january/february 2012

A whole new world—that is what Ted Cruz wanted to give her.

It was the spring of 2001, and Heidi Nelson was planning her nuptials to the man she’d met just over a year earlier. On Christmas break from Harvard Business School, she’d encountered the cocky and cerebral Cruz in Austin, Texas, where they were both working on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. He was “super-smart” and “really fun” and looked like a “1950s movie star.” “It was love at first sight,” she told me.

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

They filled those three weeks with movies and dinners and drives. Then he took her to the airport, where she’d get on a plane back to Boston. Call me every day when your day is done, she instructed him. And he did call her, every day that spring, at about 3 or 4 a.m. Later that summer, Ted gave her a strand of pearls. Probably fake, she still thinks, but they were from Bergdorf Goodman. And this was special: She’d mentioned once that she liked to go to Bergdorf’s, to look at the china and other delicate things behind glass, and he’d listened.

SAN FRANCISCO—In one room, they’re building multicolored matrices matching purchases in their online store to hashtags in affiliated Twitter accounts. In another, they’re texting supporters, tracking and amping up RSVPs to the first-anniversary town hall coming up on Saturday in New Jersey. Over at the creative pod, they’ve already cut a 30-second web ad off the idea that came up in the morning meeting. They’re tracking down supporters’ cell-phone numbers. There’s a staffer scanning bar codes on personalized postcards that have been returned, which will now be digitized and emailed to the people whose mailing addresses weren’t working. They’re prepping a glossy mailer that will hit 3.1 million people next week.

“I know what I’m going to do: I’m going to sanction the hell out of Saudi Arabia.”

That’s what Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said last week, to the delight of Saudi Arabia’s detractors on social media. The man who only one-week prior had been jeered by millions of Democrats for supporting Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation was seemingly redeemed among President Donald Trump’s critics.

There is a rare and growing bipartisan consensus in Congress about the need to smack Saudi Arabia with human-rights sanctions, or perhaps even tougher penalties, for its role in the death of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month but never walked out. Sanctions seem inevitable.

The conventional story of the rise of the conservative intellectual movement in America goes something like this: The Great Depression and Pearl Harbor discredited the so-called superfluous men who had criticized Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and U.S. involvement in the Second World War. In the early years of the Cold War, however, a coalition of classical liberals, traditionalists, and anti-Communists took shape. William F. Buckley Jr. consolidated this alliance, bound together by opposition to the Soviet Union abroad and the welfare state at home, when he founded National Review in 1955. Its greatest victory came with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. But the collapse of the Soviet Union fractured intellectual conservatism, diminishing its influence and opening it up to challenges from the populist right.

Just a few years ago, the news out of Pakistan would have sent official Washington into a tailspin. But with cable TV broadcasting Trump nonstop, few bothered to even note that a champion cricketer turned populist firebrand, Imran Khan, won the election as prime minister this summer. Nor did many pause over the fact that Khan won that election with the backing of an increasingly pro-Chinese military, or that he promised to pull Pakistan “out of the War on Terror,” or that he’s now presiding over a financial collapse. The most significant coverage Khan gets is as a comic oddity on The Daily Show, where he’s been mocked as an “even more tanned version of Donald Trump.”

The Trump effect means that America is missing the new geopolitics emerging across the world. Nowhere have I felt this more intensely than in Pakistan, where I travelled to interview the then-candidate Khan last October. Khan is much more than a celebrity clinging to his looks and lusting for power. He provides a glimpse into what the post-American world might look like: a chaotic stage where strongmen find themselves buffeted by Western, Arab, and Chinese forces.

Senator Kamala Harris, a California Democrat and potential 2020 presidential contender, has a Trump-size tax plan of her own.

Harris is offering a kind of fun-house-mirror inversion of the sweeping Republican tax initiative, one that would, instead of slashing rates on high-income households and corporations, push huge credits out to middle-income and poor families. The LIFT the Middle Class Act would provide monthly cash payments of up to $500 to lower-income families, on top of the tax credits and public benefits they already receive. “Last year, Congress gave a trillion dollars in tax breaks to corporations,” Harris told me. “That money should have gone to American taxpayers who need it instead of handing it over to corporations and the top 1 percent.”

On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful. Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.

Reality is nothing like this. As scholars Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon argue in a report published Wednesday, “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” most Americans don’t fit into either of these camps. They also share more common ground than the daily fights on social media might suggest—including a general aversion to PC culture.

For years, an organization called Women on Web has given women a way to perform their own medication-induced abortions at home. The organization would remotely do online consultations, fill prescriptions, and ship pills that trigger miscarriages to women who live in countries where abortion is illegal. Several studies have shown that the service is safe.

For American women who’ve wanted pills, though, there’s been one major problem: Women on Web wouldn’t ship to the United States. American women could (and do) instead search online for abortion pills, but some of the medicines and pharmacies they’ve found have been less than reliable. Now Women on Web’s founder, a doctor named Rebecca Gomperts, has launched a new service that she says is just as safe as Women on Web, and it does ship to the United States. The cost is $95, but the website says the service will try to help women who can’t pay.

Updated on October 17, 2018

Newt Gingrich is an important man, a man of refined tastes, accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and so when he visits the zoo, he does not merely stand with all the other patrons to look at the tortoises—he goes inside the tank.

On this particular afternoon in late March, the former speaker of the House can be found shuffling giddily around a damp, 90‑degree enclosure at the Philadelphia Zoo—a rumpled suit draped over his elephantine frame, plastic booties wrapped around his feet—as he tickles and strokes and paws at the giant shelled reptiles, declaring them “very cool.”

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

It’s a weird scene, and after a few minutes, onlookers begin to gather on the other side of the glass—craning their necks and snapping pictures with their phones and asking each other, Is that who I think it is? The attention would be enough to make a lesser man—say, a sweaty magazine writer who followed his subject into the tortoise tank for reasons that are now escaping him—grow self-conscious. But Gingrich, for whom all of this rather closely approximates a natural habitat, barely seems to notice.

President Donald Trump is slowly coming around to the probable reality of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder by Saudi Arabia. But he isn’t happy about it.

Not the assassination itself, although he does seem at least displeased about that (he calls it “bad, bad stuff”), and has promised “severe” repercussions if the allegations prove true. The president’s biggest beef seems to be that it’s been a public-relations nightmare.

“Unless the miracle of all miracles happens, I would acknowledge that he’s dead,” Trump told The New York Times on Thursday. Later that afternoon, when reporters asked him whether the Saudi journalist, who lived in Virginia and wrote for The Washington Post, was dead, he said, “Certainly looks that way to me.”