Chart: The Big Picture

Money is seen in the back pocket of U.S. President Donald Trump as he boards Air Force One. — Reuters / Tom Brenner

If This Isn’t Impeachable, Nothing Is

Tom Nichols

The president reportedly sought the help of a foreign government against Joe Biden.

The president of the United States reportedly sought the help of a foreign government against an American citizen who might challenge him for his office. This is the single most important revelation in a scoop by The Wall Street Journal, and if it is true, then President Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office immediately.

Until now, there was room for reasonable disagreement over impeachment as both a matter of politics and a matter of tactics. The Mueller report revealed despicably unpatriotic behavior by Trump and his minions, but it did not trigger a political judgment with a majority of Americans that it warranted impeachment. The Democrats, for their part, remained unwilling to risk their new majority in Congress on a move destined to fail in a Republican-controlled Senate.

Preacher — Apu Gomes / AFP / Getty Images

Evangelical Has Lost Its Meaning

Alan Jacobs

A term that once described a vital tradition within the Christian faith now means something else entirely.

Once a month or so Tommy Kidd and I get together for lunch at our favorite taco joint. Over the carnitas and barbacoa and guacamole we catch up on how our writing projects are going, and perhaps gossip a bit about what’s happening at Baylor University, where we both work. And more often that not, we end up talking about our complicated relationship with American evangelical Christianity. Because the future of that movement, which is our movement, matters to us—and, we think, matters to America.

Tommy is a Southern Baptist; I’m an Episcopalian, in the Anglican tradition descending from the Church of England. Very different things, one might think, and in some ways one would be right. Where Tommy’s Church has a praise band, mine has organ music; the central event on Sunday morning at his church is the sermon, while at mine it’s the Eucharist. And yet both of our traditions are closely connected, if in different ways, to evangelicalism.

Why Some People Become Lifelong Readers

Joe Pinsker

A lot rides on how parents present the activity to their kids.

They can be identified by their independent-bookstore tote bags, their “Book Lover” mugs, or—most reliably—by the bound, printed stacks of paper they flip through on their lap. They are, for lack of a more specific term, readers.

Joining their tribe seems simple enough: Get a book, read it, and voilà! You’re a reader—no tote bag necessary. But behind that simple process is a question of motivation—of why some people grow up to derive great pleasure from reading, while others don’t. That why is consequential—leisure reading has been linked to a range of good academic and professional outcomes—as well as difficult to fully explain. But a chief factor seems to be the household one is born into, and the culture of reading that parents create within it.

An illustration depicting a group of Jewish men kneeling before the Spanish Catholic monarchs. — Bettmann / Getty

Spain’s Attempt to Atone for a 500-Year-Old Sin

Kiku Adatto

The country is offering citizenship to Jews whose families it expelled in the 15th century.

The clock is ticking down on one of the world’s most unusual immigration proposals—Spain’s offer of citizenship to Jews whose families it expelled more than 500 years ago.

In 1492, the year Christopher Columbus set sail, Spain’s Edict of Expulsion gave Jews a stark choice: Convert, depart, or die. At the time, Spain’s Jewish community was one of the largest in the world, though their numbers had diminished due to a series of massacres and mass conversions 100 years earlier. Jews had lived on the Iberian Peninsula for more than 1,700 years, producing philosophers, poets, diplomats, physicians, scholars, translators, and merchants.

Historians still debate the number of Jews expelled; some estimate 40,000, others 100,000 or more. Those who fled sought exile in places that would have them—Italy, North Africa, the Netherlands, and eventually the Ottoman empire. Many continued to speak Ladino, a variant of 15th-century Spanish, and treasure elements of Spanish culture. Tens of thousands stayed, but converted, and remained vulnerable to the perils of the Inquisition. How many Jews were killed remains unclear, but a widely accepted estimate is 2,000 people during the first two decades of the Inquisition, with thousands more tortured and killed throughout its full course.

Trump Is Not Well

Peter Wehner

Accepting the reality about the president’s disordered personality is important—even essential.

During the 2016 campaign, I received a phone call from an influential political journalist and author, who was soliciting my thoughts on Donald Trump. Trump’s rise in the Republican Party was still something of a shock, and he wanted to know the things I felt he should keep in mind as he went about the task of covering Trump.

At the top of my list: Talk to psychologists and psychiatrists about the state of Trump’s mental health, since I considered that to be the most important thing when it came to understanding him. It was Trump’s Rosetta stone.

I wasn’t shy about making the same case publicly. During a July 14, 2016, appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, for example, I responded to a pro-Trump caller who was upset that I opposed Trump despite my having been a Republican for my entire adult life and having served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and the George W. Bush White House.

Young boy drags his foot in front of background of gold stars — Paul Spella

When the Culture War Comes for the Kids

George Packer

Caught between a brutal meritocracy and a radical new progressivism, a parent tries to do right by his children while navigating New York City’s schools.

1.

To be a parent is to be compromised. You pledge allegiance to justice for all, you swear that private attachments can rhyme with the public good, but when the choice comes down to your child or an abstraction—even the well-being of children you don’t know—you’ll betray your principles to the fierce unfairness of love. Then life takes revenge on the conceit that your child’s fate lies in your hands at all. The organized pathologies of adults, including yours—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children. Only they can save themselves.

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Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.

A still from Mandy Moore's new music video — UMG Recordings

What Makes Mandy Moore’s Return to Music So Poignant

Spencer Kornhaber

After alleging that her ex-husband, Ryan Adams, derailed her career, the singer released her first single in a decade to address the feeling of losing control.

Amanda Leigh Moore was 6 years old when she told her family that she was going to be a singer, and the dream came true faster than even the most encouraging parents could have hoped. A talent scout discovered her at age 13, and she landed a hit single, “Candy,” in 1999, when she was 15. Under the name Mandy Moore, over the course of a decade, she released six albums. As she simultaneously built an acting career, those albums captured her transformation from teen-pop product to willful singer-songwriter. “The music is all a reflection of me now, not somebody else’s choices,” she said about her most recent record, 2009’s Amanda Leigh.

Mandy Moore’s musical output then mostly stopped. Her acting continued—she’s currently in the beloved TV drama This Is Us—but outside of songs she recorded for her lead role in Disney’s 2010 fairy-tale film Tangled, there’ve been no new tunes. Onetime child stars burn out and disappear from the spotlight all the time, and many fans likely assumed that’s what happened with her. But Moore says she didn’t choose to quit music, exactly. Her explanation for where her singing career went sits among the many sad stories of stymied female ambition that have been revealed in the #MeToo era.

The Milky Way curves over the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa — SARAO

The Milky Way Has Giant Bubbles at Its Center

Marina Koren

Astronomers have found radio-emitting structures jutting out from our galaxy’s black hole.

Farhad Yusef-Zadeh was observing the center of the Milky Way galaxy in radio waves, looking for the presence of faint stars, when he saw it: a spindly structure giving off its own radio emissions. The filament-like feature was probably a glitch in the telescope, or something clouding the field of view, he decided. It shouldn’t be here, he thought, and stripped it out of his data.

But the mystery filament kept showing up, and soon Yusef-Zadeh found others. What the astronomer had mistaken for an imperfection turned out to be an entire population of cosmic structures at the heart of the galaxy.

More than 100 filaments have been detected since Yusef-Zadeh’s first encounter in the early 1980s. Astronomers can’t completely explain them, but they have given them familiar labels, naming them after the earthly things they resemble: the pelican, the mouse, the snake. The menagerie of filaments is clustered around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. “They haven’t been found elsewhere,” says Yusef-Zadeh, a physics and astronomy professor at Northwestern University.

We’re Now in the Hot Zone for Impeachment

Peter Nicholas

New reports about President Trump’s calls with the Ukrainian president could push Nancy Pelosi to recalculate the politics of an attempt to remove him from office.

Few Democratic leaders have seemed less eager to impeach President Donald Trump than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She’s warned that the public doesn’t want it and the Senate would never go for it. But a rolling series of disclosures may force her to recalculate the politics. A report in The Wall Street Journal today, quickly confirmed by other major outlets, introduced an explosive new twist to a story that already had the trappings of one of the biggest threats yet to Trump’s presidency. The fresh details about Trump’s apparent effort to strong-arm Ukraine into investigating his political rival Joe Biden may have irreversibly pushed the president into the impeachment hot zone.

According to the Journal, in a phone call in July, Trump pressed Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Biden’s son Hunter. Over and over, Trump urged Zelensky to work in tandem with his lawyer and confidant Rudy Giuliani, who has publicly accused Joe Biden of trying to interfere in the investigation of a Ukrainian gas company, on whose board Hunter Biden sat. (A Ukrainian official said there was no wrongdoing, the Journal reported.)

A WeWork sign against some tan buildings — Brendan McDermid / Reuters

WeWork and the Great Unicorn Delusion

Derek Thompson

Why the consumer-tech revolution can’t seem to survive public scrutiny

The office-space company WeWork announced that it was postponing its initial public offering this week, a reaction to a sharp decline in its reported valuation from $47 billion a few weeks ago to less than $20 billion today.

In many ways, the company’s four-week tailspin has been a one-of-a-kind spectacle. Documents filed in anticipation of its public offering revealed a pattern of behavior from its founder and chief executive, Adam Neumann, that fits somewhere on the spectrum between highly eccentric and vaguely Caligulan. In one lurid example, Neumann insisted that WeWork change its name to the We Company, a title he had already trademarked, thus allowing him to charge his own company nearly $6 million for the shotgun rechristening.