Video of the Day

An Epidemic of Disbelief

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

What new research reveals about sexual predators, and why police fail to catch them

Robert Spada walked into the decrepit warehouse in Detroit and surveyed the chaos: Thousands of cardboard boxes and large plastic bags were piled haphazardly throughout the cavernous space. The air inside was hot and musty. Spada, an assistant prosecutor, saw that some of the windows were open, others broken, exposing the room to the summer heat. Above the boxes, birds glided in slow, swooping circles.

It was August 17, 2009, and this brick fortress of a building housed evidence that had been collected by the Detroit Police Department. Spada’s visit had been prompted by a question: Why were police sometimes unable to locate crucial evidence? The answer lay in the disarray before him.

Trump Goes All In on Racism

David A. Graham

The president’s tweets are an invitation to a racial conflict that pits citizen against citizen, under the calculation that racism itself is a winning political strategy.

If you’re surprised today that Donald Trump is a racist, you haven’t been paying attention. Since he entered politics, he has proved it repeatedly. In fact, as I reported with several colleagues in The Atlantic recently, bigotry has been a part of Trump’s public persona since he’s had a public persona.

Yet Trump’s racist Twitter attacks on Democratic congresswomen over the weekend still managed to shock, even in this benumbed age, because of his willingness and eagerness to place racism at the center of his political platform in a run for reelection to the presidency. It is not simply the employment of racist ideas for political advantage—that has been a staple of campaigns in both parties for some time. It is the invitation to a racial conflict that pits citizen against citizen, under the calculation that racism itself is a winning strategy, that astonishes.

The Apollo 11 crew, from left: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins — NASA / The Atlantic

The Moment That Made Neil Armstrong’s Heart Rate Spike

Marina Koren

Real-time data from the Apollo 11 astronauts, carefully monitored by mission control, capture the frenzied maneuvers that put men on the moon.

Two men were about to land on the moon, and Mission Control in Houston was thrumming with tension. In the science operations room, Gerald Schaber, a geologist, needed something to do while he waited for the lunar module to touch down. Schaber had come from northern Arizona, where engineers had warped the desert with dynamite to make a cratered landscape where the astronauts could train. His job didn’t start until Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out of the lunar module and began to explore the slate-colored surface. And the wait was getting to him.

“Our hearts were beating [fast], of course, everybody’s was,” Schaber told me recently. “So I figured I might as well watch theirs.”

Schaber switched his monitor to the channel displaying biomedical data for the astronauts. Armstrong seemed calmer than some of the folks in Mission Control. The commander’s heart was ticking along at 75 beats per minute, a remarkable rate for someone who was about to, you know, land on the moon. An adult’s normal resting heart rate is between 60 to 100 beats per minute. My heart rate right now, writing this story, is 75, according to a fitness tracker.

Trump Is Baiting Democrats

David Frum

The president is trying to divide the House caucus and force it to fight the election on his terms. So far, it’s working.

Don’t impeach Donald Trump.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reached that decision early, and she reached it firmly.

The Senate will not remove him, so the impeachment drive will end in failure. In the aftermath of a failed impeachment, holding President Trump to account will become even more difficult than it is now. He’ll think, Why comply with subpoenas? What will they do—impeach me? They already dropped the atom bomb and it went fzzzzt. They’re not going to do it again!

A failed impeachment will rally hesitant and embarrassed Republicans to Trump’s side, risking the seats of moderate Democrats elected in 2018. Meanwhile, it will commit all Democrats, even in safe seats, to a year of talking about process issues. Important as those issues are—Who doubts that Pelosi feels them?—they are not the issues that will mobilize the voters Democrats need in 2020. Pelosi wants to set the board to run on two themes: (1) Trump will take away your health insurance, and (2) Trump wants to deport your husband or wife or nephew or neighbor.

What You Lose When You Gain a Spouse

Mandy Len Catron

What if marriage is not the social good that so many believe and want it to be?

In America today, it’s easy to believe that marriage is a social good—that our lives and our communities are better when more people get and stay married. There have, of course, been massive changes to the institution over the past few generations, leading the occasional cultural critic to ask: Is marriage becoming obsolete? But few of these people seem genuinely interested in the answer.

More often the question functions as a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand, a way of stirring up moral panic about changing family values or speculating about whether society has become too cynical for love. In popular culture, the sentiment still prevails that marriage makes us happy and divorce leaves us lonely, and that never getting married at all is a fundamental failure of belonging.

Qatar Responds: Don’t Cancel the 2022 World Cup

The tournament’s host country pushes back on Franklin Foer’s proposal that FIFA change course and reallocate funds to women’s soccer.

Last week, the United States won the 2019 Women’s World Cup championship. The tournament, Franklin Foer wrote, was “an exhibition of excellence, a noble step in the struggle for gender equity.” In contrast, he argued, the 2022 men’s World Cup, set to take place in Qatar, “will be an authoritarian regime’s vulgar vanity project, allegedly made possible by massive corruption.” The money that would be spent on that World Cup, Foer said, would be better invested in the women’s game.

An illustration of a bird watching another bird fly away. — Bianca Bagnarelli

Dear Therapist: I Don’t Understand Why My Girlfriend Dumped Me

Lori Gottlieb

She said that she loves me but doesn’t want to be with me.

Dear Therapist,

Nearly two months ago, my girlfriend broke up with me. It was quite shocking at the moment, especially considering that we had just spent a lovely weekend out of town visiting her sister and brother-in-law. She explained that something about their relationship reminded her of “what she wants,” and that being with me would compromise her pursuit of this.

I didn’t fully understand what she meant, and I was too astonished to even push back. During our final embrace, in the park, she told me that she loved me. I told her that I loved her too. The surges of heartbreak immediately rushed through my chest, and my days since have been consumed by thoughts of her. Our relationship was truly wonderful—we laughed with each other all the time, we had thoughtful discussions, and we always noted how blissful it was to be in each other’s presence. It’s been devastating to lose this person with whom I shared so many wonderful experiences.

A person walks by a health-care insurance office in Hialeah, Florida. — Associated Press / Alan Diaz

Rise of the Know-Nothing Judge

Nicholas Bagley

The Fifth Circuit may be poised to accept a ridiculous argument against the Affordable Care Act.

If you’ve heard anything about the Texas lawsuit seeking to blow up the Affordable Care Act, you’ve heard that it involves yet another constitutional challenge to the individual mandate. That’s true—but it’s also profoundly misleading.

The parties in Texas v. United States don’t actually disagree about what the Constitution means. What they’re fighting about, instead, is what Congress meant to do, in late 2017, when it wiped out the tax penalty for going without coverage. At the time, President Donald Trump crowed, “The very unfair and unpopular Individual Mandate has been terminated as part of our Tax Cut Bill.” Congressional Republicans said the same.

In the lawsuit, however, the Trump administration is singing a different tune. Together with a group of red states, it now claims that Congress didn’t really end the mandate when it removed the penalty. Instead, it says that Congress kept the mandate and made it even more coercive—and thus unconstitutional. Trump & Co. would also have you believe that if the (now zero-dollar) mandate is unconstitutional, so is the entire Affordable Care Act.

Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong

Natalie Wexler

In the early grades, U.S. schools value reading-comprehension skills over knowledge. The results are devastating, especially for poor kids.

At first glance, the classroom I was visiting at a high-poverty school in Washington, D.C., seemed like a model of industriousness. The teacher sat at a desk in the corner, going over student work, while the first graders quietly filled out a worksheet intended to develop their reading skills.

As I looked around, I noticed a small girl drawing on a piece of paper. Ten minutes later, she had sketched a string of human figures, and was busy coloring them yellow.

I knelt next to her and asked, “What are you drawing?”

“Clowns,” she answered confidently.

“Why are you drawing clowns?”

“Because it says right here, ‘Draw clowns,’ ” she explained.

Running down the left side of the worksheet was a list of reading-comprehension skills: finding the main idea, making inferences, making predictions. The girl was pointing to the phrase draw conclusions. She was supposed to be making inferences and drawing conclusions about a dense article describing Brazil, which was lying facedown on her desk. But she was unaware that the text was there until I turned it over. More to the point, she had never heard of Brazil and was unable to read the word.

Democrats Have Found Their Battle Cry

Uri Friedman

The 2020 candidates are casting Trump as a threat to democracy. Their challenge will be to demonstrate to voters that the danger is real and affects their daily lives.

U.S. presidential elections used to be about which candidate would best lead the free world. Now Democrats are advancing an unprecedented argument in modern American politics: Elect one of them to lead the free world; otherwise, Donald Trump will irreparably unravel it.

By cozying up to dictators and casting aside democratic allies abroad, and mimicking strongmen while undermining institutions at home, Trump is making the world safe for autocracy, the 2020 presidential candidates assert. The defining struggle of our time is between the forces of democracy and authoritarianism, they say, and the leader of the land of the free has strayed into enemy territory.

This was a central theme of recent foreign-policy speeches by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg, and the rationale Kamala Harris offered in describing Trump as the top threat to U.S. national security during the first Democratic presidential debate. Last Thursday it was the core message of Joe Biden’s inaugural speech on international affairs.