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When Your Child Is a Psychopath

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4. But a new clinical approach offers hope.

This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

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At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family

My Family’s Slave

Alex Tizon

She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.

The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.

It’s Too Late for Fox to Retract Its Seth Rich Story

Megan Garber

The story was notably loud. Its retraction is notably quiet.

On Tuesday of last week, the day after The Washington Post published its bombshell about President Trump’s Oval Office divulgences to Sergey Lavrov and Sergei Kisliyak, Sean Hannity took to the air at the Fox News Channel to discuss a murdered man named Seth Rich. Rich, a 27-year-old staffer at the Democratic National Committee, had been gunned down in Washington, DC, in July, seemingly the victim of a violent crime. Earlier that day, however, a local Fox TV station had reported—in a claim that would quickly be debunked—that Rich had ties to WikiLeaks, and that his death was, rather than the tragic result of random violence, instead evidence of a deeper conspiracy.

In the days since, that idea has leapt to life in the conservative areas of the media—an easy symbol, in the minds of many, of the “mainstream” media’s stubborn and partisan refusal to report on a story that would put the DNC in a negative light. (“Silence from Establishment Media over Seth Rich WikiLeaks Report,” Breitbart seethed.) And so, as many members of the nation’s press corps set out to further the Post’s reporting on the White House, the Rich story became a chorus-like feature on conservative-leaning media—and not just in Hannity’s extra-bombastic corner of Fox News. The Rich story hit Drudge. It exploded on social media. “NOT RUSSIA, BUT AN INSIDE JOB?” Breitbart asked, provocatively. The site added that, “if proven, the report has the potential to be one of the biggest cover-ups in American political history, dispelling the widespread claim that the Russians were behind hacks on the DNC.”

The Questions About Obstruction Now Spread to White House Staff

Adam Serwer

Reports that presidential aides asked senior intelligence officials to help shut down the FBI investigation put those staffers in legal jeopardy.

The Washington Post report that White House staffers were involved in President Trump’s alleged effort to shut down the FBI’s investigation into ousted National Security Adviser Michael Flynn increases the legal and political peril for the administration as Robert Mueller’s inquiry moves forward.

On Monday, the Post reported that Trump had asked Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Director Mike Rogers to push back on the testimony of the March then-FBI Director Jim Comey that Trump campaign associates were being scrutinized as a part of the investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election. Both officials reportedly refused.

“This is very close to what Nixon tried to do in drawing in the CIA to short circuit the FBI investigation during Watergate,” said a former high-ranking Justice Department official. “His advisers could be very much at risk if they played a role in the alleged interference.” The Post did not mention whether Trump-appointed CIA Director Mike Pompeo received a similar request.

Armed police officers stand near the Manchester Arena. — Andrew Yates / Reuters

The Manchester Attack Shows How Terrorists Learn

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

Can governments be as innovative about saving lives?

Yesterday’s terrorist attack that struck at the end of an Ariana Grande concert in Britain’s Manchester Arena—leaving 22 people dead and 59 injured, by the latest count—feels perhaps even more callous and personal than other such recent atrocities. As The New York Times noted, the target was “a concert spilling over with girls in their teens or younger, with their lives ahead of them, out for a fun night.”

For Europe, the attack, now claimed by ISIS, represents a continuation of a nightmare scenario: The pace and deadliness of terrorist attacks in the continent has reached levels unprecedented in the post-9/11 era, with the heinous and grotesque becoming frighteningly routine.

Even five years ago, specialists could count the major post-9/11 attacks in Western countries on one hand, and knew every date on which they had been perpetrated. They were known by names like 3/11 or 7/7 (references to attacks in Madrid and London, respectively).

What Saturday Night Live's Departures Mean for Its Future

David Sims

Bobby Moynihan, Vanessa Bayer, and Sasheer Zamata all said their goodbyes last weekend—in very different ways.

In the past, departing Saturday Night Live cast members have gotten whole sketches devoted to sending them off. Kristen Wiig was serenaded with song and dance from Mick Jagger and the rest of the crew; Bill Hader’s Stefon finally married Seth Meyers; Will Ferrell got a series of testimonials. On last weekend’s 42nd season finale, the show said goodbye to three cast members with varying tenures and legacies: Bobby Moynihan, Vanessa Bayer, and Sasheer Zamata. The first got a goodbye sketch of sorts, the second a couple of featured roles on her last night, and the third no acknowledgement at all. It was a slightly muddled end to what feels like one of SNL’s weaker eras—even as the show breaks ratings records in the age of Donald Trump.

'We Can't Walk Away From This Truth'

Mitch Landrieu

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu explains to his city why four monuments commemorating the Lost Cause and the Confederacy had to come down.

Last week, the City of New Orleans finished removing four monuments—to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee, and the postwar battle of Liberty Place. The removals occasioned threats, protests, and celebrations. On Friday, Mayor Mitch Landrieu explained to his city why he had concluded that the monuments needed to come down.

-Yoni Appelbaum

The soul of our beloved City is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years; rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way—for both good and for ill.

It is a history that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans—the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha. Of Hernando de Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Color, the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of France and Spain. The Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the south and central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more.

That Time the TSA Found a Scientist’s 3-D-Printed Mouse Penis

Ed Yong

And other tales from the intersection of science and airport security

When Martin Cohn passed through airport security at Ronald Reagan Airport, he figured that he’d probably get some questions about the 3-D-printed model of a mouse penis in his bag.

The model is 15 centimeters long, made of clear translucent plastic, and indisputably phallic— like the dismembered member of some monstrous, transparent, 11-foot rodent. One of Cohn’s colleagues had already been questioned about it when she carried it on an outward flight from Gainesville to Washington D.C. She put it through the security scanner, and the bag got pulled. A TSA official looked inside, winked at her, and let her go. She was amused but embarrassed, so Cohn offered to take the model home on the return flight.

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney presents President Donald Trump's proposed budget. — Jim Bourg / Reuters

The Unworkable Math of Trump’s Budget

Alana Semuels

Economists say the document doesn’t account for the costs of tax cuts and its other policy proposals.

Regardless of the details, the budget released Tuesday by the Trump administration was likely to be met with opposition from the Democrats for the scope of the cuts it proposed to programs that help low-income Americans. But, big-picture disagreements aside, people assumed that those details would at least add up.

Not the case: There appears to be a major problem with the details of Trump’s budget—namely, that it fails to account for the loss of trillions of dollars of revenue that will result from the tax cuts it proposes. Left-leaning economists have been quick to highlight the omission, which, as former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote in The Washington Post, “would justify failing a student in an introductory economics course.” Others are characterizing it not as an error but a deliberate manipulation: “The unreality/gimmicks in this budget are an [sic] unprecedented, epic scale,” Jason Furman, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter.

Survivors Respond to ‘My Family’s Slave’

Rosa Inocencio Smith

None

As numerous readers have written, one of the most moving aspects of “My Family’s Slave” is that Alex Tizon was able to honor Eudocia Tomas Pulido, whom he knew as Lola, by telling her story—while one of the tragedies is that Pulido was never able to tell it herself. My colleague Vann writes:

Tizon doesn’t know her desires, fears, attachments, or even very much about her own story. He attempts to learn these things, but doesn’t get very far, and we never learn whether the failure is due simply to Pulido’s reticence or to the fact that years of servitude had minimized her story even in her own mind.

After reading Alex’s essay and some of the criticism on social media, this reader wrote to us with the subject line, “On Eudocia, from someone who went through it”:

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Paul Rosenfeld

A wealthy white lawyer has spent 16 years and millions of dollars turning the Whitney Plantation into a memorial to the nation's past.

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Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

Tynesha Foreman and Nicolas Pollock

New data and analysis from PRRI and The Atlantic suggests that it was cultural anxiety more than economic distress that fueled white, working-class support for Trump.

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A New Understanding of the Childhood Brain

Nicolas Pollock

Uncovering the link between early trauma and lifelong illness

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Apple Stock Will Be Just Fine After Flash Crash

About the Author

Most Popular

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

My Family’s Slave

It’s Too Late for Fox to Retract Its Seth Rich Story

The Questions About Obstruction Now Spread to White House Staff

The Manchester Attack Shows How Terrorists Learn

What Saturday Night Live's Departures Mean for Its Future

'We Can't Walk Away From This Truth'

That Time the TSA Found a Scientist’s 3-D-Printed Mouse Penis

The Unworkable Math of Trump’s Budget

Survivors Respond to ‘My Family’s Slave’

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

A New Understanding of the Childhood Brain

Apple Stock Will Be Just Fine After Flash Crash

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Trump Scandals Are Good for Putin

About the Author

Most Popular

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

My Family’s Slave

It’s Too Late for Fox to Retract Its Seth Rich Story

The Questions About Obstruction Now Spread to White House Staff

The Manchester Attack Shows How Terrorists Learn

What Saturday Night Live's Departures Mean for Its Future

'We Can't Walk Away From This Truth'

That Time the TSA Found a Scientist’s 3-D-Printed Mouse Penis

The Unworkable Math of Trump’s Budget

Survivors Respond to ‘My Family’s Slave’

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

A New Understanding of the Childhood Brain