january/february 2003

The financier Bill Browder has emerged as an unlikely central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney Browder hired to investigate official corruption, died in Russian custody in 2009. Congress subsequently imposed sanctions on the officials it held responsible for his death, passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government retaliated, among other ways, by suspending American adoptions of Russian children.

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who secured a meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, was engaged in a campaign for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act, and raised the subject of adoptions in that meeting. That’s put the spotlight back on Browder’s long campaign for Kremlin accountability, and against corruption—a campaign whose success has irritated Putin and those around him.

The effort to repeal Barack Obama’s health-care bill is not over, and neither presumably is the public career of John McCain. But each crossed an important threshold yesterday, and Senator McCain gave us a clearer idea of who he is and what he stands for.

The repeal effort isn’t over, because debate and further voting is now under way to determine whether the bill will pass and, more basically, to define what it would actually do. McCain will have more votes to cast, on this measure and others, and it’s possible that in the end he will turn against this bill because of its provisions (whatever they turn out to be) or because of the rushed and secretive process that led to it. Just this afternoon, McCain voted No on a “straight repeal” bill that would eliminate Obamacare without any replacement.

A ride malfunction at the state fair in Columbus, Ohio resulted in the death of at least one passenger on Wednesday. Locals officials report that at least seven others were wounded, with five of them in critical condition and two others expected to recover. The incident occurred at around 7:24 p.m. local time when passengers on the Fire Ball ride were ejected around 20 to 30 feet into the air at a high speed, before falling to the ground. Witnesses have since reported that a passenger row detached from the ride while in motion—an account that is corroborated by online video footage.

In a statement released on Twitter, Ohio Governor John Kasich said he had ordered a full investigation into the incident and asked for all of the fair’s rides to be shut down pending additional safety inspections. “I am terribly saddened by this incident,” Kasich said. At a press conference on Wednesday, he again lamented the loss of life and declared that “we will get to the bottom of this.” “The fair is about the best things in life and then tonight, with this accident, it becomes a terrible, terrible tragedy,” Kasich said.

For the past few decades, the unstoppable increase in college tuition has been a fact of life, like death and taxes. The sticker price of American college increased nearly 400 percent in the last 30 years, while median household income growth was relatively flat. Student debt soared to more than $1 trillion, the result of loans to cover the difference.

Several people—with varying degrees of expertise in higher-ed economics—have predicted that it’s all a bubble, destined to burst. Now after decades of expansion, just about every meaningful statistic—including the number of college students, the growth of tuition costs, and even the total number of colleges—is going down, or at least growing more slowly.

The constituents filing into the Mesa Convention Center one evening in mid-April for the Republican senator Jeff Flake’s town hall had a decidedly un-Republican look. Tattoos and political T-shirts abounded. Activists stood near the entrance distributing stickers, flyers, and other paraphernalia of the resistance and urging attendees to get loud. While chants of “No stupid wall!” and “Health care for all!” echoed through the auditorium, a young woman in a chicken costume wandered the perimeter, clucking and posing for selfies in an act of protest whose meaning remained mysterious to me even after I asked her about it (“Jeff Flake is George Dubya’s chicken,” she said).

Flake couldn’t see any of this from backstage, but he knew that a hostile crowd likely awaited him. The early months of the Trump presidency had inflamed the grassroots left, and Republican lawmakers across the country had lately found themselves standing awkwardly in rooms like this one while liberal voters berated them. Flake is up for reelection next year, and some of his campaign advisers—wanting to avoid the kind of contentious scene that might end up in an attack ad—had suggested that he skip public forums for a while, as many of his colleagues were doing. But he insisted on going ahead.

There’s a growing segment of the American population that earns a decent salary but lives paycheck-to-paycheck: the income-rich and asset-poor.

Empty bank balances are often associated with those on the lowest rungs of the income ladder. But many members of America’s upper-middle class have almost no emergency cushion and are woefully unprepared for retirement. And years into the recovery, they are still struggling, leaving the entire economy vulnerable.

The median household income in America is about $55,000. To earn more than that is to do relatively well, particularly in low-cost areas. That’s what they bring in, but what do they really have? The figure below plots financial assets held by members of the upper-middle class aged 40 to 55. (Financial assets are any assets a household owns that isn’t a house, car, or business, which means it includes all retirement funds.)

President Donald Trump issued a ruling on Wednesday outlawing military service by people who do not conform to a binary gender system.

“Please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military,” he wrote in a string of tweets. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

Trump previously promised to be an advocate for transgender people, writing during the campaign, “Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs.”

TOKYO—Japan’s population is shrinking. For the first time since the government started keeping track more than a century ago, there were fewer than 1 million births last year, as the country’s population fell by more than 300,000 people. The blame has long been put on Japan’s young people, who are accused of not having enough sex, and on women, who, the narrative goes, put their careers before thoughts of getting married and having a family.

But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the U.S.: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to.

Toddlers crave power. Too bad for them, they have none. Hence the tantrums and absurd demands. (No, I want this banana, not that one, which looks identical in every way but which you just started peeling and is therefore worthless to me now.)

They just want to be in charge! This desire for autonomy clarifies so much about the behavior of a very small human. It also begins to explain the popularity of YouTube among toddlers and preschoolers, several developmental psychologists told me.

If you don’t have a 3-year-old in your life, you may not be aware of YouTube Kids, an app that’s essentially a stripped-down version of the original video blogging site, with videos filtered by the target audience’s age. And because the mobile app is designed for use on a phone or tablet, kids can tap their way across a digital ecosystem populated by countless videos—all conceived with them in mind.

Germany has welcomed more than a million refugees and asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries since 2015, more than any other European country. The issue of their integration has provided fodder for far-right voices in German politics, who used incidents like the 2016 attack at Berlin’s Christmas market and New Year’s sexual assaults in Cologne to suggest that Muslim newcomers are a threat to Western society. At the height of Europe’s refugee crisis, the extremist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) polled at 15 percent, drawing heavily on fear of refugees and rhetoric against the “Islamicization” of Germany.

But this isn’t the first time Germany has experienced a large Muslim influx. Before 2015, Germany was already home to some 4 million Muslims, mostly Turks who came 60 years ago to help rebuild the country after World War II. Many are poorly integrated into German society, living in social enclaves within big cities where they speak more Turkish than German and attend mosques run by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), an organization linked directly to Turkey’s government authority for religious affairs.