Politics & Policy

American Catholic Bishops Miss Their Big Chance to Implement Sex-Abuse Reforms

In an unprecedented move, the Vatican intervened this week to scuttle a vote on proposed changes to bishop oversight.

Olivia Paschal
11:54 AM ET

Most Popular on The Atlantic

Mendelsund / Munday

Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?
- Kate Julian
Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

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Steve Marcus / Reuters

Not All White Women
- Conor Friedersdorf
Some progressives are blaming a single demographic group for a string of losses in the midterm elections—but that distorts the actual results.

After Democrats gained a House majority, causing most of them to celebrate the biggest check on Donald Trump’s power since he was elected, a tiny faction in the progressive coalition reacted in anger and frustration, fixating on races that would have made their “wave” even bigger: Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Andrew Gillum in Florida, Stacey Abrams in Georgia.

In all these Democratic defeats, there was an easily identifiable group that voted overwhelmingly against the progressive candidate: Republicans. But members of this progressive faction did not lash out at Republicans. They instead directed their ire at another group, defined by race and sex. They lashed out at white women.

Read: The glaring blind spot of the “MeToo” movement

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Matthieu Bourel

The ‘Madman’ Behind Trump’s Trade Theory
- Annie Lowrey
Peter Navarro—a business-school professor, a get-rich guru, a former Peace Corps member, and a former Democrat—is among the most important generals in Trump’s trade war.

“No one’s more careful about what they buy,” Peter Navarro told me recently. The director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy was explaining that he reads labels closely and avoids products made in China. “People need to be mindful of the high cost of low prices,” he said. In Navarro’s telling, those cheap flip-flops are supporting an authoritarian state, and that cut-rate washing machine might be mortgaging America’s future.

Such wariness of foreign goods is not just one man’s consumer preference—it’s United States policy. In the past year, the Trump administration has embarked on a trade war with sweeping geopolitical aims: The entire government now has a mandate, if a murky one, to make China play by the rules—and also to slow its rise. Trump has slapped tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods imported from the People’s Republic. And China is not the only front in the war. To aid American businesses and stop other countries from growing at America’s expense, the administration has renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement and initiated bilateral talks with the European Union, Japan, and other allies.

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Pascal Rossignol / Reuters

Amazon’s HQ2 Spectacle Isn’t Just Shameful—It Should Be Illegal
- Derek Thompson
Each year, local governments spend nearly $100 billion to move headquarters and factories between states. It’s a wasteful exercise that requires a national solution.

The Amazon HQ2 saga had all the hallmarks of the gaudiest reality TV. It was an absurd spectacle, concluding with a plot twist, which revealed a deep and dark truth about the modern world.

Fourteen months ago, Amazon announced a national beauty contest, in which North American cities could apply to win the honor of landing the retailer’s second headquarters. The prize: 50,000 employees and the glory of housing an international tech giant. The cost? Just several billion dollars in tax incentives and a potential face-lift to the host city. Then last week, in a classic late-episode shock, several news outlets reported that Amazon would split its second headquarters between Crystal City, a suburban neighborhood near Washington, D.C., and Long Island City, in Queens, New York.

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Wenjia Tang

The Media Barely Covered One of the Worst Storms to Hit U.S. Soil
- Alia Wong and Lenika Cruz
Weeks ago, Super Typhoon Yutu devastated the Northern Mariana Islands, which are home to tens of thousands of Americans. Mainland outlets paid little attention.

Several hours before Super Typhoon Yutu struck the morning of October 25, Harry Blanco was making final preparations for the storm. He boarded up the windows of his house, secured loose objects outside, gathered his valuables in a backpack, and locked his black Labrador, Lady, in the laundry room, where he felt she’d be safe. Then, he—along with thousands of his neighbors in the Northern Mariana Islands—waited in their homes. The remote American territory in the western Pacific would soon face the biggest storm to hit U.S. soil since 1935.

As night fell, Yutu swept toward Blanco’s village on the island of Saipan. The howling outside intensified, and Blanco’s partially wooden home began to buckle in the sustained 180-mph winds. “The house started shaking,” recalls Blanco, a 56-year-old retired U.S. Army colonel. “I started getting scared because it was not fully concrete.” But his bathroom was, so he retreated there. Just after midnight, the roof that covered half of his house was ripped off, and Blanco felt the furious winds trying to suck him up into the air. “I jumped in the bathtub,” he said. “I was holding myself down using the spout ... It was wet, so it was slippery.”

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Nikola Solic / Reuters

The Myth Of the Traumatized Neanderthal
- Ed Yong
Contrary to popular belief, they weren’t exceptionally prone to head injuries, and certainly no more so than early humans.

The very first Neanderthal to be described in the scientific literature, back in 1856, had an old elbow injury—a fracture that had since healed, but had deformed the bone in the process. Such injuries turned out to be incredibly common. Almost every reasonably complete Neanderthal skeleton that was found during the subsequent century had at least one sign of physical trauma. Some researchers attributed these lesions to fights, others to attacks by predators. But whatever the precise reason, scientists collectively inferred that Neanderthals must have lived short, stressful, and harsh lives.

In 1995, the anthropologists Thomas Berger and Erik Trinkaus cemented that impression by showing that Neanderthal injuries were concentrated around the head and neck. Of 17 skeletons, around 30 percent had signs of cranial trauma—a far higher proportion than in either prehistoric hunter-gatherers or 20th century humans. Only one group showed a similar pattern of fractures—rodeo riders.

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Stephen Lam / Reuters

The Simple Reason That Humans Can’t Control Wildfires
- Robinson Meyer
“The fire, to me—it’s like an ocean. It’s so strong that we don’t really stand a chance of doing much to it.”

Seven years ago, Park Williams took an hour-long drive with a couple of friends to see a wildfire. He remembers it now as a revelation.

At the time, Williams was researching the scraggly pine forests that dot the southwestern United States. He worked at a national laboratory that overlooks more than 1 million acres of protected desert forest. On June 26, 2011, the wind knocked down an aspen somewhere in that national forest, toppling it into a power line and igniting a small flame. The landscape was parched, the winds were unruly, and soon that flame had become the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history.

Williams couldn’t go to work—his lab had been evacuated—so he and his friends drove around town, hoping to catch a glimpse of the blaze. Eventually they came to a spot just below the mountains. He remembers the air outside the car reeking like an ancient brick fireplace. The fire stood a mile off. “It looked like a skyline of buildings,” he told me. “You could see it in the mountains above you.”

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Cathal McNaughton / Reuters

America’s Dangerous Rhetorical Games
- David French
Allocating responsibility for violent acts to any politician or pundit should be done only with the greatest of care.

It’s an all too familiar pattern. Every time there’s an act of political violence or threatened political violence, there’s a brief pause as both sides of our polarized nation wait to see who’s responsible. Then, the instant the attacker is identified, he becomes yet another rhetorical club in perhaps one of the most divisive debates in modern American politics. Who else is to blame?

When the violence comes from the right, is it Donald Trump? Is it Fox News? When the violence comes from the left, is it Maxine Waters? Is it Bernie Sanders?

On and on it goes. At the core of the argument is a contention—your rhetoric is motivating your radicals to do terrible things. Each act of violence from your side reaffirms the systematic moral deficiency of your position. Moreover, each act of violence from your side has many fathers—those whose rhetoric makes them “complicit” or creates a “climate” that breeds violence. On the other hand, each act of violence from my side is an aberration—an incident so isolated that it’s outrageous to pin any responsibility for it to any idea or any important person. My rage doesn’t inspire violence. My rage is righteous.

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Bebeto Matthews / AP

Amazon’s HQ2 Will Only Worsen America’s ‘Great Divergence’
- Alana Semuels
In today’s economy, well-off people live in big cities, while everyone else gets pushed out. Bringing new Amazon offices to Virginia and New York could hasten the process.

On the long list of things that New York City desperately needs—money for the subway, for affordable housing, for schools and public hospitals and universal pre-K—more high-paying, high-skilled jobs is not at the top of the list. It could be argued, in fact, that many of New York’s ills are caused by the explosion of high-paying jobs in a city where the construction of affordable housing and transit improvements has not kept up pace.

Yet New York and hundreds of other cities spent the past year trying to convince Amazon to bring 50,000 jobs to the city, a process that was rewarded on Tuesday when Amazon formally announced that it would set up new offices in Queens and in the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia.

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Eric Thayer / Reuters

The New GOP Coalition Is Emerging
- Reihan Salam
In the wake of an upper-middle-class exodus, the Republican Party needs to win working-class voters—or it will lose its grip on power.

There was a time when Charlie Baker, the popular Republican governor of Massachusetts who won his bid for reelection by a wider margin than did the stalwart progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren, might have been considered one of the GOP’s leading lights. As it stands, he is an oddity. Though the Republican Party still commands the allegiance of some secular, college-educated, upper-middle-income voters in the suburbs of big cities, such voters represent a shrinking share of its coalition.

Admittedly, this is not an entirely new development. Voters who describe themselves as socially liberal and fiscally conservative, or rather socially progressive and fiscally pragmatic, have been gravitating to the Democrats since the Clinton era. But the 2018 midterm elections really do feel like the culmination of this decades-long trend. Rockefeller Republicans have fully given way to Bloomberg Democrats, a shift that seems especially pronounced among younger elite-educated professionals, and it is hard to envision a reversal. Henceforth, the Republican Party will either win working-class voters or lose its grip on power.

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Did Minority Voters Dethrone Scott Walker?

Early data suggest that enthusiasm and increased turnout from communities of color were at least part of the reason the GOP lost Wisconsin’s governor’s mansion.

Vann R. Newkirk II
6:00 AM ET

California Democrats Are Still Claiming House Seats

The state is bluer than ever, as Republican leads on Election Night in several competitive House races slowly evaporate.

Todd S. Purdum
6:00 AM ET

The Looming Legal Battle Over Jim Acosta's Press Pass

CNN says in a lawsuit that President Trump’s revocation of the correspondent’s White House credentials violated his First and Fifth Amendment rights.

Scott Nover
Nov 13, 2018

Newsletter

The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Putting on Ayers

President Donald Trump is reportedly considering replacements for several senior-level administration officials.

Nielsen Isn’t the Problem With Trump’s Immigration Policies

The president is reportedly close to firing his secretary of homeland security, but her successor will also struggle to enact impractical and illegal directives from the White House.

David A. Graham
Nov 13, 2018

Why Young, Talented Democrats Flee the House

The lack of young challengers to Nancy Pelosi as the next House speaker is both a symptom and a cause of her leadership.

Elaina Plott
Nov 13, 2018

House Progressives Celebrate a ‘New Kind of Centrism’

Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus see the midterms as a victory for progressive thinking, not a call to moderation.

Elaine Godfrey
Nov 13, 2018

Writers

Vann R. Newkirk II

Did Minority Voters Dethrone Scott Walker?

6:00 AM ET
David A. Graham

Nielsen Isn’t the Problem With Trump’s Immigration Policies

Nov 13, 2018
Russell Berman

Democrats Quickly Confront the Limits of Their Power to Stop Trump

Nov 9, 2018
Peter Beinart

Will the Left Go Too Far?

Nov 9, 2018
Emma Green

Trump’s Evangelical Allies Really Didn’t Like Jeff Sessions

Nov 7, 2018

All Writers

Politics Daily

The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: California Ablaze

Multiple wildfires have engulfed California. The Camp Fire in Northern California is now the deadliest wildfire in modern California history, with 29 confirmed dead.

Madeleine Carlisle and Elaine Godfrey
Nov 12, 2018

House Democrats Are Already Fighting for Whitaker’s Recusal From the Russia Probe

They’re also pushing for the passage of a law protecting Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Andrew Kragie
Nov 11, 2018

Putin’s Favorite Congressman Has Lost His Reelection

Dana Rohrabacher lost his reelection bid after two decades in Congress. Democrats could now dig in to his Kremlin ties.

Natasha Bertrand
Nov 11, 2018

Global

Trump’s Bromance With Macron Fizzles Spectacularly

A weekend of presidential drama in Paris culminated in the French president’s warning against an emerging global disorder.

Rachel Donadio
Nov 11, 2018

Nancy Pelosi: Mueller Doesn’t Have to Indict Trump for Congress to Impeach Him

But the congresswoman says she isn’t planning to go down that road—yet.

Edward-Isaac Dovere
Nov 11, 2018

Why Trump Is the Favorite in 2020

The Republican Party just suffered big losses in the House of Representatives, but the president is getting ready to ramp up his campaign—and he’s got a good shot at reelection.