Washington Ideas Forum, Day Two

An animation shows the interstellar object passing through our solar system. — NASA / JPL-Caltech

‘This Is Clearly Coming From Outside the Solar System’

Marina Koren

The second known visitor to our cosmic neighborhood from another star is making quite an entrance.

No one knows where it came from, but it’s here now. And the chase is on.

Astronomers around the world are monitoring an interstellar comet hurtling through the solar system, known for the moment as C/2019 Q4. It’s the second time in less than two years that they’ve seen an object from another star swing through our cosmic neighborhood. The first time around, the discovery kicked off a worldwide sprint to inspect the object before it got away. It was mysterious enough that some astronomers even began to consider whether it was dispatched by an advanced alien civilization.

This second interstellar object was spotted in late August by Gennady Borisov, an amateur astronomer in Crimea. Borisov has a reputation for catching never-before-seen comets with his telescopes, but they’re from around here; like everything else in the solar system—the planets, the moons, a sea of asteroids—they trace an orbit around the sun. And over the past few weeks, it’s become very clear that this comet does not.

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.

We Spent 10 Months Investigating Kavanaugh. Here’s What We Found.

Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin

Two journalists detail the results of their reporting on the Supreme Court justice’s past.

Years ago, when she was practicing her closing arguments at the family dinner table, Martha Kavanaugh often returned to her signature line as a state prosecutor. “Use your common sense,” she’d say. “What rings true? What rings false?”

Those words made a strong impression on her young son, Brett. They also made a strong impression on us, as we embarked on our 10-month investigation of the Supreme Court justice. We conducted hundreds of interviews with principal players in Kavanaugh’s education, career, and confirmation. We read thousands of documents. We reviewed hours of television interviews, along with reams of newspaper, magazine, and digital coverage. We studied maps of Montgomery Country, Maryland, as well as housing-renovation plans and court records. We watched Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings multiple times.

Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren greet each other on the debate stage in Houston, Texas. — Paul Sancya / AP

Why Ex–Sanders Supporters Are Backing Warren

Elaine Godfrey

The senator from Massachusetts, they argue, is proffering a gentler version of progressivism that is simple to understand and compelling enough to attract a broad swath of voters.

In 2016, Bernie Sanders described the Working Families Party (WFP), a grassroots progressive organization, as “the closest thing there is” to his “vision of democratic socialism.” The group endorsed him in his primary race against Hillary Clinton, and it’s grown more powerful in the past three years, as it has sought to build a multiracial populist movement nationwide. But this time around, with Sanders taking another shot for the White House, the group is throwing its weight behind someone else: Elizabeth Warren. The group’s surprising decision could be an early indicator of how progressives—including those who backed Sanders in the past—are planning to organize and vote next year.

“The political conditions are different” in this election, Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the WFP, told me earlier this week, after the group announced that 61 percent of its members had voted to back Warren, compared with 36 percent for Sanders. Unlike in 2016, there is more than one progressive candidate in the race to choose from, Mitchell said. Warren “has a track record of finding that nexus between visionary structural change and also the tools to operationalize it.”

Malcolm Gladwell stands in front of a purple-and-blue screen giving a speech. — Amy Harris / AP

Malcolm Gladwell Reaches His Tipping Point

Andrew Ferguson

After 20 years, has the author’s formula at last been exhausted?

It’s a bit embarrassing to finish a book by Malcolm Gladwell—master of the let me take you by the hand prose style, dealer in the simple and unmistakable thesis—and realize you don’t quite know what he’s driving at.

Gladwell’s method is well established and, you would think, fail-safe. It’s one of the reasons his books have sold millions of copies. Among his other talents, he’s one of those “professional communicators” that public-speaking coaches always say we should emulate: First he tells his audience what he’s about to tell them, then he tells them, and then he tells them what he just told them. He should be impossible to misunderstand. I must be an idiot.

Another possibility is that nearly 20 years after The Tipping Point, his best-selling debut, the Gladwell formula is at last exhausted.

The Problem With Sugar-Daddy Science

Sarah Taber

The pursuit of money from wealthy donors distorts the research process—and yields flashy projects that don’t help and don’t work.

The MIT Media Lab has an integrity problem. It’s not just that the lab took donations from Jeffrey Epstein and tried to conceal their source. As that news was breaking, Business Insider reported that the lab’s much-hyped “food computer” didn’t work and that staff had tried to mislead funders into thinking it did. These stories are two sides of the same problem: sugar-daddy science—the distortion of the research process by the pursuit of money from ultra-wealthy donors, no matter how shady.

Historically, research has been funded by grants. Government agencies and foundations announce that they want to fund X, and you, the scientist, write a proposal about why you’ll be awesome at X. If they agree, they give you money to do X.

Reinhold, Sanguinetti-Scheck, Hartmann, and Brecht

The Game That Made Rats Jump for Joy

Ed Yong

Scientists taught rats to play hide-and-seek in order to study natural animal behavior—but it was also fun, for both the researchers and the animals.

Annika Reinhold says that she likes playing with animals (she has two cats) and “doing unconventional things that no one has done before.” When the chance came up to teach rats to play hide-and-seek, she was a natural candidate.

One might question the wisdom of training rats to hide, but there’s a good reason to do so. In neuroscience, animal research is traditionally about control and conditioning—training animals, in carefully regulated settings, to do specific tasks using food rewards. But those techniques aren’t very useful for studying the neuroscience of play, which is universal to humans, widespread among animals, and the antithesis of control and conditioning. Playing is about freedom and fun. How do you duplicate those qualities in a lab?

Why the Kavanaugh Confirmation Still Haunts Us

Quinta Jurecic

The power of the stories is how normal they are.

On Sunday, The New York Times published an excerpt of a new book on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh by Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly. The snippet focused on the story of Deborah Ramirez—a classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Yale, who alleged he had exposed himself to her at a college party. While Kavanaugh angrily waved off reports of such behavior during his confirmation hearing, Pogrebin and Kelly wrote that they found both Ramirez’s claim, and Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of a drunken attempted assault by a high-school-aged Kavanaugh, to be credible.

That was all it took. The president punched out tweet after tweet demanding retribution for the “lies” told about the justice. By the end of Monday, several Democratic presidential candidates had called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment.

Ad Astra Is a Starry Epic With an Intimately Human Message

David Sims

James Gray’s new film, starring Brad Pitt, is a quiet, character-driven drama disguised as a grand adventure through the cosmos.

As he embarks on a journey into deep space, Roy McBride (played by Brad Pitt), the protagonist of James Gray’s new film Ad Astra, frequently invokes humanity’s need to explore, to blast into the cosmos out of a sense of duty and purpose. Looming over the movie is the memory of Roy’s astronaut father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones), who is believed to be lost after a noble mission to Neptune in search of alien life. But the film is set in the near future, when the romantic sheen of going to the stars is beginning to fade. As Roy takes his seat for a commercial flight to the moon—the first of many stops on a long odyssey—he requests a blanket and pillow from the Virgin Galactic attendant and is politely charged a $125 fee.

People pulling suitcases — Pearl Gabel / Reuters

American Migration Patterns Should Terrify the GOP

Derek Thompson

Millennial movers have hastened the growth of left-leaning metros in southern red states such as Texas, Arizona, and Georgia. It could be the biggest political story of the 2020s.

Liberals in America have a density problem. Across the country, Democrats dominate in cities, racking up excessive margins in urban cores while narrowly losing in suburban districts and sparser states. Because of their uneven distribution of votes, the party consistently loses federal elections despite winning the popular vote.

The most famous case was in 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election despite her 2.4-million-vote margin. Clinton carried Manhattan and Brooklyn by approximately 1 million ballots—more than Donald Trump’s margins of victory in the states of Florida, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania combined.

But 2016 wasn’t a fluke. Neither was 2000, when Al Gore lost the election despite winning 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. A recent paper from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin concluded that Republicans are expected to win 65 percent of presidential contests in which they narrowly lose the popular vote.