'Thinking About Burning the Walmart Down'

Supporters of a $15 minimum wage at a Seattle City Council meeting in June 2014 — David Ryder / Reuters

Were Seattle's Minimum-Wage Hikes Too Extreme or Just Right?

Annie Lowrey

A controversial new study raises questions about the optimal floor for pay.

Seattle’s decision to hike its minimum wage up to $13 an hour—on its way to $15—ended up costing its low-wage workers time on the job, hundreds of dollars of annual income, and a shot at a better livelihood.

That is a reasonable conclusion one could draw from a blockbuster, if not yet peer-reviewed, new study on the city’s famed minimum-wage increases. The research, performed by a group of academics from the University of Washington, looks at detailed data on the earnings and hours of workers affected by the hike of the wage floor from $9.47 an hour to $11 in 2015, and from $11 an hour to $13 an hour in 2016. It concludes that, for low-wage workers, that second wage increase reduced hours worked by nearly 10 percent and earnings by an average of $125 a month. The findings, though preliminary, call into question years of economic research and the decisions of dozens of states and cities to bump their wage floors up.

The Dark Evolution of British Drinking Culture

Chrissie Giles

In 2004, people in the U.K. consumed more alcohol than ever before. How did they get there?

I first met alcohol in the late 1980s. It was the morning after one of my parents’ parties. My sister and I, aged 9 or 10, were up alone. We trawled the lounge for abandoned cans. I remember being methodical: Pick one up, give it a shake to see if there’s anything inside, and if there is, drink! I can still taste the stale, warm metallic tang of Heineken (lager; 5 percent alcohol by volume) on my tongue. Just mind the ones with cigarette butts in them.

Other times we’d sneak a sip of Dad’s Rémy Martin VSOP (cognac; 40 percent) when he wasn’t looking, even though we didn’t like the taste. It came in a heavy glass bottle that he kept in the sideboard. He’d pour himself a glass at night, the ice cubes clinking as he walked to his small office to make phone calls. On special occasions—family birthdays, Christmas lunch—we even got to drink legitimately: usually half a glass of Asti Spumanti (sparkling wine; around 7.5 percent), served in the best glasses.

The Harry Potter Personality Test

Cari Romm

A new study found that people who identify as Slytherins may be measurably different from the Hufflepuffs of the world.

I’m not particularly proud of this fact, but here it is: Pottermore, the Harry Potter-themed website unveiled by J.K. Rowling in 2012, has peered deep into my soul, evaluated its findings, and pronounced me a Hufflepuff.

Fans of the series will know why this is upsetting. For all the non-Harry Potter buffs reading this, though, here are three quick points of explanation. One: At Hogwarts, the wizards’ academy that serves as the backdrop for most of the series, students are sorted into one of four houses, each with its own distinctive character. Two: On Pottermore, fans can take a personality quiz to do the same. Three: Hufflepuff’s defining trait is “nice.” Its mascot is a badger. Its members, if Hogwarts were an American high-school cafeteria, would be the ones in the corner, frantically combing the trash for their retainers.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad speaks with French journalists in Damascus on January 9. — SANA / AP

U.S. Warns Syria Against Launching Another Chemical Attack

Aria Bendix

In a statement issued Monday night, the White House said the Assad regime had commenced preparations for another attack on its people.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer released a statement Monday night accusing the Syrian government of potentially engaging in preparations for another chemical weapons attack. While the statement offered minimal details, it argued that a future attack “would likely result in the mass murder of civilians, including innocent children.” On April 4, a government-led chemical attack in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province resulted in the deaths of more than 80 civilians. According to Spicer, the Syrian government’s latest preparations closely resemble those carried out prior to April 4.

If indeed enacted, a new chemical weapons attack could have reverberating consequences throughout the international community. In response to April’s attack, the U.S. launched 59 tomahawk missiles at a Syrian air base—the nation’s first military operation against an Arab government since President Obama’s intervention in Libya in 2011. At the time, the administration referred to the strike as a “one-off” occurrence intended to deter future chemical attacks. But, in the wake of the operation, administration officials reported that President Trump had been deeply troubled by graphic images of Syrian children struggling to breathe. “No child of God should ever suffer such horror,” Trump said while announcing the strike.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech on May 26, 2017. — Murad Sezer / Reuters

How Much Can One Strongman Change a Country?

Shadi Hamid

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is thinking about his legacy—and his own mortality. He desires power, but not necessarily for its own sake.

Politicians—especially ideological ones—have to eventually deal with the “then what?” question. With Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s narrow victory in a tense April referendum granting him sweeping new powers (amid opposition allegations of voter fraud), he could very well dominate the country’s politics through 2029. He would have more than a decade to reshape Turkey, altering the very meaning of what it means to be Turkish.

In the first decade of its rule, beginning in 2002, Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) presided over a rapidly growing economy, pushed through liberal reforms, and sidelined a military that had undermined Turkish democracy in a series of coups over the course of six decades. Could that, though, really have been all the AKP and its fiery, erratic leader hoped to accomplish?

Who Gets to Use Facebook's Rainbow 'Pride' Reaction?

J. Nathan Matias, Aimee Rickman, and Megan Steiner

An analysis to see if the algorithms behind the new emoji contribute to political bubbles in America

James Berri traveled three hours to Sacramento earlier this month for his first Pride parade, one of hundreds of annual LGBTQ celebrations across America. Berri also talked about the experience on Facebook, reading and reacting to other people’s posts with thumbs-up likes and Facebook’s new rainbow “Pride” emoji. Throughout June, the platform is offering a rainbow flag alongside likes, hearts, and angry faces that people can click on to react to others’ posts and comments. Yet Berri, a 21-year-old transgender artist, is conflicted over the fact that not everyone can use this new rainbow button.

Back in Fresno, Berri wondered how Facebook decides who’s eligible. “Why don’t they have it, too?” he asked, referring to friends sitting with him in a salon in the larger, less-prominent California city. “It makes me confused for my friends.”

All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family

My Family’s Slave

Alex Tizon

She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.

The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.

Power Causes Brain Damage

Jerry Useem

How leaders lose mental capacities—most notably for reading other people—that were essential to their rise

If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?

When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. But it was Stumpf’s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world’s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room. Although he apologized, he didn’t appear chastened or remorseful. Nor did he seem defiant or smug or even insincere. He looked disoriented, like a jet-lagged space traveler just arrived from Planet Stumpf, where deference to him is a natural law and 5,000 a commendably small number. Even the most direct barbs—“You have got to be kidding me” (Sean Duffy of Wisconsin); “I can’t believe some of what I’m hearing here” (Gregory Meeks of New York)—failed to shake him awake.

What Trump Doesn't Understand About MS-13

J. Weston Phippen

The president may be overstating the gang’s impact.

As President Trump sat for Time’s Person of the Year interview last year, he excused himself and returned with a copy of Newsday. He wanted to show editor Michael Scherer a headline. “‘EXTREMELY VIOLENT’ GANG FACTION,” it read, and the article told of murders in Suffolk County, New York, all linked to MS-13. One murder was that of 16-year-old Kayla Cuevas, who’d argued with MS-13 members at her high school. The gang, many of them also teenagers, found Cuevas and a friend walking along the street and beat them with baseball bats and hacked at them with machetes. “They come from Central America,” Trump said to Scherer. “They’re tougher than any people you’ve ever met. They’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal.”

What’s Wrong With the Democrats?

Franklin Foer

If the party cares about winning, it needs to learn how to appeal to the white working class.

The strategy was simple. A demographic wave—long-building, still-building—would carry the party to victory, and liberalism to generational advantage. The wave was inevitable, unstoppable. It would not crest for many years, and in the meantime, there would be losses—losses in the midterms and in special elections; in statehouses and in districts and counties and municipalities outside major cities. Losses in places and elections where the white vote was especially strong.

But the presidency could offset these losses. Every four years the wave would swell, receding again thereafter but coming back in the next presidential cycle, higher, higher. The strategy was simple. The presidency was everything.