may 2009

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer. Most of the U.S. territory currently has no electricity or running water, fewer than 250 of the island’s 1,600 cellphone towers are operational, and damaged ports, roads, and airports are slowing the arrival and transport of aid. Communication has been severely limited and some remote towns are only now being contacted. Jenniffer Gonzalez, the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, told the Associated Press that Hurricane Maria has set the island back decades.

Updated on September 25 at 8:20 p.m.

Late Sunday night, Josh Dawsey of Politico dropped a story that, in any other administration, would have been cause for concern but hardly surprise.

“Presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has corresponded with other administration officials about White House matters through a private email account set up during the transition last December,” Dawsey wrote. “ Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, set up their private family domain late last year before moving to Washington from New York, according to people with knowledge of events as well as publicly available internet registration records.”

Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores. This summer, it bought Whole Foods and its 400 grocery locations. And last week, the company announced a partnership with Kohl’s to allow returns at the physical retailer’s stores.

Why is Amazon looking more and more like an old-fashioned retailer? The company’s do-it-all corporate strategy adheres to a familiar playbook—that of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Sears might seem like a zombie today, but it’s easy to forget how transformative the company was exactly 100 years ago, when it, too, was capitalizing on a mail-to-consumer business to establish a physical retail presence.

On Friday, as Puerto Rico contended with the aftermath of a hurricane that had left much of the island without power, and North Korea threatened to detonate a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean, the internet-gossip complex grappled instead with the momentous news that an unmarried 20-year-old reality star was pregnant. Kylie Jenner, TMZ reported, the youngest scion of the Kardashian family, had been telling friends that she and her boyfriend, the rapper Travis Scott, were going to have a baby. Unidentified family friends promptly confirmed the news to People. And some fans began to wonder—had Kylie’s mother, Kris Jenner, leaked the news herself to boost the ratings for E!’s Sunday night 10-year-anniversary special of Keeping Up With the Kardashians?

It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

Updated on September 25 at 6:32 p.m. ET

There remains a slim possibility that in the next few days, Senate Republicans will pass the health-care proposal known as Graham-Cassidy, the legislation that party leaders have described as their “last, best chance” to substantially repeal the Affordable Care Act.

But for that to happen, the bill’s champions would have to win back the vote of at least one of the three Republicans who have signaled their opposition. They’d have to persuade multiple others to abandon their previously stated positions on the sanctity of protections for people with preexisting conditions. And they’d have to lock down still more Republicans who balked on Monday at changes to the legislation that were made expressly to secure their support.

Friday morning, things didn’t look great for Colin Kaepernick.

The former San Francisco 49er had made headlines around the world last season for kneeling during the National Anthem. The offseason had seen a raging debate about the fact that he hadn’t been signed from free agency, which boiled down to whether teams were justified in deciding that his controversial protest outweighed his talent. Despite some comically atrocious performances by quarterbacks on NFL rosters in the first two weeks of the season, Kaepernick remained unsigned. A few fellow players said publicly that he deserved a roster spot somewhere, and some had taken up his protest, but it remained a niche question, and the cause to which Kaepernick wished to draw attention—police brutality against people of color—had faded a bit from the headlines, overwhelmed by the onslaught of Trump-related news.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

“The truth is, I am kind of done with politics for now.”

That was Megyn Kelly, on Monday morning, talking to her studio audience during the live debut of her new NBC morning show, Megyn Kelly Today. In response to the declaration, the people gathered within the airy, brightly lit set roared with approval. “Right? I know!” the host continued, her tone breezy and conspiratorial. “You know why! We all feel it. It’s eeeverywhere. It’s everywhere.”

Pleasingly apolitical, relatably indignant, preternaturally glossy: It’s a brand Kelly has been working to cultivate throughout her television career, but particularly within the whirl of publicity that has led to today’s morning-TV debut. In Kelly’s 2016 autobiography, and in glowing profiles with headlines like “Blowhards, Beware: Megyn Kelly Will Slay You Now” and “After Fox, Megyn Kelly Aims To Be a Force for Good,” the former Fox News Channel host—having moved, earlier this year, to NBC—has made a point of emphasizing her conviction that politics is a choice one can make, a topic that can be cordoned off from all the others, and, as such, willfully avoided. “Megyn Kelly Doesn’t Want to Be Political” was the headline of an interview Kelly gave to Elle magazine’s Mattie Kahn, its publication timed to coincide with Monday’s premiere of Megyn Kelly Today. The conversation went in part, like this:

First, the good.

In a shirtless locker-room interview yesterday, Miami Dolphins safety Michael Thomas was asked about Trump’s “son-of-a-bitch” condemnation of players protesting state violence.

Thomas first shot back a smile as if trying to brush it off.

Addressing Trump: “It just amazes me that with everything else going on in this world, especially involving the United States, that’s what you’re concerned about, my man?”

His tone shifted.

“As a man, as a father, as an African American who’s one of those ‘sons of bitches,’ yeah, I took it personally. But at the same time, it’s bigger than me. I got a daughter. She’s going to have to live in this world. I’m going to do whatever I got to do to make sure she can look at her dad and be like, ‘Hey, you did something. You tried to make a change.’”