Federal Drug Administration Lifting Ban on Gay Male Blood Donation

The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Matthew Stewart

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

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.

A tall building on a college campus — Charles Mostoller / Reuters

The Two Most Important College-Admissions Criteria Now Mean Less

Jeffrey Selingo

When so many students have outstanding grades and test scores, schools have to get creative about triaging applicants.

For generations, two numbers have signaled whether a student could hope to get into a top college: his or her standardized test score and his or her grade-point average.

In the past 15 years, though, these lodestars have come to mean less and less. The SAT has been redesigned twice in that time, making it difficult for admissions officers to assess, for instance, whether last year’s uptick in average scores was the result of better students or just a different test. What’s more, half of American teenagers now graduate high school with an A average, according to a recent study. With application numbers at record highs, highly selective colleges are forced to make impossible choices, assigning a fixed number of slots to a growing pool of students who, each year, are harder to differentiate using these two long-standing metrics.

Trump’s Reckoning Arrives

David Frum

The president’s unpredictability once worked to his advantage—but now, it is producing a mounting list of foreign-policy failures.

“Gradually and then suddenly.” That was how one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters described the process of going bankrupt. The phrase applies vividly to the accumulating failures of President Trump’s foreign-policy initiatives.

Donald Trump entered office with more scope for initiative in foreign policy than any of his recent predecessors.

In his campaign for president, Trump had disparaged almost every element of the past 70 years of U.S. global leadership: NATO, free trade, European integration, support for democracy, the Iraq War, the Iran deal, suspicion of Russia, outreach to China. Trump’s election jolted almost every government into a frantic effort to understand what to expect. Other countries’ uncertainty enhanced Trump’s relative power—and so, perversely, did Trump’s policy ignorance and obnoxious behavior. After eight years under the accommodating Barack Obama, the United States suddenly turned a menacing face to the world. In the short run, that menace frightened other states into attempted appeasement of this unpredictable new president.

John Bolton looking at President Trump — Evan Vucci / AP

Trump’s and Bolton’s Instincts Form a Toxic Combination

Peter Beinart

The interplay between the two helps explain the confusion whirling around the North Korea summit.

Why did the Trump administration cancel its much-hyped nuclear summit with North Korea? And why the confusing semi-backtrack the following day, in which Trump embraced North Korea’s “warm and productive statement” regretting the cancellation, and left the door open to a meeting he’d ditched barely 24 hours before? The answer lies in the toxic interplay between Donald Trump’s instincts and John Bolton’s. Each man’s foreign-policy views are dangerous enough in and of themselves. Put them together and you have the perfect cocktail for the decimation of American power.

Bolton is a Manichean in the tradition of his hero, Barry Goldwater. He has spent his career depicting America’s adversaries—the Soviet Union, Cuba, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and these days, Iran and North Korea—as evil. He denies that they have any legitimate security concerns. He abhors compromise. He demands maximum American economic, political and, if necessary, military pressure. He basic negotiating posture is: Once you give in on everything, then we’ll start talking.

A white bowl with yogurt, blueberries, raspberries — Claudia Totir / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

There’s Something About Yogurt

Olga Khazan

Several new studies suggest yogurt might reduce inflammation—a process linked to different types of diseases.

A couple years ago, I was taking a swim with my very pregnant friend when I asked her if it was hard to keep straight all of the doctors’ health recommendations for expectant mothers.

Not really. For practically every symptom, she said, their recommendations were roughly the same: “Take a walk, eat a yogurt.”

It was another example of the Cult of Yogurt. Even though some varieties have more sugar than a Twinkie, perhaps no other man-made food is so often recommended by medical professionals—and to treat such a wide variety of ailments.

Whenever I’ve been prescribed antibiotics, I’ve always been told to eat a yogurt so that the antibiotics don’t eat up all the “good” bacteria in my system and leave me with a yeast infection. (Recently, I interviewed a doctor who suggested this is bogus; there’s no way for the yogurt cultures to make it all the way down there.)

A blue and white sign attached to the Golden Gate Bridge that reads "There is hope, make the call" — Justin Sullivan / Getty

How a Public Suicide Harms the People Who See It

Alice Robb

For unwitting bystanders, the experience can be traumatic.

One evening last March, Nancy Bacon saw a stranger die. She had just touched down in Toronto and set off for a business meeting, chatting on her phone as she navigated the rush-hour traffic of the financial district. She was jaywalking, hurrying across a particularly busy street, when a fire extinguisher seemed to fall from the sky, smashing to the ground just a few feet away from her.

“I was actually annoyed,” she says. Her first thought was that some mischievous kid had thrown the extinguisher through a window high above. But when she lifted her gaze, Bacon’s annoyance turned to horror. What she witnessed next would haunt her for months. “I saw the guy falling,” she says. “I saw him hit the ground.”

The Facts and Fictions of Harvey Weinstein’s Arrest

Megan Garber

On Friday, hazy questions—about celebrity, about impunity, about American culture’s messy tangling of that which is immoral with that which is illegal—collided with stark criminal charges.

“This moves from the court of public opinion into an actual courtroom. That is super cathartic for a bunch of the survivors, or even survivors who are not necessarily victimized by him.”

That was Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, commenting on an event that has, over the past several months, seemed to toggle in its potential between the inevitable and the impossible: the arrest of Harvey Weinstein. On Friday, both against all odds and in fulfillment of them, the long-imagined event came to pass. The “disgraced mogul,” as Weinstein is so often euphemized, turned himself in to authorities in New York City—one of several jurisdictions investigating him for sexual misconduct.

The arrest of Harvey Weinstein was a seizure that seized in every sense: It shook. It disturbed the status quo. “More than seven months after sexual misconduct allegations involving Harvey Weinstein first surfaced publicly, the disgraced mogul has finally been charged with rape,” The Hollywood Reporter summed things up, in its initial announcement of the news, and the finally was telling. It was an arrest in which hazy questions—about justice, about accountability, about celebrity, about impunity, about American culture’s messy tangling of that which is immoral with that which is illegal—collided with stark facts: two charges of rape, one in the first degree and one in the third, against Weinstein. A charge, too, of a first-degree criminal sex act. Bond set, by prior negotiation, at $10 million, with Weinstein paying $1 million in cash to post bail. A GPS monitoring system meant to ensure that a post-arraignment Weinstein will be able to travel only between New York and Connecticut. Containment. Finally.

A pole supporting electric wires goes up in flames in a wildfire. — Mike Blake / Reuters

Power Lines Are Burning the West

Kendra Atleework

Human technology is responsible for more loss from fire than any other cause. But reducing fire’s impact will require changes to how people live, not just to the infrastructure that lets them do so.

In October 2017, 250 square miles burned in Northern California, destroying 6,000 homes and businesses and killing 44 people. For now, the cause of these fires has not been determined. The private utility company Pacific Gas and Electric, known to Californians as PG&E, is under investigation. Total damage for the Northern California wildfires comes to $9 billion. PG&E has started stockpiling cash.

In California, this is a familiar story. Three years ago, in February of 2015, one-third of the houses in my remote neighborhood in Eastern California burned down. Here, before the fire, 100 houses lay scattered across the leeward flank of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The people who live here spend their time walking steep roads, listening to crickets, chasing mule deer out of the garden, and looking over a desert valley below. Days after the fire, my neighbor, Cassie, wasn’t doing any of these things. Instead, she stood inside her smoking foundation. Tall and easygoing with freckles on her nose, Cassie had come home from college that winter to sift rubble with her mom and dad. Under different circumstances, we might have hiked together or skated frozen ponds. I used to carpool with her family to school, and I remember her house, wooden and gorgeous and overlooking a ravine from which flames later rose.

The Moments After Trump Tweets

Quinta Jurecic

The president’s social-media missives regularly thrust observers into a state of disquietude—waiting to discover what he actually means, if indeed he means anything at all.

On Sunday, the president tweeted out a message that could have plunged the country into a constitutional crisis or could have meant nothing at all. It was awkwardly worded and spotted through with errant capitalization. “I hereby demand,” it read, “and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes.” Then, as if for good measure, it went on, “ - and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”

For about 24 hours after the tweet went out, nobody—perhaps not even within the White House and the Justice Department—knew what was going to happen next. On its face, the message was a command for the Justice Department to place itself at the president’s beck and call with regard to an investigation in which the president himself was a subject. But the language was vague. And this would not have been the first time that President Trump issued an ultimatum before forgetting about the matter the next day.

An image from 'We Will Always Love You: A Grammy Salute To Whitney Houston' in 2012 — Mario Anzuoni / Reuters

Kanye West’s Hypocrisy on Empathy and Celebrity

Spencer Kornhaber

The rapper insisting that a photo of Whitney Houston’s bathroom be the cover art for Pusha T’s Daytona is a clear betrayal of his rhetoric about compassion.

At 1 a.m. on the Wednesday before the release of Pusha T’s Daytona, Kanye West called Pusha T and said he had a new album cover for him. Pusha and West, the record’s producer, had already settled on an image, but last-minute inspiration had struck, and West was insisting on an overhaul. Securing rights to the new art would cost $85,000, which West would pay. Pusha agreed.

The image is of Whitney Houston’s bathroom. The countertop in the photo is a mess, and in that mess is what’s understood to be signs of cocaine use. In the mirror is the lurid flash of someone’s camera, obscured by clouds of pinkish-gray film, like oxidation or grime, that were absent from the original picture when it was published in a 2006 tabloid under a headline about Houston’s “drug den.” Houston would die of accidental drowning in a bathtub six years later.