Bruce Hoffman, “The Logic of Suicide Terrorism”; James Fallows, “Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?”; Robert Dallek, “JFK's Second Term”; Richard B. Woodward, “Too Much of a Good Thing”; Christopher Hitchens, “Aural History”; Michael Kelly, “A Transformative Moment”; fiction by Lysley Tenorio; and much more.
Toward the end of his life John F. Kennedy increasingly distrusted his military advisers and was changing his views on foreign policy. A fresh look at the final months of his presidency suggests that a second Kennedy term might have produced not only an American withdrawal from Vietnam but also rapprochement with Fidel Castro's Cuba
The image of a boy shot dead in his helpless father's arms during an Israeli confrontation with Palestinians has become the Pietà of the Arab world. Now a number of Israeli researchers are presenting persuasive evidence that the fatal shots could not have come from the Israeli soldiers known to have been involved in the confrontation. The evidence will not change Arab minds—but the episode offers an object lesson in the incendiary power of an icon
First you feel nervous about riding the bus. Then you wonder about going to a mall. Then you think twice about sitting for long at your favorite café. Then nowhere seems safe. Terrorist groups have a strategy—to shrink to nothing the areas in which people move freely—and suicide bombers, inexpensive and reliably lethal, are their latest weapons. Israel has learned to recognize and disrupt the steps on the path to suicide attacks. We must learn too.
The work of a dedicated few may eventually restore America's blighted chestnut forest to their former vastness. One happy consequence can already be tasted
Selections from recent reports, studies, and other documents. This month: 39,842 box cutters; gays in the (wartime) military; how college basketball hurts U.S. productivity; the most dangerous country in the world
The theoretical physicist who ignited the biggest firestorm in the history of the American photography market was simply trying to figure out if his vintage photos were genuine. By the time he learned the answer, two of the country's best-known photography scholars had come under a cloud of suspicion
The following is excerpted from the afterword to Michael Kelly's book Martyrs' Day, about the first Gulf War. Kelly was killed in Iraq in early April as he accompanied American forces advancing on Baghdad
The former president never uttered his successor's name at an event in Chicago, but the animus was obvious.
CHICAGO—The midterms are done, and Barack Obama is trying to get back to his post-presidency. He still thinks the country and the world are broken, but he’s dropping back out of the public debate, urging those who came to his foundation’s second annual summit here on Monday that they need to pick back up the charge for change.
“You literally can remake the world right now, because it badly needs remaking,” Obama said.
The answers to fixing problems in agriculture, education, sustainable energy and other fields, he said, aren’t as complicated as they’re made out to be. But, he insisted, “the reason we don’t do it is because we are still confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues.”
Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.
These should be boom times for sex.
The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.
If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.
Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?
“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.
Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.
Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.
In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.
Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.
In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.
Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.
At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.
Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018
The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*
The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.
The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.
Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.
The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.
The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.
Protesters harassing prominent conservatives in their private lives fall short of the standards of civil disobedience.
Last Saturday night, a Fox News contributor named Kat Timpf was at a bar in Brooklyn. As she recounted the incident to National Review, a man asked her where she worked. A while later, she said, a woman began “screaming at me to get out.” Timpf walked away, but the woman followed her around the bar while other patrons laughed. Fearing physical attack, Timpf left. She told National Review and The Hill that it was the third time she has been harassed since 2017. A few months earlier, a woman yelled at her during dinner at a Manhattan restaurant. The year before, while she was about to give a speech, a man dumped water on her head.
Protests like these, that target people’s private lives, are wrong. They violate fundamental principles of civil disobedience, as understood by its most eminent practitioners and theorists. And they threaten the very norms of human decency that Trump and his supporters have done so much to erode.
At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.
I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.
The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”
Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.
