september 1999

Updated on April 26 at 10:21 a.m.

President Trump isn’t great at avoiding trouble. On Thursday alone, his nominee to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, Ronny Jackson, withdrew amid allegations of misconduct; his EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, is set to be grilled about allegations of misconduct on Capitol Hill; and his long-time fixer, Michael Cohen, was set to appear at a court hearing in Manhattan, a day after saying he’d invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in a suit in California.

But if Trump can’t avoid problems, when they crop up, he can at least try to grab the spotlight himself. That’s what the president did during a wide-ranging and characteristically bizarre call-in to Fox and Friends Thursday morning. It was the president’s first television interview in some time—he called in to another Fox show two months ago—and he didn’t hesitate to make news, if not sense. The hosts seemed shellshocked when it was over.

The scandals are like sediment in the delta of Kanye West. Each new controversy—each paparazzi fight, each “BILL COSBY INNOCENT,” each repackaging of ratty apocalypse couture as expensive fashion, each “multiracial women only” casting call—instead of burying him, only builds up higher and higher until it somehow becomes the very thing that grounds him. It’s worth wondering if, some untold number of years in the future, contemporaries will reflect on West and struggle to remember past the questionable comments and erratic behavior to even recognize his brilliant artistic contributions. The rapper and producer has become a pulsar of nihilism, an object to be followed closely only if one wants to have their faith in humans tested.

It may seem to some as though Kanye West’s recent Donald Trump rally on Twitter is comeuppance for fans and critics who gassed him up as a genius over the years. This is the wrong take. Almost from the start, the Kanye West conversation, among all but the most slavering fanboys, has been critical of West the man even as it has praised West the musician. The people who have hated him have been louder than the people who have loved him, and among the people who loved him it was largely love marbled with ambivalence. The only near-universally held opinion is Barack Obama’s: “He is a jackass. But he’s talented.”

It’s exactly this lack of unanimous acclaim that leads West to troll. He really does think he deserves worship. And most everyone else thinks that’s bonkers. Which creates a feedback loop of controversy—which is different from hype—that’s hard to imagine ever derailing.

In sitcoms, there’s a thing that will sometimes happen when a new character is introduced to the show: The newbie, often but not always a fleeting love interest of one of the main characters, will arrive on the scene … and then promptly be dismissed as narratively expendable. Tasha on Insecure, Emily on Friends, the Mother (her name is pretty much irrelevant) on How I Met Your Mother: They are good characters who serve, in the end, primarily as foils for the people the audience already knows—the people the audience has been trained, episode after episode, to care about. Issa. Rachel. Robin. So: After Ross, reciting his wedding vows to Emily, pledged his undying love to Rachel … Friends proceeded to treat the bride’s anger not as an eminently reasonable reaction to this turn of events, but rather as proof of her unfitness to marry into the tight-knit group at the show’s core. (This despite the manifest evidence that Emily’s love life, too, is DOA.)

PARIS—There was the moment French President Emmanuel Macron greeted President Trump with a kiss on both cheeks, French-style, prompting a Fox News commentator to explain that in France, that kind of thing is normal, even for men. There was the moment Trump pretended to brush dandruff off Macron’s shoulder during an Oval Office photo shoot. There was the unforgettable, amused, “I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening” look on Macron’s face when Trump said the Iran deal was terrible, end of story. There was the press conference where Trump, in television game-show-host mode, said he might withdraw from the Iran deal, or might not and instead offer “a very large deal, maybe deal, maybe not,” and anyway stay tuned for his May 12 decision deadline. There was the weird photo of the two presidential couples planting a tree, and Melania Trump’s white, wide-brimmed hat.

I have seen the future, and it is in the United States.

After a several-year immersion in parts of the country that make the news mainly after a natural disaster or a shooting, or for follow-up stories on how the Donald Trump voters of 2016 now feel about Trump, I have a journalistic impulse similar to the one that dominated my years of living in China. That is the desire to tell people how much more is going on, in places they had barely thought about or even heard of, than they might have imagined.

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In the case of China, that impulse matched the mood of the times. In the years before and after the world financial crisis of 2008, everyone knew that China was on the way up; reporters like me were just filling in the details. In the case of the modern United States, I am well aware that this message runs so counter to prevailing emotions and ideas as to seem preposterous. Everyone knows how genuinely troubled the United States is at the level of national politics and governance. It is natural to assume that these disorders must reflect a deeper rot across the country. And indeed, you can’t travel extensively through today’s America, as my wife, Deb, and I have been doing in recent years, without being exposed to signs of rot, from opioid addiction to calcifying class barriers.

"Your husband will want sex way more than you do," advises Elizabeth of the blog Warrior Wives in a post called "Wifey Sex Confessions."

"God just made him to think about sex more than you. ... Never demean this about him. Never laugh at him or make fun of him. Accept it as a difference."

Accept it as a difference. It may sound like so much cliched marital advice, but this is a much-discussed idea about sexuality in the evangelical Christian community: Men and women are different.

"There's a lot of concern among evangelical men and women about traditional roles being overturned," said Amy DeRogatis, an associate professor of religion at Michigan State University, in an interview. Her new book, Saving Sex, focuses on the anxieties evangelicals feel about sexuality in American culture. But not other people's sexuality—their own.

A strange story about MSNBC host Joy Reid has been unfolding for a week. It began when a Twitter user with about 1,000 followers, @Jamie_Maz, dug up what appeared to be homophobic posts on Reid’s defunct blog, the Reid Report. They were similar in nature to posts that Reid apologized for as “insensitive” back in December, after @Jamie_Maz brought those to light.

The new round of posts contain a lot of cliche gay jokes about Charlie Crist and others, concerns that “adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types, bringing them ‘into the lifestyle,’” and commentary like “part of the intrinsic nature of ‘straightness’ is that the idea of homosexual sex is ... well ... gross ... even if you think that gay people are perfectly lovely individuals.”

Most American kids don’t spend large chunks of their day catching salamanders and poking sticks into piles of fox poop. In a nation moving toward greater standardization of its public-education system, programs centered around getting kids outside to explore aren’t normal.

But that’s precisely what students do at the Nature Preschool at Irvine Nature Center in Owings Mills, Maryland. There, every day, dozens of children ages 3 to 5 come to have adventures on Irvine’s more than 200 acres of woodlands, wetlands, and meadows. These muddy explorers stand out at a moment when many American pre-K programs have become more and more similar to K–12 education: row after row of tiny kids, sitting at desks, drilling letter identification and counting.

It’s somewhat rare that a filmmaker’s first movie is their best, especially when they go on to have an illustrious career. But that might just be the case for Sofia Coppola: The Virgin Suicides, released this week in a new Criterion Collection edition, was such a confident debut in 2000 that it immediately announced her as a generational talent, a status she cemented with her Oscar-winning follow-up, Lost in Translation. But The Virgin Suicides, adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel, remains the richer, more enduring work, a poetic meditation on the angst of teenagehood that’s at once deadly and dreamy.

It’s a movie that borrows so many of the routines of youthful courtship and high-school melodrama—awkward dances, overbearing parents, confusing sexual encounters—but gives them unbearable weight. This is a teen drama presented as a piece of existential horror, one that turns the unknowability of its subjects (five sisters who live a cloistered life in 1970s suburban Detroit) into the movie’s main character, so to speak. The Virgin Suicides isn’t about boys and girls interacting so much as it is about the distance between them, and the ways that gulf can twist and distort from gentle fantasies into something more frightening.