Five Best Thursday Columns

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Dana Milbank in The Washington Post on Gingrich's exit Newt Gingrich officially suspended his campaign for the presidency Wednesday in a rambling speech that touched on a range of topics from Todd Palin to the Civil War. The affair, which Milbank describes in his typically scathing detail, served as a great metaphor for the campaign. "[H]is rambling farewell was a reminder of why his candidacy, like his speakership, was destined to fail: Gingrich occasionally has brilliant ideas and strategies, but they are difficult to find amid the clutter of his mind and oratory, and that makes him seem unpredictable and unstable."

George Will in The Wasington Post on his son's Down syndrome Will's son Jon, who has Down syndrome, turns 40 on Thursday, and his father uses the occasion to reflect on his life so far. "In 1972, people with Down syndrome were still commonly called Mongoloids. Now they are called American citizens, about 400,000 of them, and their life expectancy is 60. Much has improved. There has, however, been moral regression as well." Will weaves his critique of pre-natal testing, abortion, and the "baby boomers' vast sense of entitlement" into an appreciation of Jon's life. "It is said we are all born brave, trusting and greedy, and remain greedy. People with Down syndrome must remain brave in order to navigate society's complexities. They have no choice but to ... depend on the kindness of strangers. Judging by Jon's experience, they almost always receive it."

Juliette Kayyem in The Boston Globe on the state of Al Qaeda Political discourse has focused this week on whether and how much Barack Obama should claim credit for killing Osama bin Laden, but it obscures the more important questions on the state of Al Qaeda today. "Fortunately, new soundings from Muslim nations reveal that the terrorist mastermind wasn't so special after all. He only had one life." A Pew poll that asks citizens of Muslim countries whether they like al Qaeda has shown the group's significant decline in support in recent years. "This is a pretty important strategic victory for the United States. It also shows why a week that began with memories of bin Laden ended with the president making a surprise visit to Afghanistan."

Ezra Klein in Bloomberg View on lessons from Europe Europe's fiscal crisis seems to offer both sides of the American political debate ammunition and evidence for their prescriptions on the economy. "So, who's right? Well, which entity do you think is more comparable to the U.S.? Greece? Europe? Neither? I come down somewhere between 'Europe' and 'neither,' but it's worth going through each contestant in turn." Klein argues against comparisons to Greece and Europe before suggesting that the U.K. is our best model. Their austerity reforms and subsequent double-dip recession should offer a cautionary lesson, he writes.

Meghan Daum in Los Angeles Times on the 'Ugly Meter' Howard Stern has helped an app called Ugly Meter, which analyzes your face to rank your appearance, skyrocket in popularity. The app doesn't work very well, and the creators don't seem to want it to, but Daum draws lessons from its existence anyway. "I suspect our need for public validation (and its corollary, public humiliation) is also the product of a culture whose obsession with image is matched only by its obsession with classifying and ranking things. In a sense, our whole world has become an Ugly Meter."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

About the Author

Eric Randall is an associate digital editor at Boston Magazine and a former staff writer for The Atlantic Wire.

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More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”