Provocation of the Day: In Defense of the Culture War

The Truth About Dentistry

Ferris Jabr

It’s much less scientific—and more prone to gratuitous procedures—than you may think.

In the early 2000s Terry Mitchell’s dentist retired. For a while, Mitchell, an electrician in his 50s, stopped seeking dental care altogether. But when one of his wisdom teeth began to ache, he started looking for someone new. An acquaintance recommended John Roger Lund, whose practice was a convenient 10-minute walk from Mitchell’s home, in San Jose, California. Lund’s practice was situated in a one-story building with clay roof tiles that housed several dental offices. The interior was a little dated, but not dingy. The waiting room was small and the decor minimal: some plants and photos, no fish. Lund was a good-looking middle-aged guy with arched eyebrows, round glasses, and graying hair that framed a youthful face. He was charming, chatty, and upbeat. At the time, Mitchell and Lund both owned Chevrolet Chevelles, and they bonded over their mutual love of classic cars.

Joe Biden Is Running for President

Edward-Isaac Dovere

The former vice president has finally decided he’s in, and he’s announcing in less than a week. Now he just has to finish putting a campaign together.

Joe Biden is running. The former vice president will make his candidacy official with a video announcement next Wednesday, according to people familiar with the discussions who have been told about them by top aides.

Seriously, he’s actually made a decision. It’s taken two years of back-and-forth, it’ll be his third (or, depending on how you count, seventh) try for the White House, and many people thought he wouldn’t do it, but the biggest factor reshaping the 2020 Democratic-primary field is locking into place.

He wants this. He really wants this. He’s wanted this since he was first elected to the Senate, in 1972, and he’s decided that he isn’t too old, isn’t too out of sync with the current energy in the Democratic Party, and certainly wasn’t going to be chased out by the women who accused him of making them feel uncomfortable or demeaned because of how he’d touched them.

A great white shark — Dave J Hogan / Getty

The Predator That Makes Great White Sharks Flee in Fear

Ed Yong

Better to run than to have your liver squeezed out.

The great white shark—a fast, powerful, 16-foot-long torpedo that’s armed to the teeth with teeth—has little to fear except fear itself. But also: killer whales.

For almost 15 years, Salvador Jorgensen from the Monterey Bay Aquarium has been studying great white sharks off the coast of California. He and his colleagues would lure the predators to their boats using bits of old carpet that they had cut in the shape of a seal. When the sharks approached, the team would shoot them with electronic tags that periodically emit ultrasonic signals. Underwater receivers, moored throughout Californian waters, detected these signals as the sharks swam by, allowing the team to track their whereabouts over time.

The French Ambassador Is Retiring Today. Here’s What He Really Thinks About Washington.

Yara Bayoumy

Gérard Araud says that Trump is right about trade. Kushner is “extremely smart” but has “no guts.” And John Bolton’s not so bad, actually.

Gérard Araud, the charmingly blunt French ambassador to the United States, is famous for two things: the lavish parties he hosts at his Kalorama mansion, and his willingness to say (and tweet) things that other ambassadors might not even think, much less state in public.

Araud ends his nearly five-year tenure in Washington today, and when I spoke with him last week, he was, even by his usual standards, direct to the point of discomfort. He told me his view of the U.S. (“The role of the United States as a policeman of the world, it’s over”) and Donald Trump (“brutal, a bit primitive, but in a sense he’s right” on free trade), and he shared his opinions of John Bolton (he’s a “real professional,” even though “he hates international organizations”) and Jared Kushner (“extremely smart, but he has no guts”).

Trump’s Guardrails Are Gone

Peter Nicholas and Elaina Plott

The president’s more pliant senior advisers might end up indulging his ultimately self-sabotaging behavior.

One Saturday in June 2017, President Donald Trump called Don McGahn twice at home. The president ordered the White House counsel to fire Robert Mueller, who at that point had been leading the Russia probe for one month. “You gotta do this,” Trump told him. “You gotta call Rod.” In his second call, Trump told McGahn, “Call me back when you do it.”

The special counsel’s report—released on Thursday to the public—goes on to reveal that McGahn refused to call then–Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and direct him to fire Mueller. Instead, McGahn called then–Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and then chief strategist Steve Bannon to let them know that he was resigning, and that the president had asked him to “do crazy shit.” But Priebus and Bannon persuaded him to stick around. McGahn relented. The president never brought up the question again—and a potentially criminal act of obstruction of justice was narrowly averted.

The Mueller Report Could Alienate the Voters Republicans Need

Ronald Brownstein

The special counsel’s findings validate the concerns of anyone who feared how Donald Trump would wield presidential power.

Beyond all the revelations about Russian entanglements and possible obstruction of justice, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report crystallizes two cardinal rules about governance in Donald Trump’s Washington. One is that Trump will shatter any boundaries of law, morality, or custom in his exercise of presidential power. The second is that Republicans—not only in Congress, but now also in the executive branch—will not restrain any of his excesses. The same holds true for both unwritten rules: They constitute a defining gamble for the GOP in future elections.

Starting with Attorney General William Barr’s staggeringly misleading press conference Thursday about the report, and extending through the blithe dismissal from congressional Republicans of its revelations, the release was yet another demonstration that there may be literally nothing Trump can do that would cause Republicans to break from him. Mueller’s report cataloged dozens of behaviors from Trump and his advisers—from sharing internal campaign polling data and strategy with a suspected agent of a foreign power to repeatedly lying to the public to systematically seeking to thwart investigations—that would have inspired volcanic eruptions of outrage from congressional Republicans and the conservative-media infrastructure if perpetrated by a Democratic president.

Why Grown-Ups Keep Talking Like Little Kids

John McWhorter

Embracing your inner child is comforting and fun—and just might revitalize the English language.

I recently had the honor of meeting an award-winning literary sort, a man wry and restrained and overall quite utterly mature, who casually referred to having gone through a phase in his 20s when he’d been “pilly”—that is, when he’d taken a lot of recreational drugs. The word had a wonderfully childish sound to it, the tacked-on y creating a new adjective in the style of happy, angry, and silly. My writer-acquaintance, I recognized, was not alone in bending language this way. On the sleeper-hit sitcom Schitt’s Creek, for instance, one of the protagonists, David, speaks of a game night getting “yelly,” while his sister describes a love interest as “homelessy.” Meanwhile, back in real life, one of my podcast listeners informed me of a Washington, D.C., gentrifier who declared that a neighborhood was no longer as “shooty-stabby” as it once had been.

San Francisco's skyline as seen from condemned property on Treasure Island. — Reuters/Elijah Nouvelage.

The City That Apps Built, or Destroyed

Alexis C. Madrigal

An unprecedented analysis of who is buying San Francisco property

Updated on April 19 at 1:28 p.m. ET.

There has never been a town like the one San Francisco is becoming, a place where a single industry composed almost entirely of rich people thoroughly dominates the local economy. Much of the money that’s been squished out of the rest of the world gets funneled by the internet pipes to this little sliver of land on the Pacific Ocean, jutting out into the glory of the Bay. The city now sits atop a geyser of cash created from what the scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls “behavioral surplus”—the natural resource created from your behavior, which is to say your mind.

Literal colonies of the working poor now cling to forgotten streets in RV communities. Homeless encampments are stitched onto any liminal plot of land. To lose your apartment doesn’t mean moving one neighborhood over but three cities away, to Antioch or Gilroy or Stockton.

The Disciplines Where No Black People Earn Ph.D.s

Adam Harris

In more than a dozen academic fields—largely STEM related—not a single black student earned a doctoral degree in 2017.

Some trends in higher education move up and down—ebbing and flowing with the economy and demographic shifts. And then there are those that are stagnant, ever-present reminders of the work America’s universities still need to do.

One of those is the problem of faculty diversity: Less than 6 percent of full-time faculty members at institutions across the country are black. Many factors coalesce to bring about that dearth of black faculty, but one of the most significant is the perpetual scarcity of black doctoral-degree recipients.

From 2002 to 2017, of the roughly 50,000 people who earned Ph.D.s each year, the percentage who were black increased only modestly, from 5.1 percent to 5.4 percent, according to data from the National Science Foundation. In 2017, there were more than a dozen fields—largely subfields within science, technology, engineering, and math—in which not a single doctoral degree was awarded to a black person anywhere in the United States.

The Perverse Paradox of the Mueller Report

Megan Garber

Donald Trump’s outrageous behavior described by the special counsel is, at this point, so deeply familiar that it has lost its power to outrage.

On Thursday morning, the report that had been compiled over the past 22 months by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was released, in a “lightly redacted” digital format, to the American public. By Thursday evening, cheeky reviews of the 448-page compendium (title: The Mueller Report; author: US GOVERNMENT) had popped up on Goodreads. One went like this: “The previous owner used a black highlighter on all the interesting bits and the main character has no redeeming qualities.” Another: “Slightly better than the SparkNotes edition released a few weeks ago.” Another: “The whole ‘we wouldn’t presume to say the president was guilty even if he was, but we will say that he’s definitely not not guilty’ thing is a bit of a cop-out. But it did have its moments.”