James Fallows, “Blind Into Baghdad”; Kenneth M. Pollack, “Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong”; “State of the Union”; Ben Birnbaum, “A Family Deposition”; P. J. O'Rourke, “Speaking of the Candidates”; Joshua Green, “In Search of the Elusive Swing Voter”; Kenji Fujimoto, “I Was Kim Jong Il's Cook”; fiction by Nathan Roberts; and much more.
As the Philadelphia Eagles' Hank Fraley demonstrates, the behemoth who snaps the ball must also be one of the most mentally nimble players on the field
In terms of personal prosperity most people are doing better than they think. But prospects for the unemployed are only getting worse. And two big storm clouds loom over everything
The U.S. occupation of Iraq is a debacle not because the government did no planning but because a vast amount of expert planning was willfully ignored by the people in charge. The inside story of a historic failure
The chief threats to us and to world order come from weak, collapsed, or failed states. Learning how to fix such states—and building necessary political support at home—will be a defining issue for America in the century ahead
It almost doesn't matter who the Democratic candidate is. In terms of strategy, the road map for the coming presidential campaign was set long before the primaries—and it runs straight through the handful of states with the largest numbers of independent voters. Any candidate needs to hunt them down
It's no accident that the United States has always been an economic paradise for the middle class—that class was invented and reinvented by the government. Now the government needs to reinvent it again—before it's too late
The way to arrest spiraling costs is to admit that we already do what we say we never will—ration health care—and then figure out how to do that better
How could we have been so far off in our estimates of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs? A leading Iraq expert and intelligence analyst in the Clinton Administration—whose book The Threatening Storm proved deeply influential in the run-up to the war—gives a detailed account of how and why we erred
The growing trade deficit threatens U.S. living standards and makes the country dangerously vulnerable to economic extortion. The way out is to make foreigners act more like us
His verbal stumbles have voters worried about his mental fitness. Maybe they’d be more understanding if they knew he’s still fighting a stutter.
His eyes fall to the floor when I ask him to describe it. We’ve been tiptoeing toward it for 45 minutes, and so far, every time he seems close, he backs away, or leads us in a new direction. There are competing theories in the press, but Joe Biden has kept mum on the subject. I want to hear him explain it. I ask him to walk me through the night he appeared to lose control of his words onstage.
“I—um—I don’t remember,” Biden says. His voice has that familiar shake, the creak and the croak. “I’d have to see it. I-I-I don’t remember.”
We’re in Biden’s mostly vacant Washington, D.C., campaign office on an overcast Tuesday at the end of the summer. Since entering the Democratic presidential-primary race in April, Biden has largely avoided in-depth interviews. When I first reached out, in late June, his press person was polite but noncommittal: Was an interview really necessary for the story?
The bedroom can seem to contain the heart of a marriage. In the 2012 Judd Apatow movie This Is 40, the epicenter of marital tension is the bedroom of the onscreen couple, played by Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann. Pete and Debbie are as comely as their Los Angeles home, but the couple flirt with divorce fantasies more than with each other. Debbie mourns a loss of mystery; Pete craves independence. Of a kind, anyway. He’ll shed his boxers so that Debbie can weigh in on the progress of a hemorrhoid, but he also has a habit of sneaking off to hang with his buddies, an act his wife likens to infidelity. A scene in bed captures the riddle at the heart of this marriage—a parry, essentially, between forms of intimacy. Wander too far in search of privacy, and you nullify romance; get too close, and the same occurs. The couple lie under the sheets, Debbie on her laptop and Pete passing gas. “This is why we never have sex,” she says with desperation in her voice, as he grins. “You’re gross.”
A study has turned up a side effect of human spaceflight that no one had observed before.
Astronauts are more than cosmic travelers. They’re also research subjects in the careful study of what exactly outer space does to the human body. On the ground, researchers measure vitals, draw blood, swab cheeks, and more. In orbit around the Earth, the astronauts do the work themselves.
That’s how they found the blood clot.
An astronaut was carrying out an ultrasound on their own body as part of a new study, guided in real time by a specialist on the ground. A similar test before the astronaut launched to space had come back normal. But now the scan showed a clump of blood.
“We were not expecting this,” says Karina Marshall-Goebel, a senior scientist at NASA and the author of the study, published earlier this month. “This has never been reported before.”
The president’s offense is abusing his power to stay in office, not disputing Ukraine policy.
Over the past two weeks, a parade of sober and coldly furious civil servants has come forward to testify before Congress about President Donald Trump’s decision to withhold congressionally approved aid to Ukraine.
Acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor emphasized that “the security assistance we provide is crucial to Ukraine’s defense,” invoking the sacrifice of Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russia. Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, testified that “the stakes for the United States in a successful Ukraine could not be higher.” The former National Security Council aide Tim Morrison emphasized that “Ukraine is on the front lines of a strategic competition between the West and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia.” Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified that a “secure, democratic, and free Ukraine serves not just the Ukrainian people, but the American people as well.”
I interviewed dozens of black mothers about how they help their kids navigate schools where they might be perceived as threats or made to feel unwelcome.
Jessica Black is a Pittsburg, California, mother of two black teenagers, both of whom have been disciplined multiple times at their middle and high schools. Her daughter has been suspended more than once, and teachers often deem her son’s behavior out of line, reprimanding him for not taking off his hoodie in class and for raising his voice.
In observing her own family and others, Black has noticed a pattern: Behaviors that many black parents might consider annoying but developmentally appropriate, such as an ill-timed joke or talking back to an adult, are treated by school staff as cause for suspension. From there, students are pushed out of classrooms, lose learning time, and can end up in the school-to-prison pipeline. “It’s a totally different environment, a totally different culture,” Black said when we spoke in July 2018.
