This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Flowers are pictured on the grave of Sergei Magnitsky at the Preobrazhensky cemetery in Moscow. — Mikhail Voskresensky / Reuters

Bill Browder's Testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee

Rosie Gray

“I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests,” Browder writes.

The financier Bill Browder has emerged as an unlikely central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney Browder hired to investigate official corruption, died in Russian custody in 2009. Congress subsequently imposed sanctions on the officials it held responsible for his death, passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government retaliated, among other ways, by suspending American adoptions of Russian children.

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who secured a meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, was engaged in a campaign for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act, and raised the subject of adoptions in that meeting. That’s put the spotlight back on Browder’s long campaign for Kremlin accountability, and against corruption—a campaign whose success has irritated Putin and those around him.

John McCain gives a speech to the Senate after being diagnosed with brain cancer. — C-SPAN2 via AP

John McCain Makes His Choice

James Fallows

The vote he cast, more than the speech he gave, will help define his legacy.

The effort to repeal Barack Obama’s health-care bill is not over, and neither presumably is the public career of John McCain. But each crossed an important threshold yesterday, and Senator McCain gave us a clearer idea of who he is and what he stands for.

The repeal effort isn’t over, because debate and further voting is now under way to determine whether the bill will pass and, more basically, to define what it would actually do. McCain will have more votes to cast, on this measure and others, and it’s possible that in the end he will turn against this bill because of its provisions (whatever they turn out to be) or because of the rushed and secretive process that led to it. Just this afternoon, McCain voted No on a “straight repeal” bill that would eliminate Obamacare without any replacement.

A Syrian couple presents their newly issued German registration documents. — Wolfgang Rattay / Reuters

Why Germany's New Muslims Go to Mosque Less

Alice Su

Far from trying to “Islamicize” the country, some Syrian refugees find its version of Islam too conservative for their taste.

Germany has welcomed more than a million refugees and asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries since 2015, more than any other European country. The issue of their integration has provided fodder for far-right voices in German politics, who used incidents like the 2016 attack at Berlin’s Christmas market and New Year’s sexual assaults in Cologne to suggest that Muslim newcomers are a threat to Western society. At the height of Europe’s refugee crisis, the extremist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) polled at 15 percent, drawing heavily on fear of refugees and rhetoric against the “Islamicization” of Germany.

But this isn’t the first time Germany has experienced a large Muslim influx. Before 2015, Germany was already home to some 4 million Muslims, mostly Turks who came 60 years ago to help rebuild the country after World War II. Many are poorly integrated into German society, living in social enclaves within big cities where they speak more Turkish than German and attend mosques run by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), an organization linked directly to Turkey’s government authority for religious affairs.

This Is the Way the College ‘Bubble’ Ends

Derek Thompson

Not with a pop, but a hiss

For the past few decades, the unstoppable increase in college tuition has been a fact of life, like death and taxes. The sticker price of American college increased nearly 400 percent in the last 30 years, while median household income growth was relatively flat. Student debt soared to more than $1 trillion, the result of loans to cover the difference.

Several people—with varying degrees of expertise in higher-ed economics—have predicted that it’s all a bubble, destined to burst. Now after decades of expansion, just about every meaningful statistic—including the number of college students, the growth of tuition costs, and even the total number of colleges—is going down, or at least growing more slowly.

The Ohio State Fair around the time of a ride malfunction on July 26, 2017. — Bruce Lamm / Reuters

One Dead, Many in Critical Condition After Ohio State Fair Accident

Aria Bendix

A ride malfunction caused multiple passengers to be ejected around 20 to 30 feet in the air.

A ride malfunction at the state fair in Columbus, Ohio resulted in the death of at least one passenger on Wednesday. Locals officials report that at least seven others were wounded, with five of them in critical condition and two others expected to recover. The incident occurred at around 7:24 p.m. local time when passengers on the Fire Ball ride were ejected around 20 to 30 feet into the air at a high speed, before falling to the ground. Witnesses have since reported that a passenger row detached from the ride while in motion—an account that is corroborated by online video footage.

In a statement released on Twitter, Ohio Governor John Kasich said he had ordered a full investigation into the incident and asked for all of the fair’s rides to be shut down pending additional safety inspections. “I am terribly saddened by this incident,” Kasich said. At a press conference on Wednesday, he again lamented the loss of life and declared that “we will get to the bottom of this.” “The fair is about the best things in life and then tonight, with this accident, it becomes a terrible, terrible tragedy,” Kasich said.

Gelpi / Shutterstock / Paul Spella / The Atlantic

The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube

Adrienne LaFrance

Surprise eggs and slime are at the center of an online realm that’s changing the way the experts think about human development.

Toddlers crave power. Too bad for them, they have none. Hence the tantrums and absurd demands. (No, I want this banana, not that one, which looks identical in every way but which you just started peeling and is therefore worthless to me now.)

They just want to be in charge! This desire for autonomy clarifies so much about the behavior of a very small human. It also begins to explain the popularity of YouTube among toddlers and preschoolers, several developmental psychologists told me.

If you don’t have a 3-year-old in your life, you may not be aware of YouTube Kids, an app that’s essentially a stripped-down version of the original video blogging site, with videos filtered by the target audience’s age. And because the mobile app is designed for use on a phone or tablet, kids can tap their way across a digital ecosystem populated by countless videos—all conceived with them in mind.

Lana Del Rey at San Francisco's Outside Lands in 2016 — Amy Harris / AP

The Exquisite Horror in Lana Del Rey's Nostalgia

Spencer Kornhaber

Lust for Life, the singer's fourth album, greets Trump-era anxieties with an eerie flower-child grin.

Scroll through the photos that David LaChapelle recently shot with Lana Del Rey and you may be hit with a whiff of linoleum, or microwave dinner, or asbestos. She descends a spiral staircase next to a gaudy fake Christmas tree of the kind you just don’t see anymore, wearing an equally gaudy coat, her eyes squinting, the camera having snapped at the wrong moment. She stains a wedding table with red wine, her mascara running and the flash catching the blood behind her retinas, as a man in the foreground smokes in ripped whitey tighties. She poses in a ruffled dress in front of a tiered garden styled with person-sized candles, next to a sign reading, “Happy Birthday America … 1776 1976.”

Pop culture has been mining the heyday of Polaroid in this fashion for a while now, and Lana Del Rey has led the way. Ever since the Los Angeles singer first achieved fame in 2011, she’s rarely been described without mentions of Instagram filters that make new photos look old, or of the way that platforms like Tumblr and Pinterest encourage young people to collage the bygone. So the nostalgia kick should be played out by now. Still, I can’t stop staring at these LaChapelle photos. In small ways—say, the body types of the people posing with Del Rey—they capture something about the era they reference. But in the colors, the couture, Del Rey’s impish glint, they’re novel. Most striking is the sense of menace underlying the garishness. Psychedelic burnout, Watergate disillusionment, serial murders—all tingeing images that otherwise might evoke “a simpler time.”

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.

The Growing Ranks of America’s High-Earning Poor

Allison Schrager

Why do so many Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck despite earning a decent income?

There’s a growing segment of the American population that earns a decent salary but lives paycheck-to-paycheck: the income-rich and asset-poor.

Empty bank balances are often associated with those on the lowest rungs of the income ladder. But many members of America’s upper-middle class have almost no emergency cushion and are woefully unprepared for retirement. And years into the recovery, they are still struggling, leaving the entire economy vulnerable.

The median household income in America is about $55,000. To earn more than that is to do relatively well, particularly in low-cost areas. That’s what they bring in, but what do they really have? The figure below plots financial assets held by members of the upper-middle class aged 40 to 55. (Financial assets are any assets a household owns that isn’t a house, car, or business, which means it includes all retirement funds.)

The Cost of Banning Transgender Service Members

James Hamblin

Exclusion leaves the military weaker and the country more divided.

President Donald Trump issued a ruling on Wednesday outlawing military service by people who do not conform to a binary gender system.

“Please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military,” he wrote in a string of tweets. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

Trump previously promised to be an advocate for transgender people, writing during the campaign, “Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs.”