july 1872

On Sunday afternoon, Attorney General Bill Barr presented a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusions that contained a few sentences from Mueller’s final report, one of which directly addressed the question of collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” In a footnote, Barr explained that Mueller had defined “coordination” as an “agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump campaign and the Russian government on election interference.”

Mueller’s full report has not been made available to the public yet, so it’s not clear whether it sets forth everything the special counsel’s office learned over the course of its nearly two-year investigation—including findings about conduct that was perhaps objectionable but not criminal—or whether it is more tailored and explains only Mueller’s prosecution and declination decisions. But national-security and intelligence experts tell me that Mueller’s decision not to charge Trump or his campaign team with a conspiracy is far from dispositive, and that the underlying evidence the special counsel amassed over two years could prove as useful as a conspiracy charge to understanding the full scope of Russia’s election interference in 2016.

Updated at 3:34 p.m. ET on March 25, 2019.

In March 1997, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Jehovah’s Witnesses, sent a letter to each of its 10,883 U.S. congregations, and to many more congregations worldwide. The organization was concerned about the legal risk posed by possible child molesters within its ranks. The letter laid out instructions on how to deal with a known predator: Write a detailed report answering 12 questions—Was this a onetime occurrence, or did the accused have a history of child molestation? How is the accused viewed within the community? Does anyone else know about the abuse?—and mail it to Watchtower’s headquarters in a special blue envelope. Keep a copy of the report in your congregation’s confidential file, the instructions continued, and do not share it with anyone.

In hindsight, there were plenty of indications over the past decade that American politics were headed toward the partisan sniping and low-stakes media obsessions that crowd the news cycle today. Take Arugulagate. In 2007, Barack Obama was in Iowa, speaking as a presidential hopeful to a group of farmers who were worried about the stagnation of their crop prices while America’s grocery bills continued to rise.

In his speech, Obama referred to the inflated cost of arugula at Whole Foods, which was a small gaffe: Iowa didn’t have a Whole Foods, and the leafy vegetable wasn’t then familiar enough to be name-checked in a broad point about American grocery costs. But political media turned arugula into its own news cycle, with conservatives charging Obama with elitism. Around the same time, lattes were also being slandered. It was a big moment for food as proof of one’s true ability to govern.

Updated on March 22 at 9:06 p.m. ET.

Two years ago, Desmond Hughes heard so many of his favorite podcasters extolling AirPods, Apple’s tiny, futuristic $170 wireless headphones, that he decided they were worth the splurge. He quickly became a convert.

Hughes is still listening to podcasters talk about their AirPods, but now they’re complaining. The battery can no longer hold a charge, they say, rendering them functionally useless. Apple bloggers agree: “AirPods are starting to show their age for early adopters,” Zac Hall, an editor at 9to5Mac, wrote in a post in January, detailing how he frequently hears a low-battery warning in his AirPods now. Earlier this month, Apple Insider tested a pair of AirPods purchased in 2016 against a pair from 2018, and found that the older pair died after two hours and 16 minutes. “That’s less than half the stated battery life for a new pair,” the writer William Gallagher concluded.

LONDON—“There is a complete meltdown going on here,” Stephen Castle, a U.K. correspondent for The New York Times and a veteran journalist who has been based in Brussels and London for more than a quarter century, told me during another hectic week in Brexit Britain. “It’s a very slow-motion and incremental one, and that makes it harder to bring to light.”

For even the most seasoned analysts and reporters, Brexit has proved to be a political labyrinth. It’s a tumultuous moment for Britain—perhaps the most tumultuous to befall the country since World War II. Britain’s decision to leave the European Union is rife with extreme political and economic consequences. And yet, nearly three years of complications, crunch weeks, and crises later, Brexit remains seemingly impossible to understand. For the journalists tasked with covering this story, decoding and untangling Brexit has been particularly challenging. Keeping it comprehensible for audiences, both within the United Kingdom and around the world, has proved even harder.

I have four kids. I don’t strike people as the type to have so many, nor does my wife. We’re professors. Neither of us is conventionally religious. We spent our 20s in Brooklyn as vegetable-blending free spirits. I drive a Prius on principle, even though I’m 6 foot 8 and my head hits the ceiling.

It’s hard to say how we ended up with such a large family. When people ask, I say (1) my wife likes babies, (2) I tend to assume I won’t regret having another child, and (3) we love the kids we have. But there’s an element of mystery, even to me. Any answer feels incomplete. Maybe that’s because the fuller explanation is buried too deep, in layers of instinct and social expectation. I think it’s hard for people to say exactly why they have kids or not—and if they do, how many.

Dear Therapist,

My wife and I recently discovered she's about six weeks pregnant. This is devastating news for both of us. We have a 17-month-old daughter and we planned on having only one child. The birth control we had been using failed. I tried to have a vasectomy nine months ago and my wife objected at the doctor's office without citing reasons. She said she would get an IUD instead, but she was unable to get the IUD, because doctors had to remove a fibroid first. She learned about the pregnancy at the doctor's office during a consult on removing the fibroid.

Since hearing the news, I have been honest with her about my feelings. I reminded her that we simply cannot afford a second child and we can kiss our joint career aspirations goodbye if we have another baby. She agrees with me. More important, I said our marriage will be over in the sense that we will just be co-parents rather than lovers because I will resent her, and the baby will always be a reminder of my career sacrifice and our indebtedness.

Last week, for the first time since the second U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, at the end of February, the U.S. Treasury Department announced new sanctions related to North Korea, designating two China-based shipping companies that had facilitated North Korean sanctions-evasion activities.

But a day later, President Trump took to Twitter and perplexed analysts by announcing that he had ordered the U.S. Treasury department to withdraw “large scale Sanctions” that were purportedly announced on March 22. No such sanctions had been announced; North Korea-watchers were left scratching their heads. Several news agencies ran stories suggesting that the president’s announcement pertained to the two Chinese entities that had been designated a day earlier, but that was hardly convincing as a “large scale” sanctions package.

BEIRUT—If you’re looking to transfer money here, there’s a chance you will be directed to Abu Shawkat. He works out of a small office in a working-class suburb of the Lebanese capital, but won’t give you its exact location. Instead, he’ll direct you to a nearby alleyway, and whether he shows up depends on whether he likes the look of you.

Abu Shawkat—not his real name—is part of the hawala system, which is often used to transfer cash between places where the banking system has broken down or is too expensive for some to access. If he agrees to do business, you’ll set a password and he will take your cash, then provide you with the contact information of a hawala broker in the city where your money is headed. Anyone who offers that specific password to that particular broker will get the funds. Thus, cash can travel across borders without any inquiry into who is sending or receiving it, or its purpose.

Attorney General Bill Barr’s summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report—released on Sunday to Congress and the public at a slim four pages—was greeted as putting to rest the questions that have swirled around President Donald Trump’s campaign and its relationship to Russia.

But reports of the end of this chapter of Trump’s presidency have been greatly exaggerated. The only document that has so far become public is Barr’s highly truncated summary of Mueller’s report—which is not the same as the report itself. This is a time of suspended animation, after the investigators have finished their work but before it’s clear precisely what the conclusion of that work means.

The debate has shifted out of the legal playing field and into the realm of politics without any of the political players knowing what information they’re dealing with. The problem is that Mueller’s report itself is not yet public. So while the matter at hand is definitively no longer one for the courts, members of Congress and the public at large--who will need to decide what is and is not acceptable in public life--don’t yet know the things they need to know in order to make an informed decision. Between the idea of Mueller’s report and the reality of its appearance, in other words, falls the shadow.