The Hacking Investigation Trump Wants Instead

Psychics Who Hear Voices Could Be On to Something

Joseph Frankel

The ways some “healthy voice hearers” cope might be able to help people with psychotic disorders.

Jessica Dorner was lying in bed at her cousin’s house when her grandmother, a “pushy lady” in an apron who had been dead for several years, appeared in front of her. “I know you can see me,” Jessica heard her say, “and you need to do something about it.”

It was a lonely time in Jessica’s life. She was living away from home for the first time, and she thinks her grandmother was drawn by some sense of that. She eventually told her parents what happened, and according to her they were concerned, but not overly panicked. “My parents are probably the least judgmental people I know,” she said.

As Jessica tells it, over the next two years, spirits visited her every now and again. Her brother-in-law’s deceased father began forming before her, ghostlike, just as her grandmother did. And while the experiences were intense and at times made her feel “crazy,” she said, they were infrequent, and insists that they were never a real source of suffering.

The Dark Evolution of British Drinking Culture

Chrissie Giles

In 2004, people in the U.K. consumed more alcohol than ever before. How did they get there?

I first met alcohol in the late 1980s. It was the morning after one of my parents’ parties. My sister and I, aged 9 or 10, were up alone. We trawled the lounge for abandoned cans. I remember being methodical: Pick one up, give it a shake to see if there’s anything inside, and if there is, drink! I can still taste the stale, warm metallic tang of Heineken (lager; 5 percent alcohol by volume) on my tongue. Just mind the ones with cigarette butts in them.

Other times we’d sneak a sip of Dad’s Rémy Martin VSOP (cognac; 40 percent) when he wasn’t looking, even though we didn’t like the taste. It came in a heavy glass bottle that he kept in the sideboard. He’d pour himself a glass at night, the ice cubes clinking as he walked to his small office to make phone calls. On special occasions—family birthdays, Christmas lunch—we even got to drink legitimately: usually half a glass of Asti Spumanti (sparkling wine; around 7.5 percent), served in the best glasses.

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.

The Psychology of Home: Why Where You Live Means So Much

Julie Beck

There's a reason why the first thing we often ask someone when we meet them, right after we learn their name, is "where's home for you?"

There's a reason why the first thing we often ask someone when we meet them, right after we learn their name, is "where's home for you?"

My house is a shrine to my homes. There's a triptych of sunsets next to my bedroom door, dusk forever falling over the small Michigan town where I grew up, the beach next to my college dorm and Place de la Concorde in Paris, where I spent a cliché but nonetheless happy semester. And that's only the beginning. Typographic posters of Michigan and Chicago hang above my bed, a photo of taxis zooming around Manhattan sits atop my dresser and a postcard of my hometown's famous water tower is taped to my door. My roommate and I have an entire wall in our kitchen plastered with maps of places we've been, and twin Ferris wheels, one at Navy Pier, one at Place de la Concorde, are stacked on top of one another in my living room.

The Fight for Health Care Has Always Been About Civil Rights

Vann R. Newkirk II

In dismantling Obamacare and slashing Medicaid, Republicans would strike a blow against signature victories for racial equality in America.

It was a cold March night when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. turned his pulpit towards health care. Speaking to a packed, mixed-race crowd of physicians and health-care workers in Chicago, King gave one of his most influential late-career speeches, blasting the American Medical Association and other organizations for a “conspiracy of inaction” in the maintenance of a medical apartheid that persisted even then in 1966.

There, King spoke words that have since become a maxim: “Of all the inequalities that exist, the injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman.” In the moment, it reflected the work that King and that organization, the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), were doing to advance one of the since-forgotten pillars of the civil-rights movement: the idea that health care is a right. To those heroes of the civil-rights movement, it was clear that the demons of inequality that have always haunted America could not be vanquished without the establishment and protection of that right.

The Strange (and Formerly Sexist) Economics of Engagement Rings

Matthew O'Brien

Diamonds are forever, but the meaning of the diamond engagement ring has changed dramatically in the last century

Why do men buy diamond rings for our fiancées? There's the emotional story. We enjoy making grand gestures of commitment to the people we love. Behind that, there's the marketing story. DeBeers' historic ad campaign, crafted by the real-life mad men at N.W. Ayers, convinced generations of lovers that diamond bands were synonymous with eternal devotion. But behind that, there is economic story that is just as important and fascinating.

***

Once upon a time, diamond rings weren't just gifts. They were, frankly, virginity insurance.

A now-obsolete law called the "Breach of Promise to Marry" once allowed women to sue men for breaking off an engagement. Back then, there was a high premium on women being virgins when they married -- or at least when they got engaged. Surveys from the 1940s show that roughly half of engaged couples reported being intimate before the big day. If the groom-to-be walked out after he and the bride-to-be had sex, that left her in a precarious position. From a social angle, she had been permanently "damaged." From an economic angle, she had lost her market value. So Breach of Promise to Marry was born.

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.

A Major Church-State Ruling That Shouldn't Have Happened

Garrett Epps

In Trinity v. Comer, there was no remaining dispute between the actual parties—and both the majority opinion and the leading dissent got the issue wrong.

Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, the church-state case decided by the Supreme Court Monday, is a truly hard case. I can think of good arguments for either side, and even better arguments why—since there was no remaining dispute between the actual parties—the court should have stayed out altogether.

The court waded in, alas. And the majority opinion, by Chief Justice John Roberts, and the dissent, by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, got the issue wrong.

In Trinity Lutheran, a church challenged the state of Missouri’s refusal to fund safety improvements at its daycare playground. In April 2017, however, the newly elected governor of Missouri ordered the state to grant the funding and not to enforce its no-churches funding rule. The church won what it wanted because the state decided to give it—this being, for any judges unclear on the concept, what is wistfully called “the political process” courts are supposed to support, not supplant.

Neal Katyal: Senate's Obstruction of Merrick Garland 'Was Unforgivable'

Rebecca J. Rosen

The former acting solicitor general said that the Republican blockade against the onetime Supreme Court nominee represented a breakdown of checks and balances.

In March of last year, then-President Barack Obama nominated the federal appeals-court judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Spring passed. Summer passed. Fall passed. Senate Republicans, under the leadership of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, refused to hold a hearing to consider him, let alone schedule a vote. In November, Donald Trump was elected president and in short order named his own nominee. Within three months of Trump’s inauguration, the Senate confirmed Neil Gorsuch to the Court.

Speaking Tuesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, the Supreme Court attorney and former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal sharply criticized this sequence of events, calling the GOP’s Garland blockade “unforgivable.” Katyal said:

How One Pastor Is Bridging the Partisan Divide

Yoni Appelbaum

Adam Hamilton takes on controversial social issues from the pulpit, challenging his politically divided congregation to find common ground.

A recent study found that Methodism is one of America’s most politically divided denominations, with both congregants and their pastors roughly split between the Democratic and Republican Parties. That makes rising partisanship a particular challenge for pastors like Adam Hamilton, of the Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City. He estimates his congregants are perhaps 60 percent Republicans, and 40 percent Democrats—slightly more liberal than the communities from which they’re drawn, but still a decidedly red-state congregation. And, he argues, it gives the ways in which he navigates those tensions broader import.

Hamilton wanted to challenge his congregants to address pressing social challenges, despite their partisan divisions. “I’d like for them to look at the news every day, and think: ‘I wonder how the Gospel calls me to respond to this,’” he said.