october 2015

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

Dr. Sherman Hershfield woke up one morning and was surprised to find himself behind the wheel of his car. Somewhere between his Beverly Hills apartment and his practice in the San Fernando Valley, the silver-haired physician had blacked out. Somehow, he’d avoided a crash, but this wasn’t the first time. “I didn’t know what was going on,” he admitted.

Apart from his frequent blackouts, Hershfield was in fine health for a man in his 50s. He was tall and lean, ran six miles a day, and was a strict vegetarian. “I believe a physician should provide exemplary motivation to patients,” he once wrote. “I don’t smoke and have cut out all alcohol.” Hershfield specialized in physical medicine and rehabilitation, and for decades had helped patients with brain injuries learn to walk again and rebuild their lives. Even with his experience, Hershfield didn’t know what was wrong inside his own head.

Supervised, enriching playtime. Frequent conversations about thoughts and feelings. Patient, well-reasoned explanations of household rules. And extracurriculars. Lots and lots of extracurriculars.

These are the oft-stereotyped hallmarks of a parenting style that has been common in upper-middle-class households for at least a generation. But according to a recent survey, this child-rearing philosophy now has a much broader appeal, one that holds across race and class. The survey, which polled roughly 3,600 parents of children ages 8 to 10 who were demographically and economically representative of the national population, found evidence that hands-on parenting is not just what the well-off practice—it’s what everyone aspires to.

The arresting New York Times headline last Friday—“F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia”—sparked a strangely bifurcated reaction. A bombshell to some, a dud to others, the story has had lots of people scratching their heads: What does it even mean?

The confusion is understandable, as is the debate over the significance of this deceptively complex and nuanced report—a story that, through no fault of reporters Adam Goldman, Michael Schmidt, and Nicholas Fandos, remains incomplete in key respects.

“My concern with the story,” Goldman told The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, “was that it felt, to some extent, like a ‘duh’ story.” It was, after all, already well known that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was conducting a counterintelligence investigation of links between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government, and there was plenty of evidence already in the public record of the president’s alarming behavior with respect to Vladimir Putin. It was also nothing new that Mueller was investigating obstruction of justice in connection with the president’s interactions with law enforcement. We’ve known that ever since The Washington Post reported it back on June 14, 2017.

The confirmation hearing for William Barr went a lot better than the one for Jeff Sessions.

In fairness, that’s not a very high standard. The former Alabama senator made false statements to the Senate about his contacts with Russia, was forced to admit he had misled the public about his civil-rights record, and insisted he had “done no research” into whether the Russian government had interfered in the 2016 election.

Barr was far better prepared to take on the questions raised by his appointment as attorney general. Sessions resigned last November, after two years of being berated by President Donald Trump for recusing himself from the federal investigation into Russian interference. Trump’s appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general was arguably unconstitutional; Whitaker, a Trump loyalist with a questionable past, did not occupy a Senate-confirmed position at the time of his appointment. Compared with his predecessors, then, Barr seems like an improvement.

On September 28, 2018, tech died.

That’s according to a widely circulated eulogy prepared by Vincent Deluard, a strategist at INTL FCStone, a financial-services company. “If technology is everywhere, the tech sector no longer exists,” he wrote. “If the tech sector no longer exists, its premium is no longer justified.” When the Financial Times got its hands on the document, it leaned into the death thesis, declaring: “The tech sector is over.”

In news reports, death has several definitions. When it applies to a person, it means the end of life. When it applies to a company or industry, it means the end of growth. Print is dead, live TV is dead, and Millennials killed American cheese; but you can still read a print newspaper with the TV on while eating a cheeseburger.

How does that line go? All fast food served warm is alike, but every fast-foodstuff consumed after it gets cold is unhappy in its own way?

Regardless: Taste was not, by all appearances, a top concern when it came to the culinary offerings that the White House presented to visiting members of the Clemson Tigers football team on Monday evening. It was the visuals, instead—items from McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Burger King and Domino’s, many of them piled, in their branded packagings, atop silver platters—that were the point: the gleaming tongs next to the wilting boxes of Filets-O-Fish. The plastic containers of dipping sauces, sorted by flavor, stacked cheekily inside gravy boats. The many faces of Wendy, wrapped recursively around a series of Singles. The French fries arranged, haphazardly, in cardboard cups bearing the seal of the White House. The gilt candelabras lending soft light to the guilty pleasures. A little bit P. T. Barnum, a little bit Hieronymus Bosch, a little bit Beauty and the Beast, had “Be Our Guest” been staged by Willy Wonka and also set in the apocalypse: The scene was grinning and a bit grotesque, and that was the point. A portrait of Lincoln gazed down upon the spread and at the man who would claim credit for it, perhaps wondering anew what God hath wrought.

I. An Angry Little Town

Soon after the snows of 1977 began to thaw, the residents of Greenfield, Massachusetts, received a strange questionnaire in the mail. “Try to recall the number of times you became annoyed and/or angry during the past week,” the survey instructed. “Describe the most angry of these experiences.” One woman knew her answer: Recently, her husband had bought a new car. Then he had driven it to his mistress’s house so she could admire the purchase. When the wife found out, she was livid. Furious. Her rage felt like an eruption she couldn’t control.

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The survey was interested in the particulars of respondents’ anger. In its 14 pages, it sought an almost voyeuristic level of detail. It asked the woman to describe the stages of her fury, which words she had shouted, whether punches had been thrown. “In becoming angry, did you wish to get back at, or gain revenge?” the survey inquired. Afterward, did you feel “triumphant, confident and dominant” or “ashamed, embarrassed and guilty”? There were also questions for people like her husband, who had been on the receiving end: “Did the other person’s anger come as a surprise to you, or did you expect that it would occur?”

As the partial shutdown of the federal government has stretched to 25 days, Democrats are mulling a possible lawsuit: If Donald Trump declares a national emergency and reappropriates funding for his proposed border wall from other departments, as he has suggested he might do, they would almost certainly challenge that action in court. “Look, an emergency cannot be whatever a president says an emergency is,” Jamie Raskin, a former law professor and representative from Maryland, told The Washington Post. If there’s a legal question about Trump’s next steps, he said, “we’re very happy to relocate it from the halls of Congress into the courts.”

And if Democrats decide they want to sue Trump over his border wall, they may have a novel option—courtesy of their Republican colleagues. The GOP’s 2014 lawsuit against then-President Barack Obama was the first time a district-court judge affirmed the right of the House of Representatives, as an institution, to sue a sitting president. In the midst of this impasse, that suit could serve as a model for Democrats, as Congress once again turns to the courts to help it get out of the work of governing.