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Why Ossoff Lost

Molly Ball

Despite the opposition Trump has galvanized, the Democrats still haven’t figured out how to win in the places they’re trying to stage a comeback.

ATLANTA—Around midnight, hours after their candidate conceded he had lost the Most Important Special Election in History, the last remaining supporters of Jon Ossoff took over the stage where he had recently stood. One of them waved a bottle of vodka in the air. Together, they took up the time-honored leftist chant: “This is what democracy looks like!”

Sometimes, this is indeed what democracy looks like: you get outvoted.

Democrats were counting on Ossoff, the boy wonder of Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, to deliver the proof that, with Donald Trump in the White House, there was no limit to their political potential. But after a frenzied two-month runoff campaign between Ossoff and his Republican opponent, Karen Handel, the Democrat wound up with about the same proportion of the vote—48 percent—as Hillary Clinton got here in November. If this race was a referendum on Trump, the president won it.

The Cheapest Generation

Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissmann

Why Millennials aren’t buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy

In 2009, Ford brought its new supermini, the Fiesta, over from Europe in a brave attempt to attract the attention of young Americans. It passed out 100 of the cars to influential bloggers for a free six-month test-drive, with just one condition: document your experience online, whether you love the Fiesta or hate it.

Young bloggers loved the car. Young drivers? Not so much. After a brief burst of excitement, in which Ford sold more than 90,000 units over 18 months, Fiesta sales plummeted. As of April 2012, they were down 30 percent from 2011.

Don’t blame Ford. The company is trying to solve a puzzle that’s bewildering every automaker in America: How do you sell cars to Millennials (a k a Generation Y)? The fact is, today’s young people simply don’t drive like their predecessors did. In 2010, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985. Miles driven are down, too. Even the proportion of teenagers with a license fell, by 28 percent, between 1998 and 2008.

What’s Wrong With the Democrats?

Franklin Foer

If the party cares about winning, it needs to learn how to appeal to the white working class.

The strategy was simple. A demographic wave—long-building, still-building—would carry the party to victory, and liberalism to generational advantage. The wave was inevitable, unstoppable. It would not crest for many years, and in the meantime, there would be losses—losses in the midterms and in special elections; in statehouses and in districts and counties and municipalities outside major cities. Losses in places and elections where the white vote was especially strong.

But the presidency could offset these losses. Every four years the wave would swell, receding again thereafter but coming back in the next presidential cycle, higher, higher. The strategy was simple. The presidency was everything.

Power Causes Brain Damage

Jerry Useem

Over time, leaders lose mental capacities—most notably for reading other people—that were essential to their rise.

If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?

When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. But it was Stumpf’s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world’s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room. Although he apologized, he didn’t appear chastened or remorseful. Nor did he seem defiant or smug or even insincere. He looked disoriented, like a jet-lagged space traveler just arrived from Planet Stumpf, where deference to him is a natural law and 5,000 a commendably small number. Even the most direct barbs—“You have got to be kidding me” (Sean Duffy of Wisconsin); “I can’t believe some of what I’m hearing here” (Gregory Meeks of New York)—failed to shake him awake.

Women Don't Need to Have Periods

Alana Massey

Using birth control to eliminate menstruation isn’t unsafe, even if some worry it’s “unnatural.”

No matter why a woman is seeing a doctor—be it for a headache or for a broken toe—she can reliably expect to be asked the date of her last period within the first minute of her consultation. Because of the confused looks I get when I reply with “May 2012,” I started prefacing my answer with an explanation that I have a Mirena IUD, an intra-uterine device used for birth control that lessens periods for some women and eliminates them completely for others.

I fall into the latter category. Though most nurses and doctors move along after this response, a nurse recently looked at me in undisguised disapproval and asked, “But what about when you want children?” I told her that I would take it out when I want children. “But doesn’t it feel unnatural to not have a period?” she asked. I told her it feels great to not have a period. She shook her head and said, “Just seems strange to have a foreign object in your body like that.” I replied, “Yeah, like a baby.” She stopped asking questions at that point.

How to Deal With North Korea

Mark Bowden

There are no good options. But some are worse than others.

点击这里阅读中文版本 | Read this article in Chinese.

Thirty minutes. That’s about how long it would take a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched from North Korea to reach Los Angeles. With the powers in Pyongyang working doggedly toward making this possible—building an ICBM and shrinking a nuke to fit on it—analysts now predict that Kim Jong Un will have the capability before Donald Trump completes one four-year term.

About which the president has tweeted, simply, “It won’t happen!”

Though given to reckless oaths, Trump is not in this case saying anything that departs significantly from the past half century of futile American policy toward North Korea. Preventing the Kim dynasty from having a nuclear device was an American priority long before Pyongyang exploded its first nuke, in 2006, during the administration of George W. Bush. The Kim regime detonated four more while Barack Obama was in the White House. In the more than four decades since Richard Nixon held office, the U.S. has tried to control North Korea by issuing threats, conducting military exercises, ratcheting up diplomatic sanctions, leaning on China, and most recently, it seems likely, committing cybersabotage.

The Architect of the Radical Right

Sam Tanenhaus

How the Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan shaped today’s antigovernment politics

If you read the same newspapers and watch the same cable shows I do, you can be forgiven for not knowing that the most populous region in America, by far, is the South. Nearly four in 10 Americans live there, roughly 122 million people, by the latest official estimate. And the number is climbing. For that reason alone, the South deserves more attention than it seems to be getting in political discussion today.

But there is another reason: The South is the cradle of modern conservatism. This, too, may come as a surprise, so entrenched is the origin myth of the far-westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan as leaders of a Sun Belt realignment and forerunners of today’s polarizing GOP. But each of those politicians had his own “southern strategy,” playing to white backlash against the civil-rights revolution—“hunting where the ducks are,” as Goldwater explained—though it was encrypted in the states’-rights ideology that has been vital to southern politics since the days of John C. Calhoun.

Do African Americans Have a Right to Bear Arms?

David A. Graham

And if so, why won’t the justice system or the NRA stand up for it?

Philando Castile’s shooting death, at the hands of a police officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, one year ago, was numbingly similar to a string of other killings of black men by police. But Castile’s shooting was notably different in one crucial respect: Castile was licensed to carry a gun. He carefully informed Officer Jeronimo Yanez—exceeding his legal requirements under Minnesota law, though following the advice some gun-rights advocates offer for concealed carriers when stopped by police. And yet Yanez almost instantly shot him. That aspect made the case a central focus not just for Black Lives Matter activists, but for some gun owners, too.

As I wrote at the time, Castile’s killing raised the question of whether African Americans truly have a right to bear arms in practice. Even setting aside the questionable grounds under which Yanez had pulled Castile over (a malfunctioning taillight is a classic pretextual stop police use to question black drivers), Castile had done everything right.

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.

How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration

Peter Beinart

In the past decade, liberals have avoided inconvenient truths about the issue.

The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.

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In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”

Which Animal Murders the Most?

Alice Roth, Ed Yong, Jeremy Raff, and Jackie Lay

Humans aren't the only mammals who kill each other. So how do we stack up to lions, tigers, and bears?

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Little White Lie

Nadine Ajaka

Lacey Schwartz grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish household, and never once questioned her whiteness—despite not looking like anyone in her family.

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How North Korea Became a Crisis

Daniel Lombroso, Jackie Lay, and Mark Bowden

To understand how the standoff between Pyongyang and the world became so dire, it helps to go back to the country's founding

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So Good It Was Photoshopped

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Looks Like It's From a Movie Because It Is

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About the Author

Most Popular

Why Ossoff Lost

The Cheapest Generation

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How to Deal With North Korea

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So Good It Was Photoshopped

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Looks Like It's From a Movie Because It Is

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About the Author

Most Popular

Why Ossoff Lost

The Cheapest Generation

What’s Wrong With the Democrats?

Power Causes Brain Damage

Women Don't Need to Have Periods

How to Deal With North Korea

The Architect of the Radical Right

Do African Americans Have a Right to Bear Arms?

My Family’s Slave

How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration

Which Animal Murders the Most?

Little White Lie

How North Korea Became a Crisis