Five Best Monday Columns

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Jimmy Carter in The New York Times on America's human rights record Carter harshly criticizes America's leaders for their human rights records in recent years. "This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues," he writes. Carter cites drone attacks, warantless wiretaps, and detentions at Guantanamo. "At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules of law and principles of justice enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," Carter writes.

David Martin in The Washington Post on Obama's immigration discretion Martin digs into the idea of "prosecutorial discretion," which President Obama cited when he announced his Justice Department would stop deporting thousands of illegal immigrants brought here as children. "[P]rosecutorial discretion, contrary to advocates' apparent assumption, isn't authority to negate whole realms of enacted law. It is authority to choose strategies and to direct resources while still achieving the basic aims of the relevant legislation." Because the government doesn't have resources to deport more than a small fraction of illegal immigrants each year, opponents of prosecutorial discretion are basically arguing for randomness, he says. Obama's robust record on deportation allows him to make these strategic calls with more authority.

Albert Hunt in Bloomberg View on Romney's differences with big business Hunt suggests that some of Mitt Romney's political positions put him at odds with the business community, despite his mutual embrace with its leaders. "[H]is political calculations changed some long-held views," Hunt says. Romney's hard-line on China's trade policies probably concerns some who fear a trade war. On immigration and deficit reduction, too, his political stands might conflict with the business community's priorities. "There always are trade-offs in backing a presidential candidate," he says.

Misha Glenny in The New York Times on regulating cyberwars The recent confirmation that America deployed the Stuxnet virus to take down an Iranian nuclear facility could foreshadow an uncontrollable cyberwar with our enemies, Glenny says. "[O]nce released, virus developers generally lose control of their inventions, which will inevitably seek out and attack the networks of innocent parties," Glenny warns. "Moreover, all countries that possess an offensive cyber capability will be tempted to use it now that the first shot has been fired." Glenny suggests an international agreement on military use of viruses, warning that without one, the impetus to attack preemptively will grow too large, making the internet unsafe for civilians.

Josh Barro in The Boston Globe on fixing air travel Hopes for high-speed trains on both coasts seem stalled, but Barro says there are ways we can make medium-distance air travel cheaper and more efficient. "By changing the way we charge airlines to use airports, we can get a lot more travel out of the infrastructure we already have — and reduce fares and delays while we're at it," he writes. "[A]irport capacity we have is badly misused because it is mispriced. Small planes aren’t charged enough, and big planes are charged too much. As a result, airlines run lots of flights with few seats, and the skies and runways get crowded with planes." There are easy ways to change the pay structure that will result in more efficient shuttling between our major cities.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

About the Author

Eric Randall is an associate digital editor at Boston Magazine and a former staff writer for The Atlantic Wire.

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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.”