Introductions and Such

The Trump Organization Says It's 'Not Practical' to Comply With the Emoluments Clause

Russell Berman

The president’s business tells lawmakers it is too difficult to track all its foreign revenue in accordance with constitutional requirements, and it hasn’t asked Congress for a permission slip.

Days before taking office, Donald Trump said his company would donate all profits from foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury, part of an effort to avoid even the appearance of a conflict with the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

Now, however, the Trump Organization is telling Congress that determining exactly how much of its profits come from foreign governments is simply more trouble than it’s worth.

In response to a document request from the House Oversight Committee, Trump’s company sent a copy of an eight-page pamphlet detailing how it plans to track payments it receives from foreign governments at the firm’s many hotels, golf courses, and restaurants across the globe. But while the Trump Organization said it would set aside all money it collects from customers that identify themselves as representing a foreign government, it would not undertake a more intensive effort to determine if a payment would violate the Constitution’s prohibition on public office holders accepting an “emolument” from a foreign state.

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.

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4. But a new clinical approach offers hope.

This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

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At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

'Arrogant, Wrong' : U.K. Blasts U.S. Leaks of Manchester Attack

Krishnadev Calamur

Manchester police say they will stop sharing information about the investigation with their American counterparts.

Updated at 10:34 a.m. ET

U.K. authorities seemed to suggest they won’t share information about the Manchester attack with their U.S. counterparts after several leaks to the American media that British authorities say compromise the integrity of the investigation.

Manchester Mayor Ian Burnham tweeted:

Complained to acting US Ambassador about leaks out of US & was assured they would stop. They haven't. Arrogant, wrong & disrespectful to GM. https://t.co/teHhVGwYsh
— Andy Burnham (@AndyBurnhamGM) May 24, 2017

U.S media, citing U.S. officials, first reported that the Manchester attacker was a suicide bomber and subsequently identified him by his name, Salman Abedi, well before U.K. authorities said they were prepared to do so. Amber Rudd, the U.K. home secretary, said the leaks were “irritating,” adding she had conveyed her displeasure to her U.S. counterparts who, she said, assured her the leaks would stop.

A Transcript of the Greg Gianforte ‘Body-Slam’ Audio

Adrienne LaFrance

Yet again, a recording contradicts the alleged assailant’s account of what happened.

The audio recording of a congressional candidate accused of body-slamming a reporter on the eve of a special election in Montana is extraordinary for several reasons.

If you haven’t listened to it yet, and you really should, it’s essential to at least read the short transcript:

Ben Jacobs, a reporter for The Guardian: ...the CBO score. Because, you know, you were waiting to make your decision about health care until you saw the bill and it just came out...

Greg Gianforte, the congressional candidate: Yeah, we’ll talk to you about that later.

Jacobs: Yeah, but there’s not going to be time. I’m just curious—

Gianforte: Okay, speak with Shane, please.

[loud scuffling noises, an even louder crash, repeated thumping]

First He Became an American—Then He Joined ISIS

Seamus Hughes and Bennett Clifford

When the FBI discovered a network of Bosnian-Americans giving support to terrorists, they also discovered Abdullah Ramo Pazara, a U.S. citizen and a battalion commander in Syria.

Abdullah Ramo Pazara had a craving for packets of instant hot cocoa. The Bosnian-American former truck driver was, at the time, a commander of an Islamic State tank battalion in Syria. Apparently, even foreign fighters who reject their former lives in Western countries for a chance at martyrdom for ISIS sometimes long for the creature comforts of their previous homes.

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In 2013, six Bosnian immigrants in the United States allegedly sent money, riflescopes, knives, military equipment, and other supplies to jihadists in Syria and Iraq through intermediaries in Bosnia and Turkey. According to the U.S. government’s allegations, individual ISIS fighters would make specific requests—mostly for money and military equipment—and the group would then raise funds and send supplies to Syria. The requests included what was surely an unexpected revelation of nostalgia—packets of Swiss Miss hot cocoa. By sending the cocoa mix and other supplies, federal prosecutors argue, these U.S.-based Bosnians provided what is known as “material support” to terrorists, in violation of the Patriot Act.

An Apple employee poses with a personal computer in 1986. — Corbis Historical / Getty

Why American Workers Now Dress So Casually

Deirdre Clemente

The office was, until a few decades ago, the last stronghold of fashion formality. Silicon Valley changed that.

Americans began the 20th century in bustles and bowler hats and ended it in velour sweatsuits and flannel shirts—the most radical shift in dress standards in human history. At the center of this sartorial revolution was business casual, a genre of dress that broke the last bastion of formality—office attire—to redefine the American wardrobe.

Born in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, business casual consists of khaki pants, sensible shoes, and button-down collared shirts. By the time it was mainstream, in the 1990s, it flummoxed HR managers and employees alike. “Welcome to the confusing world of business casual,” declared a fashion writer for the Chicago Tribune in 1995. With time and some coaching, people caught on. Today, though, the term “business casual” is nearly obsolete for describing the clothing of a workforce that includes many who work from home in yoga pants, put on a clean T-shirt for a Skype meeting, and don’t always go into the office.

The Real Reasons for Marvel Comics’ Woes

Asher Elbein

A recent push for diversity has been blamed for weak print sales, but the company’s decades-old business practices are the true culprit.

Marvel Comics has been having a rough time lately. Readers and critics met last year’s Civil War 2—a blockbuster crossover event (and a spiritual tie-in to the year’s big Marvel movie)—with disinterest and scorn. Two years of plummeting print comics sales culminated in a February during which only one ongoing superhero title managed to sell over 50,000 copies.* Three crossover events designed to pump up excitement came and went with little fanfare, while the lead-up to 2017’s blockbuster crossover Secret Empire—where a fascist Captain America subverts and conquers the United States—sparked such a negative response that the company later put out a statement imploring readers to buy the whole thing before judging it. On March 30, a battered Marvel decided to try and get to the bottom of the problem with a retailer summit—and promptly stuck its foot in its mouth.

In the End, We Got the Baywatch We Deserved

Megan Garber

Life's a beach and then you dive.

Baywatch, the internationally syndicated television show of the 1990s, is remembered today primarily for its synthetic body parts and secondarily for its massive viewership (the show boasted a weekly audience, at its height, of 1.1 billion people, spread across 142 countries). What is generally less well recalled, however, at least in the American cultural memory, is the show’s pioneering of a category of entertainment that has since become a favorite of Hollywood: the show that is so bad it’s ~~good~~ profoundly awesome. Baywatch was so poorly acted that its oily thespians could be seen to be inventing, frame by frame, a novel strain of camp. Its stories were so patently absurd that they occasionally threatened to venture into full-on surrealism. There were, in this show, so many bouncing bodies, so many robotically delivered lines, so many animatronic sharks.

A Creationist Sues the Grand Canyon for Religious Discrimination

Sarah Zhang

The national park wouldn’t let him collect rocks for research.

“How did the Grand Canyon form?” is a question so commonly pondered that YouTube is rife with explanations. Go down into the long tail of Grand Canyon videos, and you’ll eventually find a two-part, 35-minute lecture by Andrew Snelling. The first sign this isn’t a typical geology lecture comes about a minute in, when Snelling proclaims, “The Grand Canyon does provide a testament to the biblical account of Earth’s history.”

Snelling is a prominent young-Earth creationist. For years, he has given lectures, guided biblical-themed Grand Canyon rafting tours, and worked for the nonprofit Answers in Genesis. (The CEO of Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham, is also behind the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter theme park.) Young-Earth creationism, in contrast to other forms of creationism, specifically holds that the Earth is only thousands of years old. Snelling believes that the Grand Canyon formed after Noah’s flood—and he now claims the U.S. government is blocking his research in the canyon because of his religious views.

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Paul Rosenfeld

A wealthy white lawyer has spent 16 years and millions of dollars turning the Whitney Plantation into a memorial to the nation's past.

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A New Understanding of the Childhood Brain

Nicolas Pollock

Uncovering the link between early trauma and lifelong illness

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Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

Tynesha Foreman and Nicolas Pollock

New data and analysis from PRRI and The Atlantic suggests that it was cultural anxiety more than economic distress that fueled white, working-class support for Trump.

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