Update from Aspen

The Stock-Buyback Swindle

Jerry Useem

American corporations are spending trillions of dollars to repurchase their own stock. The practice is enriching CEOs—at the expense of everyone else.

In the early 1980s, a group of menacing outsiders arrived at the gates of American corporations. The “raiders,” as these outsiders were called, were crude in method and purpose. After buying up controlling shares in a corporation, they aimed to extract a quick profit by dethroning its “underperforming” CEO and selling off its assets. Managers—many of whom, to be fair, had grown complacent—rushed to protect their institutions, crafting new defensive measures and lodging appeals in state courts. In the end, the raiders were driven off and their moneyman, Michael Milken, was thrown in prison. Thus ended a colorful chapter in American business history.

Or so it seemed. Today, another effort is under way to raid corporate assets at the expense of employees, investors, and taxpayers. But this time, the attack isn’t coming from the outside. It’s coming from inside the citadel, perpetrated by the very chieftains who are supposed to protect the place. And it’s happening under the most innocuous of names: stock buybacks.

Dylan Martinez / AP / Neville Elder / Getty / Brian Smith / Reuters / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

Boris Johnson Meets His Destiny

Tom McTague

Hailed as a savant, lampooned as a fraud, Britain’s likely next prime minister must lead his country through its moment of maximum peril—and opportunity.

Late morning on Tuesday, July 23, the denouement in Boris Johnson’s lifelong quest for political power will be revealed, when the committee that has organized the Conservative Party’s leadership election will announce the winner of the race to replace Theresa May. The following day, the winner—Johnson is the heavy favorite—will be driven to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the Queen, and be formally appointed prime minister.

It will be the culmination of seven weeks of national campaigning in which Johnson has slowly and cautiously closed in on the prize. Yet in reality it has been a 40-year pursuit, relentlessly driving forward, each step a mere prelude to the next on his seemingly unstoppable rise.

The Economist Who Would Fix the American Dream

Gareth Cook

No one has done more to dispel the myth of social mobility than Raj Chetty. But he has a plan to make equality of opportunity a reality.

Raj Chetty got his biggest break before his life began. His mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Anbu showed the greatest academic potential of her five siblings, but her future was constrained by custom. Although Anbu’s father encouraged her scholarly inclinations, there were no colleges in the area, and sending his daughter away for an education would have been unseemly.

But as Anbu approached the end of high school, a minor miracle redirected her life. A local tycoon, himself the father of a bright daughter, decided to open a women’s college, housed in his elegant residence. Anbu was admitted to the inaugural class of 30 young women, learning English in the spacious courtyard under a thatched roof and traveling in the early mornings by bus to a nearby college to run chemistry experiments or dissect frogs’ hearts before the men arrived.

The Future of the City Is Childless

Derek Thompson

America’s urban rebirth is missing something key—actual births.

A few years ago, I lived in a walkup apartment in the East Village of New York. Every so often descending the stairway, I would catch a glimpse of a particular family with young children in its Sisyphean attempts to reach the fourth floor. The mom would fold the stroller to the size of a boogie board, then drag it behind her with her right hand, while cradling the younger and typically crying child in the crook of her left arm. Meanwhile, she would shout hygiene instructions in the direction of the older child, who would slap both hands against every other grimy step to use her little arms as leverage, like an adult negotiating the boulder steps of Machu Picchu. It looked like hell—or, as I once suggested to a roommate, a carefully staged public service announcement against family formation.

The Stuff of Dystopian Nightmare

Garrett Epps

ACLU lawyers have stopped border agents from demanding ID after domestic flights.

Commercial airliners are not usually restful environments, but February 2017 was a particularly fraught time for domestic air passengers. Donald Trump had become president a month earlier and had quickly issued his “travel ban” executive order, sparking chaos at the nation’s airports. Although on February 3 a federal district judge enjoined the ban, by February 21 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was telling a press briefing that “the President want[s] to take the shackles off individuals in [immigration agencies].” The very next day, Customs and Border Protection agents met Delta Airlines flight 1583 at the gate at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The agents, and the Delta cabin crew, told the passengers that to exit, they would have to show government-issued ID.

The Quietly Changing Consensus on Neutering Dogs

Sarah Zhang

A growing body of research has documented the health risks of getting certain breeds fixed early—so why aren’t shelters changing their policies?

In the 1970s, a time when tens of millions of unwanted dogs were being euthanized in the United States annually, an orthodoxy began to take hold: Spay and neuter early. Spay and neuter everything. It’s what vets were taught. It’s what responsible pet owners were told to do.

A growing body of research, however, suggests that spaying and neutering—especially in some large breeds when very young—are linked to certain disorders later in life. “As time has gone on, vets are starting to question the wisdom,” says Missy Simpson, a veterinary epidemiologist with the Morris Animal Foundation, which recently published a study that found higher rates of obesity and orthopedic injury in golden retrievers that had been fixed. Other studies have linked early spaying and neutering to certain cancers, joint disorders, and urinary incontinence—though the risks tend to vary by sex, breed, and living circumstances. As such, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) now says in a guide for veterinarians, “There is no single recommendation that would be appropriate for all dogs.”

A giant baby sleeps between a husband and wife. — BIANCA BAGNARELLI

Dear Therapist: My Husband and I Don't Have Sex Anymore

Lori Gottlieb

I miss the closeness we had before our baby was born.

Dear Therapist,

My husband and I have been married for three years. It was like a whirlwind of romance when we first met, and we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We moved in together after just six months and were engaged after one year of being together. We got married two years later and I got pregnant soon after.

Our sex was always good before I got pregnant. When our baby was born, my husband had postnatal depression and I had to keep everything together. I was finding it hard inside, but just had to act strong for the both of us. That really put a strain on our marriage.

Our beautiful baby boy is now 15 months old and we never have sex. Our son has just started to sleep through the night, and I think we have gotten so used to taking care of our son at night and not having sex that now it feels so awkward. This is so upsetting, and I don’t know if we are attracted to each other anymore. We have date nights and nights off, but we still never want to have sex. He said it’s like having sex with his mate.

Why Online Dating Can Feel Like Such an Existential Nightmare

Derek Thompson

Matchmaking sites have officially surpassed friends and family in the world of dating, injecting modern romance with a dose of radical individualism. Maybe that’s the problem.

My maternal grandparents met through mutual friends at a summer pool party in the suburbs of Detroit shortly after World War II. Thirty years later, their oldest daughter met my dad in Washington, D.C., at the suggestion of a mutual friend from Texas. Forty years after that, when I met my girlfriend in the summer of 2015, one sophisticated algorithm and two rightward swipes did all the work.

My family story also serves as a brief history of romance. Robots are not yet replacing our jobs. But they’re supplanting the role of matchmaker once held by friends and family.

For the past 10 years, the Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld has been compiling data on how couples meet. In almost any other period, this project would have been an excruciating bore. That’s because for centuries, most couples met the same way: They relied on their families and friends to set them up. In sociology-speak, our relationships were “mediated.” In human-speak, your wingman was your dad.

Patrick Semansky / AP / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

Adam Schiff Is Back From the Wilderness

Todd S. Purdum

The House Intelligence Committee chairman opens up about the Mueller investigation.

Adam Schiff was everywhere, until he was nowhere.

In nearly 20 years as a Democratic congressman from Southern California, Schiff has grappled with issues from national security, to intellectual property, to the Armenian genocide. But for the past two years, he has been perhaps the most visible face of ongoing inquiries into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the scourge of the White House, and the darling of cable-television bookers from coast to coast.

That is, he was until he wasn’t—when the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report last spring left Schiff’s sails luffing. Mueller’s conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to charge members of Donald Trump’s campaign team with conspiring with Russian entities to tip the election was a blow to Schiff and his fellow Democrats, who were becalmed by the underwhelming public, political, and media reaction to the end of an investigation that so many of them had hoped would pack a bigger punch.

Who Actually Feels Satisfied About Money?

Joe Pinsker

“It’s not just how much you have—it’s what you do with it,” says one researcher who studies money and happiness.

These days, not even the rich feel rich. According to a recent survey by the financial-advisory firm Ameriprise Financial, only 13 percent of American millionaires classify themselves as wealthy. Even some of those surveyed who had more than $5 million across their bank accounts, investments, and retirement accounts said they didn’t feel rich. If multimillionaires don’t feel wealthy, who does?

I decided to go to Elizabeth Dunn, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending, with my question: Once people have enough money to cover their basic needs and then some, what would make them feel satisfied—happy, even—with what they have? Dunn said she didn’t know of any academic studies that addressed this question head-on, but she did point to some related research that provides possible answers.