december 2015

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.

Dogs, more so than almost any other domesticated species, are desperate for human eye contact. When raised around people, they begin fighting for our attention when they’re as young as four weeks old. It’s hard for most people to resist a petulant flash of puppy-dog eyes—and according to a new study, that pull on the heartstrings might be exactly why dogs can give us those looks at all.

A paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that dogs’ faces are structured for complex expression in a way that wolves’ aren’t, thanks to a special pair of muscles framing their eyes. These muscles are responsible for that “adopt me” look that dogs can pull by raising their inner eyebrows. It’s the first biological evidence scientists have found that domesticated dogs might have evolved a specialized ability used expressly to communicate better with humans.

Since it debuted Friday, Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down” has bounced around in my head for exactly the reason a pop song should: the way it sounds. I like that the beat’s something a great beast might march to, slowly from one side to another, rumbling with each footfall. I like that the “oh-oh” swell of the chorus takes yummy harmonies, typically the key side dish in pop, and makes them the main course. I like the dry, silly way Swift drawls the strongest punch line of the track: “Like, damn … it’s 7 a.m.”

But I’ve also been fixated on—uncalmed by, and maybe even losing sleep over!—what the lyrics say. Shout along with this brain bender: “Shade never made anybody less gay!”

“You Need to Calm Down” is Swift’s grand LGBTQ-rights statement, released in the middle of Pride Month with all the precision of a bank’s new credit-card rollout. The song’s second verse takes on homophobic demonstrators: “Sunshine on the street at the parade / But you would rather be in the dark ages.” The video, released today, has a legion of queer celebs doing famously queer things such as sipping tea, performing in drag, and getting married in matching baby-blue tuxes. It closes with a plug to sign a petition for the passage of the Equality Act, which would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and identity.

Updated at 6:10 p.m. EST on June 14

The Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting turned chaotic in Phoenix this week over a resolution that condemned white supremacy and the alt-right. On Tuesday, leaders initially declined to consider the proposal submitted by a prominent black pastor in Texas, Dwight McKissic, and only changed course after a significant backlash. On Wednesday afternoon, the body passed a revised statement against the alt-right. But the drama over the resolution revealed deep tension lines within a denomination that was explicitly founded to support slavery.

A few weeks before the meeting was slated to start, McKissic published his draft resolution on a popular Southern Baptist blog called SBC Voices. The language was strong and pointed.

In March, Kyle Kashuv got the news he’d been waiting for: He’d been admitted to Harvard. The Parkland-shooting survivor, who had become a conservative rising star, had spent his senior year as a school-safety and gun-rights activist, traveling the country as the high-school outreach director for the right-wing group Turning Point USA. He planned to take a gap year before enrolling in the fall of 2020. But today Kashuv tweeted that Harvard had rescinded its offer, in an apparent response to racist messages he had written years earlier.

The first sign of trouble came in mid-May, when Kashuv announced that he would be leaving Turning Point USA. Hours later, screenshots began to surface on Twitter. In text messages and Google Docs from when he was 16, Kashuv allegedly used the word nigger repeatedly, made crass remarks about women, and used other racist and anti-Semitic language. A week after the messages first became public, he posted an apology on Twitter in regard to “callous” remarks he had made earlier in his high-school career. (An attempt to reach Kashuv for comment on Twitter did not elicit a response.)

As I check out of a hotel, various excuses race through my head for not tipping the housekeeper. I’m in a big rush. I don’t have cash. Will the maid who folded my clothes get the money? Why can’t I just add a gratuity to the credit-card bill and expense it?

About 70 percent of hotel guests go through the same mental exercise and end up not leaving a tip. A waiter would have to spit in your soup, and you would have to see him do it, to stiff him. Housekeepers are stiffed every day. I’ve heard every reason why guests treat hotel workers so differently than other service workers, but I’ve not heard a good one.

I have more than a passing interest in the subject. For 10 years, my grandmother, Nellie O’Connor McCreary, was a maid at the Hotel Washington, now the W Hotel. If you lean over the railing of its rooftop bar after a drink or two, you’d swear you could see the Oval Office.

Chris Wallace’s question for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wasn’t complicated, or at least it shouldn’t have been. “Is accepting oppo research from a foreign government right or wrong?” the Fox News Sunday host asked.

Yet it had the nation’s top diplomat sputtering. “Chris, you asked me not to call any of your questions today ridiculous. You came really close right there. President Trump has been very clear,” Pompeo said. “He clarified his remarks later.”

Of course, had Donald Trump been very clear the first time he had addressed the subject, the president wouldn’t have needed to clarify anything later on. Trump’s answers have been a confusing mess; he even contradicted himself in a long interview with George Stephanopoulos last week:

Support for this article was provided by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

SIMFEROPOL, Crimea—One morning in February 2014, the 2 million inhabitants of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that was Ukraine’s premier seaside destination, woke to find a new set of flags flying in their streets. Overnight, Russian special forces had taken over checkpoints on the sliver of land that connects this territory to the Ukrainian mainland, and seized government buildings in the cities.

The move was neither unexpected nor much decried in Crimea, where a majority of the population are ethnic Russians. Thin straggles of pro-Ukrainian protesters were outnumbered by huge hordes cheering for Vladimir Putin. Less than a month later, a referendum, widely criticized by the international community, polled overwhelming support for joining the Russian Federation, and the annexation was complete.

As the political crisis in Sudan deepens, Instagram users are flocking to accounts that claim to be helping. @SudanMealProject, the largest of these accounts, racked up nearly 400,000 followers in less than a week; it is joined by hundreds of similar accounts with copycat names such as @SudanMealProjectOfficial, @SudanMealOfficial, @sudan.meals.project, @mealsforsudan, and @Sudanmealprojec.t, each of which has amassed tens of thousands of followers.

“We’re committed to donating up to 100,000 meals to Sudanese civilians,” @SudanMealProject’s bio read. The account’s only post promised, “For every STORY REPOST this post gets, we will provide one meal to Sudanese children, and you will help spread awareness on what’s happening in Sudan.”

Joe Biden’s Democratic rivals are hoping he tumbles. Many are confident that he will.

No one needs Biden to fade more than the other white, male, moderate candidates who believe they’d be able to step in and take his place. To anyone who complains how hard it’s become for a white man with middle-of-the-road politics to find space within the Democratic Party, many would recommend the tiniest violin, strings removed. Theoretically, it’s both the most crowded and most dismissed lane, full of people currently competing to be the most memorable also-ran: Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, Montana Governor Steve Bullock, Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, Representative Eric Swalwell of California, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas, and, to a certain extent, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.