september 2008

When Becky Evans started studying cat-human relationships, she kept hearing, over and over again, about how cats are psychopaths.

On one hand, anyone who has looked into the curiously blank face of a catloaf knows exactly what that means. But also, exactly what does it mean to apply a human mental diagnosis to felines? We let these clawed creatures into our homes and our beds, but we still have trouble understanding them on anything but our own human terms.

Evans, a psychology graduate student at the University of Liverpool, recently devised a survey for owners who think that their cats are psychopaths. The survey asks owners to describe the allegedly psychopathic behaviors, and so far they have included bullying other pets, taking over the dog’s bed, and waiting on the kitchen counter to pounce on unsuspecting family members. In short, pretty typical cat behavior.

Treating subordinates like dirt is a moral flaw, and I would be mortified to be accused of it. (I avoid these accusations by having no subordinates.) By now the evidence of Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar’s guilt in this respect is overwhelming. The New York Times has replicated the findings of BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post before it: Klobuchar, who is now seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, is a workplace terror with a penchant for winging binders and phones at underlings. It is possible that her aides are oversensitive. As a Minnesota native, I can attest that snowflakes abound there, including in Klobuchar’s hair. But I doubt these accusations are due to an abundance of them on the candidate’s staff. Their willingness to approach the media about personnel issues bespeaks true abnormality. She must really be a monster, at least when under stress.

Most Americans do not live in a totalizing bubble. They regularly encounter people of different races, ideologies, and religions. For the most part, they view these interactions as positive, or at least neutral.

Yet according to a new study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic, a significant minority of Americans do not live this way. They seldom or never meet people of another race. They dislike interacting with people who don’t share their political beliefs. And when they imagine the life they want for their children, they prize sameness, not difference. Education and geography seemed to make a big difference in how people think about these issues, and in some cases, so did age.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report could come out as soon as next week, CNN reported on Thursday. Unless, of course, it doesn’t—after all, there have been various suggestions for months that the end was in sight, and the Justice Department said Friday there would be no report next week. And anyway, none of this matters if the newly installed Attorney General Bill Barr decides not to release the report, or releases only a limited summary, or delays the release, or …

Because of the many uncertainties about when the report will arrive, and what the public will see, and what shape the report might take, and what steps might come next, the report has taken on outsize importance in discourse and coverage about the presidential campaign, Russia, and Donald Trump. That’s risky, though. Perhaps the Mueller report will deliver a stunning new revelation about Trump’s campaign or business ties, but it could just as plausibly turn out to be a short, dry summary of material that’s already known.

“Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

In the half century since John F. Kennedy said those famous words, the balance has definitely shifted toward asking what your country can do for you. In almost every democracy, citizenship today offers more rights and imposes fewer responsibilities than it did in 1961.

How much should that balance shift? Canadians have been debating that question this winter—and landed in favor of rights, against responsibilities. Canada’s example offers cautionary lessons for others.

The story starts far from Canadian shores, in Lebanon, in the summer of 2006. A cross-border raid by Hezbollah triggered an armed Israeli response. The fighting rapidly escalated into a serious Israeli-Iranian proxy war. Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel. Israeli troops crossed the border to destroy the rocket launchers. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese were displaced in the fighting.

We found the moose calf half an hour in. He lay atop thin snow on a gentle slope sheltered by the boughs of a big, black spruce, curled up as a dog would on a couch. He had turned his long, gaunt head to rest against his side and closed his eyes. He might have been sleeping. The day before, April 17, 2018, when the GPS tracker on the moose’s collar stopped moving for six hours, this stillness had caused both an email and a text to alert Jake Debow, a Vermont state field biologist who stood next to me now with Josh Blouin, another state biologist, that moose No. 75 had either shucked his collar or died.

“You want pictures before we start?” Debow asked me. He’s the senior of the two young biologists, both still in grad school, both in their late 20s, young and strong and funny, from families long in the north country, both drawn to the job by a love of hunting and being outside. Debow had always wanted to be a game warden; in college, he “fell in love with the science.” His Vermont roots go back 10 generations. “Jake Debow,” Josh told me, “is about as Vermont as you can get.” It was Debow’s second season on the moose project, and Blouin’s first. This was the sixth calf, of 30 collared, that they’d found sucked to death by ticks this season. They were here to necropsy the carcass, send the tissues to a veterinary pathology lab in New Hampshire, and try to figure out as much as possible about how and why these calves were dying.

The economic thinker who most influenced the Green New Deal isn’t Marx or Lenin. No, if you want to understand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bid to remake the economy to fight climate change, you need to read Hamilton.

Yes, Alexander Hamilton. Long before he was associated with theatrical hip-hop, former Treasury Secretary Hamilton called for policies that sound familiar to us today. Like Representative Ocasio-Cortez, he wanted massive federal spending on new infrastructure. Like Donald Trump, he believed that very high tariffs can nurture American manufacturing. And like Elizabeth Warren, he was willing to bend the Constitution to reform the financial system.

Hamilton, in short, successfully used the power of the federal government to boost manufacturing, to pick winners and losers, and to shape the fate of the U.S. economy. He is the father of American industrial policy: the set of laws and regulations that say the federal government can guide economic growth without micromanaging it. And the Green New Deal, for all its socialist regalia, only makes sense in light of his capitalistic work.

Jack Delano was one of the photographers who worked in Roy Stryker’s Farm Security Administration photography program in the early 1940s, traveling the American countryside, photographing people and places with the stated goal of “introducing America to Americans.” In 1942 and ’43, Delano spent time in the rail yards of Chicago, documenting the busy freight hub and the countless workers who kept the trains running 24 hours a day. Some of his most striking images were made on Kodachrome color transparencies, wonderfully preserved in the Library of Congress today. Collected below, a handful of images from Chicago as it was some 75 years ago.

Google apologized Wednesday to customers who purchased its Nest Secure home-security system. The device is equipped with a microphone that has gone unmentioned since it went up for sale in 2017. Earlier in February, Google announced on Twitter an upcoming software update that activated the microphone, making the Nest Guard responsive to voice commands and Google Assistant technology. The tweet startled users, who were never told the system could pick up sound.

“Have I had a device with a hidden microphone in my house this entire time?” one user asked.

Missing from the Nest account’s response was the word “yes,” but to be clear: Yes.

“We included a microphone in the Nest Guard with features such as the Google Assistant in mind. It has not been used up to this point, and you can enable or disable it at any time using the Nest app,” the company wrote on Twitter.

In 2016, Molly Bahr changed her whole life with a Google search. Bahr, a therapist, was at a professional training on eating disorders when a speaker mentioned in passing that participants might be interested in something called intuitive eating. Bahr looked up the term. “I went home that day and it was like a light switch,” she says. “I felt like I got hit by a truck.”

Bahr decided that she wanted to spread the word about intuitive eating, but there was one problem. Up to that moment, she had been dedicated to traditional ideas of dieting and health, encouraging followers of her growing fitness-focused Instagram account to weigh their food, watch their nutritional macros, and fret over their weight as a primary indicator of their health. Intuitive eating, on the other hand, is a theory that posits the opposite: Calorie counting, carb avoiding, and waistline measuring are not only making people emotionally miserable, but contributing to many of the health problems previously attributed to simple overeating.