january/february 2005

Less than a week after her contentious outburst went viral, a Georgia principal has been fired from her post. The incident marks the latest high-profile and racially charged controversy to shake up the education world. Nancy Gordeuk is the founder and former principal of the TNT Academy—a private secondary school that offers “non-traditional” education and independent-study opportunities to capture “the needs of public school students that are bored in a classroom and are starting to get into trouble,” its website says. She became infamous last weekend after a video featuring her speech and subsequent comments at the academy’s graduation ceremony spread across the Internet.

President Trump can only escalate. He cannot help it.

On Thursday night, he spread from his own presidential account a video of the speaker of the House, edited to splice together moments at which she stumbled over her words, in an apparent effort to deceive people into thinking her drunk or ill. In 2016, Trump’s Russian supporters performed this service for him with faked video of Hillary Clinton. Now he seems to have decided that if you want a dirty-tricks campaign done right, you must do it yourself.

At the same time, he has put the declassification powers of the presidency to work as part of a larger campaign of cover-up.

Trump directed his attorney general to declassify documents in an effort to depict Donald Trump’s campaign as a victim of improper surveillance in 2016. Trump tweeted that the attorney general “requested” these powers. That may even be true. But Trump has been demanding such an investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies since long before Barr got the top law-enforcement job. Barr is compliant and complicit, but the idea is all Trump’s.

The declassification process will be selective, of course, in service to a predetermined narrative. Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers are fiercely battling in court to suppress congressional subpoenas for the financial documents that would cast light on Trump’s pre-2016 finances.

Who will trust or credit in any way the integrity of a Barr-led investigation? The intelligence agencies found evidence that alarmed them enough about the campaign’s Russia connections to justify a request for warrants. A federal court reviewed that evidence and authorized and reauthorized it. Will that evidence be declassified?

T

he call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States. Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a few weeks away.  

“I was so confused,” Catrin told me recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.

Do you remember the little woven finger traps you sometimes got as a kid, as a party favor or a reward at a fair? You could comfortably stick your fingers in, but if you tried to pull them out, the weave would tighten and you’d be stuck. Only by maneuvering gently, and not pulling too hard, could you extract yourself.

President Donald Trump finds himself in a sort of impeachment finger trap right now. He isn’t certain to be impeached—but every step he’s taking to try to squirm out of it seems to tighten the bind he’s in.

Consider the president’s tantrum on Wednesday. After inviting Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to the White House for a meeting on infrastructure, Trump stomped out of the meeting, supposedly because Pelosi had earlier accused him of participating in a cover-up. (The accusation is unrebuttably true.) Trump insists he did not throw a fit—“I was purposely very polite and calm, much as I was minutes later with the press in the Rose Garden. Can be easily proven.”—but one can’t calmly blow off a meeting. It defeats the point.

If “I told you so” had a sensation, it would be the sweet cocoon of an 80-degree workspace. For years, women have been saying that the AC is on too damn high. We’ve dragged not one but two sweaters to the office in the summer: one for our slowly numbing legs, and one for our shivering shoulders. Scientific studies have already shown that offices are set for men’s frostier preferred temperatures.

Now a new paper confirms what many of us have long suspected. Women don’t just prefer warmer office temperatures. They perform better in them, too.

For the study, published today in the journal PLOS One, the researchers Tom Chang and Agne Kajackaite had 543 college students in Berlin take different types of tests in a room set to various temperatures between 61 and 91 degrees Fahrenheit. First, the participants had to answer logic problems, like the one about a bat costing $1 more than a ball. Then, the students were asked to add up two-digit numbers without a calculator. Finally, they had to form German words out of the letter scramble ADEHINRSTU.

Yesterday in Jakarta, after it was announced that incumbent President Joko Widodo had been reelected as president of Indonesia, beating former General Prabowo Subianto by 11 percentage points, Subianto’s supporters took to the streets. Protesters made claims of widespread cheating, and clashed with riot police in several locations in Jakarta, setting fire to vehicles and buildings. Police reportedly responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, arresting hundreds. After 24 hours of chaos, six people were reported to have died in the protests—the cause of their deaths are under investigation—and more than 200 were listed as injured. Subianto says he plans to contest the election results in court.

David Reif, now a biologist at NC State, realized his old paper had taken on a dangerous second life when he saw it cited—not in the scientific literature, but in a court case.

The paper was titled “Genetic Basis for Adverse Events after Smallpox Vaccination,” and it came up in 2016 when a vaccine-skeptical doctor tried to argue that it explained her patient’s development delays. The court was not persuaded, but Reif’s co-authors began hearing of yet other doctors using DNA tests to exempt patients from vaccines. Just this month, San Francisco’s city attorney subpoenaed a doctor accused of giving illegal medical exemptions from vaccination, based on “two 30-minute visits and a 23andMe DNA test.” On anti-vaccine blogs and websites, activists have been sharing step-by-step instructions for ordering 23andMe tests, downloading the raw data, and using a third-party app to analyze a gene called MTHFR. Certain MTHFR mutations, they believe, predispose kids to bad reactions to vaccines, possibly even leading to autism—a fear unsupported by science.

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In the early 1970s, the psychologist David G. Myers conducted a famous experiment on the power of groups. He divided several hundred undergraduates into two camps based on their attitudes toward feminism, creating a conservative cluster and a liberal one. Then he left them all alone to talk. When the groups disbanded, the liberal students had become much more liberal, and the conservative students had veered sharply right.

Today this effect is known as group polarization, and unlike other pseudo-phenomena in the field of psychology, it’s been ratified by several additional studies. Spending long amounts of time with people who agree with you doesn’t just lead to groupthink, these researchers have found; it can also lead to the gradual silencing of dissent and the elevation of, and consensus around, the most virulent opinions. If you want to make people more extreme, you don’t have to threaten them or brainwash them. Just plop them in a like-minded group, and human nature will do the rest.

I’m an economist. I love data and evidence. I love them so much that I write books about data-based parenting. When questions arise about how to support parents at work (for example, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter), my first impulse is to endorse paid parental leave. Mountains of data and evidence show that paid leave is good for children’s health, and for mothers in particular. I am more than comfortable making a data-based case for this policy.

But experience, rather than pure data, leads me to believe that what happens after paid leave is nearly as crucial—that is to say, what happens when Mom and Dad return to the office. We need to normalize the experience of parenting while working.    

It all started with a question, one my parents had been unable to answer for 70 years.

What happened to the French doctor they had taken in during the Russian siege of Budapest? He was an escaped prisoner of war. They were just trying to hang on. Together, they hid in a cellar, beneath the feet of German soldiers who had made the home their headquarters.

My parents’ recollections of those times surfaced only rarely. But when they talked about the winter of 1944–1945,  everything seemed more vivid. It was like their memories of the flare of the bombs lit up their lives. As a couple, that time was their beginning. When my father, who had deserted from the Hungarian Army, and my mother, who had refused to move to the ghetto and wear the yellow star, cast their lot together.