april 2016

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening addressed House Republican lawmakers on immigration, only to leave the conference with members grappling with the same issues as before.

For House GOP leadership, it was nothing short of a victory.

Speaker Paul Ryan had invited Trump to meet with the conference in the hopes the president would rally skeptics behind the leadership’s so-called “compromise” bill on immigration, scheduled to reach the floor as early as Thursday. There was no expectation, of course, that Trump would change hearts and minds about the substance of the bill. Rather, leadership saw the president as their only hope for giving conservatives cover to vote for what many of them have referred to as “amnesty lite.”

Last week, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, or else the eponymous populist demagogue that he plays on TV, declared on Tucker Carlson Tonight, “If you’re looking to understand what’s actually happening in this country, always assume the opposite of whatever they’re telling you on the big news stations.”

He has previously hosted TV shows on CNN, MSNBC, and PBS.

While not uncharacteristic of the flagrantly illogical pandering regularly broadcast on his current show, Carlson’s comment proved to be particularly controversial, prompting a sharp rebuke from comedian Seth MacFarlane, creator of the hit Fox-owned series Family Guy, who tweeted, “In other words, don’t think critically, don’t consult multiple news sources, and in general, don’t use your brain. Just blindly obey Fox News. This is fringe shit, and it’s business like this that makes me embarrassed to work for this company.”

Here are some of the things I heard about in my neighborhood over the past year: A thunderstorm downed a tree, blocking a central road; a shadowy agent called “the night clipper” arose, surreptitiously cutting overhanging bushes while unsuspecting property owners slept; several dogs and cats were lost, found, or “on the loose,” whatever that means for a cat; a federal-grand-jury-summons telephone scam struck; someone sought belly-dancing classes, an apparent alternative to Pilates; and, innumerable times, people deposited bags of dog poop into lawn-clipping and recycling canisters at the curb. All of this news came courtesy of the social-media service Nextdoor. On its website and app, people can post recommendations, updates, and warnings about their building, block, or neighborhood.

When the news stories began to surface last month of sobbing young migrant children being forcibly removed from their parents at the border, many close White House watchers instantly suspected Stephen Miller was behind it.

Though he keeps a relatively low profile compared to the cast of camera-muggers and Twitter warriors in President Donald Trump’s orbit, the 32-year-old speechwriter and senior adviser has cultivated a reputation as the most strident immigration hawk in the West Wing. So, it came as little surprise when The New York Times reported over the weekend that Miller had played a key behind-the-scenes role in advancing the new border policy:

“No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” he said during an interview in his West Wing office this past week. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

… Privately, Mr. Miller argued that bringing back “zero tolerance” would be a potent tool in a severely limited arsenal of strategies for stopping migrants from flooding across the border … And in April, after the border numbers reached their zenith, Mr. Miller was instrumental in Mr. Trump’s decision to ratchet up the zero tolerance policy.

From Laura Bush to Rosalyn Carter, from elected representatives to past high government officials, outrage is the mood of the moment, perhaps more than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election.

The Trump administration’s border policies and his dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants, whether illegal or not, have triggered this incandescent reaction. Concentration-camp comparisons have transited from Twitter—their usual home—to cable TV and the halls of Congress. CNN's pollster reports that most Americans—67 percent of those surveyed—disapprove of family separation. Apart from a few cable-news talkers who earn their livings from incitement, the administration’s usual defenders have gone AWOL. (Newt Gingrich, where are you?) The president himself has denied responsibility for his own policy, insisting he “hates” it—and that he is merely executing a law imposed on him by Democrats and the Bush administration. Those tasked with executing the policy are signaling their discomfort to the media.

Claire is a 14-year-old girl with short auburn hair and a broad smile. She lives outside Philadelphia with her mother and father, both professional scientists. Claire can come across as an introvert, but she quickly opens up, and what seemed like shyness reveals itself to be quiet self-assuredness. Like many kids her age, she is a bit overscheduled. During the course of the evening I spent with Claire and her mother, Heather—these aren’t their real names—theater, guitar, and track tryouts all came up. We also discussed the fact that, until recently, she wasn’t certain she was a girl.

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Sixth grade had been difficult for her. She’d struggled to make friends and experienced both anxiety and depression. “I didn’t have any self-confidence at all,” she told me. “I thought there was something wrong with me.” Claire, who was 12 at the time, also felt uncomfortable in her body in a way she couldn’t quite describe. She acknowledged that part of it had to do with puberty, but she felt it was more than the usual preteen woes. “At first, I started eating less,” she said, “but that didn’t really help.”

Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes—car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost seems easier to list the things they don’t mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.

Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids’ development, but it’s probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents.

Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend more time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly low-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children’s lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. To be clear, I’m not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn’t have survived infancy if I’d had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.

This article contains spoilers through the 10th episode of Season 2 of The Handmaid’s Tale.

The aura of timeliness that hovers around The Handmaid’s Tale has, for the last two seasons, charged Hulu’s television adaptation of the novel. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 work of speculative fiction imagines a repressive theocratic regime staging a coup in America and forcing fertile women into sexual and reproductive slavery. Since its publication, it’s never been out of print. But the 2016 election of Donald Trump—whose evangelical vice president, Mike Pence, won’t dine alone with a woman unless it is his wife—and the ongoing erosion of reproductive rights across America has made the story of Offred seem newly relevant to many.

The fires on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, had barely stopped burning when the Department of Justice released an extraordinary report on the city’s police department. In the findings of the 2015 investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division detailed how a municipality had built its social contract on a slow-rolling racist heist. Activists hoped that the Ferguson report—which was prompted by the 2014 police killing of an unarmed black teenager and found that police conduct had “severely damaged the relationship between African Americans and the Ferguson Police Department”—would not only change the city, but would signal that the United States was finally willing to confront the legacy of white supremacy. The Ferguson City Council reluctantly agreed to a consent decree with the DOJ that would overhaul city policing. Federal courts rejected voter-suppression schemes and reaffirmed affirmative action. Movements from Black Lives Matter to LGBTQ advocacy saw an opportunity to broaden the national civil-rights agenda.