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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.

Donald Trump — Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock / Getty / The Atlantic

The Mueller Report Is an Impeachment Referral

Yoni Appelbaum

The special counsel has concluded he can neither charge nor clear the president. Only Congress can now resolve the allegations against him.

The redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report released on Thursday runs 448 pages. But its most important implication can be summarized in a single sentence: There is sufficient evidence that President Donald Trump obstructed justice to merit impeachment hearings.

A basic principle lies at the heart of the American criminal-justice system: The accused is entitled to a fair defense and a chance to clear his name. Every American is entitled to this protection, from the humblest citizen all the way up to the chief executive. And that, Mueller explained in his report, is why criminal allegations against a sitting president should be considered by Congress and not the Justice Department. The Mueller report, in short, is an impeachment referral.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

14 Must-Read Moments From the Mueller Report

Olivia Paschal and Madeleine Carlisle

A breakdown of the massive, 448-page document

Updated on April 18 at 4:10 p.m. ET

Attorney General William Barr released Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report on his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election on Thursday. Though some of the findings have been redacted, the report will give the public a clearer sense of what the special counsel found—and whether Barr’s short summary, made public in late March, was accurate.

The report covers the special counsel’s investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, and details 10 episodes that Mueller’s team examined as part of its inquiry into whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice. Four types of information are redacted in the report, according to Barr: grand-jury material, and details that could jeopardize intelligence sources and methods, ongoing cases, and the privacy of “peripheral third parties.”

The Cataclysmic Break That (Maybe) Occurred in 1950

Robinson Meyer

Sixty-nine years ago, a new geological era may have begun on Earth.

Here is the hypothesis: Not so long ago, the very nature of planet Earth suffered a devastating rupture. The break was sudden, global, and irreversible. It happened on a Sunday within living memory. Mick Jagger, Meryl Streep, and Caitlyn Jenner were all born before this crack in time. Vladimir Putin, Liam Neeson, and Mr. T were all born after it.

That idea might soon carry the weight of scientific fact. Later this month, a committee of researchers from around the world will decide whether the Earth sprang into the Anthropocene, a new chapter of its history, in the year 1950. If accepted, this delineation will signal a new reality, that human activities, not natural processes, are now the dominant driver of change on Earth’s surface—that carbon pollution, climate change, deforestation, factory farms, mass die-offs, and enormous road networks have made a greater imprint on the planet than any other force in the past 12,000 years.

Mueller’s Damning Portrait of Trump

David A. Graham

The special counsel’s report shows a president who lies, acts rashly, and is routinely ignored by his own staff.

The president lies wantonly and profligately—to the press, to his aides, and above all to the public. He tries to interfere in investigations. He acts as if he has something to hide. He reacts petulantly to being told no, and repeatedly pressures staffers even after being rejected.

Those words are not taken from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, but they might as well be. Over 448 pages, the report sketches a portrait of the president as chronically dishonest and unfit for office. Then it fills the portrait in, with painstaking and meticulously footnoted cross-hatching and shading. Opinions on Donald Trump, both for and against, seem ossified, and it is not as though Trump is underexposed. Yet even so, the Trump who emerges from the pages of the report is surprising.

E. L. James at the world premiere of 'Fifty Shades Freed' in Paris in 2018 — François Mori / AP

The Indelible Awfulness of E. L. James’s The Mister

Sophie Gilbert

The author’s follow-up to her Fifty Shades series is hopelessly retrograde and dismally unentertaining.

It is strange, when you pause to think about it, that E. L. James is still out there being glowingly profiled as a transgressive, taboo-busting warrior for women’s desire, given that her fictional worlds position female characters somewhere between the saintly Dorothea Brooke and the wimple-wearing Maria von Trapp. Her women are blushing, impoverished virgins, pristine of heart and fragile of appetite; her men, meanwhile, are swaggering Lotharios whose wallets bulge even more conspicuously than their designer underwear. In James’s new book, The Mister, the hero is an English earl who’s also a model-slash-DJ-slash-photographer-slash-composer, and whose first page of interior monologue is a vainglorious ode to “mindless sex” and a “nameless fuck.” His name, if you can stomach it, is Maxim Trevelyan. And the ultimate object of his affections, the woman who will ensure the rake’s progress from libidinous playboy to loyal husband, is … his doe-eyed undocumented Albanian maid, Alessia Demachi.

Trump’s Second Term

Paul Starr

It’s more likely than most people think—and compared with his first term, its effects would be far more durable.

Of all the questions that will be answered by the 2020 election, one matters above the others: Is Trumpism a temporary aberration or a long-term phenomenon? Put another way: Will the changes brought about by Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party fade away, or will they become entrenched?

Trump’s reelection seems implausible to many people, as implausible as his election did before November 2016. But despite the scandals and chaos of his presidency, and despite his party’s midterm losses, he approaches 2020 with two factors in his favor. One is incumbency: Since 1980, voters have only once denied an incumbent a second term. The other is a relatively strong economy (at least as of now). Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University who weights both of those factors heavily in his election-forecasting model, gives Trump close to an even chance of reelection, based on a projected 2 percent GDP growth rate for the first half of 2020.

A laptop displays the famous black-hole photo. — D3sign / Getty / EHT / National Science Foundation via Reuters / The Atlantic

The Dark Saga of Katie Bouman

Marina Koren

How a young scientist got sucked into the black hole of the internet

Two photos—one long anticipated, the other a surprise—became instantly famous in astronomy last week. First, there was the first-ever look at a black hole, a shadowy void encircled in a fiery ring of cosmic matter. Then, in the celebration that followed, another image emerged: a young computer scientist, hands over her mouth and eyes flashing with giddiness, as the image of the most mysterious object in the universe rendered on the computer screen in front of her.

This researcher, Katie Bouman, was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and a member of the team running Event Horizon Telescope, the effort to capture visual evidence of a black hole for the first time. After astronomers released that image last week, Bouman’s spread across the internet just as rapidly, on social media and in news stories. Her face, slightly blurry but beaming, was everywhere.

A collage of chicken nuggets — Dan Kitwood / Getty Images

The Coming Obsolescence of Animal Meat

Olga Khazan

Companies are racing to develop real chicken, fish, and beef that don’t require killing animals. Here’s what’s standing in their way.

SAN FRANCISCO—The thought I had when the $100 chicken nugget hit my expectant tongue was the one cartoon villains have when they entrap a foreign critter and roast him over a spit: It tastes like chicken.

That’s because it was chicken—albeit chicken that had never laid an egg, sprouted a feather, or been swept through an electrified-water bath for slaughter. This chicken began life as a primordial mush in a bioreactor whose dimensions and brand I’m not allowed to describe to you, for intellectual-property reasons. Before that, it was a collection of cells swirling calmly in a red-hued, nutrient-rich “media,” with a glass flask for an eggshell. The chicken is definitely real, and technically animal flesh, but it left the world as it entered it—a mass of meat, ready for human consumption, with no brain or wings or feet.

Read Robert Mueller’s Written Summaries of His Russia Report

Madeleine Carlisle and Olivia Paschal

The details the special counsel apparently found most important for the public to know

Attorney General William Barr released Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full report on Thursday. Contained therein were the summaries Mueller’s team prepared for the nearly 450-page-long document—presumably, the details he felt were most important for the public to know.

The report details Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and details 10 episodes the special counsel examined related to obstruction of justice. According to Barr, four types of information have been redacted, related to grand-jury material, the intelligence community’s sources and methods, ongoing cases, and the privacy of “peripheral third parties.”

Below, the summaries as written by the special counsel.

Executive Summary to Volume I