june 2010

Updated on September 24 at 2:06 p.m. ET

You know those signs that say In case of emergency, break glass?

This is that emergency.

President Donald Trump will reportedly soon fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the man who has most directly protected the independence of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump’s efforts to compromise that inquiry mean that Rosenstein’s position has been in peril for some time, but a report last week in The New York Times that Rosenstein had suggested wiretapping the president—potentially sarcastically—made it likely that Trump would seek to push Rosenstein out.

After a morning of contradictory reports, it now seems that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will remain on the job at least until Thursday. The topsy-turvy story—and the still uncertain ultimate outcome—remind of a core lesson of the Trump years:

What happens to U.S. institutions is not something only to watch. An energized public can deter the administration’s worst instincts—whether those are to browbeat a woman alleging sexual abuse or to fire Rosenstein and suppress the Mueller investigation. Since the firing of James Comey at the beginning of his administration, President Trump has flinched from direct confrontations with those trying to uphold the rule of law. It all depends on his sense of the risks of public outcry in the media and at the polls.

On Friday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted that he has “no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents.”

Let me tell you what life was like as a girl in Montgomery County, Maryland, in the early 1980s. I am a year older than Christine Blasey Ford and a year younger than Brett Kavanaugh. I grew up in Potomac, Maryland, a few miles from both Holton Arms, Ford’s school, and Georgetown Prep, which Kavanaugh attended, but I went to my local public high school, Churchill. Never mind that any girl who was in high school in Potomac during that era knew, through the whisper network, not to go to a Georgetown Prep party alone. That was a given. What was also a given is that “date rape,” as a term, was in its infancy. Most of us thought getting our bodies groped at a high-school party—or anywhere—was the unfortunate price we paid for having them, not something we would ever go to the police to report.

On December 31, 1999, we threw a party. It was the end of one millennium and the start of a new one; people very much wanted to celebrate, preferably somewhere exotic. Our party fulfilled that criterion. We held it at Chobielin, the manor house in northwest Poland that my husband and his parents had purchased a decade earlier, when it was a mildewed ruin. We had restored the house, very slowly. It was not exactly finished in 1999, but it did have a new roof. It also had a large, freshly painted, and completely unfurnished salon—perfect for a party.

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The guests were various: journalist friends from London and Berlin, a few diplomats based in Warsaw, two friends who flew in from New York. But most of them were Poles, friends of ours and colleagues of my husband, who was then a deputy foreign minister in the Polish government. A handful of youngish Polish journalists came too—none then particularly famous—along with a few civil servants and one or two members of the government.

There’s an eerie symmetry between Donald Trump and The Great Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan, as if the villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel had been brought to life in a louder, gaudier guise for the 21st century. It’s not just their infamous carelessness, the smashing-up of things and creatures that propels Tom’s denouement and has seemed to many a Twitter user to be the animating force behind Trump’s policy and personnel decisions. The two men, real and fictional, mirror each other in superficial but telling ways. Tom moves like Trump, aggressive and restless, and talks like him, with ponderous pride. He picks personal fights in public, “as though … it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of [his] emotions.” Tom surprises his dinner guests with disjointed political speeches, warning insistently that “civilization’s going to pieces.” His patrician mannerisms are shot through with flashes of anxiety, “as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.”

With his Supreme Court nomination in the balance, Judge Brett Kavanaugh appeared on Fox News, alongside his wife Ashley, in an aggressive interview Monday night.

Not that the questions were combative. Martha McCallum asked straightforward, but never especially challenging, questions. Nor even were the answers Kavanaugh gave all that truculent. What was aggressive was Kavanaugh’s presence on Fox News in the heat of a nomination battle.

Kavanaugh mostly spoke in the bland cadences one would expect of a federal judge, though he occasionally seemed to get choked up in defending himself. He primarily stuck to talking points, reciting slight variations on the same phrases:

“I want a fair process where I can defend my integrity.”

The one overriding theme of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court has been haste, and the three new allegations of sexual misconduct against him that surfaced in the past day—bringing the total to four—suggest a motivation for Republican hurry, as well as demonstrate its dangers.

Sunday evening, The New Yorker reported on allegations by Deborah Ramirez, a woman who attended Yale with Kavanaugh, that he had “exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.” Later in the evening, Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who represents Stormy Daniels, posted an email laying out allegations that Kavanaugh might have been present at gang rapes in high school organized by a friend. Monday morning, a local paper in Montgomery County, Maryland, reported that police there are examining another allegation from the 1980s.

Your life has almost certainly been affected by Brian Wansink.

Wansink is a professor at Cornell University—for nine more months, before he is to retire, as he described it to me Sunday evening, “sooner and under different circumstances than I expected.”

Others describe it as disgrace, an abrupt fall from a position of great prestige that casts a shadow on a highly consequential but already widely distrusted area of science: how food affects our health.

Wansink has been the director of Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab for a decade, where he studied how our environments determine what and how we eat. He was integral in leading the narrative that obesity and diabetes have less to do with individual willpower or flawed personhood than about psychological manipulation by a food industry that wants to sell as many cheap calories as possible.

When Christine Blasey Ford publicly alleged that the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school, the White House immediately rejected calls for an FBI investigation. It refused to treat Ford’s claim as a “vetting” issue and instead committed to a fully political defense of the nomination.

This was a fateful mistake, which the Republican leadership seems poised to repeat now that more allegations against Kavanaugh have surfaced. Senator Chuck Grassley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has indicated that he will examine the new questions in the same fashion as the old, with an offer of closed-door interviews or a public hearing.

The Republican rush to confirm Kavanaugh backfired.

When Delphine Thizy talks to people about eliminating malaria by targeting mosquitos, the one question she says everyone asks—“whether you’re talking to someone in a village in Africa who has never studied biology or an ecologist or a UN ambassador”—is this: What are the consequences?

It’s a good question. To humans, mosquitoes are at best annoying and at worst deadly, but to dozens of other species in the wild, they are competitor, pollinator, or prey. If past malaria-eradication campaigns have taught us anything (see: 1950s, DDT), it is that reshaping the environment can have unintended consequences.

Thizy talks about mosquitos because she is the stakeholder engagement manager for Target Malaria, a Bill Gates–backed nonprofit research consortium developing genetically modified mosquitoes to suppress populations of the bugs that spread the disease. The technology is ambitious and new, and thus controversial. Even though its genetically modified mosquitoes likely won’t be ready until 2029, Target Malaria has gotten enough questions about ecological consequences that it realized answering with the current scientific consensus—It will probably be fine!—was not good enough.

By now, the idea that gut bacteria affect a person’s health is not revolutionary. Many people know that these microbes influence digestion, allergies, and metabolism. The trend has become almost commonplace: New books appear regularly detailing precisely which diet will lead to optimum bacterial health.

But these microbes’ reach may extend much further, into the human brains. A growing group of researchers around the world are investigating how the microbiome, as this bacterial ecosystem is known, regulates how people think and feel. Scientists have found evidence that this assemblage—about a thousand different species of bacteria, trillions of cells that together weigh between one and three pounds—could play a crucial role in autism, anxiety, depression, and other disorders.