Politics & Policy

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• The Supreme Court Tells the Government to Get a Warrant

  A highly watched case ends in a 5-4 ruling in which Chief Justice John Roberts and the high court’s liberals inch ever closer to stricter privacy standards.

  • Garrett Epps
  • 8:00 AM ET
• Most Popular on The Atlantic

  • Why Trump Keeps Creating Crises

    • David A. Graham

    He needs them to maintain his support.

    It’s easy to survey the last 10 days in America and be flabbergasted at President Trump’s tendency to inflict politically bruising crises on himself. I know this because I had just that reaction on Wednesday, trying to make sense of his abrupt signing of an executive order intended to end separations of unauthorized immigrant families at the border. The current moment is more acute than others, but it follows the template set by the aftermath of a white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia; brinksmanship with North Korea; the collapse of Obamacare repeal; the firing of James Comey; and any number of smaller, half-forgotten crises. Why doesn’t he learn?

    But maybe the truth is that Trump keeps creating crises because he needs them.

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  • When a Mars Simulation Goes Wrong

    • Marina Koren

    A recent mission atop a Hawaiian volcano shows humans still have much to learn before they set foot on another world.

    The drive to the little white dome on the northern slope of Mauna Loa is a bumpy one. Mauna Loa, the “Long Mountain,” is a colossal volcano that covers half of the island of Hawaii. The rocky terrain, rusty brown and deep red, crunches beneath car tires and jostles passengers. Up there, more than 8,000 feet above sea level and many miles away from the sounds of civilization, it doesn’t feel like Earth. It feels like another planet. Like Mars.

    For the past five years, small groups of people have made this drive and moved into the dome, known as a habitat. Their job is to pretend that they really are on Mars, and then spend months living like it. The goal, for the researchers who send them there, is to figure out how human beings would do on a mission to the real thing.

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  • Instagram’s Wannabe-Stars Are Driving Luxury Hotels Crazy

    • Taylor Lorenz

    Hotels are being forced to figure out how to work with a new class of brand-peddling marketers.

    Three years ago, Lisa Linh quit her full-time job to travel the world and document it on Instagram, where she has nearly 100,000 followers; since then, she has stayed in breathtaking hotels everywhere from Mexico to Quebec to the Cook Islands. Often, she stays for free.

    Linh is part of an ever-growing class of people who have leveraged their social media clout to travel the world, frequently in luxury. While Linh and other elite influencers are usually personally invited by hotel brands, an onslaught of lesser-known wannabes has left hotels scrambling to deal with a deluge of requests for all-expense-paid vacations in exchange for some social media posts.

    Kate Jones, marketing and communications manager at the Dusit Thani, a five-star resort in the Maldives, said that her hotel receives at least six requests from self-described influencers per day, typically through Instagram direct message.

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  • But, Seriously, Where Are the Aliens?

    • Derek Thompson

    Humanity may be as few as 10 years away from discovering evidence of extraterrestrial life. Once we do, it will only deepen the mystery of where alien intelligence might be hiding.

    Enrico Fermi was an architect of the atomic bomb, a father of radioactivity research, and a Nobel Prize–winning scientist who contributed to breakthroughs in quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. But in the popular imagination, his name is most commonly associated with one simple, three-word question, originally meant as a throwaway joke to amuse a group of scientists discussing UFOs at the Los Alamos lab in 1950: Where is everybody?

    Fermi wasn’t the first person to ask a variant of this question about alien intelligence. But he owns it. The query is known around the world as the Fermi paradox. It’s typically summarized like this: If the universe is unfathomably large, the probability of intelligent alien life seems almost certain. But since the universe is also 14 billion years old, it would seem to afford plenty of time for these beings to make themselves known to humanity. So, well, where is everybody?

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  • When Children Say They’re Trans

    • Jesse Singal

    Hormones? Surgery? The choices are fraught—and there are no easy answers.

    Claire is a 14-year-old girl with short auburn hair and a broad smile. She lives outside Philadelphia with her mother and father, both professional scientists. Claire can come across as an introvert, but she quickly opens up, and what seemed like shyness reveals itself to be quiet self-assuredness. Like many kids her age, she is a bit overscheduled. During the course of the evening I spent with Claire and her mother, Heather—these aren’t their real names—theater, guitar, and track tryouts all came up. We also discussed the fact that, until recently, she wasn’t certain she was a girl.

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    Sixth grade had been difficult for her. She’d struggled to make friends and experienced both anxiety and depression. “I didn’t have any self-confidence at all,” she told me. “I thought there was something wrong with me.” Claire, who was 12 at the time, also felt uncomfortable in her body in a way she couldn’t quite describe. She acknowledged that part of it had to do with puberty, but she felt it was more than the usual preteen woes. “At first, I started eating less,” she said, “but that didn’t really help.”

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  • 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.

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  • A Landmark Study on the Origins of Alcoholism

    • Ed Yong

    By studying rats in a smarter way, scientists are finally learning something useful about why some drinkers become addicted and others don’t.

    For Markus Heilig, the years of dead ends were starting to grate.

    A seasoned psychiatrist, Heilig joined the National Institutes of Health in 2004 with grand ambitions of finding new ways to treat addiction and alcoholism. “It was the age of the neuroscience revolution, and all this new tech gave us many ways of manipulating animal brains,” he recalls. By studying addictive behavior in laboratory rats and mice, he would pinpoint crucial genes, molecules, and brain regions that could be targeted to curtail the equivalent behaviors in people.

    It wasn’t to be. The insights from rodent studies repeatedly proved to be irrelevant. Many researchers and pharmaceutical companies became disillusioned. “We cured alcoholism in every rat we ever tried,” says Heilig, who is now at Linköping University in Sweden. “And at the end of every paper, we wrote: This will lead to an exciting treatment. But everything we took from these animal models to the clinic failed. We needed to go back to the drawing board.”

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  • The Dangers of Distracted Parenting

    • Erika Christakis

    When it comes to children’s development, parents should worry less about kids’ screen time—and more about their own.

    Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes—car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost seems easier to list the things they don’t mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.

    Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids’ development, but it’s probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents.

    Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend more time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly low-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children’s lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. To be clear, I’m not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn’t have survived infancy if I’d had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.

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  • 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.

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  • Deported Into a Nightmare

    • Danielle Mackey

    Most Central American migrant children get deported before they even reach the U.S. One story shows what can await them when they get back to the countries they fled.

    SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras—Edwin Vásquez, a 16-year-old, is learning how to live with fear. One afternoon last fall, as he played soccer on a field near his house in La Rivera Hernández in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, gunfire suddenly rang out, and he barely dodged bullets meant for him. Lurking around the field were members of the Olanchanos, one of six gangs in La Rivera. Although Edwin is not a member of MS-13, the Olanchanos’ rival, it does control the street he lives on. This fact alone marks him as an enemy of the Olanchanos.

    After the shooting, he considered joining MS-13 for protection, but suspected the threat was so imminent that he didn’t have time. “Our greatest challenge here is to stay alive,” he said. “To be together with your mom, your family, and to make it to 18 or 22.” So at sunrise the day after the shooting, Edwin and his half brother left for the United States. They passed through Mexico atop la bestia, the train that migrants often ride for part of their journey, notorious for robberies and assaults. Gripping white-knuckled to its roof one night, he watched a man tumble to his death while fending off two men attempting to rape his teenage daughter, Edwin said.

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  More Popular Stories
• Ideas

  The Deep Consistency of the Trump Administration

  Beneath the constant contradictions and reversals, the administration has a single through line: Its policies always serve to dehumanize those deemed not to belong.

  • Vann R. Newkirk II
  • 7:00 AM ET

• Why Trump Keeps Creating Crises

  He needs them to maintain his support.

  • David A. Graham
  • 7:00 AM ET
• Ideas

  What Krauthammer Meant to Conservatives of My Generation

  He wasn’t only an influential columnist and essayist; he was emblematic of his times.

  • Matthew Continetti
  • Jun 22, 2018
• Newsletter

  

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: You've Barely Got Mail

  Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt reportedly sent only one email to anyone outside the EPA during his first 10 months in office.

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• Ideas

  It’s Not the Holocaust

  Trump’s family-separation policy is horrible, but equating it with genocide is both historically and strategically misguided.

  • Deborah Lipstadt
  • Jun 22, 2018

• Of Course Trump Backed Down on Family Separations

  Although the president cultivates an image of never giving an inch, his folding under pressure is the rule, rather than the exception.

  • David A. Graham
  • Jun 22, 2018

• Corruption in the Trump Administration Is Spreading

  While petty scandals like Scott Pruitt’s grab attention, there are more egregious and profitable conflicts of interest elsewhere in Washington.

  • David A. Graham
  • Jun 22, 2018
• Writers
  • Garrett Epps
    The Supreme Court Tells the Government to Get a Warrant
    8:00 AM ET
  • David A. Graham
    Why Trump Keeps Creating Crises
    7:00 AM ET
  • Vann R. Newkirk II
    The Deep Consistency of the Trump Administration
    7:00 AM ET
  • Alex Wagner
    The Republican Party Moves From Family Values to White Nationalism
    Jun 22, 2018
  • Russell Berman
    How Some Immigrant Families Are Avoiding Separation
    Jun 21, 2018
  All Writers

• Don’t Blame Trump’s Advisers for Trump

  The tendency to look for a puppet master behind Trump’s actions is misguided.

  • Rosie Gray
  • Jun 22, 2018
• Ideas

  The Republican Party Moves From Family Values to White Nationalism

  The migrant crisis signals an end to one era for the GOP—and the terrifying start of a new one.

  • Alex Wagner
  • Jun 22, 2018
• Politics Daily

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Do U Care?

  On her way to McAllen, Texas, to see what’s been happening at the border, first lady Melania Trump donned an olive green jacket that read, “I don’t really care. Do U?”

  • Lena Felton and Elaine Godfrey
  • Jun 21, 2018

• How Some Immigrant Families Are Avoiding Separation

  Space constraints are preventing the government from keeping everyone who crosses the border in detention, allowing some to make it out of McAllen, Texas.

  • Russell Berman
  • Jun 21, 2018

• Trump’s Katrina Moment

  The emotive images of families being separated at the border hit close to home for Americans—and don’t bode well for Trump.

  • Mallika Rao
  • Jun 21, 2018
• Radio Atlantic

  Radio Atlantic: The View from the Border

  Outrage over families separated at the border has reached a fever pitch. Jeremy Raff and Priscilla Alvarez join to share how the issue’s developing along the border and in Washington.

  • Kevin Townsend
  • Jun 21, 2018
• Ideas

  Melania Trump Plays the Role of Medieval Queen

  The first lady’s intervention to reverse the administration’s family-separation policy fits a long historical pattern.

  • Sonja Drimmer
  • Jun 21, 2018

• How Will Detained Children Find Their Parents?

  President Trump is ordering an end to the separation of families at the border, but the fate of thousands of children already in government custody is uncertain.

  • Priscilla Alvarez
  • Jun 21, 2018

• The GOP’s ‘Utterly Dysfunctional’ Strategy of Babying Its Base

  As long as Republican lawmakers support Trump’s hardline policies, they risk alienating their college-educated, and especially younger, voters.

  • Ronald Brownstein
  • Jun 21, 2018
• Ideas

  How America Treats Its Own Children

  Child poverty, homelessness, violence, obesity, illness: The United States is already an outlier.

  • Annie Lowrey
  • Jun 21, 2018
• Politics Daily

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: A Sign of the Times

  President Trump signed an executive order he said would end his administration’s policy of separating families at the border.

  • Lena Felton and Elaine Godfrey
  • Jun 20, 2018

• Trump Says He Will End the Family Separations He Imposed

  The president said he plans to sign an executive order keeping undocumented immigrant children with their parents, but the plan contradicts his earlier statement and might be illegal.

  • David A. Graham
  • Jun 20, 2018

• Republicans Are Lost on Immigration

  Mixed directives from Trump have left Republicans yet another obstacle in their path to immigration reform.

  • Elaina Plott
  • Jun 20, 2018