Obama's New Surrogate on Women's Issues: 'Julia'

A close-up shot of Jeff Sessions's face — Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

The Strange, Slow-Motion Defenestration of Jeff Sessions

David A. Graham

Why is President Trump badmouthing his attorney general, why doesn’t he just fire him, and what does he hope to accomplish by pushing him out?

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has spent much of his career making enemies. The Alabaman’s strident views have won him plenty of detractors, from civil-rights activists to fellow members of the Senate. But in Donald Trump, Sessions believed he had finally found a champion and fellow traveler. Instead, it seems Sessions has found his most formidable enemy yet.

Trump is now on his second consecutive day of publicly humiliating the attorney general on Twitter, following an interview with The New York Times last week in which he said he wished he’d never appointed Sessions. The attorney general’s decision to recuse himself from investigation into Russian interference in the election infuriated Trump, who has repeatedly tried to end the investigation, including by firing FBI Director James Comey. Instead, Comey’s firing resulted in the appointment of a special counsel to take the case. Here’s Trump’s latest broadside against Sessions:

Trump's Mistake at the Boy Scout Jamboree

Yoni Appelbaum

The president addressed the quadrennial gathering like a campaign rally—talking to a group devoted to service as if it valued self-interest.

Donald Trump continued his ongoing tour of cherished American institutions on Monday night, delivering yet another jarringly partisan speech to an apolitical audience—this one, comprising tens of thousands still too young to vote.

During the campaign, his performance at the Al Smith dinner—where presidential candidates roast their rivals and themselves every four years—devolved into overt attacks on his opponent. Shortly after his election, he stunned CIA employees by delivering a campaign-style stump speech before the agency’s Memorial Wall. On Saturday, he surprised the crowd of uniformed personnel at the commissioning of the USS Gerald R. Ford by imploring them to lobby Congress in support of his agenda.

Senate Republicans Clear Key Health-Care Hurdle

Russell Berman

The GOP voted to begin debate on repealing Obamacare, as several holdouts fell in line. What—if anything—the party can pass remains uncertain.

Updated on July 25 at 4:08 p.m. Eastern

Senate Republicans have voted to begin debate on legislation to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, clearing a key procedural hurdle even as it remains unclear what—if any—legislation the party might ultimately pass.

The vote was as narrow as it gets: With two Republicans out of their slim majority of 52 opposing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s motion to proceed on Tuesday afternoon, Vice President Mike Pence broke a 50-50 tie to formally launch deliberations that had taken place almost entirely in private for two months. The vote was briefly delayed as Senate officials removed protesters shouting “Kill the Bill! Kill the Bill!” from the balcony of the chamber.

A lamp on a desk against a dark background — INSAGO / Shutterstock

Snopes Faces an Ugly Legal Battle

Alexis C. Madrigal

The internet’s favorite fact-checkers are caught in a messy dispute.

On Monday, the editorial staff of Snopes.com wrote a short plea for help. The post said that the site needed money to fund its operations because another company that Snopes had contracted with “continues to essentially hold the Snopes.com web site hostage.”

“Our legal team is fighting hard for us, but, having been cut off from all revenue, we are facing the prospect of having no financial means to continue operating the site and paying our staff (not to mention covering our legal fees) in the meanwhile,” the note continued.

It was a shocking message from a website that’s been around for more than 20 years—and that’s become a vital part of internet infrastructure in the #fakenews era. The site’s readers have responded. Already, more than $92,000 has been donated to a GoFundMe with a goal of $500,000.

Why Trump Might Fire Robert Mueller

Peter Beinart

President Trump is reportedly considering drastic action to end the Russia investigation.

Why do Donald Trump and his advisors keep floating the possibility of firing Robert Mueller, an act that would spark the greatest constitutional crisis since Watergate, perhaps the greatest in modern American history?

Partly, it’s simple rage. Mueller threatens Trump. And when Trump sees someone as a threat, he tries to discredit and destroy them—conventional norms of propriety, decency and legality be damned.

But there’s another, more calculated, reason. Trump and his advisors may genuinely believe that firing Mueller is a smart move. And if you put morality aside, and see the question in nakedly political terms, they may be right.

The chances that Mueller will uncover something damning seem very high. Trump has already admitted to firing former FBI Director James Comey over the Russia investigation. Donald Trump Jr. has already admitted to welcoming the opportunity to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from people he believed were representatives of the Russian government. Even if Mueller doesn’t accuse anyone of a crime, he’s likely to paint a brutal picture. And that’s just on the question of election collusion and obstruction of justice. If Mueller uses Russia to segue into Trump’s business dealings, who knows what he might find. An all-star team of legal and financial sleuths, with unlimited time and money, and the ability to subpoena documents and people, have been let loose on the affairs of a man whose own autobiographer called him a “sociopath.” No wonder Trump is scared.

The Swedish Novel That Imagines a Dystopia for the Childless

Sophie Gilbert

Ninni Holmqvist’s 2009 book “The Unit,” newly reissued, imagines a world in which people who haven’t procreated are forced to make a different—ultimate—contribution to society.

“It was more comfortable than I could have imagined,” is how The Unit begins, with Dorrit, a single, impoverished 50-year-old woman picked up from her home in a metallic red SUV and transported to a luxury facility constructed by the government for people just like her. Her new, two-room apartment is bright and spacious, “tastefully decorated,” inside a complex that includes a theater, art studios, a cinema, a library, and gourmet restaurants. For the first time, Dorrit is surrounded by likeminded people and included rather than ostracized. At the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material, she’s one among a community of people who couldn’t—or didn’t want to—have children.

The cost is that, for the remaining four or five years of her life, Dorrit will be subjected to medical testing and will donate her organs one by one until her final, fatal donation. The Unit’s author, the Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist, has imagined a society fixated on capital, but in human form. Those who have children or who work in fields like teaching and healthcare are seen as enabling growth; the childless and creative types like Dorrit, a writer, are deemed “dispensable,” removed, and forced to make their own biological contributions. The unit itself is a fantasy of government welfare for aging citizens (it offers delicious meals, culture, and companionship), but with a particularly sharp twist.

The Bankruptcies That Would Follow an Obamacare Repeal

Annie Lowrey

Without insurance, millions of Americans will find themselves in dire financial straits as they struggle to pay for medical services.

Senate Republicans are working to pass legislation scaling back government support for health coverage, with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calling for a vote on Tuesday to begin debate on a bill whose precise contents remain unknown. “Every Republican running for office promised immediate relief from this disastrous law,” President Trump said on Monday, referring to Obamacare. “But so far, Senate Republicans have not done their job in ending the Obamacare nightmare.”

Even without more specifics on the details of the legislation, one thing is clear: The options under consideration would increase the number of uninsured by 15 to 30 million over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated. A consequence of this will be not only a loss of access to medical services, but an increase in financial crises for millions of American families. Insurance, after all, is also a financial product, protecting people from economic ruin.

Gelpi / Shutterstock / Paul Spella / The Atlantic

The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube

Adrienne LaFrance

Surprise eggs and slime are at the center of an online realm that’s changing the way the experts think about human development.

Toddlers crave power. Too bad for them, they have none. Hence the tantrums and absurd demands. (No, I want this banana, not that one, which looks identical in every way but which you just started peeling and is therefore worthless to me now.)

They just want to be in charge! This desire for autonomy clarifies so much about the behavior of a very small human. It also begins to explain the popularity of YouTube among toddlers and preschoolers, several development psychologists told me.

If you don’t have a 3-year-old in your life, you may not be aware of YouTube Kids, an app that’s essentially a stripped-down version of the original video blogging site, with videos filtered by the target audience’s age. And because the mobile app is designed for use on a phone or tablet, kids can tap their way across a digital ecosystem populated by countless videos—all conceived with them in mind.

An ISIS fighter rolls down a street of Raqqa in a military tank. — Stringer / Reuters

Why Hasn’t ISIS Nuked America Yet?

Graeme Wood

There is plenty of reason to be confident that if ISIS could reliably and easily make a dirty bomb, they would do so.

In the last three years, I have not spent much time wondering whether ISIS has access to radioactive material. I know they have had access, because I had a hand in getting it to them.

In 2005, while working for an air cargo company in Mosul, I delivered a large wooden box, marked for consignment to the University of Mosul. To fly it in, we needed a special plane, an Antonov-12, whose cargo hold was cavernous compared to our usual 727s and DC-8s. The box contained, according to its air waybill, radiological imaging equipment for the university’s teaching hospital. The next day, workers from the hospital met me at my office, and I gently forklifted the crate into their truck. The load seemed off-balance, and I winced when I heard a corner of the box splinter as we strapped it down. But they drove away, and unless that million-dollar piece of medical equipment fell off the back of the truck and ended up strewn across the road, it probably made it safely to the hospital, where it was captured by ISIS nine years later.

A woman in a tri-color burkini swims in the ocean in Cannes, France. — Eric Gaillard / Reuters

The Burqini Debate's Irresolvable Tension

Shadi Hamid

Liberals emphasize personal choice, but their conception of choice has its limits.

When I wrote a largely personal, impressionistic piece last week about the burqini, it elicited one of the most charged reactions I’ve seen about anything I’ve written. The piece—or at least one reaction to the piece—went viral. The subtitle (“Is there any right way to react to the burqini?”) bothered many readers, who felt that even posing the question left open the possibility that it might be answered incorrectly.

In the piece itself, I defended the right of women to wear whatever they want wherever they want to, as I long have. But the burqini (along with the headscarf and the face veil) is such a charged topic precisely because of the reactions it elicits on both sides of the debate. Freedom of choice, autonomy, and individual agency are at the heart of the classical liberal idea. They’ve never been defended consistently by liberals, including liberal greats like Thomas Jefferson or John Locke, but the basic principle underlying these ideas has been clear: that people should be able to pursue their own conception of the Good, as long as they don’t harm anyone in the process.