february 1866

How does that line go? All fast food served warm is alike, but every fast-foodstuff consumed after it gets cold is unhappy in its own way?

Regardless: Taste was not, by all appearances, a top concern when it came to the culinary offerings that the White House presented to visiting members of the Clemson Tigers football team on Monday evening. It was the visuals, instead—items from McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Burger King and Domino’s, many of them piled, in their branded packagings, atop silver platters—that were the point: the gleaming tongs next to the wilting boxes of Filets-O-Fish. The plastic containers of dipping sauces, sorted by flavor, stacked cheekily inside gravy boats. The many faces of Wendy, wrapped recursively around a series of Singles. The French fries arranged, haphazardly, in cardboard cups bearing the seal of the White House. The gilt candelabras lending soft light to the guilty pleasures. A little bit P. T. Barnum, a little bit Hieronymus Bosch, a little bit Beauty and the Beast, had “Be Our Guest” been staged by Willy Wonka and also set in the apocalypse: The scene was grinning and a bit grotesque, and that was the point. A portrait of Lincoln gazed down upon the spread and at the man who would claim credit for it, perhaps wondering anew what God hath wrought.

The arresting New York Times headline last Friday—“FBI Investigated If Trump Worked for the Russians”—sparked a strangely bifurcated reaction. A bombshell to some, a dud to others, the story has had lots of people scratching their heads: What does it even mean?

The confusion is understandable, as is the debate over the significance of this deceptively complex and nuanced report—a story that, through no fault of reporters Adam Goldman, Michael Schmidt and Nicholas Fandos, remains incomplete in key respects.

“My concern with the story,” Goldman told The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, “was that it felt, to some extent, like a ‘duh’ story.” It was, after all, already well-known that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was conducting a counterintelligence investigation of links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and there was plenty of evidence already in the public record of the president’s alarming behavior with respect to Vladimir Putin. It was also nothing new that Mueller was investigating obstruction of justice in connection with the president’s interactions with law enforcement. We’ve known that ever since The Washington Post reported it back in June 14, 2017.

In advocating for border security, President Donald Trump has repeatedly sought to enlist Border Patrol agents and their union, the Washington Post reports, even bringing union leaders for Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the White House “to tout the wall.”

That isn’t surprising in one sense: Lots of politicians use uniformed law-enforcement officers as political props. But in another sense, it is rather strange. Typically, unions zealously oppose anything that makes the labor of their members less necessary. The Luddites smashed automated looms. The grocery-store checkers are against self-checkout kiosks. The fast-food workers don’t want touch-screen ordering.

Why would union officials representing men and women who patrol the border be in favor of a barrier intended to stop migration better than humans?

I. An Angry Little Town

Soon after the snows of 1977 began to thaw, the residents of Greenfield, Massachusetts, received a strange questionnaire in the mail. “Try to recall the number of times you became annoyed and/or angry during the past week,” the survey instructed. “Describe the most angry of these experiences.” One woman knew her answer: Recently, her husband had bought a new car. Then he had driven it to his mistress’s house so she could admire the purchase. When the wife found out, she was livid. Furious. Her rage felt like an eruption she couldn’t control.

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The survey was interested in the particulars of respondents’ anger. In its 14 pages, it sought an almost voyeuristic level of detail. It asked the woman to describe the stages of her fury, which words she had shouted, whether punches had been thrown. “In becoming angry, did you wish to get back at, or gain revenge?” the survey inquired. Afterward, did you feel “triumphant, confident and dominant” or “ashamed, embarrassed and guilty”? There were also questions for people like her husband, who had been on the receiving end: “Did the other person’s anger come as a surprise to you, or did you expect that it would occur?”

On September 28, 2018, tech died.

That’s according to a widely circulated eulogy prepared by Vincent Deluard, a strategist at INTL FCStone, a financial services company. “If technology is everywhere, the tech sector no longer exists,” he wrote. “If the tech sector no longer exists, its premium is no longer justified.” When the Financial Times got its hands on the document, it leaned into the death thesis, declaring: “The tech sector is over.”

In news reports, death has several definitions. When it applies to a person, it means the end of life. When it applies to a company or industry, it means the end of growth. Print is dead, live TV is dead, and Millennials killed American cheese; but you can still read a print newspaper with the TV on while eating a cheeseburger.

When Donald Trump gives interviews, it’s usually to Fox News. When he gives interviews to Fox, it’s usually to the channel’s opinion side, not to tougher questioners such as Chris Wallace or Bret Baier. But there he was Saturday night, talking to the normally friendly Jeanine Pirro and receiving what he called the most insulting question in his life.

“Are you now or have you ever worked for Russia, Mr. President?” Pirro asked, citing a New York Times article from over the weekend disclosing that the FBI in May 2017 had opened a counterintelligence inquiry into whether Trump was secretly working for Russia. She delivered the question dismissively, with a chuckle, but she asked it—and received a remarkable answer.

There are but a few guarantees about what each new session of Congress will bring: One is that Republicans and Democrats will bicker over government spending, and another is that Representative Steve King will say something deeply offensive about race, religion, or immigration.

So when House Republicans moved aggressively on Monday evening to kick the Iowa conservative off his two prized congressional committees, the logical question to ask was, why now? Why, after King’s 16 years in Congress and, in the words of one former top GOP aide, “a lifetime achievement award of awful comments,” did the party leadership finally decide to punish a lawmaker whose racism has long been obvious for all to see?

As the partial shutdown of the federal government has stretched to 25 days, Democrats are mulling a possible lawsuit: If Trump declares a national emergency and reappropriates funding for his proposed border wall from other departments, as he has suggested he might do, they would almost certainly challenge that action in court. “Look, an emergency cannot be whatever a president says an emergency is,” Jamie Raskin, a former law professor and representative from Maryland, told The Washington Post. If there’s a legal question about Trump’s next steps, he said, “we’re very happy to relocate it from the halls of Congress into the courts.”

And if Democrats decide they want to sue Trump over his border wall, they may have a novel option—courtesy of their Republican colleagues. The GOP’s 2014 lawsuit against then-President Barack Obama was the first time a district-court judge affirmed the right of the House of Representatives, as an institution, to sue a sitting president. In the midst of this impasse, that suit could serve as a model for Democrats, as Congress once again turns to the courts to help it get out of the work of governing.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naïve—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 convincing Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

Since 2013, Kristina Olson, a psychologist at the University of Washington, has been running a large, long-term study to track the health and well-being of transgender children—those who identify as a different gender from the one they were assigned at birth. Since the study’s launch, Olson has also heard from the parents of gender-nonconforming kids, who consistently defy gender stereotypes but have not socially transitioned. They might include boys who like wearing dresses or girls who play with trucks, but who have not, for example, changed the pronouns they use. Those parents asked whether their children could participate in the study. Olson agreed.

After a while, she realized that she had inadvertently recruited a sizable group of 85 gender-nonconforming participants, ages 3 to 12. And as she kept in touch with the families over the years, she learned that some of those children eventually transitioned. “Enough of them were doing it that we had this unique opportunity to look back at our data to see whether the kids who went on to transition were different to those who didn’t,” Olson says.