Fourteen writers on “Bill Clinton and His Consequences”; Abraham Verghese, “The Bandit King and the Movie Star”; Daniel Smith, “Shock and Disbelief”; Ian Frazier, “Walking Tour”; and much more.
Bill Clinton's talent for confounding his enemies, manipulating his friends, and playing all sides against the middle helped to create the economic golden years
Electroconvulsive therapy was once psychiatry's most terrifying tool—blunt, painful, and widely abused. It is now a safe and effective treatment for a wide range of mental illnesses. But an unlikely trio of activist groups stands against it
On July 30 of last year a notorious Indian smuggler and poacher named Veerappan kidnapped an elderly and beloved Indian actor named Rajkumar and squirreled him away in a forest hideout. The ransom demands were political—and unacceptable. The kidnapping roiled India and churned an American-style media frenzy. Then, suddenly, in November, Rajkumar was set free, under circumstances fraught with mystery
Rarely has comedy of manners been so artfully infused with pathos as in Evelyn Waugh's recently reissued Sword of Honour trilogy: "the finest work of fiction in English," our author argues, "to emerge from World War II"
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.
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.
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.
I pulled into the Circle K across the street to call him. I looked at the blood blooming across my blue dress. It was new, and I wondered whether the stain would come out. Then I looked over at a girl standing in the parking lot, talking with two boys. Her wavy blond hair shimmered beneath the fluorescent streetlights. I thought about how I wished I had wavy blond hair like hers.
A veteran Washington journalist describes the defense secretary as trying to avoid confrontation and demonstrate respect for the president. 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,” instead drawing up plans for more limited airstrikes that Trump ultimately authorized. (Both Mattis and Trump have denied this account.)
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.
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.
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.”
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.
