, and the punch immediately solidified his place in the Blues’ lineup—as well as his role in the National Hockey League as one of the many players who regularly fought members of the opposing team.
Later that same game, Ewen and Probert fought again, despite Probert having been out cold on the ice less than an hour before. This frequency of violence was typical. Ewen would go on to play 11 seasons, a soldier in the vast army of so-called “enforcers” in that era of the NHL. He would fight almost every game, mashing his fists into a pulp that doctors were forced to reconstruct with wire and screws.
The National Hockey League insisted that Todd Ewen’s death wasn’t related to his hockey career. Science suggests otherwise.
The government of New Zealand worked with the indigenous Maori people to legally confer the rights of an individual on a river.
In 1986, 1.5 million balloons were released over Cleveland, resulting in an unforeseen tragedy.
