october 2015

In the past 10 years, the percentage of American marriages that end in divorce has fallen, and in a new paper, the University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen quantified the drop-off: Between 2008 and 2016, the divorce rate declined by 18 percent overall.

After accounting for the rising average age of married Americans and other demographic shifts during that time, Cohen found “a less steep decline—8 percent—but the pattern is the same.” That is, the divorce rate in 2016 was still lower than one would have predicted if the demographics of married people were the same then as in 2008.

When I asked Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, how to make sense of this trend, he opened his explanation with something of a koan: “In order to get divorced,” he said, “you have to get married first.”

After 614 nights with Donald Trump in office, we know quite a lot about the president’s foreign policy. He has visceral beliefs about America’s role in the world that date back 30 years, most notably skepticism of alliances, opposition to free trade, and support for authoritarian strongmen. Many of his administration’s senior officials do not share his views and fight against them, with varying degrees of success. Trump is undisciplined and impervious to normal forms of argumentation and bureaucratic process. He likes those who praise him and hates those who don’t. He is often shocking but rarely surprising.

All of these features were on display in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. However, there are two things that we do not yet know: What’s Trump’s second act on the world stage? And how does it end? If one looks closely, Trump provided some clues to the answers yesterday.

Everyone’s got their own recurring nightmare—naked in class, teeth falling out, whatever. For Donald Trump, that nightmare is that the world is laughing at the United States, and on Tuesday at the United Nations General Assembly, the nightmare came true.

The president’s public remarks are littered with warnings that America is, or might be, the butt of the globe’s jokes.

“The world is laughing at us,” Trump said on the stump in October 2016. “We don’t win at the borders. We don’t win with taking care of our vets. We don’t win with anything. We don’t win anymore. We will start winning again like you’ve never seen before.” He’s kept it up since entering office. “At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country?” he asked in June 2017. “The world is laughing at us. The world is laughing at the stupidity of what we have done with immigration,” he said in August.

A key Republican senator has quietly weighed in on an upcoming Supreme Court case that could have important consequences for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

The Utah lawmaker Orrin Hatch, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, filed a 44-page amicus brief earlier this month in Gamble v. United States, a case that will consider whether the dual-sovereignty doctrine should be put to rest. The 150-year-old exception to the Fifth Amendment’s double-jeopardy clause allows state and federal courts to prosecute the same person for the same criminal offense. According to the brief he filed on September 11, Hatch believes the doctrine should be overturned. “The extensive federalization of criminal law has rendered ineffective the federalist underpinnings of the dual sovereignty doctrine,” his brief reads. “And its persistence impairs full realization of the Double Jeopardy Clause’s liberty protections.”

Genetic-ancestry tests are having a moment. Look no further than Spotify: On Thursday, the music-streaming service—as in, the service used to fill tedious workdays and DJ parties—launched a collaboration with AncestryDNA. The partnership creates custom playlists for users based on DNA results they input: Oumou Sangaré for Mali, for example, and Ed Sheeran for England.

And last May, after the U.S. men’s soccer team had embarrassingly missed the World Cup, 23andMe also saw a marketing opportunity. “What is a soccer nut to do?” the company asked in a blog post. “Here’s an idea—why not pick a team based on your genetic ancestry?”

There’s an Ancestry ad where a man trades his lederhosen for a kilt. And another where a woman traces her ancestry to the matriarchal Akan people of Ghana to conclude, “When I found you in my DNA, I learned where my strength comes from.” And yet another where a man bonds with his Irish neighbor after finding out his own DNA is 15 percent Irish.

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.

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.

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

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.

Every time we drive through farm country in my dad’s home state of Indiana, we know it’s coming. As soon as he spots it in his peripheral vision from the driver’s seat, it’s like clockwork: “Hey, you know a guy died in there?” he says, feigning nonchalance as he points to the round barn just off the highway.

There is silence, maybe a mutual here we go glance shared between the rest of us, as my dad gets a merry little gleam in his eye. Eventually he can’t resist any longer, and he lets the punch line rip: “Couldn’t find a corner to pee in!”

My dad, once a farmer, told me this joke for the first time when I was about eight. When I interviewed my father for this story, he told me he’d heard it from his dad, also a farmer, when he was about eight. (He also boasted that he’d told my mom this joke, to her great amusement, when they were dating as teenagers; my mom then yelled into the phone that she had in fact heard it before, even at the time. Probably from her own dad, a farmer.)

We are invited now to consider the late adolescence and early young manhood of Judge Brett Kavanaugh. It seems to be a trajectory that follows a classic pattern, familiar to us from literature as well as from its pale reflection, life. Call it a very modified version of the Prince Hal–to–Henry V flight plan: from wastrel youth with low companions to hero capable of leading men into battle. Call it something older than that: When I was a child I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.

It is the judge who has claimed this narrative for himself, choosing august occasions to tell esteemed audiences about his glamorous, rebellious youth. During a 2015 speech at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, he reflected that three of its graduates had been classmates of his in high school. “Fortunately,” he said, “we’ve had a good saying that we’ve held firm to to this day, as the dean was reminding me before the talk, which is, ‘What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.’ That’s been a good thing for all of us, I think.” In a 2014 speech to the students of Yale Law School, he fondly remembered “falling out of [a] bus onto the front steps of the Yale Law School at about 4:45 a.m.” It seems almost that he doesn’t even want us to regard his youthful self as Prince Hal, but as Falstaff.

It has long been a common refrain among American writers out West that New York publishers are impervious to anything outside New York. The acclaimed Nebraska author Mari Sandoz, for example, whose book Old Jules won The Atlantic’s nonfiction book prize in 1935, frequently bemoaned what she called the “intellectual and cultural dictatorship … foisted upon us the day the first malcontent crossed the Alleghenies.” Likewise, Sherwood Anderson (best known for his short-story cycle Winesburg, Ohio) tired of New Yorkers who “think the United States ends at Pittsburgh and believe there’s nothing but desert and a few Indians and Hollywood on the other side.” These writers were lamenting the sort of mind-set that the acerbic H. L. Mencken modeled when he dismissed Willa Cather: “I don’t care how well she writes. I don’t give a damn what happens in Nebraska.”