november 1999

The Baby Boomers ruined America. That sounds like a hyperbolic claim, but it’s one way to state what I found as I tried to solve a riddle. American society is going through a strange set of shifts: Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history: The longest such period ended in the Civil War. So what’s to blame for this institutional aging?

One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different interests than younger voters: Cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term problems such as excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more easily ignored.

1. The Disappearance

At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator.

"It’s not true that no one needs you anymore.”

These words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The plane was dark and quiet. A man I assumed to be her husband murmured almost inaudibly in response, something to the effect of “I wish I was dead.”

Again, the woman: “Oh, stop saying that.”

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I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but couldn’t help it. I listened with morbid fascination, forming an image of the man in my head as they talked. I imagined someone who had worked hard all his life in relative obscurity, someone with unfulfilled dreams—perhaps of the degree he never attained, the career he never pursued, the company he never started.

Burner phones, FBI stakeouts, search warrants—Season 6 of The Wire? No, just our social betters street fighting their children’s way into elite colleges. In March, we got Operation Varsity Blues, which charged a group of wealthy parents and an alleged conman with conspiring to get lackluster students into posh colleges in a scheme so improbably complex that it triggered the use of the RICO statute. Earlier this month, Sidwell Friends School, bastion of the Washington, D.C., elite, was the site of a fantastical, Real Housewives of the Independent Schools cavalcade of hideous parental behavior, which apparently included a “verbal assault” on college counselors, secretly taping conversations with them, calling them from blocked phone numbers to run down other kids in the applicant pool, and trying to obtain copies of other students’ records.

“I’ll say it with great respect. Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, okay?”

That was Donald Trump, speaking yesterday with reporters from The Hill. The president was addressing, in part, the latest allegation of sexual assault to be brought against him, this time from the advice columnist and author E. Jean Carroll: In the mid-1990s, Carroll alleged in a recent essay, Trump, cornering her in a dressing room of the department store Bergdorf Goodman, raped her.

The Hill prefaced the headline of its published interview with an all-caps “EXCLUSIVE,” which is technically true but not fully: Trump, after all, has deployed the logic of “She’s not my type” many times before, in attempting to defend himself from charges of sexual misconduct. He used a similar dismissal as a presidential candidate in October 2016, after the former People magazine journalist Natasha Stoynoff accused him of attacking her—“He was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat,” she said—during an interview she had conducted with him at Mar-a-Lago, in 2005:

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wants to be clear: He supports Donald J. Trump. But don’t you dare presume that he supports what Trump says or does.

Sure, he voted for Trump in 2016, but only reluctantly. And okay, he plans to vote for Trump again in 2020. But he’s adamantly opposed to many of the most consequential actions Trump has taken as president. He’ll even say so in public. Doesn’t that make him a good guy?

Christie did his damnedest Monday to convince a crowd at the Aspen Ideas Festival and his interviewer, the Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, that his support for the president of the United States is morally and logically defensible.

It was tough in part because of his scathing, multi-count indictment of Trump. In 2016, Christie recounted, Jared Kushner called to say that Trump was “off the rails” in his attacks on Khizr Khan, whose son was killed in Iraq. Christie claimed credit for getting Trump to finally stop going after the gold-star father.

FAR WEST TEXAS—Before Jeff Boyd became the city of Marfa’s public-works director, he had a long career underwater. As a commercial saturation diver, one of the most specialized kinds of divers around, he would spend his days some 400 feet below the surface, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen, for month-long stretches. Normal air would kill at that depth.

It was around that time, when he worked at offshore drill rigs along the Gulf of Mexico and the Bay of Campeche, a job for which he was regularly tasked with locating underwater pipelines, that he discovered he was a water witch. He calls it a gift.

Boyd, who has a Hulk Hogan handlebar mustache and liquid-blue eyes, might have grown up in the West Texas desert, but he always felt comfortable in and around water. His office is located beneath the town water tower, an Instagrammable silver beacon with Marfa painted on its side that rises above the hip, touristy town. As public-works director, he is in charge of maintaining and improving the city’s water supply and distribution, and often has to find existing underground pipelines. That’s where his sorcery comes in handy.

In one of my many failed schemes to introduce a more equitable division of labor into my home, I stuck lined Post-it Notes on the refrigerator. “Please write down the chores you do. At the end of the week, we’ll figure out if anything needs to change.” I recorded my contributions zealously: cooking, dishes, laundry, sweeping, swiping (bathrooms). Although they did a few household tasks—a load of dishes here, a trash run there—my husband and daughters declined to participate. Perhaps they forgot. But I suspect that they didn’t want to recognize who does and who doesn’t benefit from our existing arrangement.

The results of the 2018 American Time Use Survey (ATUS), released last week, succeed where I didn’t in demonstrating the continuing imbalance in American family life—writ large. Over the past calendar year, U.S. Census Bureau staff, acting on behalf of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), called about 9,600 people 15 years old or older and grilled them about all their activities in the 24-hour period starting at 4 a.m. the previous morning, from having sex and putting on hand cream to removing lint from the dryer and winterizing a boat.

When he ran for president, Donald Trump said he wasn’t going to telegraph his moves to America’s adversaries. He’s been doing just that. He said he wouldn’t draw “red lines” and then ignore them. That’s happening too. He vowed the United States on his watch would be a military colossus so feared that “nobody’s going to mess with us.” People are messing with us.

Trump leaves for Japan today for a series of meetings where he’ll try to make headway on foreign-policy goals at the core of his presidency: ending the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, dealing with Iran, and settling a persistent trade dispute with China. He’ll be talking privately with foreign leaders whose cooperation he sorely needs—China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe among them. (He later travels to Seoul to meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in.) But he’s walking into the Group of 20 summit in Osaka at a moment when his credibility has been shaken by a failure to make good on his threats and stick to his promises.

Facebook, one of the world’s most distrusted companies, wants us to trust its new Libra cryptocurrency, which, it hopes, will be used by billions of people around the world. We shouldn’t. Libra will almost exactly replicate all the problems generated by Facebook’s social network. Those problems can in turn be traced to the central paradox of Big Tech: The technological innovation that is supposed to liberate us from government ends up subjugating us to a handful of corporations.

The key insight underlying Libra is that the transfer of money from person to person is similar to the transfer of information. “Moving money around globally,” Facebook declares in the white paper laying out the company’s vision for its new cryptocurrency, “should be as easy and cost-effective as—and even more safe and secure than—sending a text message or sharing a photo.” Money is information: When I send money to you, I’m telling the financial system that wealth holdings assigned to me should now be recorded as assigned to you. Financial networks are information networks, just as social networks are. And yet while the internet has revolutionized social networks, financial networks have not caught up. They remain hard to use and expensive, especially for international transactions—whereas, once you own the hardware and obtain an internet connection, social communications are essentially free. In Facebook’s vision, the financial network will be modeled on the social network, and eventually the two networks will be merged into a single network, through which we will seamlessly convey to one another money as well as cat photos and political diatribes.