november 2007

The Baby Boomers ruined America. That sounds like a hyperbolic claim, but it’s one way to state what I found as I tried to solve a riddle. American society is going through a strange set of shifts: Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history: The longest such period ended in the Civil War. So what’s to blame for this institutional aging?

One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different interests than younger voters: Cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term problems such as excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more easily ignored.

1. The Disappearance

At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wants to be clear: He supports Donald J. Trump. But don’t you dare presume that he supports what Trump says or does.

Sure, he voted for Trump in 2016, but only reluctantly. And okay, he plans to vote for Trump again in 2020. But he’s adamantly opposed to many of the most consequential actions Trump has taken as president. He’ll even say so in public. Doesn’t that make him a good guy?

Christie did his damnedest Monday to convince a crowd at the Aspen Ideas Festival and his interviewer, the Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, that his support for the president of the United States is morally and logically defensible.

It was tough in part because of his scathing, multi-count indictment of Trump. In 2016, Christie recounted, Jared Kushner called to say that Trump was “off the rails” in his attacks on Khizr Khan, whose son was killed in Iraq. Christie claimed credit for getting Trump to finally stop going after the gold-star father.

"It’s not true that no one needs you anymore.”

These words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The plane was dark and quiet. A man I assumed to be her husband murmured almost inaudibly in response, something to the effect of “I wish I was dead.”

Again, the woman: “Oh, stop saying that.”

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but couldn’t help it. I listened with morbid fascination, forming an image of the man in my head as they talked. I imagined someone who had worked hard all his life in relative obscurity, someone with unfulfilled dreams—perhaps of the degree he never attained, the career he never pursued, the company he never started.

“I’ll say it with great respect. Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, okay?”

That was Donald Trump, speaking yesterday with reporters from The Hill. The president was addressing, in part, the latest allegation of sexual assault to be brought against him, this time from the advice columnist and author E. Jean Carroll: In the mid-1990s, Carroll alleged in a recent essay, Trump, cornering her in a dressing room of the department store Bergdorf Goodman, raped her.

The Hill prefaced the headline of its published interview with an all-caps “EXCLUSIVE,” which is technically true but not fully: Trump, after all, has deployed the logic of “She’s not my type” many times before, in attempting to defend himself from charges of sexual misconduct. He used a similar dismissal as a presidential candidate in October 2016, after the former People magazine journalist Natasha Stoynoff accused him of attacking her—“He was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat,” she said—during an interview she had conducted with him at Mar-a-Lago, in 2005:

How do you advertise a car that journalists describe as “sturdy, if drab”?

That was the question faced by Subaru of America executives in the 1990s. After the company’s attempts to reinvigorate sales—by releasing its first luxury car and hiring a hip ad agency to introduce it to the public—failed, it changed its approach. Rather than fight larger car companies over the same demographic of white, 18- to 35-year-olds living in the suburbs, executives decided to market their cars to niche groups—such as outdoorsy types who liked that Subarus could handle dirt roads.

In the 1990s, Subaru’s unique selling point was that the company increasingly made all-wheel drive standard on all its cars. When the company’s marketers went searching for people willing to pay a premium for all-wheel drive, they identified four core groups who were responsible for half of the company’s American sales: teachers and educators, health-care professionals, IT professionals, and outdoorsy types.

At a G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, this week, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are set to have a one-on-one meeting, and hopes are high that a good conversation will restart stalled trade negotiations and convince the White House to hold off on further tariffs against China.

For Alfred LaSpina, the outcome may not matter very much, though. When LaSpina, the new vice president of eLumigen, based in Troy, Michigan, began thinking about a supply chain for the startup’s industrial lighting products, China automatically came to mind: LaSpina—an old friend of mine—has had experience with manufacturing in China before, and knew he could find reliable, experienced suppliers there. Then came Trump’s unexpected tariff hike on Chinese imports in May. LaSpina and his colleagues began to think twice, and they are now looking into alternative options in Southeast Asia. With so much uncertainty in the relationship between Beijing and Washington, he believes that’s just the smart thing to do.

The most popular class in the history of Yale University was inspired by a paradox: Even when people, conventionally speaking, succeed—get into a top college, make lots of money, or accumulate prestige and accolades—they are often left feeling unsatisfied.

It’s a problem that may be particularly acute at a place like Yale, but the lessons of the class, called “Psychology and the Good Life,” are widely applicable—they address fundamental features of the human mind that make it difficult to appreciate things that seem like they’d be great. “Our minds are filled with a ton of little glitches that make it hard to enjoy the great things that we have,” as Laurie Santos, the psychology professor who teaches the course, puts it.

In the faint predawn light, the ship doesn’t look unusual. It is one more silhouette looming pier-side at Naval Base San Diego, a home port of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. And the scene playing out in its forward compartment, as the crew members ready themselves for departure, is as old as the Navy itself. Three sailors in blue coveralls heave on a massive rope. “Avast!” a fourth shouts. A percussive thwack announces the pull of a tugboat—and 3,000 tons of warship are under way.

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

But now the sun is up, and the differences start to show.

Most obvious is the ship’s lower contour. Built in 2014 from 30 million cans’ worth of Alcoa aluminum, Littoral Combat Ship 10, the USS Gabrielle Giffords, rides high in the water on three separate hulls and is powered like a jet ski—that is, by water-breathing jets instead of propellers. This lets it move swiftly in the coastal shallows (or “littorals,” in seagoing parlance), where it’s meant to dominate. Unlike the older ships now gliding past—guided-missile cruisers, destroyers, amphibious transports—the littoral combat ship was built on the concept of “modularity.” There’s a voluminous hollow in the ship’s belly, and its insides can be swapped out in port, allowing it to set sail as a submarine hunter, minesweeper, or surface combatant, depending on the mission.

Facebook, one of the world’s most distrusted companies, wants us to trust its new Libra cryptocurrency, which, it hopes, will be used by billions of people around the world. We shouldn’t. Libra will almost exactly replicate all the problems generated by Facebook’s social network. Those problems can in turn be traced to the central paradox of Big Tech: The technological innovation that is supposed to liberate us from government ends up subjugating us to a handful of corporations.

The key insight underlying Libra is that the transfer of money from person to person is similar to the transfer of information. “Moving money around globally,” Facebook declares in the white paper laying out the company’s vision for its new cryptocurrency, “should be as easy and cost-effective as—and even more safe and secure than—sending a text message or sharing a photo.” Money is information: When I send money to you, I’m telling the financial system that wealth holdings assigned to me should now be recorded as assigned to you. Financial networks are information networks, just as social networks are. And yet while the internet has revolutionized social networks, financial networks have not caught up. They remain hard to use and expensive, especially for international transactions—whereas, once you own the hardware and obtain an internet connection, social communications are essentially free. In Facebook’s vision, the financial network will be modeled on the social network, and eventually the two networks will be merged into a single network, through which we will seamlessly convey to one another money as well as cat photos and political diatribes.