september 2014

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.

For nearly six months, one of the world’s top economies has been gripped by crisis, sparking fears of wider financial contagion. Since the spring, the Turkish currency has cratered while inflation has soared, rattling other emerging markets from Argentina to Indonesia. Yet the most important warning to draw from Turkey’s recent convulsions is less economic than political: namely, the danger of betting on strongman rule.

In truth, worries about Turkey melting down the global economy are misplaced. Unlike during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, when the collapse of the Thai currency unleashed regional upheaval, Turkey’s problems are less an indicator of systemic weakness across developing economies than the outgrowth of factors that are specific to Ankara. These include a politicized monetary policy, the highest current account deficit among the G20 developing economies, the most foreign-denominated private-sector debt of any emerging market, and a gratuitous fight with Washington that has escalated into sanctions.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

The 185th Oktoberfest beer festival opened in Munich this weekend, and organizers are expecting more than 6 million visitors over the next two weeks—the last keg will be tapped on October 7. The Bavarian beer festival, the largest in the world, is held on Munich’s Theresienwiese, a large open space just southwest of the city center. In 2018, the average price one can expect to pay for a one-liter mug of beer at Oktoberfest is 11.24 euros ($13.22). Gathered here are some of the scenes from the opening weekend of Oktoberfest 2018.

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.