France calls on citizens to host refugees

The Reinvention of America

James Fallows

Americans don’t realize how fast the country is moving toward becoming a better version of itself.

I have seen the future, and it is in the United States.

After a several-year immersion in parts of the country that make the news mainly after a natural disaster or a shooting, or for follow-up stories on how the Donald Trump voters of 2016 now feel about Trump, I have a journalistic impulse similar to the one that dominated my years of living in China. That is the desire to tell people how much more is going on, in places they had barely thought about or even heard of, than they might have imagined.

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In the case of China, that impulse matched the mood of the times. In the years before and after the world financial crisis of 2008, everyone knew that China was on the way up; reporters like me were just filling in the details. In the case of the modern United States, I am well aware that this message runs so counter to prevailing emotions and ideas as to seem preposterous. Everyone knows how genuinely troubled the United States is at the level of national politics and governance. It is natural to assume that these disorders must reflect a deeper rot across the country. And indeed, you can’t travel extensively through today’s America, as my wife, Deb, and I have been doing in recent years, without being exposed to signs of rot, from opioid addiction to calcifying class barriers.

How Gabriel García Márquez Created a World in a Sentence

Joe Fassler

The novelist Mary Morris explains how the opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude shaped her path as a writer.

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Colum McCann, George Saunders, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more.

When I was her student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the novelist Marilynne Robinson told our class it was almost unthinkable for women of her generation to become writers. Society afforded women with an extremely limited range of opportunity: You could be a teacher, nurse, or homemaker, she said, and that was about it. Other paths—especially professionalized, artistic ones—were possible, but extremely hard-won.

That was the challenge facing Mary Morris, author of Gateway to the Moon, after she dropped out of grad school in the 1970s. For years, she’d worked in secret, living a kind of creative double life—writing constantly, but never sure she was really a writer. No one ever told her how the verb might earn the noun.

The Hardest Job in the World

John Dickerson

What if the problem isn’t the president—it’s the presidency?

I. A Broken Office

Donald Trump often appears to be a president in rebellion against his office. A president, we have come to expect, hastens to the scene of a natural disaster to comfort the afflicted. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, President Trump arrived tardily and behaved unseriously, tossing rolls of paper towels at storm-battered residents as if he were trying to drain three-point shots.

We have come to expect that when the national fabric rends, the president will administer needle and thread, or at least reach for the sewing box of unity. After white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, shouting “Jews will not replace us,” President Trump’s instinct was to emphasize that there were good people among the neo-Nazis.

Trump Throws Ronny Jackson Under the Bus

David A. Graham

The president appears ready to blithely sacrifice his nominee for veterans affairs secretary as part of a long-running war against the Senate confirmation process.

Hours after news of allegations of misconduct emerged against Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, the White House physician and President Trump’s pick to be the next secretary of veterans affairs, the president had a bizarre commentary to offer.

“I told Admiral Jackson just a little while ago, what do you need this for? This is a vicious group of people. … What do you need it for?” Trump said Tuesday, during a joint news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron. “I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. What does he need it for? I don’t think personally he should do it. It would be totally his decision.”

I don’t think personally he should do it.

Could there be a stranger thing to say about the man who you nominated to take the job—whom you delivered over to an “ugly” and “disgusting” confirmation process?

People in sweatshirts and jackets grab at an American flag. — Stephen Lam / Reuters

People Voted for Trump Because They Were Anxious, Not Poor

Olga Khazan

A new study finds that Trump voters weren’t losing income or jobs. Instead, they were concerned about their place in the world.

For the past 18 months, many political scientists have been seized by one question: Less-educated whites were President Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters. But why, exactly?

Was their vote some sort of cri de coeur about a changing economy that had left them behind? Or was the motivating sentiment something more complex and, frankly, something harder for policy makers to address?

After analyzing in-depth survey data from 2012 and 2016, the University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana C. Mutz argues that it’s the latter. In a new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she added her conclusion to the growing body of evidence that the 2016 election was not about economic hardship.

Black Hawk Up: The Forgotten American Success Story in Somalia

Dominic Tierney

How 43 U.S. soldiers gave their lives to help save 100,000 people

Macron standing with arms at sides next to Trump, who has a hand over his heart — Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Trump and Macron See the World Very Differently

Uri Friedman

That has big implications for everyone else.

Emmanuel Macron had something surprising to say about the United States last week, given that the president of the United States would soon be hosting his French counterpart for an elaborate state visit. Hard-edged “national selfishness”—of the kind that plunged the world into war nearly eight decades ago, long before the 40-year-old leader was born—is resurgent and endangering Europe’s “model” of liberal, pluralist democracy and international cooperation, Macron said in a speech before the European Parliament. And the threat to Europe is coming not just from without (“authoritarian powers”) and within (“illiberal” politics in certain European countries), but from its centuries-old ally across the Atlantic.

A table at a diner with a hamburger, french fries, milkshakes, and ketchup — Photo 24 / Getty

American Nostalgia on a Bun

Suzy Swartz

The burger, shake, and fries—“enduring icons of American cuisine”— are used to symbolize abundance, accessibility, and dominance while ignoring the dark side of those values.

The series Riverdale owes its ratings success to a number of factors, not least of which is its appeal to a relentless and sometimes revisionist nostalgia. The characters are lifted from the classic Archie comics, for one, which are synonymous with the wholesome, mid-century aesthetic they retained from the late ’50s through the 21st century. But the show’s nostalgia for a supposedly simpler time is most evident in the food the characters eat.

Betty, Veronica, and the rest of the gang often gather at their local diner, Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe, where they favor the greasy, calorie-laden stuff of American folklore: burgers, fries, and milkshakes. So integral is the food to the iconography of the show that the cast shared a milkshake on a Jimmy Fallon segment in reference to their characters’ heroic consumption of thick malts. In a Netflix promotional video, the show’s breakout star, Cole Sprouse, stared into a camera doing nothing but sloppily eating a hamburger.

The Negligent Nomination of Ronny Jackson

David A. Graham

The president’s pick to be secretary of veterans affairs stands accused of misconduct, but with a proper vetting process he would never have been in this position anyway.

For the third time in four months, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson is at the center of a surprising report.

The first time came in January, when Jackson, the White House physician, announced that President Trump was in excellent physical and mental health, offering an endorsement so effusive that some were led to question Jackson’s judgment.

The second came in March, when President Trump fired Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin and announced that he would nominate Jackson to succeed him. Though Jackson is a flag officer in the Navy, he had never run anything nearly as large and complicated as the federal government’s second-largest bureaucracy.

The third came Monday night, with a series of vague reports about “allegations” against Jackson that threatened to slow down or derail his nomination. Senators were tight-lipped about what they might mean, including an elegantly tautological comment from Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, who said the allegations were troubling “only if true.” Since then, a few new details have emerged. CBS News and The New York Times report the allegations include a hostile work environment in the White House medical office, drinking on the job, and overprescribing medications.

A still from Marvel's 'Avengers: Infinity War' — Disney / Marvel Studios

How Marvel Is Rewriting Its World Order

David Sims

Ahead of Avengers: Infinity War, the extended cinematic universe has been sweeping away its status quo—and questioning the very nature of superheroism.

In 1986, the famed comic-book creator Frank Miller wrote a seven-part story for Daredevil called “Born Again,” a dark tale of betrayal and redemption that helped usher in the gritty modern age of the medium. Though Miller’s recent turn toward more extreme politics in his work has alienated many fans, his influence in the mid-’80s was crucial to the evolution of mainstream comics. Near the end of “Born Again,” Daredevil, the costumed protector of Hell’s Kitchen, fights a villain named Nuke, whose powers are cataclysmic enough that more epic heroes have to get involved: the Avengers, represented by their best-known members, Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor.

The artist David Mazzucchelli draws those three heroes in mythic fashion, with Captain America cradling an injured child in his arms, Thor silhouetted against the storm he has summoned, and Iron Man standing like an immovable sentry, collectively commanding Daredevil to back off. They’re powerful, but entirely inhuman—gods among men who are worlds removed from a street-level hero like Daredevil. With this scene, their grandeur had transmuted from something that was previously soapy and colorful to something remote and frightening. It was a clear sign of a necessary shift in comic-book storytelling, one that no longer easily assumed might made right.