A Quick Word on John Derbyshire

The Plot Against America

Franklin Foer

Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

The clinic permitted Paul Manafort one 10-minute call each day. And each day, he would use it to ring his wife from Arizona, his voice often soaked in tears. “Apparently he sobs daily,” his daughter Andrea, then 29, texted a friend. During the spring of 2015, Manafort’s life had tipped into a deep trough. A few months earlier, he had intimated to his other daughter, Jessica, that suicide was a possibility. He would “be gone forever,” she texted Andrea.

His work, the source of the status he cherished, had taken a devastating turn. For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He’d been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed a highly personal relationship.

Retiring FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe — Eric Thayer / Reuters

The Mystery of Andrew McCabe's Exit

David A. Graham

The Trump-detested deputy director of the FBI is leaving his post earlier than expected, but there’s no clear explanation for why.

Updated on January 29 at 4:16 p.m.

In a win for President Trump, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is leaving his post effective Monday—and that’s about the only clear thing about his departure.

McCabe, who was appointed to that job under former FBI Director James Comey, was expected to leave his job this spring, when he reached eligibility for a pension. New FBI directors typically choose their own deputy directors, so it would make sense for new chief Christopher Wray to want his own pick. Because McCabe was a civil servant rather than a political appointee, Trump (and other superiors) could not summarily remove him. The president clearly didn’t want him in the role and distrusted him, and it’s hard to imagine McCabe was enjoying being a political football. Two days before Christmas, Trump tweeted, “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!”

The Startling Link Between Sugar and Alzheimer's

Olga Khazan

A high-carb diet, and the attendant high blood sugar, are associated with cognitive decline.

In recent years, Alzheimer’s disease has occasionally been referred to as “type 3” diabetes, though that moniker doesn’t make much sense. After all, though they share a problem with insulin, type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, and type 2 diabetes is a chronic disease caused by diet. Instead of another type of diabetes, it’s increasingly looking like Alzheimer’s is another potential side effect of a sugary, Western-style diet.

In some cases, the path from sugar to Alzheimer’s leads through type 2 diabetes, but as a new study and others show, that’s not always the case.

A longitudinal study, published Thursday in the journal Diabetologia, followed 5,189 people over 10 years and found that people with high blood sugar had a faster rate of cognitive decline than those with normal blood sugar—whether or not their blood-sugar level technically made them diabetic. In other words, the higher the blood sugar, the faster the cognitive decline.

Why Can't People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Saying?

Conor Friedersdorf

A British broadcaster doggedly tried to put words into the academic’s mouth.

My first introduction to Jordan B. Peterson, a University of Toronto clinical psychologist, came by way of an interview that began trending on social media last week. Peterson was pressed by the British journalist Cathy Newman to explain several of his controversial views. But what struck me, far more than any position he took, was the method his interviewer employed. It was the most prominent, striking example I’ve seen yet of an unfortunate trend in modern communication.

First, a person says something. Then, another person restates what they purportedly said so as to make it seem as if their view is as offensive, hostile, or absurd.

Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and various Fox News hosts all feature and reward this rhetorical technique. And the Peterson interview has so many moments of this kind that each successive example calls attention to itself until the attentive viewer can’t help but wonder what drives the interviewer to keep inflating the nature of Peterson’s claims, instead of addressing what he actually said.

The Circumscribed Ethics Investigation Into Devin Nunes

Natasha Bertrand

The House Intelligence Committee chair claimed he’d been completely cleared, but the panel probing his conduct never gained access to the intelligence he was accused of divulging.

Early last April, the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into whether the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, broke rules governing the public disclosure of classified information when he told reporters that he had obtained details about “American intelligence monitoring foreign officials” who may have “incidentally picked up communications of Trump transition team members.”

Eight months later, after seeking an analysis of Nunes’s statements by classification experts in the intelligence community, the Ethics Committee closed the case. Nunes thanked the committee for “completely clearing” him, and said it had found he “committed no violation.”

But the committee was never able to obtain or review the classified information at the heart of the inquiry, according to three congressional sources briefed on the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. The panel’s inability to determine for itself what may or may not have been classified—and what Nunes had actually been shown—likely contributed to its decision to close the investigation, according to one source.

The Conversation #MeToo Needs to Have

Caitlin Flanagan

Female rage is the movement’s essential fuel; left unchecked, it is the potent force that will destroy it.

If you haven’t noticed, we’re angry. We’re seething. For some of us, it began the first time we were groped on public transportation and discovered one of the dark realities of living life in a female body. For others—among them, famously, Oprah Winfrey—it began even earlier, and in a much more terrifying way. “I knew that it was bad,” she has said of the sexual abuse she endured as a child, “because it hurt so badly.” We live with it, suppress it, are to some extent shaped by it, but mostly we keep a cork in it. But every so often, that rage roars up to the surface, and it’s not just one or two of us, it’s just about all of us. And when that happens, it seems to us that—if we can just stay angry and if we can just keep going—we might actually change things. Female rage is the essential fuel of #MeToo. Unchecked it is the potent force that will destroy it.

A colorful array of seats in a movie theater — Viviane Moos / Corbis / Getty Images

Is MoviePass Here to Stay?

David Sims

As its user base grows, the subscription-based film-ticket service is playing hardball with AMC, the biggest theater chain in the country.

When MoviePass—the subscription-based company that allows its customers to see a film a day—announced it was dropping its monthly fee to $10, the biggest theater chain in the country objected. On paper, it was hard to tell why AMC would do this: MoviePass reimburses cinemas for the full cost of each ticket purchased, theoretically driving more traffic to participating multiplexes without any financial loss. But last week, the downside of that arrangement became clearer, as MoviePass summarily blocked its users from buying tickets at 10 big AMC locations as a negotiating tactic, seeking a cut of ticket sales from the company in exchange for full cooperation.

MoviePass initially launched in 2011 as a voucher system, where you had to print your tickets from home. It later switched to its current credit-card format (requiring check-in on an app before a purchase can be made), but with much higher monthly fees that ranged from $30 to $50 depending on location. Last August, the data-analytics firm Helios and Matheson acquired a majority stake in the company and slashed its subscription price to just $9.95 a month (users can buy one ticket a day for any film, excluding 3D or IMAX screenings). The Helios and Matheson CEO Ted Farnsworth said MoviePass could absorb the price cut because it would attract more subscribers, and the resulting data on their filmgoing habits would be valuable to advertisers. Within months, a niche service for cinephiles became a national trend—MoviePass now has 1.5 million members.

Carter Page speaks at a news conference in Moscow in December 2016. — Pavel Golovkin / AP

The Unlikely Martyrdom of Carter Page

David A. Graham

In a more rational world, the fact that Trump’s Justice Department sought to surveil the former Trump aide would undermine his claim to political persecution.

The meta-fight over releasing a memo prepared by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee has at times obscured what exactly is in the memo, but its contents are slowly starting to come into view.

A New York Times story Monday provides one crucial element. According to that report, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein signed off on an application for a warrant to surveil Carter Page, a former Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser, that was based on information gathered by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who was paid in part by the Democratic National Committee. But when the Justice Department requested (and was granted) the warrant, the memo contends, it did not inform the judge of the source of the information underpinning the warrant.

A painting of several books tossed haphazardly on a table — John Frederick Peto / Getty

Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read

Julie Beck

... and the movies and TV shows we watch

Pamela Paul’s memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. “I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object,” says Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. “I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.”

For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. “While I read that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution,” she says. “Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution.”

The Devastating Paradox of Pakistan

Mark Mazzetti

How Afghanistan’s neighbor cultivated American dependency while subverting American policy

Two months after the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Vice President–elect Joe Biden sat with Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, in the Arg Palace, an 83-acre compound in Kabul that had become a gilded cage for the mercurial and isolated leader. The discussion was already tense as Karzai urged Washington to help root out Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, implying that more pressure needed to be exerted on Pakistani leaders. Biden’s answer stunned Karzai into silence. Biden let Karzai know how Barack Obama’s incoming administration saw its priorities. “Mr. President,” Biden said, “Pakistan is fifty times more important than Afghanistan for the United States.”

It was an undiplomatic moment for sure, but also a frank expression of the devastating paradox at the heart of the longest war in American history. In 16 years, the United States has spent billions of dollars fighting a war that has killed thousands of soldiers and an untold number of civilians in a country that Washington considers insignificant to its strategic interests in the region. Meanwhile, the country it has viewed as a linchpin, Pakistan—a nuclear-armed cauldron of volatile politics and long America’s closest military ally in South Asia—has pursued a covert campaign in Afghanistan designed to ensure that the money and the lives have been spent in vain. The stakes in Pakistan have been considered too high to break ties with Islamabad or take other steps that would risk destabilizing the country. The stakes in Afghanistan have been deemed low enough that careening from one failed strategy to another has been acceptable.