James Fallows, “An Acquired Taste”; Daniel Sarewitz and Roger Pielke Jr., “Breaking the Global-Warming Gridlock”; Cullen Murphy, “Outtakes”; Bill McKibben, “The World Streaming In”; and much more.
Both sides on the issue of greenhouse gases frame their arguments in terms of science, but each new scientific finding only raises new questions—dooming the debate to be a pointless spiral. It's time, the authors argue, for a radically new approach: if we took practical steps to reduce our vulnerability to today's weather, we would go a long way toward solving the problem of tomorrow's climate
Al Gore is the most lethal debater in politics, a ruthless combatant who will say whatever it takes to win, and who leaves opponents not just beaten but brutalized. But Gore is no natural-born killer. He studied hard to become the man he is today.
Hard as he tried, Murray Gell-Mann could never make himself into a legend like his rakish colleague and collaborator, Richard Feynman -- even if he was probably the greater physicist
The father's lonely figure moved along the wharf, arms stiff at his sides and hands pushed into jacket pockets. We decided before he reached us that if he got even a little bit crazy, we'd beat him until he cried and then toss him into the harbor
Lionel Trilling believed that politics needed the imaginative qualities of literature and that liberalism needed literature's sense of "variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty"
A cowardly coup from within the administration threatens to enflame the president’s paranoia and further endanger American security.
Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a constitutional mechanism. Mass resignations followed by voluntary testimony to congressional committees are a constitutional mechanism. Overt defiance of presidential authority by the president’s own appointees—now that’s a constitutional crisis.
If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no “riskiness” exemptions in the text of that oath.
The sociologist Margaret Hagerman spent two years embedded in upper-middle-class white households, listening in on conversations about race.
When Margaret Hagerman was trying to recruit white affluent families as subjects for the research she was doing on race, one prospective interviewee told her, “I can try to connect you with my colleague at work who is black. She might be more helpful.”
To Hagerman, that response was helpful in itself. She is a sociologist at Mississippi State University, and her new book, White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America, summarizes the two years of research she did talking to and observing upper-middle-class white families in an unidentified midwestern city and its suburbs. To examine how white children learn about race, she followed 36 of them between the ages of 10 and 13, interviewing them as well as watching them do homework, play video games, and otherwise go about their days.
Acts of sabotage against the president are perilous to the American system of government. They're also self-serving.
The title of Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear, contains a multitude of meanings. For one thing, it describes the attitude of many of President DonaldTrump’s own aides toward his judgment.
It’s not just thatmany sources werewilling to tell Woodward damaging stories about Trump: The most stunning examples are those in which top aides reportedly thwarted his will. Even more stunning is an anonymous op-ed published in The New York Times Wednesday afternoon written by a purported “senior official in the Trump administration.”
The writer says that senior Trump officials “are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.” The official adds: “We believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”
The Constitution demands that the legislature serve as a check on the executive. In its absence, unelected bureaucrats are taking it on themselves to act.
We don’t yet know which senior administration official authored today’s astounding New York Times op-ed suggesting that President Donald Trump’s aides are actively thwarting him in an attempt to protect the country. But in a sense, it doesn’t matter. Indirectly, the op-ed’s real authors are the Republicans of the United States Congress.
In theory, in America’s constitutional system, the different branches of the federal government check one another. When a presidents acts in corrupt, authoritarian, or reckless ways, the legislative branch holds hearings, blocks his agenda, refuses to confirm his nominees, even impeaches him. That’s how America’s government is supposed to work. But it no longer does. Instead, for the last year and a half, congressional Republicans have acted, for the most part, as Trump’s agents. Not only have they refused to seriously investigate or limit him, they have assaulted those within the federal bureaucracy—the justice department and the FBI in particular—who have.
In his new book, Fear, the legendary reporter writes that Trump stumbled over questions about Michael Flynn.
“I’m not sure.” “I don’t know.” “I can’t remember.” In a mock interview with President Trump to prepare him for a possible sit-down with the special counsel’s office, Trump’s lawyer reportedly found that there was a lot Trump couldn’t remember about key events relevant to the Russia investigation.
In a new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, by Bob Woodward, obtained by The Atlantic ahead of its release next week, Woodward offers the first detailed look at the way the president might handle an interview with the experienced prosecutors on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team. “If the questions seem harmless, don’t treat them that way,” Trump’s then-lawyer, John Dowd, advised the president during the mock interview in January, according to Woodward’s account. “And I want you thoroughly focused on listening to the words.”
A nearly 50-year campaign of vilification, inspired by Fox News's Roger Ailes, has left many Americans distrustful of media outlets. Now, journalists need to speak up for their work.
I’ve devoted much of my professional life to the study of political campaigns, not as a historian or an academic but as a reporter and an analyst. I thought I’d seen it all, from the bizarre upset that handed a professional wrestler the governorship of Minnesota to the California recall that gave us the Governator to candidates who die but stay on the ballot and win.
But there’s a new kind of campaign underway, one that most of my colleagues and I have never publicly reported on, never fully analyzed, and never fully acknowledged: the campaign to destroy the legitimacy of the American news media.
Bashing the media for political gain isn’t new, and neither is manipulating the media to support or oppose a cause. These practices are at least as old as the Gutenberg press. But antipathy toward the media right now has risen to a level I’ve never personally experienced before. The closest parallel in recent American history is the hostility to reporters in the segregated South in the 1950s and ’60s.
This mismatch creates a child-care crisis between 3 and 5 p.m. that has parents scrambling for options.
This past March, on a Thursday morning before dawn, more than 70 bleary-eyed parents lined up in front of the Parks and Recreation building in South Windsor, Connecticut. Wrapped in heavy coats and clutching Dunkin’ Donuts cups, many of them slouched against the building’s cement walls, while others, exercising a tad more foresight, lounged in foldable camping chairs. Most had arrived around 3 in the morning. The first in line had been there since 11:30 p.m. the night before.
The scene closely resembled the crowds that gather before the release of a new iPhone or outside the box office for Hamilton tickets, but the reward for waiting wasn’t anywhere near as flashy. The parents had lined up for the chance to register their kids for a before- and after-school program sponsored by the town. The 4th “R,”—a play on the old-fashioned saying “reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic,” with the added “recreation”—serves elementary-school students whose parents’ work schedules don’t align with the school day’s 8:45 a.m. start and 3:20 p.m. finish. And braving the cold to stand in line didn’t even guarantee the parents a spot for their kids—the program had filled up earlier that week, thanks to a rule that prioritized siblings of current attendees. When the office opened its doors and began accepting registration requests at 8 a.m., many of the parents knew they’d endured the line simply to put their child on the wait list.
If Brett Kavanaugh’s extensive paper trail can’t be fully and publicly disclosed, the simplest solution is to nominate someone else.
The Brett Kavanaugh hearings—such as they are—began on Wednesday to take on a shape that ordinary citizens can understand. When discussing the law, Judge Kavanaugh has been an impressive witness. But anyone watching the hearings Wednesday morning could see the discomfort on Kavanaugh’s face when Senator Patrick Leahy asked him about his potential knowledge of the theft of Democratic-committee emails a decade and a half ago.
From 2002 to 2003, the Republican aide Manuel Miranda, first working on the Senate Judiciary Committee and later in the majority leaders’ office, exploited a computer glitch to access confidential memos written by Senate Democrats on judicial nominees, leaking their contents to friendly media outlets. Senator Orrin Hatch, at the time, called it “improper, unethical, and simply unacceptable.” Kavanaugh was asked at his 2006 confirmation hearing whether, as a White House aide working on judicial nominations at the time, he’d been aware of the breach, and insisted he “did not know about it, did not suspect it.” On Wednesday, though, Leahy suggested that emails available to the committee, but not the public, contradict that—indicating that Miranda had sent Kavanaugh a draft letter written by Leahy but not yet released, among other documents.
The viral responses to the company’s new campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick reinforce the stakes of his protests—and misunderstand what motivated the brand in the first place.
Monday afternoon, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick tweeted a tightly cropped grayscale photo of his face, emblazoned with a simple message: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” Below Kaepernick’s lips, the Nike logo accompanied the company’s pithy slogan: “Just do it.”
For Kaepernick, the “something” meriting a Sisyphean sacrifice has been addressing systemic racial injustice (most notably, police brutality), a platform he’s dedicated himself to advancing since he first began kneeling during the playing of the national anthem in the 2016 season. In the time since, the anthem protests have become a much larger movement, but the athlete behind them remains a much reviled figure even as he pledged—and then donated—more than $1 million to 41 charitable organizations. The free agent was not offered a spot on any NFL team’s roster last season, and his collusion grievance against league owners—in which he alleges that NFL executives and owners alike conspired to keep him from playing because of his activism—is ongoing.
Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among a small elite if we don’t take steps to stop it.
I. The Growing Fear of Irrelevance
There is nothing inevitable about democracy. For all the success that democracies have had over the past century or more, they are blips in history. Monarchies, oligarchies, and other forms of authoritarian rule have been far more common modes of human governance.
The emergence of liberal democracies is associated with ideals of liberty and equality that may seem self-evident and irreversible. But these ideals are far more fragile than we believe. Their success in the 20th century depended on unique technological conditions that may prove ephemeral.
