—The Senate Judiciary Committee begins deliberations today on the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. Republicans need five more Democratic votes to overcome a filibuster that Democrats have vowed to mount on the nomination.
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).
Trump Donates His First-Quarter Paycheck to the National Park Service
Carlos Barria / Reuters
President Trump donated his first three months of salary to the National Park Service (NPS) on Monday. The total comes to $78,333.32, which Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, handed in the form of a check to an NPS employee. During his election campaign, Trump promised to donate his $400,000 annual salary if elected, even asking for the press corps’s help in deciding where to send it. The NPS is overseen by the Department of Interior, which said the money would go toward maintaining historic battlefield sites. At these areas alone, the NPS faces a $229 million budget shortfall. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has said the NPS faces an overall maintenance shortfall of $12 billion, and he’s made this one of his top priorities. But it’s unclear how that shortfall will be made up because Trump’s “skinny” budget calls for a 12 percent cut to the Interior Department.
UPDATE: Democrats Have Enough Votes to Filibuster Gorsuch's Nomination; GOP Vows to Press Ahead
(Joshua Roberts / Reuters)
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-9 along party lines Monday to move the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to a full Senate vote. The move comes after Senate Democrats said they have the 41 votes needed to filibuster Gorsuch’s nomination, likely forcing Republicans to use the so-called “nuclear option” and put the Supreme Court nominee’s appointment to a full vote. Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee to fill the vacancy created by the death last year of Judge Antonin Scalia, has the support of all 52 Republicans in the Senate, as well as of at least three Democrats—Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Joe Donnelly of Indiana—from conservative states that went to Trump. He needed 60 votes—a supermajority—for his nomination to be approved. The “nuclear option” would allow Gorsuch’s nomination to be approved by a simple majority of senators rather than the 60-vote supermajority. Democrats, who are still angry over the Republican refusal to hold hearings for Judge Merrick Garland, whom President Obama nominated to fill Scalia’s spot on the court, insist that if Republicans don’t have 60 votes for Gorsuch, Trump should nominate a judge who can win the support of a supermajority of lawmakers. Despite their opposition, however, Gorsuch is expected to be confirmed.
President Trump meets Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in the Oval Office on April 3, 2017. (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters)
President Trump welcomed Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to the White House Monday, marking the Arab leader’s first visit to Washington since he assumed power following former President Mohamed Morsi’s ouster in 2013. “I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President al-Sisi,” Trump told reporters at the meeting. “He’s done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation. We are very much behind Egypt and the people of Egypt.” Though Egypt has been a longstanding U.S. ally—receiving approximately $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid annually—Sisi was never afforded an invitation to the White House under the Obama administration. Indeed, Obama froze aid to the country for two years after Sisi, then Egypt’s defense minister, led a popular uprising against Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood-led government, which was elected the previous year. The U.S.-Egyptian relationship was further strained by alleged human-rights abuses by the Sisi government, including mass arrests, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial executions. Though Trump noted that both countries “have a few things” they do not agree upon, he said the two countries will work together “to fight terrorism and other things.”
Ecuador's New Socialist President Is Good News for Julian Assange
Mariana Bazo / Reuters
Socialist candidate Lenín Moreno narrowly won Ecuador’s presidential election Sunday night, though his opponent has demanded a recount and protesters from both sides took to the streets. Moreno’s win bucked a trend of center-right victories in South America, and was also good news for Julian Assange, whose fate as an asylee in Ecuador’s embassy in London was predicated on the win. Moreno, a former vice president, won 51 percent of the vote over his opponent, Guillermo Lasso. Lasso was a former banker who offered voters a change from leftist economic policies he blamed for the country’s sagging economy. He also promised to kick Assange out of the embassy within 30 days of taking office. At least one respected exit poll had put Lasso ahead Sunday night, so when news of Moreno’s win came later that evening, Lasso denounced it as fraudulent, saying, “We won’t let them cheat us!” His supporters stormed the country’s election headquarters and battled riot police. As oil prices and exports have fallen in the region, countries like Argentina, Peru, and Brazil have turned to center-right leaders who’ve promised fiscal reforms. But by selecting Moreno, Ecuador remains in the company of Socialist-led Bolivia and Venezuela.
Blast Reported at Metro Station in St. Petersburg, Russia
A general view of St. Petersburg, Russia (Maxim Zmeyev / Reuters)
Updated at 9 a.m.
Russian news reports say an explosion in the St. Petersburg metro system has killed at least people. The blast reportedly occurred at the Sennaya Square metro station.
I thought I could fix the air quality in my apartment. I was wrong.
A few weeks ago, a three-inch square of plastic and metal began, slowly and steadily, to upend my life.
The culprit was my new portable carbon-dioxide monitor, a device that had been sitting in my Amazon cart for months. I’d first eyed the product around the height of the coronavirus pandemic, figuring it could help me identify unventilated public spaces where exhaled breath was left to linger and the risk for virus transmission was high. But I didn’t shell out the $250 until January 2023, when a different set of worries, over the health risks of gas stoves and indoorair pollution, reached a boiling point. It was as good a time as any to get savvy to the air in my home.
I knew from the get-go that the small, stuffy apartment in which I work remotely was bound to be an air-quality disaster. But with the help of my shiny Aranet4, the brand most indoor-air experts seem to swear by, I was sure to fix the place up. When carbon-dioxide levels increased, I’d crack a window; when I cooked on my gas stove, I’d run the range fan. What could be easier? It would basically be like living outside, with better Wi-Fi. This year, spring cleaning would be a literal breeze!
Other groups made a bigger splash, but Blondie was a true genre chameleon.
No decade is dominated by a single genre of popular music, but the 1970s was arguably more motley than most. What is the sound of the ’70s? Is it … folk rock? (Neil Young’s Harvest turned 50 last year.) Progressive rock? (Prog’s nadir, Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans, was released in 1973 and promptly crashed under its own weight.) How about disco? Punk? Post-punk? New wave? Reggae? Rap? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. And what do we do with Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell, one of the 10 best-selling albums of the decade? Is bombast a genre?
But if you were to drill down through the decade and pull up a core sample of ’70s pop, it would come up Blondie—and would look, in fact, very much like the band’s eight-disc box set, Against the Odds: 1974–1982, which is nominated for the Best Historical Album Award at this weekend’s Grammys. As the academic and artist Kembrew McLeod has written, Blondie was a mediator between the experimental music and art scene of downtown New York City and the larger pop audience. But more fundamentally, I’d argue, the group was also a conduit and popularizer of a wide variety of new rock and pop sounds.
Artificial intelligence could spare you some effort. Even if it does, it will create a lot more work in the process.
Have you been worried that ChatGPT, the AI language generator, could be used maliciously—to cheat on schoolwork or broadcast disinformation? You’re in luck, sort of: OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT, has introduced a new tool that tries to determine the likelihood that a chunk of text you provide was AI-generated.
I say “sort of” because the new software faces the same limitations as ChatGPT itself: It might spread disinformation about the potential for disinformation. As OpenAI explains, the tool will likely yield a lot of false positives and negatives, sometimes with great confidence. In one example, given the first lines of the Book of Genesis, the software concluded that it was likely to be AI-generated. God, the first AI.
Yesterday Vladimir Putin went to Stalingrad. It was the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in the city once named after the Soviet dictator. The current Russian dictator solemnly bowed his head and knelt before a wreath laid to honor the heroes of the battle that turned the tide of World War II. The day before the ceremony, a bronze bust of Joseph Stalin had been unveiled in the city, whose name was changed to Volgograd in 1961. By then Stalin, perhaps the 20th century’s greatest mass murderer, was out of favor. But for Putin, the city is still Stalingrad, the year is still 1943, Nazis are still waging a scorched-earth war, and the heroic Russian people are still fighting a far stronger enemy in defense of the motherland. Only it’s 2023, and the enemy is the independent, democratic, much smaller nation of Ukraine, led by a Jewish president and armed by Western democracies—including Germany.
America can’t shake the feeling that vaccination rates are about to plummet. The facts say otherwise.
The world has just seen the largest vaccination campaign in history. At least 13 billion COVID shots have been administered—more injections, by a sweeping margin, than there are human beings on the Earth. In the U.S. alone, millions of lives have been saved by a rollout of extraordinary scope. More than three-fifths of the population elected to receive the medicine even before it got its full approval from the FDA.
Yet the legacy of this achievement appears to be in doubt. Just look at where the country is right now. In Florida, the governor—a likely Republican presidential candidate—openly pursues the politics of vaccine resistance and denial. In Ohio, kids are getting measles. In New York, polio is back. A football player nearly died on national TV, and fears about vaccines fanned across the internet. Vaccinologists, pediatricians, and public-health experts routinely warn that confidence is wavering for every kind of immunization, and worry that it may collapse in years to come.
Homeland-security threats and national-security threats demand different responses.
Montana balloon crisis sounds a lot less dramatic than its Cuban-missile counterpart, and not just because the Chinese surveillance balloon spotted over Big Sky Country last night is inherently less threatening than Soviet weaponry just off the coast of Florida in 1962. This situation isn’t a crisis. It isn’t even close. Although the U.S. government had to acknowledge the presence of the balloon because regular citizens were posting pictures online, the Biden administration’s best option wasn’t to panic and respond with what the military calls a “kinetic action”—or what normal people call shooting the sucker out of the sky. It was to play for time.
The revelation immediately produced a chorus of armchair analysts and GOP politicians insisting that President Joe Biden was weak in the face of a clearly aggressive action by the Chinese. Some insisted that former President Donald Trump would never have allowed such a violation of American borders. Many commentators wanted the U.S. to do something—anything.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Let’s say you’re a politician in a close race and your opponent suffers a stroke. What do you do?
If you are Mehmet Oz running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, what you do is mock your opponent’s affliction. In August, the Oz campaign released a list of “concessions” it would offer to the Democrat John Fetterman in a candidates’ debate, including:
“We will allow John to have all of his notes in front of him along with an earpiece so he can have the answers given to him by his staff, in real time.” And: “We will pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby.”
The model and actor drove men wild. She’s still enduring the consequences.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
When the subject of Pamela Anderson comes up, understatement likely isn’t the first word that comes to mind. And yet, as her entirely self-authored memoir, Love, Pamela, makes clear, it is actually her preternatural calling. She can virtually murder a man with a simple declarative sentence.
About Jack Nicholson, who she says meets her gaze in a bathroom at the Playboy Mansion, while she’s fixing her lip gloss and he’s carousing with two women against a wall, she writes, “I guess that got him to the finish line, because he made a funny noise, smiled, and said, Thanks, dear.” She recalls Scott Baio (also at the Playboy Mansion) strangely inspecting her toes and ears before making a move, but later getting in trouble with his family “when he let me drive his Mercedes convertible.” Tim Allen, she alleges, flashes her on her first day filming Home Improvement, which she gently categorizes as one of many “encounters where people felt they knew me enough to make absolute fools out of themselves.” (Allen denies the allegation.) Tom Ford, at a Vanity Fair shoot, strips her naked, trusses her up in nude-toned Thierry Mugler, and says, “You have NO organs, you must never leave the house without a corset.”
Long hours on the job can temporarily ease the symptoms of depression and anxiety. But you’re better off leaving the office and facing your feelings head-on.
“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.
Winston Churchill was many things: statesman, soldier, writer. He was one of the first world leaders to sound the alarm about the Nazi menace in the 1930s, and then captivated the global imagination as a leader against the Axis powers in World War II. While prime minister of the United Kingdom during the war, he kept a crushing schedule, often spending 18 hours a day at work. On top of this, he wrote book after book in office. By the end of his life, he had finished 43, filling 72 volumes.
Churchill also suffered from crippling depression, which he called his “black dog,” and which visited him again and again. It seems almost unthinkable that he could be so productive in states so grim that he once told his doctor, “I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything.”
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.
In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state.
