july/august 2012

The band got back together on Friday. For five hours, members of the House of Representatives peppered former FBI Director James Comey with questions. All the greatest hits were there: Hillary Clinton’s private email server; the tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and then–Attorney General Loretta Lynch; the affair between the FBI agent Peter Strzok and the FBI attorney Lisa Page, and the anti-Trump texts they’d shared; and, of course, the salacious Steele dossier.

Because this show had no live audience, but also because Comey had resisted an entirely closed hearing, a 235-page transcript of the hearing was released late Saturday. And that’s where the twists came in. At one point, for example, an FBI official accompanying Comey confirmed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is pursuing a possible obstruction-of-justice case against the president.

Federal prosecutors filed three briefs late on Friday portending grave danger for three men: the former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, the former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, and President Donald Trump. In an age when Americans usually get mere squibs of breaking news from Twitter, Facebook, and red-faced cable shouters, many started their weekend poring over complex legal filings and peering suspiciously at blacked-out paragraphs. The documents were stunning, even for 2018.

In brief No. 1, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office argues that Paul Manafort breached his cooperation agreement with the government by lying to the FBI and the Special Counsel’s Office in the course of 12 meetings. The brief oozes a level of confidence notable even among professionally hubristic prosecutors: Mueller says he’s ready to present witnesses and documents, and that he gave Manafort’s lawyers an opportunity to refute the evidence but they could not. Mueller is sure he has the receipts.

The summaries this week of the complicated accusations against Neil deGrasse Tyson—there are now four women, accusing the famed astrophysicist of four different kinds of sexual impropriety—have tended to distill the allegations, and Tyson’s reaction to them, down to a familiar, binary bluntness: “Neil deGrasse Tyson Denies Misconduct Accusations.” Action and reaction, equal and opposite, the negative charges offset with the positive: The women have made claims; he has denied them. A matter of simple physics, the headlines suggest.

What the summaries can miss—and what many of the write-ups of the matter, far beyond the blunt demands of the headline, can miss as well—is the fact that the claims in question are not, actually, just about sexual misconduct. The women who have come forward to share stories about Neil deGrasse Tyson have also been talking about a related, but different, indignity: the harm that the alleged misconduct has done to their careers. They are talking, in that, about something Americans haven’t been terribly good at talking about, even in the age of #MeToo: the radiating damage that sexual abuse can inflict on women’s professional lives. The smothered ambitions. The seeded self-doubts. The notion that careers can experience trauma, too.

The movie Mudbound helped me train for a half marathon last year. I watched it on a treadmill and it made me so angry that I didn’t even think about the tightness in my shins and hamstrings; it distracted me from the grueling workout.

Mudbound is a tender and compelling story of black pain that’s set in the Mississippi Delta during World War II. The overarching theme—which is what enraged me—was sadly familiar: White people belittling, dehumanizing, and violently attacking black folks with impunity. Meanwhile, the black people have no choice but to act benevolently toward whites for fear of more punishment. It states in the white-supremacy handbook that those brutalized by racism must be virtuous in the face of indignity—because it would be inhumane to be impolite to racists.

There are people who stand every morning outside the Carroll Street station in Brooklyn staring dead-eyed into the middle distance. They stand still in ones and twos, clearly strangers to one another, mostly quiet, as though they’d stopped on their way to work to take note of some spectacular disaster in the sky. But you look in the general direction they’re all looking and there’s nothing there.

They are, as it turns out, waiting for the F train. Carroll Street is one of the rare New York subway stations whose trains are boarded underground but where you can stand outside to see them coming. When you spot the F rolling down the bridge, you have just enough time to run inside to catch it. So people stand there waiting. They wait for as long as it takes, for as long as their patience will allow, because in 2015 there is no app, no screen, not even a scratchy voice over a PA system that can tell them when the train is actually going to arrive.

Trying to pick the best television series of 2018 is a bit like trying to judge a cuteness contest in a zoo: There’s way too much to choose from, and very little of it looks alike. How to compare, say, a peerless drama about repressed Edwardian England with a satirical animated comedy about an anthropomorphized, alcoholic horse actor? Or a thoughtful, in-depth documentary series about inequality in a Chicago-area high school with a bleakly comic fable about America’s nastiest and most overprivileged media dynasty?

Television’s current abundance means not just a laundry list of new quality shows each month, but also new styles and techniques with which TV creators are pushing the limits of the form. With that in mind, this list of the best series of 2018 tries to recognize things that TV has done exceptionally well this year, from complex and dynamic female characters to empathetic cringe comedy to experimental modes of storytelling, and everything that comes in between.

In the Collected Works of Robert Mueller, there are Russian names that come and go. But there’s only one of these figures who provides a recurring presence in this oeuvre. He is a diminutive man, whom Mueller has called an “asset” of Russian intelligence. His presence is either the sort of distracting irrelevance that Alfred Hitchcock described as a MacGuffin, or he is the shadowy character who steps into the frame to foreshadow an ominous return.

Konstantin Kilimnik trained in Russian military intelligence as a linguist; he spent decades by Paul Manafort’s side, serving as a translator and then rising through the ranks of his organization. Eventually, Manafort would come to describe Kilimnik—also known as K.K. or Kostya—as “My Russian Brain.” He would travel with Manafort to Moscow to meet with their client, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. When Kostya worked with Americans, they suspected him as some sort of spook. (Last June, I wrote this profile of him.)

Updated on December 4 at 10:55 a.m. ET.

Before last week, few people had heard the name He Jiankui. But on November 25, the young Chinese researcher became the center of a global firestorm when it emerged that he had allegedly made the first CRISPR-edited babies, twin girls named Lulu and Nana. Antonio Regalado broke the story for MIT Technology Review, and He himself described the experiment at an international gene-editing summit in Hong Kong. After his talk, He revealed that another early pregnancy is under way.

It is still unclear if He did what he claims to have done. Nonetheless, the reaction was swift and negative. The CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna says she was “horrified,” NIH Director Francis Collins said the experiment was “profoundly disturbing,” and even Julian Savulescu, an ethicist who has described gene-editing research as “a moral necessity,” described He’s work as “monstrous.”

When a staid American institution is declared dead, the news media like to haul the same usual suspect before the court of public opinion: the Millennial generation.

The 80 million–plus people born in the United States between the early 1980s and the late 1990s stand accused of assassinating various hallmarks of modern life. The list of the deceased includes golf, department stores, the McDonald’s McWrap, and canned tuna. Millennials tore up napkins, threw out mayonnaise, and mercifully disposed of divorce and Applebee’s before graduating to somewhat postmodern crimes: “Have Millennials Killed Serendipity?” With the national murder rate in long-term decline, it may even be said that Millennials are killing killing.

It is better to have an attorney general nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate in an undoubtedly legal fashion than to have an acting attorney general serving in circumstances of dubious legality.

It is better to have an attorney general who is steeped in the traditions and culture of the Justice Department than to have an acting attorney general who is understood at the department to be operating as the “eyes and ears” of a president who is busily attacking the institution.

It is better to have an attorney general who has run the department before and served with distinction in other senior roles within it than to have an acting attorney general whose experience is limited to a brief stint running a relatively sleepy U.S. attorney’s office and an even briefer stint as the chief of staff to the attorney general.