december 1883

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?

How does that line go? All fast food served warm is happy, 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, from Wendy’s, from Burger King, from Domino’s, carefully piled atop silver platters—that were the point: the silver tongs next to the wilting cardboard of the Filet-O-Fish boxes. The containers of dipping sauces, sorted by flavor, stacked cheekily inside silver gravy boats. The recursive faces of Wendy, wrapped around a series of Singles. The French fries, removed from their original packagings and placed, 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 whole thing 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.

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?

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.

LONDON—The likelihood of Britain leaving the European Union without a deal just got a whole lot higher—and Prime Minister Theresa May is largely to blame.

On Tuesday, British lawmakers overwhelmingly voted against May’s negotiated agreement with the EU, delivering a damaging (albeit foreseeable) blow to her Brexit strategy. The deal, which outlines the terms of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU and paves the way for the next phase of negotiations that will decide their future trade relationship, was reached by negotiators late last year. But it still needs to be ratified by both the British and European Parliaments before it can go into effect, and without such an agreement in place, the U.K. will leave the bloc without a deal on March 29.

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.

The year 2018 was not an easy one for planet Earth.

Sure, wind and solar energy kept getting cheaper, and an electric car became America’s best-selling luxury vehicle. But the most important metric of climatic health—the amount of heat-trapping gas entering the atmosphere—got suddenly and shockingly worse.

In the United States, carbon emissions leapt back up, making their largest year-over-year increase since the end of the Great Recession. This matched the trend across the globe. According to two major studies, greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide shot up in 2018—accelerating like a “speeding freight train,” as one scientist put it.

U.S. emissions do remain 11 percent below their 2007 peak, but that is one of the few bright spots in the data. Global emissions are now higher than ever. And the 2018 statistics are all the more dismal because greenhouse-gas emissions had previously seemed to be slowing or even declining, both in the United States and around the world.

The current debate in the United States about building up and reinforcing the border wall with Mexico may have distinctly American roots, but the problems, and the controversial solutions, are global. Growing numbers of immigrants, terrorist activity, continued drug trafficking, and protracted wars have sparked the construction of temporary and permanent border barriers in many regions worldwide. Our own Uri Friedman wrote in his 2016 article “A World of Walls,” “Of the 51 fortified boundaries built between countries since the end of World War II, around half were constructed between 2000 and 2014.” Below, a look at some famous and some lesser-known barriers across the globe.

Senate Democrats were undoubtedly heartened to hear from President Donald Trump’s attorney-general nominee, Bill Barr, that he does not believe Special Counsel Robert Mueller is on “a witch hunt” and that he would allow Mueller to complete the Russia probe unimpeded.

But they also appeared considerably unnerved as Barr defended a lengthy memo he wrote attacking Mueller’s obstruction inquiry as “fatally misconceived,” dodged questions about making Mueller’s final report public, and refused to commit to recusing himself from the investigation if advised to do so by ethics officials.

As the likely next head of the Justice Department—Republicans have majority control of the Senate, all but ensuring his confirmation—Barr will be at the center of a tug-of-war between Trump, who has sought to exert greater control over the Justice Department and FBI, and Mueller, who is probing a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to win the 2016 election. Barr is set to replace Jeff Sessions, who was ousted in November following a year-long public humiliation campaign led by the president. Trump never forgave Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation early on in his tenure.

New Year’s Eve, 2014

I weigh 460 pounds.

Those are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write. Nobody knows that number—not my wife, not my doctor, not my closest friends. It feels like confessing a crime. The average American male weighs about 195 pounds; I’m two of those guys, with a 10-year-old left over. I’m the biggest human being most people who know me have ever met, or ever will.

The government definition of obesity is a body mass index of 30 or more. My BMI is 60.7. My shirts are size XXXXXXL, which the big-and-tall stores shorten to 6X. I’m 6 foot 1, or 73 inches tall. My waist is 60 inches around. I’m nearly a sphere.

Those are the numbers. This is how it feels.

I’m on the subway in New York City, standing in the aisle, clinging to the pole. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, and don’t visit New York much, so I don’t have a feel for how subway cars move. I’m praying this one doesn’t lurch around a corner or slam to a stop, because I’m terrified of falling. Part of it is embarrassment. When a fat guy falls, it’s hard to get up. But what really scares me is the chance that I might land on somebody. I glance at the people wedged around me. None of them could take my weight. It would be an avalanche. Some of them stare at me, and I figure they’re thinking the same thing. An old woman is sitting three feet away. One slip and I’d crush her. I grip the pole harder.