december 2011

“Now Donald Trump has finally done it” is a sentence many people have said or written, but which has never yet proven true. As Trump gained momentum during the campaign season, errors that on their own would have stopped or badly damaged previous candidates bounced right off.

These ranged from mocking John McCain as a loser (because “I like people who weren’t captured”), to being stumped by the term “nuclear triad” (the weapons of mass destruction that he as U.S. president now controls), to “when you’re a star ... you can grab ‘em by the pussy” (my onetime employer Jimmy Carter had to spend days in the 1976 campaign explaining away his admission to Playboy that he had sometimes felt “lust in the heart”), to being labelled by an in-party opponent a “pathological liar,” “utterly amoral,” and “a narcissist at a level I don't think this country's ever seen” (the words of his now-supporter Ted Cruz). I kept my list of 152 such moments in the Time Capsule series as the campaign went on.

TOKYO—Japan’s population is shrinking. For the first time since the government started keeping track more than a century ago, there were fewer than 1 million births last year, as the country’s population fell by more than 300,000 people. The blame has long been put on Japan’s young people, who are accused of not having enough sex, and on women, who, the narrative goes, put their careers before thoughts of getting married and having a family.

But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the U.S.: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to.

Chester Bennington started as a rock star by saying that he was finished. “I cannot take this anymore / saying everything I’ve said before” went the opening lines to Linkin Park’s first smash, “One Step Closer,” which is among the many, many songs that take on an awful resonance after the news that Bennington has died, in what’s being investigated as suicide, at age 41.

Linkin Park became one of the most popular and most divisive bands of the new millennium because of their genre blending and pop polish, but to listen to that debut single is to remember that they were also differentiated by a core of raw, convincing pain. It almost entirely came from Bennington. He was arguably the purest font of angst—and inarguably one of the most powerful male voices—in mainstream music since 2000.

Maybe it should come as little surprise that a man who, until summer of 2015, was most famous for firing people, is not a good boss. Yet President Trump’s comments Wednesday about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, delivered in an interview with The New York Times, still take one’s breath away.

“Look, Sessions gets the job. Right after he gets the job, he recuses himself,” Trump said. “So Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself. I then have—which, frankly, I think is very unfair to the president. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president.”

The Senate Republican health-care bill has been repeatedly crushed in a slow-motion collision between the party’s historic ideology and the interests of its modern electoral coalition. Yet congressional Republicans appear determined to plow right through the wreckage.

Even as the Senate’s latest effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act collapsed on Tuesday, the House Republican leadership released a 10-year federal-budget blueprint that points them toward a similar confrontation, between their dominant small-government dogma and the economic needs of their increasingly blue-collar and older white base.

John F. Kennedy famously said that failure is an orphan. But the failure, at least for now, of the GOP drive against the ACA has many parents. One was a distracted and ineffectual President Trump. Even higher on the list sits Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who displayed a blinding hubris that will forever cloud his previous reputation for legislative wizardry. Operating with unprecedented secrecy and insularity, McConnell degraded Senate tradition by refusing to hold any public hearings or committee votes on the legislation. His closed-door process provoked not only unified opposition from Democrats, but also every major medical stakeholder. He sought to pressure dissenting senators with unrealistic vote deadlines—then retreated as they repeatedly called his bluff.

The transcript of Donald Trump’s interview yesterday with the New York Times runs over 7,000 words. But you can boil down its essence to two words: I’m better. No matter what the subject, Trump finds someone to compare himself to. And in every comparison, he comes out the winner.

The Times reporters start the interview by asking Trump about health care, where the Senate—by refusing to even vote on a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare—has handed him a major defeat. Trump doesn’t admit any mistakes. He barely mentions the substance of the bill. Instead, he immediately compares himself to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In the fourth sentence of the interview, he declares that, “Hillary Clinton worked eight years in the White House with her husband as president and having majorities and couldn’t get it done.”

President Trump’s extraordinary broadside this week against Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Special Counsel Robert Mueller raised eyebrows across the nation’s capital. But it’s unclear whether it will affect how either man performs his day-to-day job.

The president expressed frustration with both men, as well as with other top federal law-enforcement officials, in an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday. Trump reserved his greatest ire for Sessions’s decision to step aside from the Russia investigation in March following controversy over his interactions with that country’s ambassador. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” he said.

There’s a saying in China that it’s better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of a phoenix. The premise of the aphorism—it’s better to be over-qualified than under-qualified relative to one’s surroundings—is so widely accepted that similar versions of it exist across cultures. In Japan, they tend to say that it’s better to be the head of a sardine than the tail of a whale. Americans and Brits often declare that it’s better to be a big frog (or fish) in a small pond than a little frog in a big pond.

Extensive research supports these axioms, particularly in the realm of education. Longitudinal studies have consistently shown that high-performing students at less-selective schools feel more competent, have higher GPAs, and have more ambitious career aspirations than low-performing students at more-selective schools.

Photography owes much of its early flourishing to death. Not in images depicting the aftermath of violent crimes or industrial accidents. Instead, through quiet pictures used to comfort grieving friends and relatives. These postmortem photographs, as they are known, were popular from the mid-19th through the early-20th centuries—common enough to grace mantelpieces. Many can be viewed anew at online resources like the Thanatos Archive.

Historians estimate that during the 1840s, the medium’s first decade, as cholera swept through Britain and America, photographers recorded deaths and marriages by a ratio of three to one. Budding practitioners had barely learned to handle the bulky machinery and explosive chemicals before they were asked to take likenesses of the dead: to bend lifeless limbs into natural poses and mask tell-tale signs of sickness, racing against rigor mortis.

Last year I fell in love with a toaster.

It looks like most others. A brushed, stainless-steel housing. Four slots, to accommodate the whole family’s bread-provisioning needs. It is alluring but modest, perched atop the counter on proud haunches.

But at a time when industry promises disruptive innovation, Breville, the Australian manufacturer of my toaster, offers something truly new and useful through humility rather than pride.

The mechanism that raises and lowers the bread from the chassis is motorized. After I press a button atop the frame, the basket silently lowers the bread into the device to become toast. On its own, this feature seems doomed to mechanical failure. But the risk is worthwhile to facilitate the toaster’s star ability: the “A Bit More” button. That modest attribute offers a lesson for design of all stripes—one that could make every designed object and experience better.