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Jesse Draxler; Photo: David Hume Kennerly / Getty

The First White President

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.

It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

North Koreans watch news report showing North Korea's Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile launch on an electronic screen. — Kyodo via Reuters

What Total Destruction of North Korea Means

Kori Schake

As Trump considers military options, he’s drawing unenforceable red lines.

Speaking before the UN General Assembly today, President Donald Trump announced that, unless North Korea gives up its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, “the United States will have no choice but to totally destroy” the country. He sounded almost excited as he threatened, “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

North Korea is a serious problem, and not one of Trump’s making—the last four American presidents failed to impede North Korea’s progress towards a nuclear weapon. President George H.W. Bush took unilateral action, removing U.S. nuclear weapons and reducing America’s troop levels in the region, hoping to incentivize good behavior; Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush tried to negotiate restrictions; President Barack Obama mostly averted his eyes. North Korea defied them all.

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Jean M. Twenge

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

A security checkpoint inside the lobby of Trump Tower — Mike Segar / Reuters

Is Trump's 'Wiretap' Claim Vindicated?

David A. Graham

The president’s defenders say reported surveillance of Paul Manafort justifies an accusation against Barack Obama, but they overstate the facts.

Viewed from the most obvious angle, the latest scoops about special counsel Robert Mueller investigating Paul Manafort are at best neutral news for the president and more likely bad news.

The new reports say that U.S. officials got warrants to surveil Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, before and after the 2016 election under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and that Mueller told Manafort he would soon be indicted. At the least, this means Trump made the dubious decision to hire a man with shadowy ties as a top aide. At worst, it could mean Mueller wants to flip Manafort into a witness against Trump or his campaign.

But viewed from a more oblique angle, could the fresh revelations actually be good news for Trump? So far several of the president’s allies argue that this represents vindication for Trump’s thus-far-unproven allegation that President Barack Obama improperly surveilled him.

Several young women being received by noblemen — Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale / Library and Archives Canada

How One Woman Brought the 'Mother's Curse' to Canada

Sarah Zhang

Old French Canadian genealogy records reveal how a harmful mutation can hide from natural selection in a mother's DNA.

The first King’s Daughters—or filles du roi—arrived in New France in 1663, and 800 more would follow over the next decade. Given their numbers, they were not literally the king’s daughters of course.

They were poor and usually of common birth, but their passage and dowry were indeed paid by King Louis XIV for the purpose of empire building: These women were to marry male colonists and have many children, thus strengthening France’s hold on North America.

And so they did. The filles du roi became the founding mothers of French Canadians, for whom these women are a source of historical pride. A grand old restaurant in Montreal was named after the filles du roi. So is a roller-derby team. French Canadians can usually trace their ancestry back to one or more of these women. “French Canadian genealogy is so well documented, it’s just a piece of cake to trace any line you have,” says Susan Colby, a retired archaeologist who comes from a French Canadian family and has done some of that tracing herself.

Silhouette of a doctor looking at an MRI scan — Don Carstens / Getty

Reading the Bible Through Neuroscience

Sigal Samuel

What was it like inside the brain of an ancient prophet?

James Kugel has been spent his entire scholarly career studying the Bible, but some very basic questions about it still obsess him. What was it about the minds of ancient Israelites that allowed them to hear and see God directly—or at least, to believe that they did? Were the biblical prophets literally hearing voices and seeing visions, understanding themselves to be transmitting God’s own exact words? If so, why did such direct encounters with God become rarer over time?

In his new and final book, The Great Shift, Kugel investigates these questions through the lens of neuroscientific findings. (The approach is reminiscent of other recent books, like Kabbalah: A Neurocognitive Approach to Mystical Experiences, co-written by a neurologist and a mysticism scholar.) First, Kugel uses biblical research to show that ancient people had a “sense of self” that was fundamentally different from the one modern Westerners have—and that this enabled them to experience and interpret prophecy differently than we do. Then he uses scientific research to show that we shouldn’t assume their view was wrong. If anything, our modern Western notion of the bounded, individual self is the anomaly; most human beings throughout history conceived of the self as a porous entity open to intrusions. In fact, much of the rest of the world today still does.

Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Colorado on October 30, 2016. — Brennan Linsley / AP

How the GOP Prompted the Decay of Political Norms

E.J. Dionne Jr., Norm Ornstein, and Thomas E. Mann

The Republican Party laid the groundwork for dysfunction long before Donald Trump was elected president.

President Trump’s approach to governance is unlike that of his recent predecessors, but it is also not without antecedents. The groundwork for some of this dysfunction was laid in the decades before Trump’s emergence as a political figure. Nowhere is that more true than in the disappearance of the norms of American politics.

Norms are defined as “a standard or pattern, especially of social behavior, that is typical or expected of a group.” They are how a person is supposed to behave in a given social setting. We don’t fully appreciate the power of norms until they are violated on a regular  basis. And the breaching of norms often produces a cascading effect: As one person breaks with tradition  and expectation, behavior previously considered inappropriate is normalized and taken up by others. Donald Trump is the Normless President, and his ascendancy threatens to inspire a new wave of norm-breaking.

Jennifer Lawrence in Darren Aronofsky's new film 'mother!' — Paramount Pictures

What Is the Meaning of Mother!?

David Sims

Delving into the plot, allegories, and shocking ending of one of the most surprising Hollywood releases of the year

This story contains spoilers throughout for the plot of mother!

The Two Republicans Who Will Likely Determine Obamacare's Fate

Russell Berman

A last-minute repeal vote could come down to Senators John McCain and Lisa Murkowski, who opposed the GOP’s most recent proposal in July and are facing competing pressures from their state’s governors.

The fate of the GOP’s 11th-hour effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act likely will come down to two familiar faces in the health-care debate: Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

And in the last 24 hours, the fence-sitting Republicans were pulled in opposite directions by their state’s governors. On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Bill Walker of Alaska joined a bipartisan group of nine other state leaders in opposing the bill that the Senate might vote on next week. Walker, who won his election as an independent after previously running as a Republican, rebuffed entreaties from the White House to support the proposal written by Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Instead, he urged the Senate—and by extension, Murkowski—to pursue a bipartisan fix to Obamacare.

Customers shopping at Toys R Us — Alan Diaz / AP

Toys Aren’t Us

Rebecca J. Rosen

Millennials may have loved the big-box chain as kids, but as parents, they’d rather shop online.

In a year of constant bad news across the retail sector, Toys “R” Us has become a little engine that couldn’t, filing for bankruptcy in a federal court in Virginia Monday night. As part of its bankruptcy plan, the company will continue to operate most of its stores through the holiday season, when the company has traditionally pulled in the most revenue.

The bankruptcy marks a new phase for a chain that has struggled to find its way online, a vulnerability for a company whose primary customers are parents. While the convenience of online shopping is a boon to most consumers, for parents it may be even more of a draw. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the vast majority of households do not have a stay-at-home parent. After a full day of work, there’s dinner to be served, baths to be drawn, and bedtime rituals to be undertaken at length. Squeezing in a trip to the store is often impossible.

‘It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness'

Tynesha Foreman, Nicolas Pollock, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg

Ta-Nehisi Coates explores how the 2016 election was a reaction to Obama’s presidency.

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How Just Six Words Can Spark Conversation About Race in America

Nicolas Pollock and Sophia Myszkowski

Michele Norris has created an archive of more than 50,000 stories about race and identity.

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When In-Person Conversation Is Better Than Texting

Nicolas Pollock and Brianna Pressey

Sherry Turkle, the Director of the MIT “Initiative on Technology and Self,” discusses the relationship between talking in real life and cultivating empathy.

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The First White President

What Total Destruction of North Korea Means

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Is Trump's 'Wiretap' Claim Vindicated?

How One Woman Brought the 'Mother's Curse' to Canada

Reading the Bible Through Neuroscience

How the GOP Prompted the Decay of Political Norms

What Is the Meaning of Mother!?

The Two Republicans Who Will Likely Determine Obamacare's Fate

Toys Aren’t Us

‘It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness'

How Just Six Words Can Spark Conversation About Race in America

When In-Person Conversation Is Better Than Texting