october 2014

In the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political consultant Lee Atwater learned that he was dying. Atwater, who had just turned 39 and was the head of the Republican National Committee, had suffered a seizure while at a political fund-raising breakfast and had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. In a year he was dead.

Atwater put some of that year to use making amends. Throughout his meteoric political rise he had been known for both his effectiveness and his brutality. In South Carolina, where he grew up, he helped defeat a congressional candidate who had openly discussed his teenage struggles with depression by telling reporters that the man had once been “hooked up to jumper cables.” As the campaign manager for then–Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1988, when he defeated Michael Dukakis in the general election, Atwater leveraged the issue of race—a specialty for him—by means of the infamous “Willie Horton” TV ad. The explicit message of the commercial was that, as governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis had been soft on crime by offering furloughs to convicted murderers; Horton ran away while on furlough and then committed new felonies, including rape. The implicit message was the menace posed by hulking, scowling black men—like the Willie Horton who was shown in the commercial.

The alleged killing of a Washington Post columnist on the orders of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has triggered many rethinks—and not least a rethinking of the lavishly flattering journalism that hailed the crown prince’s rise to supreme power.

Among the biggest media boosters of the Saudi crown prince was Bob Woodward in his new book, Fear. Woodward observed that a National Security Council staffer, Derek Harvey, believed that “MBS was the future. MBS saw that transformative change in Saudi Arabia was the only path to survival for the Kingdom.” This is but one of the encomia to MbS in Woodward’s pages—all of them traceable much less to Woodward’s feelings about MbS than to Woodward’s apparent indebtedness to Harvey.

Spending time looking at the varying and beautiful images of our planet from above in Google Earth, zooming in and out at dizzying rates, I thought it would be interesting to compare all of these vistas at a fixed scale—to see what New York City, Venice, or the Grand Canyon would look like from the same virtual height. So, the following images are snapshots from Google Earth, all rectangles of the same size and scale, approximately three and a half miles (5.6 kilometers) wide by two miles (3.2 kilometers) tall—showing seven square miles (18.1 square kilometers, or 4,480 acres) of the surface of our planet in each view.

These days, walking through parts of Manhattan feels like occupying two worlds at the same time. In a theoretical universe, you are standing in the nation’s capital of business, commerce, and culture. In the physical universe, the stores are closed, the lights are off, and the windows are plastered with for-lease signs. Long stretches of famous thoroughfares—like Bleecker Street in the West Village and Fifth Avenue in the East 40s—are filled with vacant storefronts. Their dark windows serve as daytime mirrors for rich pedestrians. It’s like the actualization of a Yogi Berra joke: Nobody shops there anymore—it’s too desirable.

A rich ghost town sounds like a capitalist paradox. So what the heck is going on? Behind the darkened windows, there’s a deeper story about money and land, with implications for the future of cities and the rest of the United States.

The title of Ariana Grande’s latest album, Sweetener, reclaims the often-used knock on radio-ready singalongs as “saccharine.” Perky music doesn’t just make life yummier, in Grande’s view. It makes it bearable. Her first album after the 2017 terrorist attack on one of her concerts, Sweetener arrived with lyrics about responding to bitterness with sugar, dark with light, suffocation with breathing. There were no tears left to cry, and she’d been crying with good reason.

As is almost always the case in pop, though, music could be heard as a rough synonym for love. The sweet/light/air in Grande’s lyrics were presented as stemming from a you, and listeners could envision that you as someone specific: Pete Davidson, the SNL comedian who Grande began dating in May and got engaged to in June. Calling their relationship “public” would be an understatement. They Instagrammed about their matching tattoos. He joked at length on SNL about being with her. She named a Sweetener song “Pete Davidson.”

When Brandon Farbstein first joined Instagram in 2014, he was 14 and optimistic. Farbstein was born with a rare form of dwarfism, and he wanted to use the photo-sharing site to educate people about his condition—to, as he told me, “show people a glimpse into my life and inspire people.”

Soon enough, though, the hateful messages started coming: death threats, expletive-laden comments about his appearance, worse. A meme page put his face on Hitler’s body. Multiple accounts popped up with the explicit purpose of taunting him. His house was swatted. When he does a live video, the insults float onscreen, fast and furious. “It’s been hard to keep my composure,” Farbstein told me. After trolls started posting pictures of him in the hallways at his high school, he started to fear for his safety. Eventually, he left and finished high school online.

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.”

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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.

In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue that well-intentioned adults are unwittingly harming young people by raising them in ways that implicitly convey three untruths:

1. The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
3. The Untruth of Us vs. Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.  

In their telling, the spread of these untruths, especially in the middle and upper classes, helps to explain a spike in mental-health problems among young people and recent tumult on the campuses of highly selective colleges. But if parents and educators change course, they argue, they can raise happier, healthier kids who’ll turn into better citizens.

Paul Allen, one of my oldest friends and the first business partner I ever had, died yesterday. I want to extend my condolences to his sister, Jody; his extended family; and his many friends and colleagues around the world.

I met Paul when I was in seventh grade, and it changed my life.

I looked up to him right away. He was two years ahead of me in school, really tall, and proved to be a genius with computers. (Later, he also had a very cool beard, which I could never pull off.) We started hanging out together, especially once the first computer arrived at our school. We spent just about all our free time messing around with any computer we could get our hands on.

Paul foresaw that computers would change the world. Even in high school, before any of us knew what a personal computer was, he was predicting that computer chips would get superpowerful and would eventually give rise to a whole new industry. That insight of his was the cornerstone of everything we did together.

In his 1960 short story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” which was first published in The Atlantic, James Baldwin describes the pervasive feeling that informed his expatriatism: the bitter push of American racism versus the sweet pull of life elsewhere. When the story’s main character—a black American expat who lives in France with his Swedish wife and their French-born son—wonders whether his kid would want to “see the country in which his father and his father’s fathers were born,” he concludes, “Why should he want to cross all that water just to be called a nigger? America never gave him anything.”

For generations, black Americans have been leaving the U.S. and seeking freedom—from segregated performance spaces, from the specter of lynching, from being disrespected in their hometowns despite serving honorably in the armed forces abroad. Luminaries, intellectuals, and artists like Baldwin, Richard Wright and Josephine Baker (Paris), Paul Robeson (London, Moscow), Julian Mayfield (Accra, Ghana and Georgetown, Guyana), Claudia Jones (London), and Yasiin Bey f.k.a. Mos Def, (Cape Town) either emigrated by choice or were forcibly expelled—but their myriad reasons for leaving often included politics. They’d all agitated for black equality in different ways, and became expats after experiencing the inescapability of American racism. Robeson, who fervently protested American racism as a violation of American ideals, was pushed out of the country for his speech. Of the world abroad, he said, “In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being.”