Pretty Much Everything Will Make You Overeat

Trump’s Attacks on Comey Collide With Reality

David Frum

The president’s allies were looking for vindication—but were led astray by their reliance on a closed information system.

Samuel Johnson once stood talking with James Boswell about a theory expressed by a certain Bishop Berkeley that the external world was made up entirely of representations. There was no reality, only beliefs. Disgusted, Johnson said: “I refute it thus!”—and aimed a kick at a nearby boulder.

The point being: You can believe what you want, but if you ignore the rocks, you’ll badly hurt your toe. The Republican world would do well to take this story to heart.

It’s another familiar story that conservatives have built themselves a closed information system. The system generates and repeats agreed fictions, and people are rewarded according to their ability to internalize, repeat, and embellish these fictions.

Four Things the Comey Memos Reveal

David A. Graham

From Putin to Flynn, the highlights of the former FBI director’s conversations with President Trump

Thursday evening, after a long legal battle, the Department of Justice turned over to Congress a set of memos written by FBI Director James Comey about his interactions with Donald Trump. And within about an hour, predictably, the memos had leaked to the press.

The documents are a fascinating read: a window into Comey’s mind at the moment of his encounters with the president-elect and then president, unmediated by either time or Comey’s consciousness of being an author writing for a public audience, unlike his new book A Higher Loyalty. In general terms, the content of the memos hews closely to what was publicly known about them, first via a Columbia Law professor with whom Comey shared them; then from Comey himself, in blockbuster congressional testimony in summer 2017; and more recently from his book.

Donald Trump, standing among a group of churchgoers, claps during a worship service in Las Vegas. — Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

White Evangelicals Can't Quit Donald Trump

Robert P. Jones

New polling finds that their support for the president remains strikingly high. But are they mortgaging the future of the faith?

With two alleged extramarital affairs looming over the presidency, white evangelicals are doubling down on their support for Donald Trump. But the near-term political gains their support is yielding may come at a high cost for the future of the faith.

A new survey released this week by PRRI, where I serve as the CEO, finds white evangelical support for Trump remains strikingly high, with 75 percent holding a favorable view of the president and only 22 percent holding an unfavorable view. This level of support far exceeds his favorability among all Americans, which is at 42 percent. Among all non-white evangelical Americans, Trump’s favorability is only 36 percent.

This is hardly the first time white evangelicals have chosen to weather a Trump scandal. Despite revelations of taped boasts of sexual assault during the 2016 campaign, moral equivocation about white supremacy during his first year as president, and a host of other controversies, white evangelical support for Trump has steadily increased over time. While his favorability never reached 50 percent during the 2016 primary season, by the early fall of 2016, it jumped to 61 percent. Until this week, the highest level of support from white evangelicals PRRI had measured was 74 percent, shortly after his inauguration. Since the start of his presidency, there have been minor fluctuations, but overall his favorability with this group has never dipped below 65 percent.

Rape in the American Prison

Maurice Chammah

In 2003, Congress passed legislation to eliminate sexual assaults against inmates. One young man’s story shows how elusive that goal remains.

Three years ago, the young man who would later be known as John Doe 1 shuffled into the Richard A. Handlon Correctional Facility in Ionia, Michigan. The town of 11,000 residents, which sits in the remote center of the state, houses five prisons, and over the years, it has earned the nickname “I Own Ya.” John, who was 17, had already gotten over the initial fear of going to an adult prison—he had spent several months at a county jail near Detroit and an intake facility in Jackson—but he also knew he would be spending longer at this lonely outpost, a minimum of three years for a couple of home invasions. It was still wintery in April, and his state-issued jacket was poor protection against the drafts coming through the broken windows, shattered by men who had passed through before. “It was pretty ragged,” he recalled recently, “a tear down.”

Partial skeleton remains from an ancient burial site — Regis Duvignau / Reuters

Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans?

Adam Frank

A look at the available evidence

It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me.

Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (a.k.a. GISS) a world-class climate-science facility. One day last year, I came to GISS with a far-out proposal. In my work as an astrophysicist, I’d begun researching global warming from an “astrobiological perspective.” That meant asking whether any industrial civilization that rises on any planet will, through their own activity, trigger their own version of a climate shift. I was visiting GISS that day hoping to gain some climate science insights and, perhaps, collaborators. That’s how I ended up in Gavin’s office.

Just as I was revving up my pitch, Gavin stopped me in my tracks.

The Post-Parkland Unity Is Officially Over

Isabel Fattal

The national student-activist movement is dealing with fractures—but that could mean it’s stronger than ever.

At 10 o’clock on Friday morning, thousands of students across the country commemorated a moment that not one of them was alive to experience: the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado that killed 13 people 19 years ago today. Kids walked out of their classrooms on Friday to remember and to protest in the latest iteration of the student-led movement against gun violence that burgeoned after February’s Parkland, Florida, school shooting.

It’s fitting that the student who organized Friday’s walkouts—the first protest of its kind pegged to the massacre that happened nearly two decades ago—is a history buff. Lane Murdock, a 16-year-old from Ridgefield, Connecticut, had spent her early life reading about protests and walkouts in history books, she told me, and always wondered what she’d do in the face of injustice. She started a Change.org petition immediately after learning of the Parkland shooting, laying the groundwork for Friday’s demonstration, which included participants from at least one school in every state. Murdock lives 20 minutes from Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 26 children and staff were killed in 2012, but she has no other personal connection to gun violence. In fact, she was motivated by what she worried was her detachment from the problem: “I was desensitized,” she said. “This country was desensitized.”

Protesters shouting at policemen — Mukesh Gupta

India’s Vicious Patriarchy

Supriya Nair

The gruesome rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl has left many Indians wondering what it will take to stop sexual violence.

Indian law prohibits the identification of a rape victim by name or appearance without explicit permission from the survivor or their next of kin. Yet for the last three months, the name and face of an eight-year-old child, raped and murdered in the small town of Kathua in January this year, circulated widely in the Indian media.

Perhaps her details were published due to early confusion over the nature of the crime; she had been missing for days before her dead body turned up. Perhaps it simply seemed like an acceptable mistake in the case of someone from a marginal community of nomads, impoverished Muslims with little social clout. Yet the slip resulted in an unforgettable shock for many Indians this month, forced to confront the use of rape as a political crime, and the question of what, if anything, has changed for Indian women despite years of feminist advocacy and anguished protests against sexual violence.

The Man Who Brought Down Lance Armstrong

Matt Hart

Floyd Landis, a former teammate of the cyclist’s, just won more than $1 million in a legal case against Armstrong. Here are his thoughts on the suit, cycling, and his onetime rival.

At 5:19 p.m. on Friday, April 30, 2010, Floyd Landis hit send on what would prove the most consequential email of his life. Addressed to the then-CEO of USA Cycling, Steve Johnson, the email bore the subject line “nobody is copied on this one so it’s up to you to demonstrate your true colors….” It went on to detail, year by year, how Landis and other members of the United States Postal Service team had used illegal performance-enhancing drugs and methods to dominate the sport of cycling and claim victories at the sport’s premier event, the Tour de France. The email, later included in Landis’s 2012 affidavit for a United States Anti-Doping Agency (usada) investigation, clearly implicated many of his former teammates—most famously, the seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong (who declined to comment for this article).

Rinzy999 / Atstock Productions / Shutterstock / The Atlantic

What's the Difference Between a Frat and a Gang?

Ibram X. Kendi

They’re both blamed for predisposing their members to violent acts, but they’ve sparked radically different public-policy responses.

When I thought about locking up with a crew in 1996, I wanted to see a full initiation first, not parts I stumbled upon over the years. My friend Cliff and I arrived at a park not close from my home in Jamaica, Queens. Leaves danced with the wind around our feet, wafting an eerie feeling in my 14-year-old black body. The grounds of the initiation beckoned: a high-rise chain link fence, enclosing two basketball courts.

Through the daylighted chain, I watched scowls and punches and stomps engulf the uninitiated teen—a stoppage, then an awkward transition into hugs, handshakes, and smiles. The striking contrast shot at my core of authenticity, the insincerity of the punch-hug, of the stomp-smile, murdering my thoughts of joining a crew.

The Rift Between McCabe and Comey Could Help Trump

Natasha Bertrand

Both former top FBI officials are potential witnesses in the obstruction probe focusing on the president—and each is now attacking the other's credibility.

The growing tension between two frequent targets of President Trump, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and his old boss, former FBI Director James Comey, was laid bare Friday morning.

“Andy is upset and disappointed in some of the things Comey has said,” McCabe’s lawyer Michael Bromwich said at a briefing for reporters Friday morning. Comey told the Justice Department’s internal watchdog that McCabe never alerted him to disclosures he planned to authorize to The Wall Street Journal in October 2016. McCabe, who was fired last month after the Justice Department Inspector General determined that he lied about those disclosures, insists that Comey knew—and that there are email and phone records that prove it. The IG has referred McCabe for possible prosecution to the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C.