january 2000

When the news stories began to surface last month of sobbing young migrant children being forcibly removed from their parents at the border, many close White House watchers instantly suspected Stephen Miller was behind it.

Though he keeps a relatively low profile compared to the cast of camera-muggers and Twitter warriors in President Donald Trump’s orbit, the 32-year-old speechwriter and senior adviser has cultivated a reputation as the most strident immigration hawk in the West Wing. So, it came as little surprise when The New York Times reported over the weekend that Miller had played a key behind-the-scenes role in advancing the new border policy:

“No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” he said during an interview in his West Wing office this past week. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

… Privately, Mr. Miller argued that bringing back “zero tolerance” would be a potent tool in a severely limited arsenal of strategies for stopping migrants from flooding across the border … And in April, after the border numbers reached their zenith, Mr. Miller was instrumental in Mr. Trump’s decision to ratchet up the zero tolerance policy.

One of the paradoxes of modern-day American politics is that white identity politics can be a potent political platform, as long as you don’t call it that. Policies with racist effects are often popular; explicit racism is verboten.

Thus Donald Trump can win the presidency while running, as my colleague Adam Serwer documented, on a program of discrimination, but when Corey Stewart, a Republican politician in Virginia, makes his white-identity politics too explicit he gets shunned by the GOP.

Sometimes, however, the president’s mask slips, usually at moments of national crisis, and he says the quiet part loud, as The Simpsons memorably put it. This happened after race riots in Charlottesville, when Trump insisted there were good people among the white-supremacist marchers. And it’s happening again now in the context of separating families at the borders.

Claire is a 14-year-old girl with short auburn hair and a broad smile. She lives outside Philadelphia with her mother and father, both professional scientists. Claire can come across as an introvert, but she quickly opens up, and what seemed like shyness reveals itself to be quiet self-assuredness. Like many kids her age, she is a bit overscheduled. During the course of the evening I spent with Claire and her mother, Heather—these aren’t their real names—theater, guitar, and track tryouts all came up. We also discussed the fact that, until recently, she wasn’t certain she was a girl.

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Sixth grade had been difficult for her. She’d struggled to make friends and experienced both anxiety and depression. “I didn’t have any self-confidence at all,” she told me. “I thought there was something wrong with me.” Claire, who was 12 at the time, also felt uncomfortable in her body in a way she couldn’t quite describe. She acknowledged that part of it had to do with puberty, but she felt it was more than the usual preteen woes. “At first, I started eating less,” she said, “but that didn’t really help.”

The fires on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, had barely stopped burning when the Department of Justice released an extraordinary report on the city’s police department. In the findings of the 2015 investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division detailed how a municipality had built its social contract on a slow-rolling racist heist. Activists hoped that the Ferguson report—which was prompted by the 2014 police killing of an unarmed black teenager and found that police conduct had “severely damaged the relationship between African Americans and the Ferguson Police Department”—would not only change the city, but would signal that the United States was finally willing to confront the legacy of white supremacy. The Ferguson City Council reluctantly agreed to a consent decree with the DOJ that would overhaul city policing. Federal courts rejected voter-suppression schemes and reaffirmed affirmative action. Movements from Black Lives Matter to LGBTQ advocacy saw an opportunity to broaden the national civil-rights agenda.

Donald Trump didn’t get much in the way of North Korean denuclearization in Singapore. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

In the days since the summit with Kim Jong Un, critics—including me—have pointed out how little the U.S. president got from North Korea’s leader during their much-hyped meeting. And it’s true that Trump fell far short in that meeting of his stated goal to fully dismantle North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, and then wildly overstated his achievement by declaring the North Korean nuclear threat over. (It’s not.) But the Trump administration racked up real accomplishments in Singapore that are perhaps best understood by setting aside the president’s grand (and at times groundless) pronouncements. The summit’s modest and provisional results are actually of considerable consequence.

Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes—car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost seems easier to list the things they don’t mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.

Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids’ development, but it’s probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents.

Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend more time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly low-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children’s lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. To be clear, I’m not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn’t have survived infancy if I’d had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.

Nearly six months before his death, the embattled 20-year-old rapper XXXTentacion shared an urgent manifesto via Instagram Live. Eerily prescient, his words belied a sense of macabre resignation. “If I’m gonna die or ever be a sacrifice, I wanna make sure that my life made at least 5 million kids happy or they found some sort of answers or resolve in my life,” said the rapper, born Jahseh Onfroy. “Regardless of the negative around my name, regardless of the bad things people say to me, I don’t give a fuck.”

Having summarily addressed “the negative,” he moved toward buttressing his persona as a potent if counterintuitive source of inspiration. The rapper, who at the time of his death was facing serious charges that included assault of a pregnant woman and witness harassment, trailed off into nearly Oprah-esque affirmations, talking about how he wanted his young fans, especially those dealing with mental illnesses, to live life without fear:

Three years ago, Lisa Linh quit her full-time job to travel the world and document it on Instagram, where she has nearly 100,000 followers; since then, she has stayed in breathtaking hotels everywhere from Mexico to Quebec to the Cook Islands. Often, she stays for free.

Linh is part of an ever-growing class of people who have leveraged their social media clout to travel the world, frequently in luxury. While Linh and other elite influencers are usually personally invited by hotel brands, an onslaught of lesser-known wannabes has left hotels scrambling to deal with a deluge of requests for all-expense-paid vacations in exchange for some social media posts.

Kate Jones, marketing and communications manager at the Dusit Thani, a five-star resort in the Maldives, said that her hotel receives at least six requests from self-described influencers per day, typically through Instagram direct message.

Every year, Harvard’s admissions officers are charged with whittling a batch of 40,000 applicants down to a bare-bones selection to fill the institution’s roughly 1,600 freshman seats. Those officers can’t just set a high bar for test scores and GPAs to arrive at that selection; far too many candidates boast those qualifications. Plus, even if that arithmetic were possible, Harvard prides itself as an institution where students learn from each other in addition to their professors. Building each freshman class is, in turn, both an art and a science—one that effectively requires admissions officers to exercise a combination of number-crunching and intuition.

An organization representing Asian Americans who were at some point rejected from Harvard is suing the school for that art-and-science approach. The group, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), recently reignited tensions around that approach with a new legal filing that it says confirms suspicions that the university’s admissions practices discriminate on the basis of race. The documents, filed on Friday in federal court by SFFA, could influence admissions policies at universities across the country; the case is slated to go to trial in October.

Children as young as 2 have been pulled from their parents and moved to facilities that are, as Laura Bush put it, “eerily reminiscent” of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II. Families are being separated. Kids are sleeping under foil blankets inside cages.

The main reason that this story has received so much attention is simple: It is awful. Of course most of the American voters who were shown images of crying children or who heard audio recordings of them calling out for their parents had an intense negative reaction.

But in today’s splintered and strange media environment, the more difficult question to answer is how so many people did end up seeing these images and hearing these stories. After all, this may now be the most notorious injustice at the American border, but it’s not the first.