The Voters of Alabama

A series of circuits and wires labeled with the letters of the alphabet — Fred Prouser / Reuters

Email Is Dangerous

Quinn Norton

Electronic mail as we know it is drowning in spam, forged phishing mails, and other scams and hacks. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

One week ago, a group of European security researchers warned that two obscure encryption schemes for email were deeply broken. Those schemes, called OpenPGP and S/MIME, are not the kinds of technologies you’re using but don’t know it. They are not part of the invisible and vital internet infrastructure we all rely on.

This isn’t that kind of story.

The exploit, called Efail by the researchers who released it, showed that encrypted (and therefore private and secure) email is not only hard to do, but might be impossible in any practical way, because of what email is at its core. But contained in the story of why these standards failed is the story of why email itself is the main way we get hacked, robbed, and violated online. The story of email is also the story of how we lost so much of our privacy, and how we might regain it.

Trump Almost Always Folds

David A. Graham

From trade deals to gun control and immigration to military deployments, the president has a consistent pattern: Talk a big game, then back down.

President Trump’s May 8 announcement that he was withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal should not have come as a surprise. He’d spent years railing against the plan—“the worst deal ever,” he dubbed it—and had promised to rip it up. And yet up to the moment when the president made the final call, there was still some suspense about what he would say.

This was not merely wishful thinking by the deal’s backers, though it was partly that. It was not only that members of Trump’s team, most notably Defense Secretary James Mattis, had voiced support for the deal. It wasn’t even just that Trump relishes taking the press (and even his own advisers) by surprise.

No, the other big reason that no one could be sure was that Trump almost always folds. Faced with a tough decision, the president has consistently blinked, giving in to his opponents. Trump has mocked former Secretary of State John Kerry for his supposedly poor negotiation powers, argued that multiple past international agreements suffered from weak-kneed diplomacy, and criticized British Prime Minister Theresa May, a close U.S. ally, for her conduct of the discussion on the U.K.’s departure from the European Union.

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.

There Is Only One Trump Scandal

Adam Serwer

The myriad Trump scandals can obscure the fact that they’re all elements of one massive tale of corruption.

The sheer volume of Trump scandals can seem difficult to keep track of.

There’s the ongoing special-counsel investigation into whether the Trump campaign aided a Russian campaign to aid Trump’s candidacy and defeat his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton; there’s the associated inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice when he fired former FBI Director James Comey, whom he had asked not to investigate his former national-security adviser; there are the president’s hush-money payments to women with whom he allegedly had extramarital affairs, made through his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, and facilitated by corporate cash paid to influence the White House; there is his ongoing effort to interfere with the Russia inquiry and politicize federal law enforcement; there are the foreign governments that seem to be utilizing the president’s properties as vehicles for influencing administration policy; there’s the emerging evidence that Trump campaign officials sought aid not only from Russia, but from other foreign countries, which may have affected Trump’s foreign policy; there are the ongoing revelations of the president’s Cabinet officials’ misusing taxpayer funds; there is the accumulating evidence that administration decisions are made at the behest of private industry, in particular those in which Republican donors have significant interests.

Cargo containers stacked at the Port of Seattle in April — Ted S. Warren / AP

The Problem With Buying Cheap Stuff Online

Alana Semuels

Sites like Wish.com are taking out the middleman in retail. Will customers like this new dynamic?

The package came in a small black box, covered in tape. It had no return address. Under layers of packaging, there was a box labeled Smart Watch, with no brand name. Inside the box was the watch itself, which looked nothing like the inexpensive Apple Watch I’d hoped it would be. Instead, the large digital face featured icons for Twitter, Facebook, a pedometer, and a photo-taking app called “Camina” rather than “camera.” It was about what you’d expect for a smart watch that cost less than $20.

I ordered the watch from Wish.com, one of a growing number of sites that allows consumers from around the world to buy deeply discounted goods from China, directly from sellers or manufacturers there. After receiving promotional emails from Wish offering bikinis for $4 (marked down from $75!), camera drones for $29 (down from $1,399!), and, for some reason, a spoon that says “My Peanut-Butter Spoon” for $1 (down from $12), I could no longer resist. I ordered the smart watch, advertised as “Hot Sell New product Q18S Smart Wrist Watch” for $18, marked down, supposedly, from $896. The product had more than 8,000 reviews in dozens of languages, averaging four stars. “Its cool I like it for the price,” read one.

Duncan speaking into a microphone with Obama behind him — Charlie Neibergall / AP

Arne Duncan Is Serious: Americans Should Boycott School

Adam Harris

The former education secretary thinks parents need to take radical action to change the country's gun laws.

The former education secretary says it’s time for American families to boycott school to fight for stricter gun laws.

Over the weekend, Arne Duncan, who served in the Obama administration, replied approvingly to a radical suggestion from a former colleague. “Maybe it’s time for America’s 50 million school parents to simply pull their kids out of school until we have better gun laws,” tweeted Peter Cunningham, another Obama-era education official. Duncan’s reply: “This is brilliant, and tragically necessary. What if no children went to school until gun laws changed to keep them safe? My family is all in if we can do this at scale. Parents, will you please join us?”

After Duncan tweeted, Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, said she was on board. So did Jim Manly, the superintendent of KIPP public charter schools in New York City.

Remembering Philip Roth, a Giant of American Literature

Adam Kirsch

The writer, who died at the age of 85, was the last of the larger-than-life novelists of the mid-20th century.

Philip Roth, who died Tuesday night at the age of 85, was at the center of American literature for almost 60 years—a quarter of his country’s history. It has been eight years since Roth announced his retirement from writing, and there were surely no more books to come; so why does his death feel so much like a loss, as if readers had been deprived of something? Perhaps it is because Roth was the last of the larger-than-life novelists of the mid-20th century, a reminder of a time when literary excellence and bestsellerdom and celebrity could all go together in one electric package. We still have writers as talented and accomplished as Roth, but no one seems so grand. In mourning him, we are also mourning the fact that literature itself doesn’t matter as much as it once did: It’s hard to imagine any novel, no matter how daring, having the same kind of cultural impact today that Portnoy’s Complaint had in 1969.

An Epic Supreme Court Decision on Employment

Garrett Epps

The 5-4 ruling in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis could weaken workplace protections—and the justices on both sides knew it.

False dichotomy, meretricious piety, and pay-no-attention-to-that-man-behind-the-curtain misdirection are vital arrows in the quiver of any lawyer or judge, no matter of what persuasion. These tricks were on particularly egregious display in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, a 5-4 decision announced Monday in which the Supreme Court’s conservative majority continued its drive to narrow protection for employee rights. (The opinion, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito; the dissent, by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.)

The issue in Epic Systems was this: Can an employer require its employees, as a condition of keeping their jobs, to submit to individual arbitration of wage-and-hour and other workplace-condition claims—not only without an option to go to court, but without an option to pursue even private arbitration in common with other employees making the same claim? Employees’ objection to a “no group arbitration” clause is that individual arbitration may concern amounts too small to make pursuing them worthwhile. Thus, these clauses make it easier for employers to maintain unfair or even unlawful employment structures and salary systems.

John McCain in front of an American flag — Brian Snyder / Reuters

John McCain’s Greatest Fear

Jeffrey Goldberg

A conversation with Mark Salter about the core tenet of the senator’s worldview: Always speak up. Especially in Donald Trump’s America.

Let me stipulate at the outset that I am like many journalists in my fondness for Senator John McCain; let me also stipulate that this fondness derives in part from happy memories trailing McCain through Hungary and Germany and Ohio and the Middle East; and I will further note that this fondness also derives from a belief that McCain represents, at his best, something larger than partisanship and mercantilism and cynicism and the advancement of narrow self-interest. (Suggested reading: Dana Milbank and Anne Applebaum on McCain’s meaning and legacy.)

I am also aware that McCain is a flawed man, a flawed thinker, and a flawed politician, though I am not so interested in enumerating these flaws, in part because they are, generally speaking, either minor, or borne of good intentions, or both, and in part, of course, because he is slipping away from us, and now is the time to focus on the useful things he has done, and the things that he won’t get to do. This latter category is the troublesome category, because McCain’s cancer comes at a particularly inopportune moment in the life of this country.

European Parliamentarian Guy Verhofstadt and Mark Zuckerberg during a hearing Tuesday in Brussels — European Parliament

A Belgian Legislator Berates and Scoffs at Mark Zuckerberg

Alexis C. Madrigal

In a hearing today, European parliamentarian Guy Verhofstadt said many of the things that Facebook haters have been thinking.

On Tuesday, as the deadline to implement the sweeping European internet rule known as the General Data Protection Regulation approached, Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the European Parliament in Brussels to answer a few questions.

The representatives of the many different parties present in the European legislative body asked some tough questions, but the format did not allow them to pin Zuckerberg down on specific issues. First, the legislators asked all their questions in a row. Rather than answering them one at a time, Zuckerberg answered to the “themes” of the questions after they had all been asked.

The most caustic line of questions came from a centrist, Guy Maurice Marie Louise Verhofstadt, the former prime minister of Belgium and now the leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. He begins roughly 30 minutes into the video below.