The Rapidly Diminishing Returns of Outrage at Guns

Disconnected by Disaster—Photos From a Battered Puerto Rico

Alan Taylor

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer.

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer. Most of the U.S. territory currently has no electricity or running water, fewer than 250 of the island’s 1,600 cellphone towers are operational, and damaged ports, roads, and airports are slowing the arrival and transport of aid. Communication has been severely limited and some remote towns are only now being contacted. Jenniffer Gonzalez, the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, told the Associated Press that Hurricane Maria has set the island back decades.

The Brazenness of Trump's White House Staff Using Private Email

David A. Graham

How could six senior presidential aides mimic the strategy for which Trump lacerated Hillary Clinton? Only if they believe they are as immune to the usual rules as he is.

Updated on September 25 at 8:20 p.m.

Late Sunday night, Josh Dawsey of Politico dropped a story that, in any other administration, would have been cause for concern but hardly surprise.

“Presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has corresponded with other administration officials about White House matters through a private email account set up during the transition last December,” Dawsey wrote. “Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, set up their private family domain late last year before moving to Washington from New York, according to people with knowledge of events as well as publicly available internet registration records.”

A pneumatic-tube station in the Sears, Roebuck & Company mail-order plant in Chicago — Library of Congress

The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing

Derek Thompson

One hundred years ago, a retail giant that shipped millions of products by mail moved swiftly into the brick-and-mortar business, changing it forever. Is that happening again?

Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores. This summer, it bought Whole Foods and its 400 grocery locations. And last week, the company announced a partnership with Kohl’s to allow returns at the physical retailer’s stores.

Why is Amazon looking more and more like an old-fashioned retailer? The company’s do-it-all corporate strategy adheres to a familiar playbook—that of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Sears might seem like a zombie today, but it’s easy to forget how transformative the company was exactly 100 years ago, when it, too, was capitalizing on a mail-to-consumer business to establish a physical retail presence.

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.

A Primetime Clash Over Health Care

Russell Berman

Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy sparred with Bernie Sanders and Amy Kobluchar on CNN hours after their bill dismantling Obamacare appeared to collapse.

Ordinarily, you debate to stave off defeat. But for Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy on Monday night, the defeat came first.

By the time the two GOP senators stepped on CNN’s stage Monday night for a prime-time debate over their health-care proposal, they knew they had already lost.

A few hours earlier, Senator Susan Collins became the third Republican to formally reject the pair’s legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, effectively killing its chances for passage through the Senate this week. Graham and Cassidy had hoped to use the forum to make a closing argument for their plan, and to line it up against Senator Bernie Sanders and his call for a single-payer, Medicare-for-All health-care system. Instead, the two senators found themselves defending a proposal that was no less hypothetical—and probably much less popular—than Sanders’ supposed liberal fantasy.

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.”

Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner, and Khloe Kardashian during the 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians' 10-year-anniversary special — E!

The Sadness of the Kardashians

Sophie Gilbert

E!’s 10-year-anniversary special celebrating its flagship family was surprisingly honest and strangely tragic.

On Friday, as Puerto Rico contended with the aftermath of a hurricane that had left much of the island without power, and North Korea threatened to detonate a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean, the internet-gossip complex grappled instead with the momentous news that an unmarried 20-year-old reality star was pregnant. Kylie Jenner, TMZ reported, the youngest scion of the Kardashian family, had been telling friends that she and her boyfriend, the rapper Travis Scott, were going to have a baby. Unidentified family friends promptly confirmed the news to People. And some fans began to wonder—had Kylie’s mother, Kris Jenner, leaked the news herself to boost the ratings for E!’s Sunday night 10-year-anniversary special of Keeping Up With the Kardashians?

The Breitbart Universe Unites for Roy Moore

Rosie Gray

Everyone from Steve Bannon to Nigel Farage came out on Monday for the Alabama judge turned aspiring senator’s closing rally.

FAIRHOPE, Ala.—There were the Avengers. There were the X-Men. There was the Suicide Squad.

And then there was Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage, Phil Robertson, Chris McDaniel, Paul Nehlen, and Roy Moore.

Monday night in the Mobile Bay town of Fairhope, the stars of the Breitbart universe assembled for Moore’s closing rally ahead of Tuesday’s Senate special primary to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s old seat. On the other side from the aforementioned A-team: Luther Strange and millions of dollars connected to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—and, though it was barely mentioned, President Trump.

The crew in town for Moore’s rally, despite a mixed record of electoral success and relevance, constitute some of the biggest avatars of the insurgent populist movement Bannon has championed. There was Bannon himself, the former chief strategist who has returned to Breitbart and used it to heavily promote Moore in this special election, which Bannon views as a bellwether for insurgent candidates in 2018. McDaniel and Nehlen are two of Bannon’s favored candidates; McDaniel ran unsuccessfully against Senator Thad Cochran in Mississippi in 2014, and Nehlen, a hardline anti-globalist and occasional user of the alt-right epithet “cuck,” lost by 68 points against Paul Ryan in 2016 and is challenging him again this cycle. Farage, the Brexit thought leader, represents the global aspect of Bannon’s vision of a worldwide nationalist insurgency.

Chicago Police District Commander Kenneth Johnson, wearing his uniform and holding a microphone, speaks during an anti-violence rally in Chicago in July. — Kamil Krzaczynski / Reuters

America's Uneven Crime Spike

Matt Ford

Violence in a few major cities drove the national murder rate higher in 2016, according to new FBI statistics.

The FBI’s latest crime report isn’t heartening. Murders in the United States rose by almost 9 percent last year, the FBI reported Monday, mirroring similar increases in other forms of violent crime. The homicide spike is one of the sharpest one-year upticks since the Great American Crime Decline in the 1990s, and, when combined with 2015’s numbers, marks only the second two-year increase since the 1980s.

But a deeper dive into Monday’s stats doesn’t suggest that the United States is backsliding to the high-crime years of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Instead, the FBI’s data points to sharp geographic disparities in violent crimes in American society, with a few major cities accounting for large portions of 2016’s growth in murders and other serious offenses.

Lady Gaga during a doctor's visit in the 'Five Foot Two' documentary — Netflix

Lady Gaga's Illness Is Not a Metaphor

Spencer Kornhaber

A new film details the reason the star postponed her recent tour—and will test cultural attitudes about gender, pain, and pop.

“Pain without a cause is pain we can’t trust,” the author Leslie Jamison wrote in 2014. “We assume it’s been chosen or fabricated.”

Jamison’s essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” unpacked the suffering-woman archetype, which encompasses literature’s broken hearts (Anna Karenina, Miss Havisham) and society’s sad girls—the depressed, the anorexic, and in the 19th century, the tubercular. Wariness about being defined by suffering, she argued, had led many modern women to adopt a new pose. She wrote, “The post-wounded woman conducts herself as if preempting certain accusations: Don’t cry too loud; don’t play victim.” Jamison questioned whether this was an overcorrection. “The possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it,” she wrote. “Pain that gets performed is still pain.”