august 1932

1.

To be a parent is to be compromised. You pledge allegiance to justice for all, you swear that private attachments can rhyme with the public good, but when the choice comes down to your child or an abstraction—even the well-being of children you don’t know—you’ll betray your principles to the fierce unfairness of love. Then life takes revenge on the conceit that your child’s fate lies in your hands at all. The organized pathologies of adults, including yours—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children. Only they can save themselves.

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Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.

Among the freedoms afforded to Hong Kong citizens after Britain gave up control in 1997 were freedom of speech and of the press. The result was a vibrant publishing industry that has produced a dizzying array of books, journals, newspapers, and magazines addressing every aspect of mainland China’s history, politics, and society. Indeed, without the publishers of Hong Kong, the world would know a lot less about China than it does—and the same is true of the thousands of mainlanders who, until recently, flocked to such popular Hong Kong bookstores as Causeway Bay and the People’s Recreation Community.

Today these bookstores are gone, along with nearly all of Hong Kong’s independent publishers. The courageous men and women who struggled to keep them alive have been effectively silenced. This crackdown, along with the many other issues that have brought 2 million protesters into the streets of Hong Kong, reflect the Chinese Communist Party’s aggressive efforts to bring the former British colony into line with President Xi Jinping’s 2017 decree that all forms of media would be consolidated and placed under the direct control of the Central Propaganda Department.

America is a place defined by bigness. It is infamous, both within its borders and abroad, for the size of its cars, its portions, its defense budget—and its houses.

Rightly so: U.S. houses are among the biggest—if not the biggest—in the world. According to the real-estate firms Zillow and Redfin, the median size of an American single-family home is in the neighborhood of 1,600 or 1,650 square feet. About five years ago, Sonia A. Hirt, a professor of landscape architecture and planning at the University of Georgia, was working on a book about land-use patterns in the U.S., and when she tracked down the average size of dwellings for about two dozen countries, the U.S. came out on top. Her comparisons were rough because she’d cobbled together her data from various sources, but she found that American living spaces had a good 600 to 800 square feet on most of the competition.

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protest movement, the David to China’s Goliath, is calling out to the land of the free for help—and help may be on the way. The question is whether it will be substantial enough and fast enough, and have the support of the president of the United States.

For months now, a small but zealous contingent of American flag-waving protesters has been a fixture of the huge demonstrations in Hong Kong, including today, when dozens of people again carried the U.S. flag during a rally held in defiance of a police ban. As the struggle to resist China’s tightening grip on the semiautonomous region has intensified, protesters have appealed to the United States in larger numbers and with greater urgency. Last weekend, tens of thousands of protesters marched near the U.S. consulate in the territory, singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and carrying signs that urged President Donald Trump to “liberate Hong Kong.” Perhaps more realistically, they also issued a practical plea: for Congress to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which would grant the United States further means to defend the territory’s freedoms and autonomy.

President Donald Trump says the United States is “locked and loaded” to retaliate against whoever struck Saudi Arabia’s oil refineries on Saturday. But before American forces rain “fire and fury” on Iran, some urgent questions must be answered.

Are we quite sure that Iran is the culprit?

Iranian culpability certainly seems the most plausible explanation for the refinery attack. But given the utter untrustworthiness of both the Trump presidency and Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi government, it seems wise to demand certainty, not plausibility. How confident are U.S. analysts that the attack was ordered from Tehran, rather than by an Iranian proxy acting for its own motives?

Where’s the treaty obligation?

Donald Trump has changed the presidency—but has he changed it forever? One undercurrent in the Democratic presidential race is an implicit debate over just that question.

Some Democrats seem to want to fight Trump’s fire with fire, outrage with outrage, vulgarity with vulgarity. Beto O’Rourke courts the cameras by barking out the F-word—and selling T-shirts displaying his vulgar quote. At the August debate, Bill de Blasio and Tulsi Gabbard grasped for a boost in the polls by launching Trump-like demagogic attacks on the front-runners. Trump showed America that political experience doesn’t count for Republicans; Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang, and Marianne Williamson are trying to convince us that it doesn’t matter for Democrats either—or is even a liability.

Michael Bennet walked into a classroom at the Jesse Taylor Early Education Center on the north side of Des Moines carrying a box of school supplies. It was the first day of school. Around a table sat 10 Iowans—nine women and one man—teachers, school administrators, education experts. Bennet set the box down and took a chair. Jacketless and tieless, medium height, medium build, slight hunch, blue shirt coming untucked, pale-brown shoes, red-brown hair conventionally combed and parted, low-wattage smile flickering across thin lips: He might have been the preschool director, except she was a woman named Celeste Kelling sitting to his right. Even the position of school superintendent—which Bennet once held in Denver—would have needed a little more flash. When he introduced himself as a senator from Colorado who was running for president, it sounded like a half-apologetic and slightly improbable aside. He wanted to get to his real business, which was listening to these people.

During the 2016 campaign, I received a phone call from an influential political journalist and author, who was soliciting my thoughts on Donald Trump. Trump’s rise in the Republican Party was still something of a shock, and he wanted to know the things I felt he should keep in mind as he went about the task of covering Trump.

At the top of my list: Talk to psychologists and psychiatrists about the state of Trump’s mental health, since I considered that to be the most important thing when it came to understanding him. It was Trump’s Rosetta stone.

I wasn’t shy about making the same case publicly. During a July 14, 2016, appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, for example, I responded to a pro-Trump caller who was upset that I opposed Trump despite my having been a Republican for my entire adult life and having served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and the George W. Bush White House.

The helter-skelter 1970s and ’80s are remembered as the serial killer’s heyday—think of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz. Since then, data suggest, the number of serial killers—defined by the National Institute of Justice as those who commit two or more separate murders, often with a psychological motive and a sadistic sexual component—has plunged, falling 85 percent in three decades; the FBI now says that serial killers account for fewer than 1 percent of killings. Several reasons are commonly cited for this decline, among them longer prison sentences and a reduction in parole (many serial killers are convicted murderers who, after serving time, kill again). Better forensic science is also credited, as are cultural and technological shifts: less hitchhiking, more helicopter parents, 60 million security cameras.

The folded American flag from her father’s military funeral is displayed on the mantel in Tawanda Rhodes’s living room. Joseph Victorian, a descendant of Creole slaves, had enlisted in the Army 10 days after learning that the United States was going to war with Korea.

After he was wounded in combat, Joseph was stationed at a military base in Massachusetts. There he met and fell in love with Edna Smith-Rhodes, a young woman who had recently moved to Boston from North Carolina. The couple started a family and eventually settled in the brick towers of the Columbia Point housing project. Joseph took a welding job at a shipyard and pressed laundry on the side; later, Edna would put her southern cooking skills to use in a school cafeteria. In 1979, Joseph and Edna bought a house in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood for $24,000.