november 2012

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

“Gradually and then suddenly.” That was how one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters described the process of going bankrupt. The phrase applies vividly to the accumulating failures of President Trump’s foreign-policy initiatives.

Donald Trump entered office with more scope for initiative in foreign policy than any of his recent predecessors.

In his campaign for president, Trump had disparaged almost every element of the past 70 years of U.S. global leadership: NATO, free trade, European integration, support for democracy, the Iraq War, the Iran deal, suspicion of Russia, outreach to China. Trump’s election jolted almost every government into a frantic effort to understand what to expect. Other countries’ uncertainty enhanced Trump’s relative power—and so, perversely, did Trump’s policy ignorance and obnoxious behavior. After eight years under the accommodating Barack Obama, the United States suddenly turned a menacing face to the world. In the short run, that menace frightened other states into attempted appeasement of this unpredictable new president.

For generations, two numbers have signaled whether a student could hope to get into a top college: his or her standardized test score and his or her grade-point average.

In the past 15 years, though, these lodestars have come to mean less and less. The SAT has been redesigned twice in that time, making it difficult for admissions officers to assess, for instance, whether last year’s uptick in average scores was the result of better students or just a different test. What’s more, half of American teenagers now graduate high school with an A average, according to a recent study. With application numbers at record highs, highly selective colleges are forced to make impossible choices, assigning a fixed number of slots to a growing pool of students who, each year, are harder to differentiate using these two long-standing metrics.

A couple years ago, I was taking a swim with my very pregnant friend when I asked her if it was hard to keep straight all of the doctors’ health recommendations for expectant mothers.

Not really. For practically every symptom, she said, their recommendations were roughly the same: “Take a walk, eat a yogurt.”

It was another example of the Cult of Yogurt. Even though some varieties have more sugar than a Twinkie, perhaps no other man-made food is so often recommended by medical professionals—and to treat such a wide variety of ailments.

Whenever I’ve been prescribed antibiotics, I’ve always been told to eat a yogurt so that the antibiotics don’t eat up all the “good” bacteria in my system and leave me with a yeast infection. (Recently, I interviewed a doctor who suggested this is bogus; there’s no way for the yogurt cultures to make it all the way down there.)

One evening last March, Nancy Bacon saw a stranger die. She had just touched down in Toronto and set off for a business meeting, chatting on her phone as she navigated the rush-hour traffic of the financial district. She was jaywalking, hurrying across a particularly busy street, when a fire extinguisher seemed to fall from the sky, smashing to the ground just a few feet away from her.

“I was actually annoyed,” she says. Her first thought was that some mischievous kid had thrown the extinguisher through a window high above. But when she lifted her gaze, Bacon’s annoyance turned to horror. What she witnessed next would haunt her for months. “I saw the guy falling,” she says. “I saw him hit the ground.”

Why did the Trump administration cancel its much-hyped nuclear summit with North Korea? And why the confusing semi-backtrack the following day, in which Trump embraced North Korea’s “warm and productive statement” regretting the cancellation, and left the door open to a meeting he’d ditched barely 24 hours before? The answer lies in the toxic interplay between Donald Trump’s instincts and John Bolton’s. Each man’s foreign-policy views are dangerous enough in and of themselves. Put them together and you have the perfect cocktail for the decimation of American power.

Bolton is a Manichean in the tradition of his hero, Barry Goldwater. He has spent his career depicting America’s adversaries—the Soviet Union, Cuba, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and these days, Iran and North Korea—as evil. He denies that they have any legitimate security concerns. He abhors compromise. He demands maximum American economic, political and, if necessary, military pressure. He basic negotiating posture is: Once you give in on everything, then we’ll start talking.

In October 2017, 250 square miles burned in Northern California, destroying 6,000 homes and businesses and killing 44 people. For now, the cause of these fires has not been determined. The private utility company Pacific Gas and Electric, known to Californians as PG&E, is under investigation. Total damage for the Northern California wildfires comes to $9 billion. PG&E has started stockpiling cash.

In California, this is a familiar story. Three years ago, in February of 2015, one-third of the houses in my remote neighborhood in Eastern California burned down. Here, before the fire, 100 houses lay scattered across the leeward flank of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The people who live here spend their time walking steep roads, listening to crickets, chasing mule deer out of the garden, and looking over a desert valley below. Days after the fire, my neighbor, Cassie, wasn’t doing any of these things. Instead, she stood inside her smoking foundation. Tall and easygoing with freckles on her nose, Cassie had come home from college that winter to sift rubble with her mom and dad. Under different circumstances, we might have hiked together or skated frozen ponds. I used to carpool with her family to school, and I remember her house, wooden and gorgeous and overlooking a ravine from which flames later rose.

At 1 a.m. on the Wednesday before the release of Pusha T’s Daytona, Kanye West called Pusha T and said he had a new album cover for him. Pusha and West, the record’s producer, had already settled on an image, but last-minute inspiration had struck, and West was insisting on an overhaul. Securing rights to the new art would cost $85,000, which West would pay. Pusha agreed.

The image is of Whitney Houston’s bathroom. The countertop in the photo is a mess, and in that mess is what’s understood to be signs of cocaine use. In the mirror is the lurid flash of someone’s camera, obscured by clouds of pinkish-gray film, like oxidation or grime, that were absent from the original picture when it was published in a 2006 tabloid under a headline about Houston’s “drug den.” Houston would die of accidental drowning in a bathtub six years later.

Since the Kilauea volcano began its most recent eruptive activity on Hawaii's Big Island three weeks ago, the situation has evolved and worsened. More than 40 structures have been destroyed and one resident was badly injured when he was struck in the leg by a molten hunk of rock thrown from one of the erupting fissures. The Associated Press reported that some fissures were merging and producing faster and more fluid lava, which began flowing in glowing rivers toward the Pacific Ocean. Over the weekend at least two of the lava flows reached the shore, sending up billowing plumes of steam, and generating “laze,” or lava haze, a dangerous mix of hydrochloric acid, steam, and volcanic glass particles. Geologists continue to urge caution and patience during this event, saying that Kilauea remains volatile with no predictable end in sight for the current eruptions.

On Friday morning, President Trump gave the commencement speech at the U.S. Naval Academy’s graduation ceremony in Annapolis, Maryland. Among his messages to the 1,042 graduates, the president said that the country has begun “the great rebuilding of the United States military,” and argued that “we are witnessing the great reawakening of the American spirit and of American might.” This was his second time addressing graduates from one of the nation’s military schools: Last year, he gave a speech at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy’s ceremony.

Here, a full transcript of his remarks, as delivered.

Thank you. Thank you. Hello, midshipmen, hello. Let me say to the entire brigade—please be at ease—enjoy yourselves, because we are all here to celebrate the amazing class of 2018. Amazing job. Thank you. Really something. Admiral Carter, thank you for that wonderful introduction and for your leadership, an incredible job you have done at this storied academy. And thank you, Captain Chadwick, for your dedication and service. Thank you to Undersecretary Modly, Admiral Richardson, General Walters, for joining us today. Thanks also to Senator Wicker, Congressman Wittman, Congressman Valadao.