James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett, “Dow 36,000”; Todd Oppenheimer, “Schooling the Imagination”; Garry Wills, “Lincoln's greatest Speech?”; Alan Wolfe, “The Mystique of Betty Friedan”; and much more.
"Emancipation is the demand of civilization," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in April, 1862. "That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue." Atlantic articles by Emerson and Frederick Douglass comment on Lincoln's greatest decision, and his greatest legacy.
Has the long-running bull market been a contemporary version of tulipmania? In explaining their new theory of stock valuation, the authors argue that in fact stock prices are much too low and are destined to rise dramatically in the coming years
Frederick Douglass called it "a sacred effort," and Lincoln himself thought that his Second Inaugural, which offered a theodicy of the Civil War, was better than the Gettysburg Address
She helped to change not only the thinking but the lives of many American women, but recent books throw into question the intellectual and personal sources of her work.
Waldorf schools, which began in the esoteric mind of the Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner, have forged a unique blend of progressive and traditional teaching methods that seem to achieve impressive results -- intellectual, social, even moral.
Basil dressed like a man, with shirt and pants, but he had the long snout of a dog, yellow eyes as scary as a snake's, and goat hooves fitted tightly into human shoes.
In the terrible desert and desolate massif of Xinjiang, the Beijing government faces a volatile mixture of ethnic groups, some of whom are hostile to all that is Chinese.
The White House again wants to expel certain groups of protected immigrants, a reversal after backing away from the policy months ago.
Updated at 4:22 p.m.
The Trump administration is resuming its efforts to deport certain protected Vietnamese immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades—many of them having fled the country during the Vietnam War.
This is the latest move in the president’s long record of prioritizing harsh immigration and asylum restrictions, and one that’s sure to raise eyebrows—the White House had hesitantly backed off the plan in August before reversing course. In essence, the administration has now decided that Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the country before the establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and Vietnam are subject to standard immigration law—meaning they are all eligible for deportation.
In the 19th century, cold rinses and days-long baths became a way to treat—and control—psychiatric patients.
The 19th century was a time of great innovation in plumbing. Cities got the first modern sewers, with tunnels that snaked for miles underground. Houses got bathrooms, with ceramic toilets, tubs, and sinks that you would easily recognize today. And, not to be left behind in this period of infrastructure overhaul, psychiatric hospitals got hydrotherapy: the method of using water to treat madness.
By then, this curious idea was not new. In the 17th century, for example, the Flemish physician Jan Baptist van Helmont would plunge patients into ponds or the sea. His inspiration came from a story he’d heard of an escaping “lunatic” who ran right into a lake. The man nearly drowned, but when he recovered, so did his mind, apparently. Van Helmont concluded that water could stop “the too violent and exorbitant Operation of the fiery Life.” His began stripping his patients naked, binding their hands, and lowering them headfirst into the water, according to van Helmont’s son, who wrote a book about his father.
The untold story of how anger became the dominant emotion in our politics and personal lives—and what we can do about it.
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.
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?”
Donald Trump’s ideological cousins around the world want to reverse the feminist gains of recent decades.
When Americans look abroad these days, they see Donald Trumps everywhere: In Brazil, whose new president, Jair Bolsonaro, endorses torture, threatens to pull out of the Paris climate-change agreement, and suggests that his country was better off under military rule. In the Philippines, where President Rodrigo Duterte has overseen the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug dealers and threatened to impose martial law nationwide. In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has quashed the free press, enriched his cronies, and stoked fear and hatred of refugees. In Poland, whose Law and Justice Party has undermined the independence of the supreme court. Even in Italy, whose leaders demonize immigrants, bash the European Union, and pal around with Steve Bannon.
Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.
These should be boom times for sex.
The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.
If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.
In federal court on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer sought to break free of the president as a judge sentenced him to prison.
NEW YORK — With his teary-eyed and grim-faced family arrayed behind him, Michael Cohen laid claim to his freedom in a federal courtroom here on Wednesday morning. Not from incarceration, of course—Donald Trump’s former longtime lawyer, fixer, and foot soldier knew he was soon headed to prison after he pleaded guilty to what a federal judge called “a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct.”
No, the 52-year-old Cohen was declaring his formal, surely irrevocable liberty from the clutches of the president of the United States.
“Today,” he told Judge William H. Pauley III in a deep, steady voice, “is the day I am getting my freedom back.”
“I have been living,” Cohen continued, “in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real-estate mogul whose business acumen I admired.”
The filmmaker Deeyah Khan is the latest anti-racist to enjoy success by engaging, rather than shunning, people with deplorable beliefs.
In White Right: Meeting the Enemy, the filmmaker Deeyah Khan, a Muslim woman of color, recounts a television interview she gave during the summer of 2016. “The fact of the matter is that the U.K. is never going to be white again,” she told the BBC. “Similarly, our parents who have left Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and other Muslim countries, for them to think that they can reestablish those countries and the lives that they had there over here—it’s not gonna happen. We’re together going to have to find out: What does it mean to build a society that includes all of us?” A deluge of hate mail quickly followed.
Rather than silence her, the threats provoked her to go out and meet “the kind of people who sent me this abuse … to get behind the hatred and the extremist ideology to find out what they are really like as human beings.”
Some who enter this president’s service are changed for the worse. Others have been that way all along.
John Kelly’s forthcoming departure as White House chief of staff is a reminder of an important but underpublicized distinction among those who have chosen to support or work for Donald Trump.The distinction is between those whom Trump has made bad, and those who have been revealed as bad through their association with this man. (There’s also a small “not yet bad” category, which I will get to later on.)
In the first category,“made bad,” are people who in other circumstances might have taken a harder, higher-minded path. They might have chosen to stand on principle, to take the long view, to seek out reasonable compromises, to defend the norms and values of American institutions—and, overall, to behave in a way they’d be happy to talk about later on. Many of these people have actually made those choices at previous times in their life.
Proving white-collar crimes is an exceedingly difficult task for prosecutors. Trump is doing his best to make it easier.
Donald Trump can’t stop telling on himself.
Just two years into his presidency, the New York real-estate mogul turned politician faces at least two separate criminal investigations, while half a dozen former advisers, including his former campaign chair, deputy campaign chair, national-security adviser, foreign-policy adviser, and personal attorney have all pleaded guilty to or been convicted of serious crimes. That’s even more remarkable when you consider that the American legal system makes white-collar crimes difficult to prove, by making guilt conditional on a defendant’s state of mind, a notoriously high standard.
Nevertheless, Trump has done his best to ensure that we all know what he’s thinking, even as his legal peril grows. Last Friday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York claimed in a filing that Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, had been directed during the campaign to pay hush money to women who claimed to have had affairs with the president. Those payments, according to the filing, were laundered through shell corporations and reimbursed by the president’s private company. Effectively, the president’s own Justice Department accused him of ordering his personal attorney to commit a felony.
Other countries swear by brooms, mops, and sponges. The U.S. prefers something more disposable.
Every day, as Americans dry their hands, soak up their spills, and wipe their counters, they are—whether they know it or not—contributing to their country’s dominance. In an era of waning American exceptionalism, inhabitants can at least pride themselves on an underratedly important, probably shameful distinction: They reside in the paper-towel capital of the world.
This status is unquestioned. According to data shared with me by the market-research firm Euromonitor International, global spending on paper towels for use at home (but not in office or public bathrooms) added up to about $12 billion in 2017, and Americans accounted for about $5.7 billion of that total. In other words, the U.S. spends nearly as much on paper towels as every other country in the world combined.
