april 2015

The flight that put the Boeing Company on course for disaster lifted off a few hours after sunrise. It was good flying weather—temperatures in the mid-40s with a slight breeze out of the southeast—but oddly, no one knew where the 737 jetliner was headed. The crew had prepared three flight plans: one to Denver. One to Dallas. And one to Chicago.

In the plane’s trailing vortices was greater Seattle, where the company’s famed engineering culture had taken root; where the bulk of its 40,000-plus engineers lived and worked; indeed, where the jet itself had been assembled. But it was May 2001. And Boeing’s leaders, CEO Phil Condit and President Harry Stonecipher, had decided it was time to put some distance between themselves and the people actually making the company’s planes. How much distance? This flight—a PR stunt to end the two-month contest for Boeing’s new headquarters—would reveal the answer. Once the plane was airborne, Boeing announced it would be landing at Chicago’s Midway International Airport.

Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, opened today with a statement attacking media reporting on the Trump administration. He singled out six stories for attack.

One of them was retracted by its publisher, CNN—a form of corporate responsibility never seen from a White House notorious for emitting six false statements in a single morning. Another was an opinion piece in New York magazine by Jonathan Chait that did not claim to report news, but instead built known facts into a damning narrative of Donald Trump’s Russia connection. The other four range from the exaggerated to the unverified to the apparently mistaken.

But let’s take a closer look at those errors and what they mean. One of the stories singled out by Nunes was published by BuzzFeed News. That story asserted that Trump had explicitly directed his then–personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow project. Cohen would ultimately testify to Congress that Trump’s direction was implicit, not explicit.

1. The Disappearance

At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator.

Pity the American children: No one is writing books about how great they are. Instead, praise has lately been reserved for kids overseas, who—according to a profusion of books and articles in the past decade—possess deep stores of resourcefulness and resilience, those sought-after traits that allegedly set kids up for a lifetime of contentment, or at least success.

These thriving children develop under the guidance of parents who are in some cases carefree and in others completely overbearing. In 2011, the author and law professor Amy Chua detailed the strictures—and the payoffs—of a hard-driving “Chinese” (as opposed to “Western”) approach to parenting in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The following year, Pamela Druckerman, an American writer living in Paris, walked American parents through the seemingly effortless child-rearing techniques of the French in Bringing Up Bébé, telling of “a fully functioning society of good little sleepers, gourmet eaters, and reasonably relaxed parents.”

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This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”