Democrats chose Tom Perez as new leader, Trump says he won’t attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and more from the United States and around the world.
Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez
Christopher Aluka Berry / Reuters
—Members of the Democratic National Committee have selected former Labor Secretary Tom Perez as their new chairman, beating out Representative Keith Ellison for the top position. More here
—In the latest development with his contentious relationship with the press, President Trump said will not attend this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. More here
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
President Trump Will Not Attend the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner
Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP
In the latest development with his contentious relationship with the press, President Trump said will not attend this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The president made the announcement over Twitter on Saturday afternoon.
I will not be attending the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner this year. Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!
Trump, who would firsthand be the subject of ridicule by a comedian selected by the association, decided to avoid the awkward showing on April 29. In 1981, Ronald Reagan was the last person to not attend the dinner, but that was because he was shot in an assassination attempt a month earlier.
Several media organizations, including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Bloomberg, had already announced they would no longer host afterparties. Samantha Bee, of TBS’s Full Frontal, said she would host a Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner event to raise money for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Trump has never handled roast-style events well. In 2011, Seth Meyers ripped Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with some scathing jokes, including, “Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke.”
Earlier this year, there were rumors of whether this year’s dinner would even happen. But in February, Jeff Mason, a Reuters reporter and WHCA president, said the dinner was still on, adding, “the WHCA will pursue its core mission of advocating for journalists’ ability to ask questions of government officials, push for transparency, and help Americans hold the powerful to account.”
Members of the Democratic National Committee have selected former Labor Secretary Tom Perez as their new chairman, beating out Representative Keith Ellison for the top position. Democrats, still reeling after the win of President Trump in the last election, are hoping fresh leadership can get the party back on track. In recent years, Democrats have struggled to connect with voters in state and local elections, as Republicans dominate state governments nationwide. A majority of the 447 members of the DNC, who are activists and donors from across the country, thought Perez could bring the necessary change. Ellison, who is the first Muslim elected to Congress, was backed by the progressive wing of the party, including from Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and former DNC Chairman Howard Dean. Perez was a darling of former administration officials, and enjoyed the endorsement of former Vice President Joe Biden. Meeting in Atlanta, the selection required two rounds of voting. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who built an outsider campaign, dropped out of consideration before the first round of voting, along with a string of other long-shot candidates. Perez said the Democratic Party is “suffering from a crisis of confidence, a crisis of relevance" after Trump’s win in the 2016 election. In his first act as chairman, Perez made Ellison the deputy chairman of the DNC.
A September 2016 view of Homs (Omar Sanadiki / Reuters)
Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents stormed two Syrian security offices in Homs, killing at least 32 people, including the head of the local military intelligence service branch. The Levant Liberation Committee attack in the central city, which has been ravaged by the civil war, also wounded at least 24 others. The twin attacks, each with three suicide bombers, hit heavily fortified buildings. As rescue workers arrived on the scene, other bombs went off at security checkpoints. This comes just one day after a suicide car bombing killed 60 people and wounded 100 in the northern city of al-Bab. The city was recently retaken by Syrian forces after three years of ISIS control.
Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.
On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.
Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.
This is not a partisan judgment. Many of the president’s fiercest critics have emerged from within his own party. Even officials and observers who support his policies are appalled by his pronouncements, and those who have the most firsthand experience of governance are also the most alarmed by how Trump is governing.
Insights into the little-studied realm of last words
Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.
During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.
A controversial set of guidelines aims to help men grapple with “traditional masculinity.”
This week, the American Psychological Association, the country’s largest professional organization of psychologists, did something for men that it’s done for many other demographic groups in the past: It introduced a set of detailed guidelines for clinicians who treat men and boys. The 10 guidelines make suggestions on how to encourage fathers to engage with their kids, how to address problems that disproportionately affect men, like suicide and substance abuse, and how to steer men toward healthy behaviors. The guidelines’ development began in 2005, and has included input from more than 200 physicians and researchers.
This emphasis on understanding the issues men face comes at a crucial time, according to Ryon McDermott, a psychologist who helped the APA craft its new standards. Although people of all genders face no shortage of obstacles in America, “men are struggling,” he says. “The recession has hit men harder than women, men are less likely to graduate from college, men are more likely to complete suicide than women.” To help patients, the guidelines assert, psychologists need to understand what’s making their lives untenable. For a lot of men, it might be the harsh cultural expectations that can come along with manhood itself.
Dr. Sherman Hershfield woke up one morning and was surprised to find himself behind the wheel of his car. Somewhere between his Beverly Hills apartment and his practice in the San Fernando Valley, the silver-haired physician had blacked out. Somehow, he’d avoided a crash, but this wasn’t the first time. “I didn’t know what was going on,” he admitted.
Apart from his frequent blackouts, Hershfield was in fine health for a man in his 50s. He was tall and lean, ran six miles a day, and was a strict vegetarian. “I believe a physician should provide exemplary motivation to patients,” he once wrote. “I don’t smoke and have cut out all alcohol.” Hershfield specialized in physical medicine and rehabilitation, and for decades had helped patients with brain injuries learn to walk again and rebuild their lives. Even with his experience, Hershfield didn’t know what was wrong inside his own head.
The president and his party have grown accustomed to representing a minority of Americans—and ignoring majority opinion.
A government shutdown that most Americans oppose, on behalf of a border wall that most Americans oppose, may be the logical end point for a president and a political party that appears more and more unconcerned about attracting support from a majority of the public.
Donald Trump’s decision to precipitate a government shutdown over his demands for money to build a border wall, and the virtual absence of congressional GOP resistance to his approach, shows how comfortable the president and the broader Republican Party around him have grown in pursuing goals that face majority opposition in polls—so long as they retain the backing of their core supporters.
Attracting and sustaining majority support has traditionally represented a North Star for American presidents. The showdown over the shutdown, perhaps more than any earlier decision, makes clear that Trump is setting his course by a very different compass. Trump has abandoned any pretense of seeking to represent majority opinion and is defining himself almost entirely as the leader of a minority faction.
It’s not meant to be comforting, but somehow it is.
If you ever find yourself sinking into the plush blue couch of Dr. Jane Prelinger, you should know that she doesn’t want you to call her Dr. Prelinger. In her office, even when you’re on the couch and she’s facing you from her chair, looking at you through heavy eyeliner and the frame of her white-blond bangs, she insists: You’re just two humans. “It’s Faith and Jane,” she told me when I was in that position. “Here, it’s human to human.”
Jane is an existential therapist. She sees a lot of different clients with a lot of different problems, but she thinks all of those problems can be reduced to the same four essential issues: death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom.
Existential therapy isn’t new. Its roots go back to the existential philosophers of the 20th century, and specifically to Jean-Paul Sartre, who summed up his philosophy in 1943 when he wrote that humans are “condemned to be free.” Unlike other animals, humans are conscious and aware of their own mortality—but that means they have the possibility, and responsibility, of deciding in each moment what to do and how to be.
She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.
Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.
Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.
A 70 percent marginal rate could help, not hurt, innovation.
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested this month that the United States should tax income over $10 million by 70 percent, it galvanized something unusual: a broad and substantive national conversation about the design and purpose of federal tax policy.
From the cacophony of communist callouts, however, a subtler argument emerged. Entrepreneurs and center-right economists insisted that raising taxes dramatically on the rich would undo America’s ability to spark innovation and attract entrepreneurs who want to start companies and solve big problems.
In the abstract, their case is clear. “If income taxes are high enough, start-ups stop happening,” said Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, the country’s preeminent start-up incubator.
Can marketers rebrand capitalism for young Americans?
On Monday, the men’s shaving brand Gillette released a new commercial and social-responsibility initiative, and the internet had some feedback. The ad, which shifts Gillette’s longtime tagline from “The Best a Man Can Get” to “The Best Men Can Be,” is intended to mark the brand’s 30th anniversary and reflect on the masculine ideals the razor purveyor has endorsed in the past and will demonstrate going forward. It also promises million-dollar donations to nonprofits with related goals over the next three years, starting with the Boys & Girls Club of America.
Reactions were very mixed and very loud, even though the ad itself is pretty moderate and diverse in its depictions of male behavior. It features fictionalized scenes and clips from the news or viral videos. Some of the men depicted bully or sexually harass others, while other men are active parents and healthy conflict-resolvers. The spot’s voice-over ends by reminding viewers that what they do is important, because it sets an example for the next generation.
These gorgeous, weird, and often overlooked organisms have repeatedly challenged our understanding of nature—and our way of studying it.
Science is sometimes caricatured as a wholly objective pursuit that allows us to understand the world through the lens of neutral empiricism. But the conclusions that scientists draw from their data, and the very questions they choose to ask, depend on their assumptions about the world, the culture in which they work, and the vocabulary they use. The scientist Toby Spribille once said to me, “We can only ask questions that we have imagination for.” And he should know because no group of organisms better exemplifies this principle than the one Spribille is obsessed with: lichens.
Lichens can be found growing on bark, rocks, or walls; in woodlands, deserts, or tundra; as coralline branches, tiny cups, or leaf-like fronds. They look like plants or fungi, and for the longest time, biologists thought that they were. But 150 years ago, a Swiss botanist named Simon Schwendener suggested the radical hypothesis that lichens are composite organisms—fungi, living together with microscopic algae.
