William Langewiesche, “The Million-Dollar Nose”; Carl Elliott, “A New Way to Be Mad”; Barbara Ferry and Debbie Nathan, “Mistaken Identity? The Case of New Mexico's 'Hidden Jews'”; Stephen Budiansky, “The Physics of Gridlock”; and much more.
The phenomenon is not as rare as one might think: healthy people deliberately setting out to rid themselves of one or more of their limbs, with or without a surgeon's help. Why do pathologies sometimes arise as if from nowhere? Can the mere description of a condition make it contagious?
With his stubborn disregard for the hierarchy of wines, Robert Parker, the straight-talking American wine critic, is revolutionizing the industry -- and teaching the French wine establishment some lessons it would rather not learn.
Imagine descendants of Jews pursued by the Spanish Inquisition, still tending the dying embers of their faith among peasant Latinos in the American Southwest. The story has obvious resonance, and it has garnered considerable publicity. The truth of the matter may turn out to be vastly different, and nearly as improbable.
Part of what I felt was shame -- shame for something I didn't understand, shame for other people's misery, shame that it had lain naked and exposed before us, shame that we'd seen it.
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.
A veteran Washington journalist describes the defense secretary as avoiding confrontation and showing respect. But the rest of the book may have blown up that strategy.
James Mattis has long distinguished himself as a canny survivor in Donald Trump’s shape-shifting inner circle, somehow managing to remain firmly entrenched at the Pentagon as fellow advisers such as Rex Tillerson and H. R. McMaster vanished into the vortex that is Trump’s bad side. Then Bob Woodward wrote a book. Now the defense secretary and retired four-star general has been thrust directly into the political maelstrom he’s so studiously avoided.
Excerpts from the journalist’s forthcoming account of Trump’s White House, first published Tuesday in The Washington Post, portray Mattis as scornful of the president’s intellect and judgment, and, in a boost to an already prominent narrative, as a vital check against the president’s dangerous instincts. Woodward depicts an agitated Mattis explaining to Trump in a meeting that the United States maintains a military presence on the Korean peninsula to “prevent World War III” and later deriding the president as “a fifth or sixth grader.” Woodward also claims that when Trump called up Mattis and suggested the United States “fucking kill” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against civilians in 2017, Mattis played along but then hung up the phone and told an aide, “We’re not going to do any of that,” and instead drew up plans for more limited air strikes that Trump ultimately authorized. (Both Mattis and Trump have denied this account.)
American democracy is imperiled by Republicans enabling the president’s authoritarian impulses, not by self-aggrandizing op-eds from anonymous bureaucrats.
For political observers and reporters, every day since the November 2016 election seems to have contained some sort of absurd twist or development. The pace of the Donald Trump–era news cycle has made it difficult to separate signal from noise—the truly important, like a Supreme Court–nomination battle, from the simply bizarre or dramatic, like anonymous Trump officials testifying to the president’s incompetence.
On Wednesday, TheNew York Timespublished an anonymous op-ed from a senior official claiming to be part of the “resistance” inside the Trump administration. The piece sparked a media frenzy, with some commentators, including my colleague David Graham, alleging that government officials are engaged in a kind of coup against the elected president. “If protecting the rules requires tearing down the rules,” Graham writes, “what is there to be gained?”
I grew up in a gun-loving town in Alabama. My grandfather’s store sells firearms. But only after I was shot did I begin to understand America’s complicated relationship with guns.
I was shot on a Sunday. It was late and it was hot and I was 21, on my way home from dinner during summer break. I’d rolled the windows down because the breeze felt good.
I pulled up to a red light, about half a mile from my home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “Yeah!” by Usher was playing on the radio. A silver Toyota Tacoma turned the corner. As it passed me, I heard a pop. Then my left arm was on fire.
If you’d asked me before that night how I might react to being shot, I would have said: I would call 911. I would get myself to the hospital. In fact it never occurred to me to call 911, only to want my dad.
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 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.
Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa had sought the former British spy’s deposition in a civil suit related to his Trump-Russia dossier, but a judge in Florida ruled Grassley would have to follow normal court procedures to get Steele’s testimony.
When the news broke earlier this summer that the elusive former British spy Christopher Steele had for the first time testified under oath and on camera in a deposition about his explosive and controversial dossier outlining the president’s alleged ties to Russia, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee wasted little time trying to obtain the videotape.
“Please produce to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary the transcript and video of Mr. Steele’s deposition, as well as any exhibits used during the deposition and all other discovery materials received from Mr. Steele,” the chairman, Chuck Grassley, wrote to Valentin Gurvits on July 25. Gurvits is the lead counsel representing a Russian technology executive, Aleksej Gubarev, who sued BuzzFeed and Steele in a Florida federal court in January for defamation following the news outlet’s publication of the dossier, which mentioned Gubarev and his company.
Led by Cory Booker, senators are breaking the rules to protest the GOP’s speedy consideration of Brett Kavanaugh. But their effort is likely too little, too late.
As the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh sailed this summer toward a presumed confirmation in the fall, progressive activists implored Democrats in the Senate to escalate their fight—even to abandon the chamber’s cherished norms if necessary—in a bid to stop him.
On Thursday, they got their wish.
Led by Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee released documents from Kavanaugh’s service in the George W. Bush administration that had been labeled as “confidential” and withheld from public view as the federal appellate judge sat for his confirmation hearing. One set of emails leaked to The New York Times showed Kavanaugh casting doubt on the Court’s precedent legalizing abortion. And in a contentious moment as the panel reconvened Thursday morning, Booker announced that he would risk expulsion by releasing emails related to Kavanaugh’s views on affirmative action and racial profiling.
The encounter between the Infowars host and the Florida senator offers a perfect summary of why life online is so terrible.
Senator Marco Rubio was holding court with reporters outside a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing when Infowars publisher Alex Jones confronted him. The committee had been grilling the Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and the Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on their companies’ role in spreading disinformation to impact elections. Jones had been in the audience, and he wanted to know why Rubio wasn’t pursuing the tech executives for purportedly censoring conservative voices online.
The altercation was surreal. Jones implied Rubio was a hypocrite for worrying about international electoral instability when “the Democrats are purging conservatives” from social-media platforms through supposed “shadow banning,” a name for hiding certain content without users’ knowledge. At different points during the incident, Jones called Rubio a “frat boy,” a “snake,” and a “little gangster thug.”
Kidding brings Jim Carrey to the small screen, Cary Fukunaga directs Maniac on Netflix, and HBO adapts Elena Ferrante.
Is there anything particularly different about the slate of shows for fall? Yes and no. Kevin Spacey is gone from House of Cards after allegations of sexual abuse surfaced during the #MeToo movement. Roseanne has become The Conners, in the wake of racist tweetsby its former star. The line of movie stars jumping ship for TV shows no signs of abating, with Julia Roberts, Jim Carrey, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Douglas, and Jennifer Garner among the actors starring in new series. And Park Chan-wook, Ben Stiller, and Cary Fukunaga are all directing original miniseries this fall.
New shows, reboots, and revivals:
Kidding (September 9, Showtime)
Jim Carrey reunites with the director Michel Gondry 14 years after Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with this comedy-drama about a children’s television host waylaid by grief. Frank Langella, Judy Greer, and Catherine Keener co-star.
