july/august 2001

A strange story about MSNBC host Joy Reid has been unfolding for a week. It began when a Twitter user with about 1,000 followers, @Jamie_Maz, dug up what appeared to be homophobic posts on Reid’s defunct blog, the Reid Report. They were similar in nature to posts that Reid apologized for as “insensitive” back in December, after @Jamie_Maz brought those to light.

The new round of posts contain a lot of cliche gay jokes about Charlie Crist and others, concerns that “adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types, bringing them ‘into the lifestyle,’” and commentary like “part of the intrinsic nature of ‘straightness’ is that the idea of homosexual sex is ... well ... gross ... even if you think that gay people are perfectly lovely individuals.”

PARIS—There was the moment French President Emmanuel Macron greeted President Trump with a kiss on both cheeks, French-style, prompting a Fox News commentator to explain that in France, that kind of thing is normal, even for men. There was the moment Trump pretended to brush dandruff off Macron’s shoulder during an Oval Office photo shoot. There was the unforgettable, amused, “I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening” look on Macron’s face when Trump said the Iran deal was terrible, end of story. There was the press conference where Trump, in television game-show-host mode, said he might withdraw from the Iran deal, or might not and instead offer “a very large deal, maybe deal, maybe not,” and anyway stay tuned for his May 12 decision deadline. There was the weird photo of the two presidential couples planting a tree, and Melania Trump’s white, wide-brimmed hat.

I have seen the future, and it is in the United States.

After a several-year immersion in parts of the country that make the news mainly after a natural disaster or a shooting, or for follow-up stories on how the Donald Trump voters of 2016 now feel about Trump, I have a journalistic impulse similar to the one that dominated my years of living in China. That is the desire to tell people how much more is going on, in places they had barely thought about or even heard of, than they might have imagined.

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In the case of China, that impulse matched the mood of the times. In the years before and after the world financial crisis of 2008, everyone knew that China was on the way up; reporters like me were just filling in the details. In the case of the modern United States, I am well aware that this message runs so counter to prevailing emotions and ideas as to seem preposterous. Everyone knows how genuinely troubled the United States is at the level of national politics and governance. It is natural to assume that these disorders must reflect a deeper rot across the country. And indeed, you can’t travel extensively through today’s America, as my wife, Deb, and I have been doing in recent years, without being exposed to signs of rot, from opioid addiction to calcifying class barriers.

When young couples of the ’60s and ’70s thought about the future, their path forward was often clear: get married, move in, have babies. Two of the steps of that sequence swapped places decades ago—for the first time, in the mid-’90s, over half of all couples lived together before marriage. Now, researchers are finding that the order is again undergoing change: More and more Americans are first sharing a home, then having children. Marriage comes later, if at all.

A report published today by the Pew Research Center finds that 35 percent of all unmarried parents are now living together, up from 20 percent of unmarried parents in 1997. In 1968, the first time the government recorded data on this trend, less than 1 percent of unmarried parents cohabited. While the Pew study defines “cohabiting couples” as including either one or both of the child’s parents—meaning, a couple could be a parent plus his or her new partner—scholars I spoke with told me this trend is driven by an uptick in families in which both members of the couple are also the parents. (The report doesn’t specify how the data breaks down among gay and straight couples.)

The scandals are like sediment in the delta of Kanye West. Each new controversy—each paparazzi fight, each “BILL COSBY INNOCENT,” each repackaging of ratty apocalypse couture as expensive fashion, each “multiracial women only” casting call—instead of burying him, only builds up higher and higher until it somehow becomes the very thing that grounds him. It’s worth wondering if, some untold number of years in the future, contemporaries will reflect on West and struggle to remember past the questionable comments and erratic behavior to even recognize his brilliant artistic contributions. The rapper and producer has become a pulsar of nihilism, an object to be followed closely only if one wants to have their faith in humans tested.

At least no one ever put up a prominent statue to Hans Asperger, so we are spared the scene where they bring in the crane to drag another historical figure down from his pedestal. But essentially, that is what has just happened to Asperger, the Austrian pediatrician who lent his name to the syndrome that recognized autistic traits in verbally fluent individuals who demonstrate superior intelligence and creativity. As the current issue of the scholarly journal Molecular Autism makes clear in specific detail, Asperger, who lived and worked in wartime Vienna, not only went along with the Nazi project to murder disabled children—in some ways, he facilitated it, putting his expert’s signature on documents that dispatched such children to facilities where they were murdered. The new, novella-length study by the medical historian Herwig Czech answers many of the questions that have dogged Asperger for decades, except for one: why it took so long for the story to come out in full.

I. A Broken Office

Donald Trump often appears to be a president in rebellion against his office. A president, we have come to expect, hastens to the scene of a natural disaster to comfort the afflicted. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, President Trump arrived tardily and behaved unseriously, tossing rolls of paper towels at storm-battered residents as if he were trying to drain three-point shots.

We have come to expect that when the national fabric rends, the president will administer needle and thread, or at least reach for the sewing box of unity. After white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, shouting “Jews will not replace us,” President Trump’s instinct was to emphasize that there were good people among the neo-Nazis.

Last April, Matthew Bennett was lying on a white salt flat in New Mexico, uncovering fossilized footprints that had been preserved in the white rock. The print belonged to a ground sloth—a bulky animal, whose large feet and curved claws left apostrophe-shaped impressions wherever it walked. There were many such tracks around, but Bennett found one that was very different.

Inside the outline of the sloth’s 20-inch-long foot was a human footprint.

He looked at the next track in the series and found the same thing—a human footprint, perfectly nestled inside a sloth one. There were at least 10 of these, all in a row. “It slowly dawned on me what was happening,” he says. Thousands of years ago, a ground sloth had walked along this site, and a person had followed it, carefully matching its every step. “There was a lot of profanity [from me],” Bennett adds. “That’s what geologists do when we discover something.”

When Netflix’s hit series Wild Wild Country debuted in March, friends who know about my upbringing began messaging me. They wanted to hear what I thought about the documentary, which centers on the so-called cult my mother once belonged to. Even if I had wanted to skip the show, it’d have been impossible to avoid all the articles about the group’s leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He stared at me from news sites with the same eyes I’d seen on book covers in my mother’s apartment—after she returned from his ashram in India, and before she left our family a second time to follow him to Oregon, where much of Wild Wild Country takes place. Though my mother made her way back into my life when I was in high school and we now have a close relationship, I never wanted to think about Bhagwan again. But a couple of weeks after the documentary’s release, I braced myself and sat down to watch.

In one sweeping move, the Trump administration may soon not only destabilize the last three decades of clean air and water rules, but also completely overhaul how the Environmental Protection Agency uses science in its work. If EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s recently-proposed rule gets enacted, it will spark a revolution in environmental regulation. But the question is—will it stand up in court?

Pruitt proposed the regulation on Tuesday, describing it as an effort to increase transparency. It would require the EPA to publish all the underlying scientific data used to support studies which guide clean-air and clean-water rules. It would forbid the use of studies that do not meet this standard, even if they have been peer-reviewed or replicated elsewhere.