The Latest Huntsman 2012 News

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.

An illustration of an anonymous child highlighted in red in a crowd of other young students — Niv Bavarsky

The Futility of Trying to Prevent More School Shootings in America

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

As long as there is easy access to guns, there’s no way parents, teachers, and other specialists can thwart every violent teenager.

The 17-year-old who killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School, in Texas, allegedly used his father’s shotgun and .38 revolver. After a firefight with police, he surrendered, saying he did not have the courage to kill himself, as he had planned, Governor Greg Abbott told reporters.

In the hours after the May 18 attack, some students were shocked that Dimitrios Pagourtzis felled his classmates and two substitute teachers with buckshot. He played defensive tackle on the football team. He made honor roll. He is not known to have a criminal record, according to Abbott. Just the day before, he had been joking around with friends on a field trip to a waterpark. Others found him disturbing, often wearing a trench coat, said his classmates, and, on that day, a black T-shirt with the haunting message BORN TO KILL.

A Timeline of Trump Associates Asking for Dirt on Clinton

Natasha Bertrand

A new report that Roger Stone sought damaging information on Clinton from Julian Assange is the latest in an increasingly complicated chronology.

On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that longtime Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone tried to solicit information about Hillary Clinton from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in September 2016. At the time, the Journal reported, Stone wrote to Randy Credico, a New York radio host who had interviewed Assange, and asked Credico to ask Assange for “any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30, 2011.”

Like Stone, Trump seemed to believe that damaging information about Clinton could be found in the emails that she sent using her private email server, and later deleted. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said during a press conference in July 2016.

Relationships Are More Important Than Ambition

Emily Esfahani Smith

There's more to life than leaving home.

This month, many of the nation's best and brightest high school seniors will receive thick envelopes in the mail announcing their admission to the college of their dreams. According to a 2011 survey, about 60 percent of them will go to their first-choice schools. For many of them, going away to college will be like crossing the Rubicon. They will leave their families—their homes—and probably not return for many years, if at all.

That was journalist Rod Dreher's path. Dreher grew up in the small southern community of Starhill, Louisiana, 35 miles northwest of Baton Rouge. His family goes back five generations there. His father was a part-time farmer and sanitarian; his mother drove a school bus. His younger sister Ruthie loved hunting and fishing, even as a little girl.

Where Has Teen Car Culture Gone?

Gary Cross

Something is missing in the lives of today’s adolescents: that magical coming-of-age feeling when a whole world opened up.

For nearly a century, coming of age in America meant getting behind the wheel. A driver’s license marked the transition from childhood and dependence to adult responsibility and freedom. To many, it was a far more important milestone than voting or legal drinking. It was the beginning of a new world—of cruising down Main Street to meet with friends and compete with rivals; the ritual of being picked up for a date and making out while “parking”; and of the pleasures and frustrations of repairing, souping up, customizing, or racing a car.

This world, familiar to anyone who has seen American Graffiti, the 1973 paean to teen driving, was unique to the U.S. No teens in any other country in the world shared American teens’ level of enthusiasm for all things automotive. This was in part because in the mid-20th century there was a wealth of available cars—cheap used ones from the late 1920s—as well as the fact that by 1940, American teenagers were more likely to be attending high school than working. Elsewhere, 16-year-olds rode bikes or buses and had jobs. Practically nowhere else on earth did teens have the means—and, as high-school students and not full-time workers, the time—to join the adult world of automobility. And they did so on their own terms, partially emulating their elders who had cars, but also by using cars to craft their own personal styles and escape their parents’ control.

Campaign-Finance Reform Can Save the GOP

Reihan Salam

As the Republican Party tilts toward populism, its donor base is drying up.

If Republicans lose the House in 2018, expect the Trumpist right to start thinking very hard about the virtues of campaign-finance reform.

Late last year, as Republicans in Congress scrambled to pass a sweeping tax overhaul, there was a palpable sense that if they failed to do so, their most devoted financial supporters might revolt. One Republican, Representative Chris Collins of New York, told reporters, “my donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again,’” a message that surely concentrated the mind. Just after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was signed into law, a number of major donors opened their wallets to GOP candidates, as if to positively reinforce good behavior, much as one might train a wayward child. Fears of a donor strike quickly receded.

How the Enlightenment Ends

Henry A. Kissinger

Philosophically, intellectually—in every way—human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence.

Three years ago, at a conference on transatlantic issues, the subject of artificial intelligence appeared on the agenda. I was on the verge of skipping that session—it lay outside my usual concerns—but the beginning of the presentation held me in my seat.

The speaker described the workings of a computer program that would soon challenge international champions in the game Go. I was amazed that a computer could master Go, which is more complex than chess. In it, each player deploys 180 or 181 pieces (depending on which color he or she chooses), placed alternately on an initially empty board; victory goes to the side that, by making better strategic decisions, immobilizes his or her opponent by more effectively controlling territory.

Asylum seekers walk down Roxham Road to cross into Quebec at the U.S.-Canada border in 2017. — Christinne Muschi / Reuters

‘There’s a Perception That Canada Is Being Invaded’

Sigal Samuel

Justin Trudeau’s government has started rejecting more refugee claims from migrants who cross the U.S.-Canada border on foot.

It may seem paradoxical. Last year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared to issue an open invitation to refugees with a tweet declaring, “to those fleeing persecution, terror & war ... #WelcomeToCanada.” This year, his government is working hard to deter thousands of people who are walking over the U.S. border to seek asylum in Canada.

Canada has begun granting refugee status to fewer irregular border crossers—that is, people who walk into the country without going through a designated port of entry. Since President Donald Trump was elected, over 27,000 people have crossed into Canada overland. (By comparison, only 2,000 people did this in 2016.) In 2017, the country granted refugee status to 53 percent of such border crossers, but that number was down to 40 percent in the first three months of this year, Reuters reported. Did Trudeau change his mind about Canada’s welcoming posture in general? Or is something else at work here?

How South Korea Pulled Trump and Kim Back From the Brink

Uri Friedman

Will Moon Jae In achieve a breakthrough—or will his peace offensive blow up in his face?

To be in South Korea in mid-May—when North Korea released American hostages and Donald Trump announced his summit in Singapore with Kim Jong Un and the leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea gathered in Tokyo to talk denuclearization and reconciliation on the Korean peninsula—was to feel as if the spring of 2018 might be one of those moments when history, after plodding along for decades, suddenly moved very fast.

And pushing it along was South Korean President Moon Jae In, who had lobbied hard for talks between Trump and Kim and whose diplomatic investment seemed to be paying off as the summit approached. Even last week, when history seemed to come to a screeching halt as Trump canceled the summit, Moon kept pushing, holding his own surprise summit with the North Korean leader on Saturday. Moon had been blindsided by Trump’s decision, but he was moving to reassert control over what he still hopes could be a historic breakthrough for peace on the Korean peninsula. Human history, one of Moon’s advisers told me recently in Seoul, “is ... governed by certain law of heavenly mandate. There is a time for peace—that is a dictate of nature. And Moon Jae In is following that heavenly mandate.”’

The Soul of Solo Is a Droid

Spencer Kornhaber

Star Wars’ first woke robot, L3-37, speaks to the film’s revolutionary themes—and to pop culture’s anxiety around artificial intelligence.

Spoilers for Solo: A Star Wars Story ahead.

George Lucas has long said that he envisioned Star Wars as a story told from the perspective of a robot, and that the lovable rolling trashcan R2-D2 is really the saga’s hero and narrator. But in the Star Wars universe itself, droids are far from central. They’re bought and sold, wantonly disassembled and deprogrammed, ignored and talked-over, used as cannon fodder and denied access to drinking establishments.

It’s an awkward fact of the galaxy. Many droids appear as smart and self-aware as any human. They convey emotions, whether in excited bleeps or gasps of “Oh, dear.” Yet if they rue their second-class status, we don’t hear about it.

That is, until Solo: A Star Wars Story, Disney’s spin-off film about a young Han Solo. Lando Calrissian’s droid L3-37, voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is no go-along, get-along machine. She’s a robot revolutionary, demanding equal rights and sowing dissent among servants. You might call her Star Wars’ first woke bot. Though that description may make her sound like a cute gimmick for a 2018 blockbuster, L3’s highly entertaining persona comes with fascinating implications—about Solo, about Star Wars, and about popular culture.