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• Anonymity Is Having a Moment

  But when is it justified?

  • Rachael Allen
  • 1:17 PM ET
• Most Popular on The Atlantic

  • Rosenstein’s Departure Is a National Emergency

    • David Frum

    Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is now in mortal peril.

    You know those signs that say In case of emergency, break glass?

    This is that emergency.

    President Donald Trump will reportedly soon fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the man who has most directly protected the independence of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump’s efforts to compromise that inquiry mean that Rosenstein’s position has been in peril for some time, but a report last week in The New York Times that Rosenstein had suggested wiretapping the president—potentially sarcastically—made it likely that Trump would seek to push Rosenstein out.

    What Rosenstein’s exit would mean for Mueller’s Russia investigation

    If the president can browbeat Rosenstein into resigning—or even plausibly misrepresent the firing as a resignation—Trump gains the power to bypass the Senate confirmation process under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. He can replace Rosenstein with any serving official previously confirmed by the Senate to any other job.

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  • The Republican Rush to Confirm Kavanaugh Backfired

    • David A. Graham

    Three new allegations against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee show the dangers of a hasty process.

    The one overriding theme of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court has been haste, and the three new allegations of sexual misconduct against him that surfaced in the past day—bringing the total to four—suggest a motivation for Republican hurry, as well as demonstrate its dangers.

    Sunday evening, The New Yorker reported on allegations by Deborah Ramirez, a woman who attended Yale with Kavanaugh, that he had “exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.” Later in the evening, Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who represents Stormy Daniels, posted an email laying out allegations that Kavanaugh might have been present at gang rapes in high school organized by a friend. Monday morning, a local paper in Montgomery County, Maryland, reported that police there are examining another allegation from the 1980s.

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  • What Rosenstein’s Exit Would Mean for Mueller's Russia Investigation

    • Natasha Bertrand

    His departure could have consequences for the special counsel's probe.

    Updated on September 24 at 1:10 p.m. ET

    Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s status within the Justice Department is unclear following an explosive report in The New York Times last week that claimed he’d once suggested secretly recording President Trump and discussed invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. He is scheduled to meet with Trump later this week, according to the White House, and reportedly discussed resigning over the weekend with Chief of Staff John Kelly.

    “At the request of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, he and President Trump had an extended conversation to discuss the recent news stories,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement on Monday. “Because the President is at the United Nations General Assembly and has a full schedule with leaders from around the world,  they will meet on Thursday when the President returns to Washington, D.C.”

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  • A Warning From Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come

    • Anne Applebaum

    Polarization. Conspiracy theories. Attacks on the free press. An obsession with loyalty. Recent events in the United States follow a pattern Europeans know all too well.

    On December 31, 1999, we threw a party. It was the end of one millennium and the start of a new one; people very much wanted to celebrate, preferably somewhere exotic. Our party fulfilled that criterion. We held it at Chobielin, the manor house in northwest Poland that my husband and his parents had purchased a decade earlier, when it was a mildewed ruin. We had restored the house, very slowly. It was not exactly finished in 1999, but it did have a new roof. It also had a large, freshly painted, and completely unfurnished salon—perfect for a party.

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    The guests were various: journalist friends from London and Berlin, a few diplomats based in Warsaw, two friends who flew in from New York. But most of them were Poles, friends of ours and colleagues of my husband, who was then a deputy foreign minister in the Polish government. A handful of youngish Polish journalists came too—none then particularly famous—along with a few civil servants and one or two members of the government.

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  • My Rapist Apologized

    • Deborah Copaken

    The Kavanaugh allegations led me to reach out to the man who had assaulted me decades before.

    On Friday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted that he has “no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents.”

    Let me tell you what life was like as a girl in Montgomery County, Maryland, in the early 1980s. I am a year older than Christine Blasey Ford and a year younger than Brett Kavanaugh. I grew up in Potomac, Maryland, a few miles from both Holton Arms, Ford’s school, and Georgetown Prep, which Kavanaugh attended, but I went to my local public high school, Churchill. Never mind that any girl who was in high school in Potomac during that era knew, through the whisper network, not to go to a Georgetown Prep party alone. That was a given. What was also a given is that “date rape,” as a term, was in its infancy. Most of us thought getting our bodies groped at a high-school party—or anywhere—was the unfortunate price we paid for having them, not something we would ever go to the police to report.

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  • The Myth of Authoritarian Competence

    • Vance Serchuk

    What trouble in Turkey reveals about the perils of strongman rule

    For nearly six months, one of the world’s top economies has been gripped by crisis, sparking fears of wider financial contagion. Since the spring, the Turkish currency has cratered while inflation has soared, rattling other emerging markets from Argentina to Indonesia. Yet the most important warning to draw from Turkey’s recent convulsions is less economic than political: namely, the danger of betting on strongman rule.

    In truth, worries about Turkey melting down the global economy are misplaced. Unlike during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, when the collapse of the Thai currency unleashed regional upheaval, Turkey’s problems are less an indicator of systemic weakness across developing economies than the outgrowth of factors that are specific to Ankara. These include a politicized monetary policy, the highest current account deficit among the G20 developing economies, the most foreign-denominated private-sector debt of any emerging market, and a gratuitous fight with Washington that has escalated into sanctions.

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  • No One Knows Exactly What Would Happen If Mosquitoes Were to Disappear

    • Sarah Zhang

    A four-year experiment sets out to study the ecological consequences of a bold scheme to end malaria.

    When Delphine Thizy talks to people about eliminating malaria by targeting mosquitos, the one question she says everyone asks—“whether you’re talking to someone in a village in Africa who has never studied biology or an ecologist or a UN ambassador”—is this: What are the consequences?

    It’s a good question. To humans, mosquitoes are at best annoying and at worst deadly, but to dozens of other species in the wild, they are competitor, pollinator, or prey. If past malaria-eradication campaigns have taught us anything (see: 1950s, DDT), it is that reshaping the environment can have unintended consequences.

    Thizy talks about mosquitos because she is the stakeholder engagement manager for Target Malaria, a Bill Gates–backed nonprofit research consortium developing genetically modified mosquitoes to suppress populations of the bugs that spread the disease. The technology is ambitious and new, and thus controversial. Even though its genetically modified mosquitoes likely won’t be ready until 2029, Target Malaria has gotten enough questions about ecological consequences that it realized answering with the current scientific consensus—It will probably be fine!—was not good enough.

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  • The Crisis of the American Elites

    • Eliot A. Cohen

    Judith Butler and Ed Whelan share little in common—save their willingness to direct cruelty against ordinary people in defense of eminent colleagues.

    Judith Butler and Ed Whelan have probably never met. And if they did, we may be quite certain that they would have very little use for each other. After all, what does the professor of comparative literature, the author of (among other works) Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, who teaches in the critical-theory program at UC Berkeley, have to do with the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the co-editor of Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived? And yet, they find themselves embarrassed by nearly identical behaviors, forced to make shamefaced admissions that they have behaved like nasty, irresponsible idiots.

    Butler wrote a letter, signed by 50 other professors, urging New York University’s president and provost not to implement disciplinary sanctions on Avital Ronell, a professor of German, comparative literature, and English, for the sexual harassment of a graduate student whom Butler described as having “waged a malicious campaign against” Ronell with “malicious intention.” (Style point: It’s bad for anyone, including literature professors, to repeat the same strong adjective in one paragraph). Ronell, who also holds the Jacques Derrida Chair of Philosophy at the European Graduate School, is, needless to say, a very important person in the world of critical theory.

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  • How Puberty Kills Girls’ Confidence

    • Claire Shipman, Katty Kay, and JillEllyn Riley

    In their tween and teenage years, girls become dramatically less self-assured—a feeling that often lasts through adulthood.

    The change can be baffling to many parents: Their young girls are masters of the universe, full of gutsy fire. But as puberty sets in, their confidence nose-dives, and those same daughters can transform into unrecognizably timid, cautious, risk-averse versions of their former self.

    Over the course of writing our latest book, we spoke with hundreds of tween and teen girls who detailed a striking number of things they don’t feel confident about: “making new friends,” “the way I dress,” “speaking in a group.” In our research, we worked with Ypulse, a polling firm that focuses on tweens and teens, to survey more than 1,300 girls from the ages of 8 to 18 and their parents. (The sample was broadly representative of the country’s teen population in terms of race and geographic distribution.) The data is more dramatic than we’d imagined: The girls surveyed were asked to rate their confidence on a scale of 0 to 10, and from the ages of 8 to 14, the average of girls’ responses fell from approximately 8.5 to 6—a drop-off of 30 percent.

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  • Dear Therapist: I Love My Best Friend Like a Brother. My Wife Hates Him.

    • Lori Gottlieb

    She refuses to hang out with him, and it’s destroying our friendship.

    Dear Therapist,

    One of my best friends—I’ve known him since I was fourteen—is a bit of an inadvertent asshole. He can sometimes come off as incredibly insensitive, rude, and show-offy, and, for some reason, he competes with me in life. I am aware of these qualities, but I attribute them to his very difficult past and upbringing. I believe these experiences have given him a complex and some rough edges—hence my calling him an “inadvertent asshole.” To put it another way: I have known people who are nice, polite, and thoughtful, but who have not been there when I truly needed them. This friend, on the other hand, can come off as a prick, but if you call him at 2 o’clock in the morning for literally anything, he’ll be there, no hesitation. He’s always been there for me, and I love him like a brother.

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  More Popular Stories

• What Rosenstein’s Exit Would Mean for Mueller's Russia Investigation

  His departure could have consequences for the special counsel's probe.

  • Natasha Bertrand
  • 11:51 AM ET

• The Republican Rush to Confirm Kavanaugh Backfired

  Three new allegations against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee show the dangers of a hasty process.

  • David A. Graham
  • 11:13 AM ET

• Trump Signals an Openness to Talks With Iran

  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley appeared on Sunday morning’s news shows and took a hard line on Iran, but said the president would react favorably if Iran expressed interest in meeting.

  • Andrew Kragie
  • 9:20 AM ET
• Newsletter

  

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Oh My Rod

  Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein reportedly suggested secretly recording President Trump and invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.

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• Christine Blasey Ford and the Search for a Standard of Proof

  The Sunday shows were filled with commentary on the 51-year-old research psychologist’s expected testimony against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, but no one could quite define what a fair hearing should look like.

  • Andrew Kragie
  • Sep 23, 2018

• A Grassroots Call to Ban Gerrymandering

  Voters Not Politicians gathered an astounding 425,000 signatures in Michigan to secure a spot on the November ballot for a proposed constitutional amendment creating a citizens’ commission for redistricting.

  • Erick Trickey
  • Sep 23, 2018

• Christine Blasey Ford Agrees to Testify as Frustrated Republicans Ask ‘When?’

  Attorneys for the woman who has accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault said she would testify this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee without specifying a date or final terms.  

  • Andrew Kragie
  • Sep 22, 2018
• Writers
  • David A. Graham
    The Republican Rush to Confirm Kavanaugh Backfired
    11:13 AM ET
  • Vann R. Newkirk II
    The Situation in Puerto Rico Is Untenable
    Sep 20, 2018
  • Priscilla Alvarez
    The U.S. Sends an Unwelcoming Signal to Refugees
    Sep 18, 2018
  • Russell Berman
    Where Brett Kavanaugh's Nomination Goes From Here
    Sep 17, 2018
  • Emma Green
    The Tiny Blond Bible Teacher Taking on the Evangelical Political Machine
    Sep 17, 2018
  All Writers

• Christine Blasey Ford Weighs the Risks and Rewards of Testifying

  There’s almost no way the woman who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault can adequately prepare for a high-pressure appearance Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

  • Elaina Plott
  • Sep 22, 2018

• Donald Trump Might Be the ‘Client From Hell’

  The president doesn’t seem to understand what lawyers do—including the ones trying to defend the presidency.

  • Dick Polman
  • Sep 22, 2018

• Who Stands to Benefit From the New Leak About Rod Rosenstein?

  The New York Times reported Friday that the deputy attorney general had talked about secretly recording the president and invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

  • David A. Graham
  • Sep 21, 2018

• A Conservative Judge Takes Aim at Roe v. Wade in Face of a Shifting Supreme Court

  Judge Bobby Shepherd of the Eighth Circuit has upheld, for now, two Missouri laws restricting abortion that are virtually identical to those struck down in 2016 by the Supreme Court.

  • Emma Platoff
  • Sep 21, 2018

• The Kavanaugh Confirmation Process Is Getting Even Uglier

  After several days of comparative restraint, President Trump argued that if his Supreme Court nominee had really tried to assault Christine Blasey Ford, she would have filed a police report.

  • David A. Graham
  • Sep 21, 2018

• Big Spenders Come Out in Anticipation of the 2018 Midterms

  Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Richard Uihlein, George Soros, and Bill Maher all made political contributions in August.

  • Sarah Kleiner, Lateshia Beachum, Dave Levinthal, and Carrie Levine
  • Sep 21, 2018
• Radio Atlantic

  Radio Atlantic: The Reputations and Reckonings of #MeToo

  Alex Wagner, Megan Garber, and Gillian B. White join Matt Thompson to discuss Kavanaugh, Moonves, and the #MeToo movement one year in.

  • Kevin Townsend
  • Sep 21, 2018

• The Bail-Reform Tool That Activists Want Abolished

  They worry that algorithms used to determine a person’s flight risk will only perpetuate racial discrimination.

  • Madeleine Carlisle
  • Sep 21, 2018
• Politics Daily

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Terms and Conditions

  The woman who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault said she’s “prepared to testify next week,” as long as the conditions are “fair” and her safety is ensured.

  • Madeleine Carlisle and Olivia Paschal
  • Sep 20, 2018

• The Situation in Puerto Rico Is Untenable

  Although the effort to rebuild Puerto Rico has made progress, the island is still confronting questions of status, economics, and emigration that Hurricane Maria helped expose.

  • Vann R. Newkirk II
  • Sep 20, 2018

• Brett Kavanaugh Could Make the Midterms a Landmark Election for Women

  Especially women of color, who are running for state and congressional offices across the country this year

  • Ronald Brownstein
  • Sep 20, 2018

• A New Petition From House Democrats Could Complicate Nancy Pelosi’s Future

  Weeks before the midterms, lawmakers could be in the potentially awkward position of taking sides in the brewing leadership fight.

  • Elaina Plott
  • Sep 19, 2018
• Politics Daily

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Up in the Air

  Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said he was focused on “doing everything we can” to get Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault, to testify.

  • Madeleine Carlisle and Olivia Paschal
  • Sep 19, 2018