The Apollo 11 Journey in Photographs

The Reinvention of America

James Fallows

Americans don’t realize how fast the country is moving toward becoming a better version of itself.

I have seen the future, and it is in the United States.

After a several-year immersion in parts of the country that make the news mainly after a natural disaster or a shooting, or for follow-up stories on how the Donald Trump voters of 2016 now feel about Trump, I have a journalistic impulse similar to the one that dominated my years of living in China. That is the desire to tell people how much more is going on, in places they had barely thought about or even heard of, than they might have imagined.

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In the case of China, that impulse matched the mood of the times. In the years before and after the world financial crisis of 2008, everyone knew that China was on the way up; reporters like me were just filling in the details. In the case of the modern United States, I am well aware that this message runs so counter to prevailing emotions and ideas as to seem preposterous. Everyone knows how genuinely troubled the United States is at the level of national politics and governance. It is natural to assume that these disorders must reflect a deeper rot across the country. And indeed, you can’t travel extensively through today’s America, as my wife, Deb, and I have been doing in recent years, without being exposed to signs of rot, from opioid addiction to calcifying class barriers.

A woman and man sitting far apart on a bench — Photodisc / Getty

Why More Young Married Couples Are Keeping Separate Bank Accounts

Caroline Kitchener

It doesn’t signal a lack of trust—to some, it’s a way for spouses to show they trust each other more.

A joint bank account has, traditionally, been a sign of commitment. As newlyweds start their lives together, it is perhaps the clearest way for them to say, to each other and to the world, “What’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is mine.”

But these days, some young couples are skeptical. “There has been a generational change,” said Joanna Pepin, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland who studies the organization of money in romantic relationships. “The research we have shows that, cross-culturally, more people are keeping money separate.” Indeed, a Bank of America study published earlier this year seemed to suggest that Millennial married and cohabitating couples were more likely to hold separate accounts than previous generations were.

Five racially diverse babies sitting in a line wearing white onesies — Jamie Grill / Getty

What Happens When Geneticists Talk Sloppily About Race

Ian Holmes

The field widely agrees that race is a social construct, but gets into trouble when it ignores semantics.

In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, “How Genetics is Changing Our Understanding of Race,” the geneticist David Reich challenged what he called an “orthodoxy” in genetics. Due to concerns of political correctness, he argued, scientists are unwilling to do research on—or, in some cases, even discuss—genetic variation between human populations, despite the fact that genetic variations do exist. “It is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races,’” he wrote.

The piece was widely circulated, drawing condemnation from some social scientists who were appalled by its implications and praise from people who believe that discussion of racial differences has become taboo. Predictably, it rang the bell for another round of an ongoing media fight over why there’s a gap between black and white IQ scores. Ezra Klein referenced the piece in Vox, and debated it with Sam Harris. Andrew Sullivan riffed on campus leftists and culture war.

The Hardest Job in the World

John Dickerson

What if the problem isn’t the president—it’s the presidency?

I. A Broken Office

Donald Trump often appears to be a president in rebellion against his office. A president, we have come to expect, hastens to the scene of a natural disaster to comfort the afflicted. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, President Trump arrived tardily and behaved unseriously, tossing rolls of paper towels at storm-battered residents as if he were trying to drain three-point shots.

We have come to expect that when the national fabric rends, the president will administer needle and thread, or at least reach for the sewing box of unity. After white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, shouting “Jews will not replace us,” President Trump’s instinct was to emphasize that there were good people among the neo-Nazis.

John Bolton holding a legal pad — Susan Walsh / AP

The Iran Regime-Change Crew Is Back

Vali Nasr

That probably spells doom for the nuclear deal.

Among the most strident critics of the nuclear deal with Iran are those who believe it furthers the survival of its leadership. By throwing Iran’s rulers an economic lifeline, they believe, the deal is an abject failure. America’s goal, they say, should never have been “denuclearization,” but regime change.

These days, those regime-change evangelists, having shrugged off the lessons of the Iraq War, are back at the helm of U.S. foreign policy. John Bolton, Donald Trump’s new national-security adviser, has long advocated regime change in Iran, and more recently has argued that the administration should openly embrace it as a foreign-policy goal. At the same time, Bolton and his ilk are pushing for a denuclearization deal with North Korea ahead of Trump’s planned summit with Kim Jong Un, the country’s leader. Preparations for the meeting will likely be in full swing by May 12, the next deadline for extending the Iran deal. The Trump administration, in other words, could find itself in the odd situation of tearing down the nuclear deal with Iran while pursuing a similar deal with North Korea.

How Gabriel García Márquez Created a World in a Sentence

Joe Fassler

The novelist Mary Morris explains how the opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude shaped her path as a writer.

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Colum McCann, George Saunders, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more.

When I was her student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the novelist Marilynne Robinson told our class it was almost unthinkable for women of her generation to become writers. Society afforded women with an extremely limited range of opportunity: You could be a teacher, nurse, or homemaker, she said, and that was about it. Other paths—especially professionalized, artistic ones—were possible, but extremely hard-won.

That was the challenge facing Mary Morris, author of Gateway to the Moon, after she dropped out of grad school in the 1970s. For years, she’d worked in secret, living a kind of creative double life—writing constantly, but never sure she was really a writer. No one ever told her how the verb might earn the noun.

The Handmaid's Tale and the Suffering of Women

Sophie Gilbert

In entertainment, when does empathy become exploitation?

The most chilling scene in the early new episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale comes when a 15-year-old Econowife, Eden (Sydney Sweeney), shyly tells June (Elisabeth Moss) that her new husband refuses to lie with her. June gently explains that she should be patient, that the strangeness of the arranged marriage is hard for her husband, too. “I can’t wait,” Eden replies. “It’s our duty to God.” Then her face hardens. “What if I don’t? What if he can’t?” She wonders if her husband is a “gender traitor,” a crime that carries a death sentence in the theocratic Republic of Gilead.

During the scene, the camera lingers—as it tends to do in The Handmaid’s Tale—on Moss’s face. The shock for the viewer comes as June processes what Eden has said, and what it implies. June’s affect beforehand is sisterly, treating the teenager with a gentle kind of authority. But over the space of a few seconds she realizes how dangerous Eden is—that her devotion to Gilead’s regime could spur a man’s execution in a heartbeat. The moment is quietly terrifying; its menace comes from what isn’t shown or said, but what’s left to viewers to imagine.

Dear Therapist: My Partner Wants Me to Cut Ties With My Friends

Lori Gottlieb

I appreciate them. He doesn't accept them. How can I make everyone happy?

Dear Therapist,

My partner has a strong tendency to see everyone else’s behavior in black or white. People are either saintly and wonderful or diabolical and dangerous, and the switch between the two can be lightning fast. I understand this is coming from his past—he comes from an emotionally abusive home. After much gentle nudging, he’s now been in therapy for over a year and I can see the results slowly emerging.

Meanwhile, I try my best not to react to his judgments, though they cause havoc with our friendships. He insists that when he writes someone off for an infraction that he sees as unforgivable (but that I probably didn't even notice, or brushed off as an everyday misunderstanding), I should support him by also cutting ties. In our early days I complied, but after a while I could see how much it was affecting my life.

A laptop screen showing the HealthCare.gov website — Andrew Harnik / AP

The True Cost of Cheap Health Insurance

Vann R. Newkirk II

What the Trump administration’s forthcoming rule expanding access to “junk” plans will mean for consumers

Any day now, the Trump administration is expected to release new regulations to make short-term health-insurance plans last a lot longer. In a fact sheet about the forthcoming changes, the administration said it wants to extend access to the plans—which now expire after three months, and offer too few services to qualify for the Affordable Care Act’s tax credits—in order to “provide additional, often much more affordable coverage options, while also ensuring consumers understand the coverage they purchase.” According to that release, the policies are beneficial for unemployed people and for those who can’t afford pricey Obamacare plans. But are they?

As stated in the proposed rule released by the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and the Treasury in February, the federal government wants to reverse previous restrictions on short-term plans. In 2016, the Obama administration issued a rule limiting their maximum coverage duration to three months and effectively eliminating enrollees’ ability to automatically renew the plans at the end of their term. While the new rule’s exact language is not yet known, it will likely extend that duration to 12 months and allow for reapplication, essentially making short-term plans continuous for diligent enrollees, according to the National Association of State Policy.

Mick Mulvaney Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

David A. Graham

The head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau tells it like it is: If you want access to policymakers, it’s helpful to donate lots of money. But that doesn’t seem to bother him.

The problem isn’t that Mick Mulvaney wasn’t being honest. It’s that he was a little too honest.

Speaking to the American Bankers Association at a conference in Washington on Tuesday, Mulvaney, who is head of the Office of Management and Budget and interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had advice for those gathered: If you want to play, you better pay.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” he said, according to The New York Times. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.” He added, however, “If you came from back home and sat in my lobby, I talked to you without exception, regardless of the financial contributions.”