The Periodic Table of Rejected Elements

The Cheapest Generation

Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissmann

Why Millennials aren’t buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy

In 2009, Ford brought its new supermini, the Fiesta, over from Europe in a brave attempt to attract the attention of young Americans. It passed out 100 of the cars to influential bloggers for a free six-month test-drive, with just one condition: document your experience online, whether you love the Fiesta or hate it.

Young bloggers loved the car. Young drivers? Not so much. After a brief burst of excitement, in which Ford sold more than 90,000 units over 18 months, Fiesta sales plummeted. As of April 2012, they were down 30 percent from 2011.

Don’t blame Ford. The company is trying to solve a puzzle that’s bewildering every automaker in America: How do you sell cars to Millennials (a k a Generation Y)? The fact is, today’s young people simply don’t drive like their predecessors did. In 2010, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985. Miles driven are down, too. Even the proportion of teenagers with a license fell, by 28 percent, between 1998 and 2008.

Why Ossoff Lost

Molly Ball

Despite the opposition Trump has galvanized, the Democrats still haven’t figured out how to win in the places where they’re trying to stage a comeback.

ATLANTA—Around midnight, hours after their candidate conceded he had lost the Most Important Special Election in History, the last remaining supporters of Jon Ossoff took over the stage where he had recently stood. One of them waved a bottle of vodka in the air. Together, they took up the time-honored leftist chant: “This is what democracy looks like!”

Sometimes, this is indeed what democracy looks like: you get outvoted.

Democrats were counting on Ossoff, the boy wonder of Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, to deliver the proof that, with Donald Trump in the White House, there was no limit to their political potential. But after a frenzied two-month runoff campaign between Ossoff and his Republican opponent, Karen Handel, the Democrat wound up with about the same proportion of the vote—48 percent—as Hillary Clinton got here in November. If this race was a referendum on Trump, the president won it.

What's In the Senate Republican Health-Care Bill

Russell Berman

Like the House version, Mitch McConnell’s proposal would slash taxes, cut Medicaid, and eliminate Obamacare’s insurance mandates for individuals and employers.

Updated on June 22 at 12:10 p.m. ET

The Senate Republican health-care bill is finally out in the open.

After weeks of secretive deliberations, party leaders on Thursday released a 142-page proposal that would slash taxes on the wealthy and businesses; reduce federal funding for Medicaid and phase out its expansion under the Affordable Care Act; and limit the tax credits available to help people purchase insurance on the individual market. The legislation, titled the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017, is officially labeled a “discussion draft,” but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants Republican to debate and vote on the bill by the end of next week.

Like the American Health Care Act that passed the House in May, the Senate bill is a substantial revision to Obamacare but not a wholesale repeal. And while Senate Republicans had vowed to start over rather than work off the unpopular House proposal, their version is structured the same way. The Senate measure mirrors the House bill in eliminating the ACA’s employer and individual insurance mandates and most of the tax increases it imposed to pay for new programs. Both proposals call for an overhaul of Medicaid funding that would allow states to institute work requirements and end the program’s status as an open-ended entitlement. The Senate bill would go further than the House’s $800 billion in cuts by reducing its growth rate beginning in 2025, but unlike the House version, it would begin a three-year phase-out of the program’s expansion in 2020. The AHCA would cut off the expansion entirely that year.

J. Scott Applewhite / AP / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

'We're Amending Obamacare. We're Not Killing It'

Russell Berman

The Senate bill coming out Thursday would do many things to health care in the U.S., but it won’t get rid of the Affordable Care Act, and Mitch McConnell won’t claim that it does.

The health-care bill Senate Republicans plan to unveil on Thursday likely will make substantial changes to Medicaid and cut taxes for wealthy Americans and businesses. It will eliminate mandates and relax regulations on insurance plans, and it will reduce the federal government’s role in health care.

What it won’t do, however, is actually repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Lost in the roiling debate over health care over the last several weeks is that Republicans have all but given up on their longstanding repeal-and-replace pledge. The slogan lives on in the rhetoric used by many GOP lawmakers and the Trump White House but not in the legislation the party is advancing. That was true when House Republicans passed the American Health Care Act last month, which rolled back key parts of Obamacare but was not a full repeal. And it is even more true of the bill the Senate has drafted in secret, which reportedly will stick closer to the underlying structure of the law.

The Big Sick Is the Best Romantic Comedy in Years

David Sims

Kumail Nanjiani has transmuted a remarkable true story into a warm, big-hearted summer film that deserves to be a blockbuster.

Watching The Big Sick is like fondly reconnecting with an old friend you didn’t know you missed. The general beats of the film are familiar and warm; I quickly realized it had been a long time since I’d seen a romantic comedy about people who are generally supportive of each other, one free of violent subplots about kidnapping or murder, or many of the stoned, bro-y digressions typical of the last decade. The film has a tremendous asset on its hands, in that it follows the remarkable real-life story of comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his wife Emily V. Gordon (who wrote the movie together), but it’s also special for being such a sincere example of the genre.

Kumail (Nanjiani plays himself) is a struggling stand-up comic living in Chicago—but wait, please, don’t click away! This is not the latest in the never-ending, navel-gazing trend of stories about struggling to make your way in the cutthroat world of comedy. The Big Sick, wisely, lets Kumail’s career serve only as a charming backdrop, rather than an emotional core. It’s neither a “struggling comic” film nor a straightforward romance, but somehow ends up being a terrific example of both, mixing in a healthy soupçon of culture clash and navigating its relationships with grace.

Elaina Natario / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

Therapy for Everybody

Olga Khazan

In Appalachia, a primary-care clinic offers quick bursts of psychotherapy on the spot.

JOHNSON CITY, Tennessee—The first patient of the morning had been working 119 hours a week. Greta (not her real name) had been coming home late at night, skipping dinner, and crashing into bed. One recent night, her college-aged daughter melted down, telling an exhausted Greta that her parents’ marital tensions were putting a strain on her.

“She’s like, ‘Why don’t you just divorce him?’” Greta recounted to her psychotherapist, Thomas Bishop, who was perched on a rolling stool in the bright examination room. “‘Why don’t you just do it and get it over with?’” Greta planned to stay with her husband, but her daughter’s outburst worried her. “Is this going to affect the way she feels about relationships?” she asked Bishop.

What’s Wrong With the Democrats?

Franklin Foer

If the party cares about winning, it needs to learn how to appeal to the white working class.

The strategy was simple. A demographic wave—long-building, still-building—would carry the party to victory, and liberalism to generational advantage. The wave was inevitable, unstoppable. It would not crest for many years, and in the meantime, there would be losses—losses in the midterms and in special elections; in statehouses and in districts and counties and municipalities outside major cities. Losses in places and elections where the white vote was especially strong.

But the presidency could offset these losses. Every four years the wave would swell, receding again thereafter but coming back in the next presidential cycle, higher, higher. The strategy was simple. The presidency was everything.

Power Causes Brain Damage

Jerry Useem

Over time, leaders lose mental capacities—most notably for reading other people—that were essential to their rise.

If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?

When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. But it was Stumpf’s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world’s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room. Although he apologized, he didn’t appear chastened or remorseful. Nor did he seem defiant or smug or even insincere. He looked disoriented, like a jet-lagged space traveler just arrived from Planet Stumpf, where deference to him is a natural law and 5,000 a commendably small number. Even the most direct barbs—“You have got to be kidding me” (Sean Duffy of Wisconsin); “I can’t believe some of what I’m hearing here” (Gregory Meeks of New York)—failed to shake him awake.

The Paradox of American Restaurants

Derek Thompson

The quality and variety of food in the U.S. has never been better. The business seems to be struggling. What’s really going on?

For restaurants in America, it is the best of times, and it is the worst of times.

Last century’s dystopians imagined that mediocre fast-food chains would take over every square inch of the country. But in cities across the U.S., residents are claiming that the local restaurant scene is in a golden age of variety and quality. I’ve heard it in Portland, Oregon, named the best food city in America by the Washington Post; in Washington, D.C., named the best food city in America by Bon Appetit; in New Orleans, where the number of restaurants grew 70 percent after Hurricane Katrina; and in San Francisco, which boasts the most restaurants per capita in the country; and in Chicago, which has added several three-Michelin-star restaurants this decade. I live in New York, which will always lead the country in sheer abundance of dining options, but after years of visiting my sister in Los Angeles, I’m thoroughly convinced that America’s culinary capital has switched coasts.

How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration

Peter Beinart

In the past decade, liberals have avoided inconvenient truths about the issue.

The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.

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In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”

Which Animal Murders the Most?

Alice Roth, Ed Yong, Jeremy Raff, and Jackie Lay

Humans aren't the only mammals who kill each other. So how do we stack up to lions, tigers, and bears?

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Little White Lie

Nadine Ajaka

Lacey Schwartz grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish household, and never once questioned her whiteness—despite not looking like anyone in her family.

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