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The Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com/2018-08-14T09:38:35-04:00Copyright 2018 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
Much about the Trump administration has been unpredictable, surprising, even shocking. The president's falling-out with Omarosa Manigault Newman is not one of those things.

On Tuesday morning, the day Manigault Newman's new book was published, Trump escalated his attacks on her, using the most vicious and dehumanizing language yet:

When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn't work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!
 — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 14, 2018

Over the weekend, he'd debuted the "lowlife" insult, and on Monday called her "not smart," lazy, and nasty.

The acrimonious end to their relationship was predictable to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Manigault Newman's stints on The Apprentice. So, too, is the intensely personal way the president has conducted his side of the feud—and the racially charged language he's employed.

Over the last few days, Manigault Newman has been all over the media, boosting her allegedly tell-all memoir about her short, sour stint in the Trump administration. (Whether the book lives up to its billing is a different matter—NPR noted that within the first days of the publicity blitz, she was already contradicting her own text.) She has attacked the president personally, calling him "truly a racist." The strategy of the book launch seems to have been to get the president to respond, multiplying the publicity.

Omarosa's bold claim of breaching the Situation Room

Mission accomplished! Trump has unloaded on Manigault Newman in his public comments since Saturday:

Wacky Omarosa, who got fired 3 times on the Apprentice, now got fired for the last time. She never made it, never will. She begged me for a job, tears in her eyes, I said Ok. People in the White House hated her. She was vicious, but not smart. I would rarely see her but heard....
 — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 13, 2018

...really bad things. Nasty to people & would constantly miss meetings & work. When Gen. Kelly came on board he told me she was a loser & nothing but problems. I told him to try working it out, if possible, because she only said GREAT things about me - until she got fired!
 — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 13, 2018

While I know it's "not presidential" to take on a lowlife like Omarosa, and while I would rather not be doing so, this is a modern day form of communication and I know the Fake News Media will be working overtime to make even Wacky Omarosa look legitimate as possible. Sorry!
 — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 13, 2018

Contrary to Trump's claim, the press isn't making much effort to make Manigault Newman seem legitimate. In interviews, she has faced tough questions about her past statements in defense of Trump and how she could have missed his racist rhetoric before. (In an interview shortly after her firing, she said he was "racial, but he is not a racist," a brutal act of torture against the English language.) Many of the claims in her book have been met with deserved skepticism. The press has also expressed horror that she apparently surreptitiously recorded her own firing in the White House Situation Room, as my colleague Vernon Loeb reported.

The most damning knock on Trump is not that he fired Manigault Newman. It's that he hired her in the first place. On The Apprentice, Manigault Newman's role was as scheming, duplicitous villain. Years ago, he told journalist Tim O'Brien, "We didn't know she was the Wicked Witch until the audience found she was the Wicked Witch." As the president himself tweeted, he fired her three times. Meanwhile, a tape that Manigault Newman played on Meet the Press, allegedly of the president, captured him expressing sadness about her December ouster.

The president has no reason to be surprised that she was as prone to drama in his White House as she had been in the Apprentice boardroom. Trump seemed to have two reasons to add her to his administration, despite ample forewarnings. One was that, as he pointed out in his tweet, she was willing to praise him bombastically. The other was that she's African American. Trump had been accused of racist rhetoric throughout the campaign; at the very least, his outreach to black voters had been awkward, as when he asked them, "What do you have to lose?" by supporting him. It's no surprise that Kellyanne Conway, asked to name a high-profile black adviser to the president since Manigault Newman's departure, could not.

There weren't many high-profile African Americans who were willing to sign up to work in the administration. Of Trump's high-profile black surrogates on the campaign trail, Ben Carson was appointed secretary of housing and urban development, while Don King, an octogenarian convicted of manslaughter, wasn't really a contender. Manigault Newman was available and willing to serve as an emissary to the black community, and Trump gave her a plush salary and title to do so.

If Manigault Newman's hiring was shadowed by Trump's difficulties with race, her firing places them in the foreground. He is calling his former employee a "dog," "not smart," lazy, and a "lowlife." Individually, none of these terms is necessarily racially tinged. But accusing her of missing work and meetings fits in with the old, incorrect racist stereotype of African Americans as lazy. Since the election, as Philip Bump has demonstrated, Trump has most often disparaged the intelligence of black people on his Twitter account.

Serwer: The white nationalists are winning

Taken together, and placed in the context of Trump's past remarks, these comments congeal into a disturbing picture. The president has repeatedly gotten himself into feuds with famous African Americans. The most recent was NBA star LeBron James, who has criticized Trump's presidency. The president has repeatedly fought with black athletes in both the NBA and NFL, and he uninvited the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles to the White House after many members said they would not attend. Trump sniped at LaVar Bell, the father of the NBA's Lonzo Ball.

The list goes on: CNN's Don Lemon said Trump once told him he couldn't report on race fairly because he is black (as though being white puts one outside of race). The White House called for the firing of ESPN personality Jemele Hill.

The president has also fiercely criticized black members of Congress, from civil-rights icon John Lewis to Florida's Frederica Wilson—against whom Chief of Staff John Kelly launched a (debunked) attack—to California's Maxine Waters. He even managed to get into a back-and-forth with the wife of a Green Beret killed in action in Niger.

Trump built his rise to the presidency on the twin, race-based planks of warning of massive Hispanic immigration and furthering the bogus theory that Barack Obama, the first African American president, was not an American citizen or born in the United States. His earlier forays into politics were similarly racially fueled, including taking out advertisements calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, young men arrested for a 1989 rape. Even after DNA evidence exonerated them, he stood by his prior position.

Manigault Newman herself implied Trump's use of the term "lowlife" was racist. "In fact, yesterday, on this moment before Charlottesville, the anniversary of Charlottesville, instead of talking about how to unify the nation, he actually insulted me by calling me a 'lowlife,'" she said on Meet the Press.

Indeed, as I wrote on Saturday, his statement about the anniversary of the white-supremacist-ignited violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year was distinguished by his decision not to name white supremacy, and his apparent dogwhistle about anti-white racism.

"That is a man who is inclined to start racially charged engagement, and use race to kind of stir up his base," Manigault Newman said Sunday. Her claim that she was hoodwinked into overlooking Trump's history on race is dubious and self-serving. Trump was not shy about his racial rhetoric before taking office, and she had even more intimate exposure to it than most Americans. Still, that doesn't mean she's wrong about him now.
David A. Grahamhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-a-graham/?utm_source=feedCarlo Allegri / ReutersTrump Escalates His Attacks on Omarosa by Calling Her a 'Dog'2018-08-14T09:28:08-04:002018-08-14T09:38:35-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567431In recent days, the president has consistently used disparaging and racially charged language to go after his former aide.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trump-omarosa-feud/567431/?utm_source=feed
A car plowed into the gates of U.K.'s Parliament Tuesday, injuring two people in what London's Metropolitan Police are investigating as a possible act of terrorism. It's at least the fourth vehicular attack to take place in London since March 2017, and the second outside the U.K.'s Houses of Parliament since March 2017.

"Given that this appears to be a deliberate act, the method, and this being an iconic site, we are treating it as a terrorist incident," Neil Basu, the Metropolitan Police's counterterrorism chief, told reporters Tuesday outside Scotland Yard, the police headquarters. Basu noted that there were no other people or weapons found inside the car, and that authorities are now working to establish the identity and possible motivation of the driver, described as a man in his late 20s, who was arrested by police on suspicion of terrorism offenses. He "is currently not cooperating," Basu said.

London and the mainstreaming of vehicular terrorism

If the incident is determined to be terrorism-related, it will be the second in London in 11 months, following the non-fatal explosion on the London Tube in September. More significantly it has striking parallels to the fatal attack in March 2017: Not only was it in the same area, but also carried out using a vehicle. Attackers also drove vehicles into pedestrians on London Bridge in June 2017, killing at least eight people; and weeks later into pedestrians near Finsbury Park Mosque, killing one person. The first two of those attacks were attributed to Islamist militants; the third to an anti-Muslim activist.

Vehicular attacks have also been used in Quebec, Jerusalem, Nice, Berlin, Columbus, Ohio, and Stockholm. As Colin P. Clark and Louis Klarevas wrote in The Atlantic after the previous Westminster attack, the trend is worrisome.

"After authorities made it much more difficult to hijack planes and obtain weapons of mass destruction following 9/11—depriving terrorists of the means to launch spectacular attacks—extremists shifted to simple, easy-to-execute acts of violence like mass shootings and automobile rammings," they wrote. "The unsophisticated and omnipresent threat posed by vehicular terrorism is now forcing those entrusted with security to rethink their paradigms."

The circumstances behind Tuesday's incident are similar to last year's crash outside the U.K.'s Houses of Parliament that resulted in the deaths of five people. In that incident, a 52-year-old British national drove his car into pedestrians along Westminster Bridge before crashing his car into the Westminster Palace fence and fatally stabbing an unarmed officer. He was later shot dead at the scene. Tuesday's crash also involved a seemingly deliberate collision into one of the U.K.'s most iconic—and therefore heavily fortified—sites. It also resulted in the injury of pedestrians and cyclists who were hit by the car.

But there were also notable differences. Whereas the 2017 attack took place at about 2:40 p.m. (at a time where the area would likely be filled with tourists and lawmakers), Tuesday's incident took place at around 7:30 a.m., well before most people would be around. It also took place during Parliament's summer recess, during which Westminster is less busy than usual.

The British government announced it will hold an emergency COBRA committee meeting—as is customary in the aftermath of national emergencies—Tuesday afternoon to address the incident. In a statement, London Mayor Sadiq Khan urged vigilance. "All Londoners, like me, utterly condemn all acts of terrorism on our city," he said. "The response of Londoners today shows that we will never be cowed, intimidated or divided by any terrorist attack."

President Trump, who has previously clashed with Khan on the response to terrorists attacks in London, said on Twitter: "Another terrorist attack in London … These animals are crazy and must be dealt with through toughness and strength!"
Yasmeen Serhanhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/yasmen-serhan/?utm_source=feedHannah Mckay / ReutersPolice officers stand at a cordon after a car crashed outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster on August 14, 2018.U.K. Police Are Investigating a Crash Near Parliament as Terrorism2018-08-14T08:54:27-04:002018-08-14T09:05:33-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567464Two people were injured in the suspected attack.https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/london-attack/567464/?utm_source=feed
Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, in late January of 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced to an audience in Sioux City: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."

Trump, who has always been prone to fantastical overstatement, was derided at the time, but here and now—over two-and-a-half years later—the statement seems prescient.

You could list the scandals—from the Mueller probe to Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels, from Tom Price to Scott Pruitt to Ben Carson, from Bill Shine to Ronny Jackson to Jared Kushner, from the Trump Hotel to the Trump label, from Charlottesville to Ukraine—and while it would be very long, it would not (at least in the eyes of his supporters) be disqualifying. Politically speaking, the president is standing with his guns blazing in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and he's not losing anyone. Miraculously, Trump remains on top; so far this year, Gallup has registered an approval rating among the members of his own party ranging from 81 to 90 percent. Despite it all, those numbers have barely budged.

How is such a thing possible? In part, it's a symptom of contemporary politics—Obama enjoyed similarly high approval ratings from Democratic partisans during his terms in office. And there's some evidence that Republicans disaffected with Trump are ceasing to identify with their party, leaving only the president's supporters behind. But Obama never endured a comparable string of scandals; the erosion of the GOP's ranks doesn't explain the fervency of those who remain.

Is it Trump—or something larger than Trump? Possibly, it's both. Last spring, my colleague Peter Beinart looked at the increasing secularization of American society and how it had contributed to the rise of political tribalism:

As Americans have left organized religion, they haven't stopped viewing politics as a struggle between "us" and "them." Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways.

This tribalism has infected both the right and the left—but in particular, Beinart cited the work of W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, who has concluded that "rates of religious attendance have fallen more than twice as much among whites without a college degree as among those who graduated college."

Non-college-educated whites are the Trump base, now set adrift:

Establishing causation is difficult, but we know that culturally conservative white Americans who are disengaged from church experience less economic success and more family breakdown than those who remain connected, and they grow more pessimistic and resentful.

You could draw a straight line from a disenfranchised, pessimistic, resentful audience to Trump's brand of fear-driven, divisive politics, but this would leave out an equally important part of the Trump phenomenon, and something critical to its success: the elation. Go to a Trump rally, speak to Trump supporters, and the devotion is nearly evangelical. Their party line is less a talking point than a sermon: His voters have talked to me about the "bad deal" with Iran, the "drug mules" crossing the border, the Robert Mueller "witch hunt." The language is uniform, as they quote chapter and verse. Here are the true believers: It is no surprise that Trump's numbers won't move.

In his research, Wilcox noted the particular isolation of the white working class in the institutional church:

Moderately educated Americans may feel less attracted to churches that uphold the bourgeois virtues—delayed gratification, a focus on education, self-control, etc.—that undergird this lifestyle. As importantly, working class whites may also feel uncomfortable socializing with the middle and upper class whites who have increasingly come to dominate the life of religious congregations in the U.S. since the 1970s, especially as they see their own economic fortunes fall.

The declining economic position of white working class Americans may have made the bourgeois moral logic embodied in many churches both less attractive and attainable.

Trumpism proposes a system of worship formed in direct opposition to bourgeois moral logic, with values that are anti-intellectual and anti-P.C. If mainline Protestantism is a bastion of the educated, upper middle class, the Church of Trump is a gathering place for its cast-offs. Trump's rhetoric about the "silent majority" is indeed a racial dog whistle, but it is also a call to his supporters to unmask themselves. He offers a public embrace of a worldview that has been, at least until this point, a mark of shame. There is belonging in this—but there is also relief.

That part of the Trump phenomenon remains mostly unnoticed, except by those who have witnessed it firsthand. Reporting from a rally in South Carolina in 2015, Molly Ball observed:

Despite all the negativity and fear, the energy in this room does not feel dark and aggressive and threatening. It doesn't feel like a powder keg about to blow, a lynch mob about to rampage. It feels joyous.

"There is so much love in every room I go to," Trump says, near the end of nearly an hour and a half of free-associative bombast, silly and sometimes offensive impressions, and insane pronouncements. "We want our country to be great again, and we know it can be done!"

At a rally in South Bend, Indiana that I attended earlier this year, there were offensive T-shirts ("Hillary Sucks … But Not Like Monica") and angry chants, but there were also goofy costumes and free sandwiches. There was name-calling, but there were also group selfies.

I spoke to Wilcox about this aspect of Trumpism—the strange joy inherent in the shouts of self-designated "deplorable" status, and whether that might signal a substitute for the rapture of the church. "The Trump rallies have collective effervescence," said Wilcox. "Emile Durkheim wrote about the power of collective effervescence—of engaging in common rituals that give them meaning and power and strength. And those things can be wonderful, or they can be dangerous."

Durkheim's theory—that a gathering of the tribe can create a certain energy that renders particular people or objects sacred—goes a long way toward explaining Trump's infallibility among his supporters. But it also brings to the fore something that Trump critics have missed so far when focusing on his (not insignificant) negatives: Trumpism, like many forms of non-secular worship, makes its believers feel good.

"Among the poor and the working class," Wilcox told me,"when it comes to both marriage and religion, there has been a real erosion. And that has hit them harder than the upper classes."

He continued: "These two important sources of solidarity and meaning are now much less a part of working class American's lives—and leaves them that much more disenchanted and disenfranchised."

If Trumpism is endowing certain Americans with a sense of solidarity and support that were once found in institutions like the church (or marriage), the implications for the Republican Party—to say nothing of American society writ large—are consequential. At its core, the Church of Trump is irreconcilable with a society that values equal protection, free speech and the separation of powers. And yet strident efforts to convince the faithful of a prophet's fallacy may backfire, producing redoubled faith. To deconstruct the complicated and visceral relationship between Trump and his supporters, those on the outside must begin to grapple with the oddness of the proposition itself: Trump, in all his baseness, offers his believers something that is, strangely, spiritually elevated.
Alex Wagnerhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/alex-wagner/?utm_source=feedCarlo Allegri / ReutersThe Church of Trump2018-08-14T07:56:23-04:002018-08-14T07:56:24-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567425At the president's rallies, his devotees find the relief of belonging—and something more, besides.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/the-church-of-trump/567425/?utm_source=feed
I have never lost a public debate more completely than I have lost the debate over judicial confirmations. For many years, across administrations of both parties, I clung to the increasingly minority view that each judicial nominee ought not be a skirmish in a larger war for the courts, that the Senate should tend to defer to the president in its exercise of the power to "advise and consent" on nominees, and that the Senate should treat nominees decently and without undue delays. I started arguing this position during the Clinton administration; I maintained it during the Bush administration; I wrote a book on the subject warning of the dangers of the erosion of norms surrounding confirmations.

I stand by everything I argued.

But those of us who argued for de-escalating what I called the "Confirmation Wars" got our clocks cleaned. We lost decisively—on every front and against every foe. We lost at the hands of Democrats and Republicans alike. We lost at the hands of interest groups. We lost at the hands of law professors. Perhaps most importantly, we lost at the hands of voters—party-base voters, to be precise—who demanded of their elected officials precisely the kind of activity of whose dangers we warned. In a democracy, voters tend to get what they want in the long run. In this case, it didn't even take very long.

And so we come to a place where Brett Kavanaugh is preponderantly likely to be confirmed by the Senate, yet for all the wrong reasons. He will be confirmed not because he is well qualified to sit on the Supreme Court, though he is certainly well qualified. He will be confirmed not because he is a principled and talented jurist, though he is a principled and talented jurist. Indeed, he will be confirmed not because of any of his virtues, though he has many virtues.

He will be confirmed because there are 51 Republican senators in office and a Republican vice president who can break a tie if need be. While he may get a few Democratic votes, he will get confirmed—indeed, he will get a vote at all—because Republicans right now have the raw political power to confirm him on their own. That political constellation of power exists because people expect him to vote in certain ways on certain types of cases, to deliver certain specific outcomes on issues they care about. Democrats will oppose him for the same reasons. And here's the rub: If the balance of power changes even a little bit before the vote on him takes place and Democrats somehow come into a working majority, then Kavanaugh will not be confirmed and might not even get a vote. Our partisanship over Supreme Court nominations is not yet perfect, but it is getting there fast.

Our debate about judges takes place in the language of principle. We pretend to debate judicial philosophies, when we all know there was no philosophical objection to confirming Merrick Garland. We pretend to debate whether a given dilatory tactic is legitimate or not, when everyone on both sides of the argument knows they will adopt the other's arguments the moment power changes hands. We strike principled poses about what the Constitution requires of the Senate or what the Senate's precedents allow, because we don't like acknowledging that the only real principle at issue in the Senate's treatment of judicial confirmations boils down to power—who has it and who doesn't at any given moment in time.

Before exploring the implications of our contemporary environment with respect to the Senate and judicial confirmations, let me pause over two critical antecedent points. The first is that this situation actually is new. While America has seen ideological contest over the courts at various times in its past, we have never before in our history faced a reality in which our normative expectation was that the opposition party would oppose the average Supreme Court appointment of a nominee whose formal qualifications were not seriously questions—and block that nominee if humanly possible. We have never before faced a situation in which our working assumption was that Democrats would oppose all Republican nominees and that Republicans would oppose all Democratic nominees and that we would thus create partisan camps on every appellate court in the country. While the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas nominations provoked sharp battles, the Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Sandra Day O'Connor nominations did not. And as recently as the Clinton administration, Supreme Court nominees were still being confirmed with near unanimity. Barring a dramatic shift in political climate, that's all but unthinkable today.

The second point is that moral equivalence between the two sides is the only analytically serious way to understand our new reality. Neither side likes this point. Democrats and Republicans alike pretend that the escalations in the judicial confirmation wars took place entirely at the other side's hands. They both see their own roles as primarily defensive, responsive to the other side's aggression. They are both—the word is not too strong—lying, sometimes to themselves, sometimes to the public, sometimes to both.

In fact, both sides have incrementally escalated at every stage since at least the late 1980s. At no point did either step back and sue for peace. The erosion of the norm of a relatively modest Senate confirmation process took place because both sides calculated at every stage—probably rightly—that the other would take the next incremental escalatory step if roles were reversed. They calculated that base voters would sooner forgive escalation than they would forgive weakness. They calculated that they could get away with escalation. And they calculated that they could lie about what they were doing—flamboyantly and without shame—and get away with it. And so they did.

The search for the original sin is a mug's game. Democrats opposed Robert Bork for ideological reasons and then held up some appellate court nominees during the first Bush administration. Republicans held up a lot of appellate court nominees during the Clinton administration, but stopped short of using the filibuster. Democrats during the second Bush administration used the filibuster to actually finish off nominees but stopped short of using it profligately—because Republicans threatened to go "nuclear" and change the rules to prevent the filibustering of nominees. The result was a temporary truce in which Republicans, for their part, stopped short of carrying out this threat. When Democrats controlled the Senate during the Obama administration, however, both sides switched and escalated; Republicans profligately filibustered and Democrats pulled the trigger on the nuclear option. They did this only for lower court nominees, however, leaving the filibuster rule in place for Supreme Court nominees. Republicans, in control of the Senate during an election year, held a Supreme Court seat open for the better part of a year to give themselves the chance of filling it. When they won the 2016 election, they ended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, too.

There are consequences to this protracted war. The most important is that the courts are, in fact, more ideologically divided than they used to be—and, more particularly, that those divisions track party lines more closely than they used to. As Lee Epstein and Eric Posner recently wrote in the New York Times:

The court has recently entered a new era of partisan division. If you look at close cases—5 to 4 or 5 to 3—going back to the 1950s to illustrate this division, you will see that the percentage of votes cast in the liberal direction by justices who were appointed by Democratic presidents has skyrocketed. And the same trajectory applies on the other side: The percentage of votes cast in the conservative direction by justices who were appointed by Republican presidents has also shot up.

Whether the war for the courts is more cause or effect of the increasing ideological uniformity of appointments is a complicated question. In all likelihood, cause runs in both directions. That is, we fight more over courts because of an increasingly ideological sense of how courts should operate, and in turn, our fights over the courts tend to entrench our increasingly ideological sense of how courts should operate. Whichever is cause and whichever is effect and in whichever proportion, however, the result is clear: Increasingly well-defined ideological voting blocs in the Senate are generating increasingly well-defined voting blocs on courts. This is clearest on the Supreme Court but is also coming into focus on some federal appellate courts.

In the world that I argued for, liberal senators would support Kavanaugh. They would do so because he is qualified, because the decision to give President Trump the authority to select judges was made when the electorate chose Trump over Hillary Clinton, and because the cost of opposing Kavanaugh—that Republican senators would oppose similarly qualified judges when the presidency is in Democratic hands—exceeds the possible benefits of opposition. This set of assumptions was driven by norms: not by law, not by the Constitution, not even by Senate rules. It was just the way things worked, because everything worked better if everyone behaved that way. And everyone behaved that way because everyone had confidence that those on the other side would behave that way as well.

Polarization put cracks in that confidence. And once people no longer believed the other side would observe the norm, the norm collapsed remarkably quickly.

Today, I have no good answer to a liberal who says he can't support Kavanaugh because he lacks confidence that Kavanaugh will affirm Roe v. Wade. Why should he support a justice who won't deliver the political results he wants? Similarly, I had no good answer to Republican senators who wanted to hold Antonin Scalia's seat open to see what happened in the election. Why shouldn't they have supported Mitch McConnell in freezing out Merrick Garland? Why shouldn't their Democratic counterparts have sought to filibuster Neil Gorsuch out of some combination of retaliation and suspicion of Gorsuch's ideological views? And why shouldn't a Republican senator have then voted to deprive Democrats of the ability to do this? If Democrats retake the Senate in the fall, I fully expect them to confirm no additional justices over the remaining two years of Trump's first term and to confirm almost no appellate court nominees either. I cannot make an argument that they should behave otherwise. If there are no rules, then there aren't a lot of shoulds. There are only cans.

But here's the problem: The breakdown of the norms that have traditionally induced restraint in the judicial-confirmation process will not end with the creation of polarized judicial nominations and confirmations. It will run deeper. A highly polarized Senate in interaction with a winner-take-all presidency picking judges on the basis of raw power alone and creating party factions on every court in the country is a contagion that will spread.

Already, in response to the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy and the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, some Democrats have begun talking about court packing. And why not? There's no magic to the number nine as the proper number of justices. Changing that number requires only an act of Congress. And while court packing has a disreputable flavor because of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's ill-fated effort at it during the Depression, it's a perfectly sensible next step for either side in making sure the "balance" of the court is maintained so as to prevent erosion of "our" values. And hey, Republicans just "stole" a seat. Why not create two more by way of compensation? If what is happening in the confirmation process is okay—and we have evidently decided that it is—it is only a matter of time before one side or another tries this, too. Perhaps the Democrats won't have the raw power to get this done any time soon. But eventually, one side will. And the pattern of escalation will continue—because again, the only thing stopping it from happening before was that it was unthinkable.

The contagion won't even stop there. There are other powers that Congress has over the courts that it generally refrains from deploying to force jurisprudential outcomes that it likes or to impede outcomes it dislikes. Why not defund courts that rule in ways temporal majorities dislike, for example?

Come to think of it, most courts exist not by constitutional decree but because of acts of Congress. The Constitution created the Supreme Court, but it left the entire rest of the judiciary to Congress to "from time to time ordain and establish." During the 1990s, conservatives pushed this idea of breaking up the famously liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. While it never came to fruition, it wasn't unthinkable then and hasn't been at other times in the past. And in an environment in which we all accept an overtly political understanding of the courts, why should it be unthinkable? Why not break up courts that routinely do things that political majorities don't like?

Even the Supreme Court is not immune from a much more activist Congress. We tend to think of the Supreme Court's jurisdiction as vast, but it's only vast because Congress makes it so. The Supreme Court's original jurisdiction, the jurisdiction Congress cannot touch, is actually pretty narrow. The Constitution limits it to "all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party." As to "all the other cases ... the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make." The exact parameters of Congress's power to strip the courts of jurisdiction are not well defined, partly because Congress has tended to avoid provoking confrontations over it. But that's a norm of interbranch respect too. Why be so gentle? If Congress doesn't want the Supreme Court to hear abortion cases, it could strip it of appellate jurisdiction over them—or at least, it could try.

In a world of polarized partisan control over the gateways to courts and thus partisan factions on the courts themselves, I can see no reason why these things won't eventually happen. And I won't even be able to make a principled argument that they shouldn't happen.
Benjamin Witteshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/benjamin-wittes/?utm_source=feedLeah Millis / ReutersThe Confirmation Wars Are Over2018-08-14T06:00:00-04:002018-08-14T06:00:12-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567422Partisanship won out—and the contagion is spreading.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/the-polarization-contagion/567422/?utm_source=feed
Alison Sweeney, actor and producer

Abraham Lincoln's assassination changed the trajectory of the United States. We'll never know what could have been if he'd been able to finish his second term.

Victor Levin, writer and director, Destination Wedding and 5 to 7

Anton Yelchin died tragically at 27, having made some 40 feature films. There was no finer actor. He was also a gifted writer and director, with a dazzling intellect and revolutionary ideas. Had he lived, I believe he would have been the Orson Welles of his generation.

Ashley Eckstein, founder, Her Universe, and actor, Star Wars: The Clone Wars

I often ask myself what Walt Disney would think of his company if he were alive today—is it what he hoped it would be? Disney changed the world. Imagine how much more happiness and magic he could have spread had he not passed away early.

Janina Gavankar, actor, Blindspotting

I'd bring back Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. He gifted the world in 1440, forever changing the way and speed at which we share information and stories. He deserves to see the descendant of his work: the internet. Wake him up and hand this man a smartphone!

Reader Responses

Robert A. Legg, Greensboro, Ga.

Listening to a sample of Buddy Holly's best work—"That'll Be the Day," "Oh, Boy!," "Maybe Baby," "Rave On," "Peggy Sue"—one can't help but wonder how many other classics he might have written and recorded had he lived past the age of 22.

Graham Roumieu

Betsy Golden Kellem, New Haven, Conn.

Jim Henson. No one was better at navigating life's dualities: youth and age, innocence and darkness, slapstick and depth, men and Muppets. "Bein' Green" still makes me cry.

Eric Weinberger, Cambridge, Mass.

Yitzhak Rabin. Some people now say that the Oslo Accords were never going to work. But that's not how it seemed in 1995, when Israel was led by perhaps the one person who could, by force of will and brave politics, bring a decent peace to Israel and its neighbors.

Thomas Cahill, Bar Harbor, Maine

A twofer: Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. What America could have looked like today had they not died in 1968.

Erik Hogstrom, Dubuque, Iowa

The Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, who died at age 27. How would music history have unfolded had Johnson lived long enough for recording technology to catch up with his prodigious talents? I suspect that the development of 20th-century musical styles would have been greatly accelerated.

Ernest F. Imhoff, Baltimore, Md.

James Garfield was assassinated by a crazed job seeker just months after he became the 20th president. Some contemporaries and historians have said that with his intelligence, high moral purpose, and record as a Union general in the Civil War, Garfield might have become one of America's greatest presidents.

Graham Roumieu

Leslie Ellen Brown, Spring Mills, Pa.

The trifecta of brilliant composers who died before we could call them middle-aged: Mozart (35), Schubert (31), and Mendelssohn (38). What great music churned in their brains but wasn't put down on paper?

Want to see your name on this page? Email email@example.com with your response to the question for our November issue: What was the most significant breakup in history?

This article appears in the September 2018 print edition with the headline "Whose Untimely Death Would You Most Like to Reverse?"
Graham RoumieuWhose Untimely Death Would You Undo?2018-08-14T06:00:00-04:002018-08-14T06:00:12-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:39-565784A big questionhttps://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/whose-untimely-death-would-you-most-like-to-reverse/565784/?utm_source=feed

Marc Burckhardt

Early in the recent BBC/PBS miniseries Little Women, the first significant adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel in 24 years, Laurie (played by Jonah Hauer-King) tells Jo (Maya Hawke)—the first March sister he falls in love with—how much he enjoys watching her family from his nearby window. "It always looks so idyllic, when I look down and see you through the parlor window in the evenings," he says. "It's like the window is a frame and you're all part of a perfect picture."

"You must cherish your illusions if they make you happy," Jo replies.

The scene nods to an awkward truth: Little Women is the window tableau and we, its readers, are Laurie, peering in and savoring its sham perfection, or at any rate its virtuous uplift. During the 150 years since the novel's publication, fans have worshipped Alcott's story of the four March sisters and their indomitable mother, Marmee, who navigate genteel poverty with valiant acceptance and who strive—always—to be better. Detractors (notably fewer in number) have generally fastened on some version of that saga of gritty goodness too, irritated rather than awed.

But Alcott herself took a more skeptical view of her enterprise. She was reluctant to try her hand at a book for girls, a kind of writing she described later in life as "moral pap for the young." Working on it meant exploring the minds and desires of youthful females, a dismal prospect. ("Never liked girls or knew many," she wrote in her diary, "except my sisters.") While writing Little Women, Alcott gave the fictional Marches the same nickname she used for her own tribe: "the Pathetic Family." By the final chapter of Jo's Boys, the second of two novels that followed Little Women, Alcott didn't try to hide her fatigue with her characters, and with her readers' insatiable curiosity about them. In a blunt authorial intrusion, she declared that she was tempted to conclude with an earthquake that would engulf Jo's school "and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no [archaeologist] could ever find a vestige of it."

The lie of Little Women is a multifaceted one. The book, a treasured American classic and peerless coming-of-age story for girls, is loosely inspired by Alcott's own biography. Like Jo, she was the second of four sisters who grew up in Massachusetts under the watchful eye of an intelligent and forceful mother. Unlike Jo's early years—in which her father is absent because, after losing the family fortune, he is serving as a chaplain in the Civil War—Alcott's childhood was blighted by the failure of her religious-fanatic father, Bronson Alcott, to provide for his family. Stark deprivation, rather than the patchy poverty of the book, was a daily reality.

The four sisters, frequently cared for by friends and relatives, were itinerant and often obliged to live apart. Alcott's sister Lizzie contracted scarlet fever while visiting a poor immigrant family nearby, much as Beth does in the novel. But Lizzie's death at 22, unlike Beth's around the same age, followed a protracted, painful decline that some modern biographers attribute to anxiety or anorexia. And while Jo was mandated by convention (and Alcott's publisher) to pick marriage and children over artistic greatness, Alcott chose the opposite, relishing her newfound wealth and her success as a "literary spinster."

For the first 80 or so years after Little Women was published, conflict scarcely arose over how to interpret it. Readers adored the book and its two sequels without probing for Alcott's own feelings about them (curious though her fans were about her life). Not until 1950 did a comprehensive biography appear: Madeleine B. Stern dug into her subject's fraught family history, and outed the grande dame of girls' lit as the author (under a pen name) of sensationalist stories about murder and opium addiction. Then, from the 1970s onward, feminist critics began examining Little Women from a new perspective, alert to the inherent discord between text and subtext. As the literary scholar Judith Fetterley argued in her 1979 essay " 'Little Women': Alcott's Civil War," the novel is about navigating adolescence to become a graceful little woman, but the story itself pushes back against that frame. The character who continually resists conforming to traditional expectations of demure femininity and domesticity (Jo) is the true heroine, and the character who unfailingly acquiesces (Beth) dies shortly after reaching adulthood.

The blossoming of feminist criticism finally gave Little Women the thoughtful, rigorous analysis it deserved. Exploring the internal tug-of-war between the novel's progressive instincts and the era's prevailing constraints revealed a book that was far from pap. And yet Little Women continues to be sidelined in the American canon. Its reputation as fictional fare for and about girls and women prevents it, even now, from achieving the status of, say, Huckleberry Finn. Many male readers feel, as G. K. Chesterton put it, like "an intruder in that club of girls." At the same time, the domestic setting and sermonizing that irked Alcott herself can strike contemporary female readers as bland and restrictive: The book's popularity shows signs of waning among a younger audience. But the fascination with Little Women endures among writers and filmmakers, as a current surge of adaptations attests. Inspired by the challenge of bridging the gap between Alcott's life and Alcott's writing, efforts to renew and expand its power help illuminate complexities in a novel whose literary stature is ripe for reevaluation.

The wealth of adaptations of Little Women over the past century is proof of its durability, and also its malleability. As Anne Boyd Rioux writes in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, stage and screen versions of the novel have reflected the eras they were made in. Early ones offered morally and socially wholesome entertainment in the presumed spirit of the original text. During the Great Depression, when audiences were consoled by the idea of simpler times, theatrical performances of Little Women were popular across America. By 1949, when Mervyn LeRoy directed the fourth film adaptation, this one with an all-star cast (Janet Leigh as Meg, June Allyson as Jo, Margaret O'Brien as Beth, and Elizabeth Taylor as Amy), consumerism had become a patriotic duty. So the movie's writers invented a new scene in which the March sisters go on a Christmas spending spree with money from Aunt March.

W. W. Norton

Rioux's astute examination of the long life of Little Women in American culture is itself, fittingly enough, very much of its era: She draws particular attention to the problematic paternal shadow looming over Alcott's enterprise. Rioux, a professor at the University of New Orleans, delves into Alcott's background, emphasizing that the young Transcendentalist—who grew up in a circle that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau—saw writing as a more practical and less lofty endeavor than her male peers did. As for Bronson Alcott, "the only occupations that did not compromise his principles were teaching and chopping wood," Rioux writes of the radical education reformer, whom she characterizes as flaky at best and unstable at worst. His family, forbidden to eat animal products or wear anything but linen, often starved and froze in New England's fierce winters. (At Fruitlands, a utopian community he co-founded in the 1840s, root vegetables were initially outlawed because they grew in the direction of hell.)

For Alcott, who shared her father's creativity but lacked his zealotry, writing was both a path to realizing her literary ambitions and a means of feeding her family. After publishing a couple of stories in The Atlantic, she met with a colder reception from the magazine's new editor, James T. Fields, who in 1862 gave her $40 to open a school instead—which she did, although it soon failed. She returned to writing sensational stories, which she described as "blood and thunder tales," published in weeklies, some under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, and featuring passionate, assertive female characters who scheme and adventure their way to prosperity. While she didn't want her father or Emerson to know she was stepping into the literary gutter, she seems to have enjoyed the "lurid style," and thought it suited her "natural ambition." The money she earned was also crucial. "I can't afford to starve on praise, when sensation stories are written in half the time and keep the family cozy," she wrote in her journal.

The irony was that Little Women, which Alcott embarked on with reluctance and wrote with formulaic conventions in mind, turned out to be the book that made her name and her fortune. It's impossible not to wonder what she might have achieved had she been able to throw off the "chain armor of propriety," the phrase she used to describe the burden of having "Mr. Emerson for an intellectual god all one's life." The recent BBC/PBS miniseries nods briefly to nonidyllic realities, but mostly doubles down on the domesticity front: Rustic chic pervades the March home, a twee extravaganza of muslin, bouquets of baby's breath, and homemade jam. If each era gets the Little Women adaptation it deserves, this is Alcott as fall-wedding Pinterest board. But in 1994, Gillian Armstrong, directing the most successful film adaptation to date, took a bolder approach.

Robin Swicord, who wrote the screenplay, created virtually every line of dialogue from scratch, saying that she had imagined what Alcott might have written had she been "freed of the cultural restraints" of her time. The result swerves from the usual homey scene to offer a politically engaged drama in which Marmee (Susan Sarandon) and Jo (Winona Ryder) advocate for women's suffrage and none of the Marches wears silk, because it's produced using slavery and child labor. Males are relegated to the margins: The March household is a matriarchy, presided over by a fierce feminist and reformist crusader who emphasizes the importance of education and moral character rather than interior decoration. Swicord even names Marmee Abigail, which was Alcott's mother's name.

Focusing on the Marches as more than just daughters, sisters, and wives, Armstrong's Little Women also foregrounds its characters' creative talents—their plays, their newspaper, Jo's writing, Amy's art—without sacrificing the aspects that readers have come to love, not least the have-it-all denouement that Alcott fiercely, and by now famously, resisted delivering in its most treacly form: Chafing at the pressure to marry Jo off, she made sure to flout readers' desperate desire to see Jo end up with Laurie. Alcott instead paired her with the older, far less glamorous Professor Bhaer—a subversive step beyond which a late-20th-century director and audience plainly weren't ready to go, aware though Armstrong surely was that the author herself had yearned to leave Jo single.

In the future, though, who's to say what choices new film incarnations might make? Lea Thompson is starring as Marmee in a feature-length "modern" update of Little Women pegged for release this year, and the actor and Oscar-nominated director Greta Gerwig is adapting and directing a version to appear in 2019; Robin Swicord is back, this time as a producer, and the star-studded cast will include Meryl Streep. However the latest adapters proceed, they have already found—as have directors and writers before them—that the reality of Alcott's life adds a liberating, complicating dimension to the story of Little Women. For her, literary success came with suppressing her creative instincts. "What would my own good father think of me if I set folks to doing the things I have a longing to see my people do?" she confided to a friend about her fictional characters. At the same time, that literary success gave her a personal freedom she couldn't afford to give her characters—at least not those in the March family. Writing as A. M. Barnard, she empowered her adult heroines in ways her little women could only dream of.

But dream they did. Jo's creativity, her nonconformism, and especially her anger—that energy constantly undercuts the sanctimony Alcott dreaded in a genre that she, without blood and thunder, found ways to sabotage in Little Women. Her ambivalence emboldened her to unsettle conventions as she explored women's place in the home and in the world—wrestling with the claims of realism and sentimentality, the appeal of tradition and reform, the pull of nostalgia and ambition. Her restless spirit is contagious. The more Alcott's admirers seek to update her novel, drawing on her life as context, the more they expose what her classic actually contains.

This article appears in the September 2018 print edition with the headline "The Lie of Little Women."
Sophie Gilberthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/sophie-gilbert/?utm_source=feedMarc BurckhardtThe Lie of Little Women2018-08-14T06:00:00-04:002018-08-14T08:26:52-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:39-565754Peering into the secrets of Louisa May Alcott's real life sheds light on her treasured coming-of-age tale.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/little-women-louisa-may-alcott/565754/?utm_source=feed
The Birth of a New American Aristocracy

In June, Matthew Stewart wrote about the gilded future of the top 10 percent—and the end of opportunity for everyone else.

I am moved to write simply because I find Mr. Stewart's cover story one of the best-written, best-reasoned, and most important pieces of journalism I have read in many years. As a longtime citizen of the author's hometown, I have sometimes prided myself on not being a member of the 9.9 percent, unlike many of my neighbors. However, having lived, worked, and been educated among them, I have enjoyed the same lifelong perks and privileges as the new aristocracy.

Over the years a certain gnawing, insistent voice has whispered to me that I, too, have gamed the system to the exclusion of many I knew when I was young. Now there can be no doubt about my complicity with the 0.1 percent.

Paul R. Constantino
Brookline, Mass.

I think the lack of a military draft since 1973 has contributed to the acceleration of class separation in American society. Remember the days when the likes of John F. Kennedy could serve alongside and develop relationships with people from various socioeconomic levels? Americans have not had that kind of class intermingling for decades.

I don't understand why the idea of mandatory national service does not get more consideration. National service could take many forms and be used as an avenue to education, while giving young people a chance to see how the other half lives.

James Mason
Woodbury, Minn.

Quote of the Month

"[A] thought-provoking analysis ... about how economic inequality in America isn't just growing, but self-reinforcing—and what that means for education, health, happiness, even the strength of our democracy."

— Barack Obama
 in a Facebook post on his reading list, citing "The Birth of a New American Aristocracy"

While I certainly appreciate the threat to American society posed by extreme income inequality and the hoarding of cultural capital by the 9.9 percent, I wonder whether gendered and racial aspects of the conversation are being overlooked.

For example, Mr. Stewart's discussion about how "assortative mating" today consolidates social and educational capital by pairing up highly educated people with each other seems to overlook how recently women like me have even had such capital to hoard and pass on to our children.

Women were not admitted to most Ivy League schools until the 1960s (or later). As to race, according to The Harvard Crimson, until the 1970s, Harvard admitted fewer than 12 black undergraduates each year. The current freshman class, by contrast, is the most diverse in Harvard's history and the first majority-minority class by a whisker. In my own Ivy League class's Facebook group, it is the minority alumni who are often most passionately against abolishing legacy admissions, seeing such a move as an attempt to deny them the same opportunities to pass on the social and educational capital they have accrued.

LeeAnn Einert Deemer
Mendham, N.J.

I found the way that Matthew Stewart referred to the 9.9 percent as we cringeworthy. Also cringeworthy is the notion of the 9.9 percent lauding the 0.1 percent. He assumes that everyone is as anxious as he is to maintain a privileged status. He speaks of education as a means to an end in strictly monetary terms. What about the people whose sole purpose in life isn't financial success? What about those who are literate enough to read The Atlantic but who aren't in the 9.9 percent?

Mikaela Kraus
Toronto, Ontario

Craig Cutler

Matthew Stewart tells us that 9.9 percent of Americans possess nearly 60 percent of U.S. wealth. But the real situation is that the top 1 percent controls about 40 percent of U.S. wealth, and the next 9 percent control another 40 percent. Is it really so terrible that this country has a small professional class (9 percent of Americans) whose members own approximately four times as much as they would if wealth were equally distributed in the United States?

The reality is that the $1.2 million in assets required to enter this villainous class doesn't go very far in the cities where the villains are concentrated. In Washington, D.C., it will buy you a very narrow rowhouse on Capitol Hill and a college education for two kids (with precious little left over for retirement). The other reality is that despite this, most of us 9 percenters feel just as guilt-ridden as Stewart would like us to feel—that's why we read The Atlantic, after all. This magazine does nothing but tell its readers how awful we all are, and we clearly never get tired of hearing it.

Bronwyn Bruton
Washington, D.C.

"The Birth of a New American Aristocracy" is predicated on the assumption that wealth inequality is a bad thing. Yet the only real negative characteristic Matthew Stewart cites is a tendency for wealth to breed resentment.

Perfect equality is neither possible nor desirable, and it is incompatible with freedom because individual actions will quickly result in differences between people. Perhaps the real problem is those who—usually for political ends—feed the negative sentiment of envy.

Walter Cuje
Little Silver, N.J.

How the Enlightenment Ends

Human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence, Henry Kissinger argued in June—philosophically, intellectually, in every way.

Edmon de Haro

I was dismayed to read former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's article joining the chorus warning against a future shared by humans and advanced artificial intelligence.

Mr. Kissinger and the rest of the chorus are of course correct that technical development and discussions about AI safety and risks should be top priorities. Fortunately, many smart, thoughtful efforts are already addressing that priority.

What if we applied brilliant AI tools to our biggest problems? Might we be able to combine human and AI genius, and together come up with what would otherwise have taken centuries of iterative human work? Could AI be the breakthrough we need to get to the next levels of understanding, expansive thought, and self-awareness?

Billions of years of evolution and modern-day capitalism have made us think that competition is the default relationship between any two things, especially things as different as humans and machines. We fail to imagine a world that could prioritize harmoniousness over all else.

AI is the future, and we would do better to thoughtfully and enthusiastically embrace its potential.

Bryan Johnson
Venice, Calif.

I have rarely, if ever, agreed with Henry Kissinger or his political philosophy, but his article was insightful, thought-provoking, and spot-on. The concerns he raises are precisely the answer to those who dismiss liberal-arts education as an anachronism in 21st-century America. The metaphysical questions surrounding AI are way too important to be left to technocrats or the marketplace. Every computer scientist, engineer, and entrepreneur should be exposed to the kind of classical training that fosters informed contemplation of such deep and difficult issues.

Deborah A. Sivas
Environmental-law professor, Stanford Law School
 Stanford, Calif.

When Children Say They're Trans

In the July/August issue, Jesse Singal reported on the choices facing the parents of children who say they're transgender. How can these parents help their children gain access to the support and medical help they might need, he asked, while also keeping in mind that adolescence is, by definition, a time of fevered identity exploration?

I have a trans daughter. The facts clearly show that supporting my trans child is the most important thing I can do to avoid hurting her. Without support, she is more likely to kill herself. I have already lost the son I thought I had. I feel grateful I still have a child—a very happy child who is finally being herself.

I fear she will regret medical intervention. I wouldn't want to deny my child the ability to have biological children and regret it later. But I'm confident we will figure it out together; she'll be happy with her life and the choices she makes. None of those choices has been made yet. She's 4; we have time to figure it out. But the way the article is written, I feel that Jesse Singal doesn't appreciate how important it is to get this right.

Singal steers the conversation to those who regret their mistakes and their surgery. This is not the norm, as the research shows. These are small pieces of a bigger story—a story of the struggle to exist, to be safe, and to be yourself.

Erik Ostrom
Poulsbo, Wash.

As a primary-care pediatrician and an advocate for children for 20-plus years, I've had the privilege of caring for more than 500 transgender/gender-diverse patients of all ages across the country. I practice medicine honoring both data and professional experience supporting the power of careful listening and encouragement of all patients in their authentic self. "When Children Say They're Trans" (for which Singal interviewed me) focuses on a small but potentially growing number of patients who explore gender and selfhood in ways that may not result in an adult transgender identity. As our knowledge of gender expands, outcomes and care options expand as well. This doesn't negate the role of exploring aspects of self, nor does it erase transgender/gender-diverse persons' need for care that validates their gender identity.

Listening to young people is crucial to providing patient-centered care, encouraging authenticity, appreciating diversity, and modeling how to support some of our citizens who have little access to resources. We know what happens when transgender/gender-diverse patients are not heard, respected, and supported: higher experiences of anxiety, depression, substance use, HIV, socioeconomic disadvantage, and suicide.

That gender is complex, and is a highly individualized core element of identity, should be no surprise. That each child and adolescent should be recognized and respected for their authentic self just makes common sense. That feeling safe and loved, at home and in their community, is key to healthy outcomes for all children seems obvious, but is a responsibility and call to action that professionals and adults should not ignore.

Michelle Forcier, M.D., M.P.H.
Providence, R.I.

There's something so glaringly obvious about the people Singal interviewed for his feature on detransitioning. Did you catch it? They're all alive.

In a 2015 study conducted by Pace, an LGBTQ mental-health charity, 48 percent of trans people under the age of 26 said they had attempted suicide. Additionally, 59 percent reported having considered it in the past year. For the sake of comparison, the Pace study also found that only 26 percent of cisgender people under the age of 26 had ever attempted suicide …

In Singal's feature, he talks about how there's not a one-size-fits-all solution for what parents should do for their child if they're trans. He's right. There's not. But he goes wrong when he creates fear that exploring a nonnormative gender identity might lead down roads that are dangerous, or fraught. Singal writes, "Some families will find a series of forking paths, and won't always know which direction is best."

No one can ever know which direction is best. That's part of living.

Robyn Kanner
Excerpt from a post on TheAtlantic.com

I came out as a transgender man at 38. That was two and a half years ago. After some initial skepticism, my mom and dad are now supportive of this change. I know how relieved they are that their sad, angry, hopeless child has finally found joy and success in adult life …

Maciek Jasik

I can't help thinking how much richer my relationship with them might have been if they'd had the benefit of raising me in a time when gender nonconformity, gender exploration, and trans identity were better understood. As much love as they feel, as hard as they try, they may never know me—really know me—more as their successful son than as the hapless, unhappy daughter they thought they had …

Today so much more information is available about what gender-nonconforming kids need, for parents who are willing to learn. But I fear parents won't find that information in this story; they're more likely, it seems to me, to leave the piece questioning whether their child is really trans—especially if, like me, their child didn't experience gender dysphoria until adolescence, or if, like me, their gender nonconformity coexists with depression, anxiety, or other mental-illness symptoms. Kids today don't need to go through what I went through … Parents can let their child know they will be just as loved whether they're a boy, a girl, or neither of those two. Instead of obsessing about the risks of a wrong medical choice, they can help their child understand the risks and benefits of every option, slowing them down if necessary but all the while guiding them toward well-informed decisions.

Evan Urquhart
Excerpt from a post on TheAtlantic.com

I found Jesse Singal's piece to be additive and life-affirming, rather than the "fearmongering" some critics have described. Reactions have tended to focus on how Singal's choice to draw attention to what remains, for now, only a small minority of gender-questioning individuals somehow misconstrues or distracts from the vast majority of people whose dysphoria was treated effectively by medical transition. But by highlighting the cases of people who aren't necessarily trans but whose identities are still, quite clearly, more complicated than "male" or "female," Singal doesn't undermine the trans experience so much as he affirms another experience.

As a person whose gender rebellion didn't require any medical transitions, I'm well aware of how frequently my specific experience is leveraged cheaply by conservative actors to "disprove" and delegitimize trans stories that do involve hormones and surgery. Medical transition is, more often than not, an effective treatment for gender dysphoria. But this doesn't mean that unraveling the myth that men and women must look and act a certain way couldn't still function as its own kind of medicine. What I heard Jesse Singal asserting, contra the raft of reductive misreadings, was that the rush to avoid coming across as "anti-trans" sometimes prevents us from substantively interrogating what "trans" means on a more granular level. And I sincerely believe that, whatever flaws the piece might actually contain, Singal is absolutely right in this regard. While this interrogation will necessarily involve questioning the trans experience, it needn't take the form of outright skepticism.

The best way to hasten the eventual mainstreaming of gender nonconformity is to peek inside it with a magnifying glass—to inhabit the experience with sympathetic imagination.

Daniel Culbertson
San Francisco, Calif.

Jesse Singal responds:

Robyn Kanner is correct that there is nothing "fraught" about allowing a child to explore "a nonnormative gender identity." As I noted in my article, children and adolescents should be encouraged to engage in such exploration without judgment or stigmatization. What I do believe can be fraught, however, is the decision about whether a teenager should start cross-sex hormones. Over the long term, these hormones change the body, voice, and other aspects of the person taking them, sometimes permanently. For the moment, while this treatment shows encouraging early signs of benefiting carefully diagnosed teenagers with persistent, severe gender dysphoria, there are little long-term data for those who begin this process during adolescence.

This doesn't mean adolescents shouldn't transition. But some detransitioners—not all— ultimately believe that physical transition was not the right course for them. And many of the clinicians I spoke with described interactions with teenagers who were certain they required physical transition, then later came to feel differently. It can be difficult for parents to know how best to help children who experience gender dysphoria. But preventing a teenager who has been deeply dysphoric for an extended period of time from starting hormones (or puberty blockers) is not responsible— it can bring terrible consequences, including, as Kanner notes, a potential increase in the risk of suicide. Because different adolescents need different care—and because of the high stakes—I have come to believe that the sorts of comprehensive, compassionate assessment protocols favored by many of the clinicians I interviewed will result in the best outcomes for the most teenagers.

Evan Urquhart is right that many parents harm their children by refusing to believe that they are "really" trans. But if parents decide to deprive their child of the resources they need to survive and thrive because of my article, they didn't read it very closely. Gender identity is complicated, and no one piece of information— including the age at which a transgender or gender-nonconforming child comes out—can alone reveal which path is best.

More broadly, my article has been criticized as a veiled attempt to scare parents
 into not letting their gender-dysphoric children and teens transition. That couldn't be further from its actual intent. In my interviews with clinicians, I marveled at the careful, thoughtful work they do, and at their commitment to getting adolescents the relief they need, including through physical transition. My reporting led me to believe that the best way to encourage parents and children to explore gender identity with an open mind is to have an honest discussion about this subject, and to not shy away from its complexity. Since my article appeared, one clinician I interviewed told me she's heard from parents around the country asking for her counsel. That outcome—one in which more parents understand the nuances of gender dysphoria and seek out the guidance of caring, qualified clinicians—is what I hoped to achieve.

To contribute to The Conversation, please email email@example.com. Include your full name, city, and state.
The Conversation2018-08-14T06:00:00-04:002018-08-14T06:00:12-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:39-565727Readers respond to our June 2018 cover story and more.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/the-conversation/565727/?utm_source=feed
In her new book Unhinged, set to be released on Tuesday, Omarosa Manigault Newman charts her fifteen years in the "cult" of Trumpworld, from her "Apprentice" days to the West Wing. She uses the word often throughout her 330-page memoir—cult—describing its leader as "mentally impaired," his followers as "worshipful."

Manigault admits to being an unwitting member herself. The former reality-television start writes of knowing her "friend and mentor," Donald Trump, was "racial" from the start of their relationship, but not necessarily "racist"—a distinction she can't quite define, but one she says kept her enmeshed in the cult for over a decade. Manigault's breaking point, in her words, was when chatter about the "N-word tape"—a rumored recording of Trump using the racial slur during his "Apprentice" days—became "intense again" last fall. Manigault writes that she has not heard the alleged tape herself, but that she has confirmed through "three sources" that it exists. It is for this reason, she concludes, that she was "brusquely" fired on December 17, 2017 from her post as assistant to the President, with Chief of Staff John Kelly deep in fear of what she might know, and what she might reveal publicly.

Yet while Manigault Newman paints herself as a doe-eyed, innocent passenger on the Trump Train, unaware of its defects until one bombshell-like moment, she's not so charitable toward her former colleagues. As Manigault Newman tells it, she was engaged only in a good-faith effort to serve her country, but people such as Vice President Mike Pence, Hope Hicks, and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos were actively intent on destroying it, all in service of their idol: Trump.

Here is how she describes her former "battle buddies" in the cult of Trumpworld, according to an advance copy of Unhinged obtained by The Atlantic.

Vice President Mike Pence

Manigault Newman writes that she became suspicious of Pence's ambitions during the Republican National Convention in summer 2016. It was the third night of festivities when she met Pence and his three brothers, "who looked like his clones," in the Trump family box.

"'We always knew this would happen to Mike. He's always wanted to be president...I mean vice president!' one of his brothers said with a wink," Manigault Newman writes. "It was a real joking-not-joking look, and I filed it under 'keep an eye on that situation.'"

Having kept an eye on the "situation" in the two years since, Manigault Newman concludes that Pence's presidential ambitions guide his actions unilaterally. That, she writes, should "worr[y]" people: "So everyone wishing for impeachment might want to reconsider it. We would be begging for the days of Trump back if Pence became president."

She accuses Pence of a monotonous acquiescence to this White House's every scandal. In senior staff meetings, she says, Pence would defend Trump by saying, "'God is telling me to support the president. God is telling me I'm here to serve.' He was being directed by a higher deity to agree with Trump no matter what."

His team wasn't so on message, Manigault Newman writes. "I became troubled about [Pence]. The first thing I noticed was that people on his staff kept slipping up and calling him president—accidentally sometimes. Jokingly, in private, I heard people say things like, 'When we're in charge…' or 'Once you become president…'....I suspected that Pence was just biding his time, looking the part of the perfect VP, until Trump resigned, was impeached, or served his term."

If Trump had caught on to his number two's alleged ambitions, he didn't let on. "Perhaps his attraction to Pence was another sign of his loneliness," Manigault Newman writes. "No one else in his life gazed at him with such adoration, certainly not his wife anymore. (Maybe Ivanka?)"

Hope Hicks

Manigault Newman writes condescendingly of Hicks, former Trump campaign spokesperson and White House communications director, describing her as "very nice, capable, sensitive, and out of her depth."

Manigault Newman argues that Hicks was an infamously silent spokesperson—indeed, she never spoke publicly on the campaign trail—because she was "so painfully aware of her inadequacies." "Hope was terrified to give statements or even entertain the idea of it. She lacked confidence because she knew she wasn't qualified to talk about policy or the political process," Manigault writes. "She had no insight into or understanding of what was going on."

Manigault Newman recalls an early conversation with Hicks about encouraging turnout during one of the primaries. "She didn't even know the basic terminology," she writes. "I remember once talking to her about GOTV for one of the primaries. She said, 'What's GOTV?'"

Manigault Newman writes she was "surprised" by Hicks's answer, because it was "politics 101." She says she'd then observe Hicks "always Googling terms while we were in meetings, always playing catch-up, always sensitive about what she didn't know."

In Manigault Newman's view, Hicks's attractiveness kept her around. "Trump has an affinity for pretty women," she writes. "He'd rather have a pretty woman with no experience around than a qualified, less-attractive woman."

Manigault critically implies that Hicks knew her looks were her armor. She "pushed her fashion choices as far as possible, wearing miniskirts with thigh-high boots or diaphanous summer dresses in the dead of winter, the opposite of traditional Washington conservative style."

 Manigault Newman also suspects Hicks of informing John Kelly that she was "this close to getting [her] hands" on the supposed tape. "I'd informed Hope Hicks...that chatter about the N-word tape was heating up," Manigault Newman writes. "Ever since that meeting, she'd been eager and asking frequently about my progress on the matter." Manigault Newman offers no evidence that Hicks tipped off Kelly to Manigault Newman's "progress on the matter," yet still identifies Hicks, in this sense, as the catalyst for her termination.

Reince Priebus

"I liked Reince," Manigault Newman writes of Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman-turned-White House chief of staff, "but he and Donald were a very bad fit."

Manigault Newman says Trump would have preferred David Bossie, Corey Lewandowski, or Jared Kushner as chief of staff, but House speaker Paul Ryan "pressured" the president-elect to appoint Priebus. "From the beginning," she writes, "the GOP was putting up safety guardrails so that Donald wouldn't drive the US government over a cliff."

Why did Trump give in to "pressure" from Ryan? Priebus, after all, had shown "weakness" and "doubt" in Trump in the aftermath of the Access Hollywood tape, as Manigault Newman puts it. But "if putting in Reincey (as he nicknamed him) would make peace with the Never Trumpers and the GOP," she writes, "then it was worth it."

Yet Manigault Newman says that Trump "never let Reince—or anyone for that matter, ever—forget that Reince wanted him to drop out. He would demean Reince and mock that moment of weakness."

Manigault Newman had her own personal problems with Priebus, whom she says could be "very slippery." She describes being asked during the transition the top three positions she wanted to be considered for. She only wrote one: director of the Office of Public Liaison (OPL).

She assumed she was a shoo-in. "But then Reince blindsided me and told me there were a dozen or so people he was considering for the job, including me. He suggested that...I should consider taking a job in" presidential personnel.

She wasn't interested. She also informed him that her "top priority" was to be an "assistant to the president"—the highest appointees in the White House other than cabinet officials.

Manigault Newman says that she could feel Priebus "stonewalling." And then there was another obstacle: Paula White.

The televangelist and Trump spiritual adviser, according to Manigault Newman, had "objected" to her running OPL. Manigault Newman then called Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. "'Yes,'" she writes that he told her. "'She doesn't want you as the head of the OPL because you're not an evangelical.'"

"I was incensed," she writes. The two, she says, had a "heated exchange" by phone, but ultimately it wasn't enough to get her the title she craved. Priebus came back to her with an offer of assistant to the president and "director of communications" for OPL.

Manigault Newman would never quite abandon her grudge against White. She writes of being "surprised" to hear that White was delivering the invocation at the inauguration."A Trump family member pulled me aside and told me to back off," she writes. "When I asked why, I was told she and Trump enjoyed a special relationship."

"I was not sure what to make of this...But I could not stop myself from contemplating whether her positions as his spiritual advisor had ever been missionary," she writes, seeming to imply that she wondered whether the televangelist and Trump had had an affair.

 After Priebus's firing six months into the administration, Manigault Newman says White claimed to her in a "come to Jesus conversation" that it was Priebus who hadn't wanted her as OPL director, not she. "She apologized in any event," Manigault Newman writes. "And I moved on."

Sean Spicer

Manigault Newman claims that during his short-lived tenure as White House press secretary, Sean Spicer "had difficulty pronouncing certain words, so we would have to go through each one phonetically with him."

"He also stuttered a lot when he got really nervous," she adds, "which could make him appear to be lying when he was not. He was just nervous."

The President could never quite marshal respect for Spicer, she says. Trump was "as usual, highly critical and mocking, to Sean's face and behind his back." She recalls watching a clip of a briefing with Trump when he said of Spicer, "He looks like a spokesman from Men's Warehouse [sic]. Cheap and tacky." He would often refer to him in private, she says, as "Mr. Men's Warehouse [sic]."

Manigault Newman seems to resent that when Spicer was fired, he was "allowed to stay in the White House for several weeks, to just ramble around and use the office to find a new job. He was given the dignity of a peaceful transition—which was not afforded to me."

When his replacement, Anthony Scaramucci, was fired, Manigault Newman claims that Scaramucci "started crying."

She writes: "I like to think that somewhere in the West Wing, Sean Spicer was still rambling around in the final days of his grace period, heard Anthony's high-pitched, plaintive wail, and smiled."

The children

Manigault Newman writes that her "heart went out" to Donald Trump Jr. whenever she saw him interact with his father. He was desperate, she says, for his father's encouragement and support. "Having lost my father very young, I understood Don Jr.'s longing for his father's approval, which was not forthcoming."

She recalls, moreover, sitting in the family box during the RNC convention and observing Don and Vanessa Trump's marriage "hanging by a thread." "They never held hands or touched. They never even looked at each other. She had a dour expression on her face the entire time," she writes. (Don Jr. and his wife have since divorced. He now reportedly dates ex-Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle.)

That fall, when Don Jr. infamously compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles, Manigault Newman writes that Trump "just shook his head and said, 'Look what he did now. He screwed up again. What a f**kup.'"

He was never so critical of his daughter Ivanka.

She writes again of the RNC convention, when Trump walked on stage and placed his hands on his daughter's "bare upper arms and kissed her" following her speech. "Then he placed his hands low on her hips while appraising her, and then patted her on her hip. The placement of his hands made everyone uncomfortable.

"But I was used to the sickening feeling I had whenever they touched or kissed or he openly admired her form," Manigault Newman continues. She recalls a meeting pre-convention, when Ivanka strode into a meeting wearing a fitted skirt. "The entire meeting had to stop so he could gush about her body. 'You look great! I like the way that skirt fits. Doesn't Ivanka look great?' He insisted that we all agree that his daughter's tight skirt was very flattering."

Once in the White House, Ivanka had among the tougher times enduring criticism from the press, Manigault Newman claims. Ivanka, she says, "would not stop talking about being ribbed" by a Saturday Night Live skit that featured Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka "selling a fragrance called 'Complicit.'" "Like her father," Manigault Newman says, "Ivanka was thin-skinned and could not seem to take a joke."

Trump took his daughter's skewering in the press to heart, she writes. "He wanted Jared [Kushner] and Ivanka out of the White House. It hurt him when people attacked her." But Manigault Newman writes that she was one of the few who wanted Ivanka to stick around, and was thrilled when she was promoted to a senior staff position. "His forgetfulness and frustration were getting worse. Any time somebody new came in to brief him, he'd get angry and say, 'Who's that guy? What's he want?'...I thought Ivanka's promotion from adviser to assistant would give him a measure of emotional comfort and support he needed."

She devotes very little copy to Eric and Tiffany Trump.

Interestingly, the same goes for Kushner. Manigault Newman does write, however, that when Ivanka Trump first started dating Jared Kushner, she asked her father what he thought of Kushner. "'He seems a little sweet to me,'" she writes Trump said, "using his phrasing for 'gay.'"

Of all the children, Manigault Newman seemed to grow closest to Lara Trump, Eric's wife. The two often worked side-by-side on the campaign trail. She writes that Lara was the first person she tried to confide in with her concerns about what she calls the president's "mental decline." When Trump seemed to admit to Lester Holt in an interview that he had fired FBI Director James Comey because of the Russia investigation, Manigault Newman "realized that something real and serious was going on in Donald's brain," she writes.

"But what could I do? Declare a state of mental emergency for Donald J. Trump? Should I report this insight to...to whom exactly?"

She writes that she texted Lara and asked to get together. "I'm really concerned about him," Manigault Newman claims she said to Lara.

"She said, 'I know. The whole situation is really messed up.'"

"'No, I mean his language is incoherent,'" Manigault Newman responded. "'This is more than just a—'"

"'No,'" Lara apparently said, "like she didn't want to hear it."

Melania Trump

Manigault Newman has a theory about the First Lady: her every sartorial choice is deliberate and meaningful. She points to the Gucci "pussy bow" blouse Melania wore to the presidential debate following the Access Hollywood tape. The white pantsuit to Trump's first joint address to Congress. The "I DON'T REALLY CARE. DO U?" Zara jacket to a Texas border facility. "Taken as a whole, all of her style rebellions have served the same purpose, and not only misdirection and distraction—strategies her husband knows all too well," Manigault Newman writes. "I believe Melania uses style to punish her husband."

Manigault Newman claims that "it was often discussed among Trumpworld intimates" that Trump had pulled strings to help Melania obtain an EB-1 visa, which gives immigrants with "extraordinary ability" US citizenship. "I have speculated that Trump was able to use his networks and resources to secure it or expedite it."

She implies that this may be part of what keeps Melania by Trump's side today. "Since Donald is fully aware of however she acquired her permanent citizenship, he could...expose the methods and somehow invalidate it," she writes. "He is a vindictive man...If Melania were to try to pull the ultimate humiliation and leave him while he's in office, he would find a way to punish her."

"In my opinion," she concludes, "Melania is counting every minute until he is out of office and she can divorce him."

All the same, Manigault Newman writes that rumors that Melania spent election day "sobbing" when Trump won are "inaccurate." On election day, "I remember thinking, 'She's smiling!' Melania rarely smiles…Melania was as upbeat as I'd ever seen her in thirteen years of our acquaintance, and very engaged by what was going on. She, like everyone, wanted to win, desperately."

***

Manigault Newman casts herself as a victim in her story. Her argument is that for years, she talked herself out of seeing Trump for who he was: a "racist," "bigot," and "misogynist." She provides plenty of examples of Trump's display of such traits, whether during his "Apprentice" days, on the campaign trail, or even in the White House. It didn't matter: Manigault Newman continues to sketch herself as the innocent bystander until she wasn't, like a child who suddenly realizes that not all people are good.

And that's the problem with Manigault Newman's version of events. She tries to use the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville as the climax of her story, the moment she decides she wants out of the cult of Trumpworld. But it's hard to take her assessment—that her "blind spot" vis-a-vis Trump was "shattered," that she refused to go on TV following the event because she would not "defend the indefensible"—seriously. Because she doesn't leave the White House immediately after. As with so many moments throughout the book, when she charts her "unease" and "worry" and "fear" about Trump the man and Trump the president, she never acts. Indeed, even after the peak disgust she says she felt after Charlottesville, she says she still resolved not to leave until January, when she could claim a "work anniversary" exit that's typical among White House staffers. Yet if her stance against Trump was in fact so principled, as she claims time after time throughout her book, why would she not leave in outspoken defense of those principles? Why would she leave the public any room for doubt about her values, especially when she claims they are the values she holds dearest?

It amounts to a portrait of a woman who likely did have nagging qualms about the president throughout her tenure, but valued her plum title and sense of power so much more. Accordingly, her exit from the White House was not a personal decision; rather, she was fired.

Weighted concerns about Charlottesville and a supposed N-word tape read as ham-fisted attempts to save face and squeeze a final fifteen minutes of fame out of her proximity to the leader of the free world. It's no wonder that Manigault Newman has contradicted herself multiple times with regard to the tape—whether she has in fact heard it, whether it was in fact the reason behind her termination. It is, after all, the most troubling hypothetical her book has to offer. What's unfortunate is that rather than spark a serious discussion about such a tape and its deep, moral implications, Manigault Newman has promoted it only, it seems, as an extension of herself. As a way to drum up more attention and prolong her star power.

It's a tactic you're bound to embrace and master should you hang around Trumpworld long enough. Consider Manigault Newman, then, its most accomplished cult member yet.
Elaina Plotthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/elaina-plott/?utm_source=feedDominick Reuter / AFP / GettyOmarosa Slams Her Former Colleagues in Forthcoming Tell-All2018-08-13T21:56:07-04:002018-08-14T08:51:17-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567458The former senior White House official describes the Trump administration as a "cult" of "worshipful" followers.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/omarosa-slams-her-former-colleagues-in-forthcoming-tell-all/567458/?utm_source=feed
Written by Madeleine Carlisle (@maddiecarlisle2)

Today in 5 Lines

Peter Strzok, the FBI agent removed from the Russia investigation over anti-Trump text messages, was fired, his lawyer said.

Bobby Goodlatte, the son of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, said he's "embarrassed" by his father's "political grandstanding" during Strzok's hearing earlier this year.

Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman released audio of a phone conversation with President Trump after she was fired by Chief of Staff John Kelly. Trump responded on Twitter, writing that Manigault Newman was "vicious, but not smart."

After nearly two weeks of witnesses, prosecutors rested their case against Paul Manafort.

During a visit to Fort Drum, Trump signed a $716 billion defense bill named after Senator John McCain, but made no mention of the senator.

Today on The Atlantic

Death of a Nation? David Frum writes about Dinesh D'Souza's resurgence under President Trump and what his comeback says about the state of conservatism.

Becoming the Enemy: Regardless of whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election, President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin's convergence of interests may damage the United States even more in the long run, argues John Sipher.

The Next Revolution: Though Democrats have bet on America's diversifying electorate to secure their party's future, many second generation Latinos may be more hesitant to align with white coastal liberals who have been complicit in their parent's mistreatment. (Reihan Salam)

An Expert on Violent Encounters: Graeme Wood profiles John Correia, a pastor whose self-defense YouTube videos have made him something of a celebrity in gun-rights circles.

Snapshot

President Trump salutes a U.S. Army soldier as he observes a military demonstration with U.S. Army Major General Walter "Walt" Platt, the Commanding General of the Army's 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York. (Carlos Barria / Reuters)

What We're Reading

Send Me Your Location: A new AP investigation reveals that many Google services track the location of iPhone and Android users, even if their privacy settings prohibit Google from doing so. (Ryan Nakashima)

Protests for Puerto Rico: Critics of the Trump administration's response to Hurricane Maria are launching a seven-figure campaign to mobilize displaced Puerto Rican voters, and planning demonstrations to mark the anniversary of the hurricane. (Ed O'Keefe, CBS News)

He's A Late Adolescent: Science doesn't draw the same "bright line" as the Supreme Court when determining the age at which defendants stop being children and start being tried as "adults." (Beth Schwartzapfel, The Marshall Project)

Taken for Granted: Despite the party's resources, Democrats are not placing enough attention on Hispanic outreach—and that's a mistake. (Adrian Carrasquillo, The New Republic)

Visualized

Countdown to November: This interactive map tracks the House races to watch in the 2018 midterms. (The New York Times)

Mapping an Epidemic: Republicans control the regions of the country with the most opioid prescriptions per person. (Sam Baker, Axios)
Madeleine Carlislehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/madeleine-carlisle/?utm_source=feedLeah Millis / ReutersFBI agent Peter Strzok walks to a classified meeting after being interviewed before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., June 27, 2018.The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: One Strzok and He's Out2018-08-13T17:58:56-04:002018-08-13T17:58:56-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567455Peter Strzok, the FBI agent removed from the Russia investigation over anti-Trump text messages, was fired, his lawyer said.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/the-atlantic-politics-policy-daily-one-strzok-and-hes-out/567455/?utm_source=feed
What We're Following

Charlottesville Anniversary: The white-supremacist "Unite the Right" rally planned for August 12 in Washington, D.C., drew roughly two dozen marchers, who were were far outnumbered by counterprotesters. Elaine Godfrey and Madeleine Carlisle reported from the event. Donald Trump commemorated the violence that followed last year's rally with a tweet that decried "all types of racism," but he avoided explicit condemnation of hate groups. Here's what Susan Bro, whose daughter was killed in Charlottesville last year, has to say about the country's response to white nationalism.

Turkey's Troubles: Turkey's central bank took steps to slow the decline of the lira, the county's national currency, after the doubling of U.S. tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminum exacerbated its slide. In his tweet announcing the tariffs, Trump declared that "our relations with Turkey are not good at this time!" Krishnadev Calamur explains what's fractured in the allies' relationship.

Academy Angst: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a new Outstanding Popular Film category for the Oscars, reportedly in response to broadcasters' concerns about the awards show's declining ratings. But critics say the award won't solve the Academy's problem—and could create troubling new incentives for filmmakers and studios.

—Rosa Inocencio Smith

Snapshot

The growing number of American adults who live with roommates share a home life that, as shown in Janice Chang's illustration, can be fraught with complications—but also surprisingly intimate. Read more.

Evening Read

Sophie Gilbert on America's diet culture:

The weight-loss industry in the United States is worth $66 billion a year, an amount that's substantially bigger than the GDP of Costa Rica. At any given time, about one-third of Americans are on a diet. And yet, the adult obesity rate, at 39.8 percent, continues to rise. Kim Kardashian hawks weight-loss lollipops made of sugar and unregulated appetite suppressants, touting their "literally unreal" effectiveness. (If you're looking for a way to describe the benefits of most weight-loss products sold on the internet, "literally unreal" is as good as any.) Clearly the status quo isn't working. But hating fatness, it turns out, is a hard habit for culture to break.

Keep reading, as Sophie considers how two new shows, Dietland and Insatiable, reveal how cultural concepts of fatness have changed—and where they still have a long way to go.

What Do You Know … About Education?

1. From 1970 to 1979, the number of ____________ majors in U.S. colleges more than doubled.

Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.

2. In the run-up to Brown v. Board of Education, some black educators in the South described their role in the school-integration movement as "_____________."

Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.

3. Starting next year, the Common Application used by hundreds of colleges will no longer ask students about their ____________.

Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.

Answers: journalism / hidden provocateurs / criminal history

Dear Therapist

Every week, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader's questions in the Dear Therapist column. This anonymous reader writes:

I recently discovered that my husband and a female colleague of his have a texting streak going back as far as 2016. I found this out when I saw his phone. While there's nothing sexual in their messages, and he assures me they are only friends, I have repeatedly expressed my displeasure and discomfort about the situation. I have also repeatedly asked for this behavior to stop. He lies and tells me they no longer text, until he gets caught red-handed again …

He tells me I am overreacting and that I should get over it. I am considering separating from him if his behavior doesn't stop. What do you suggest?

Read Lori's advice, and write to her at firstname.lastname@example.com.

We're making some changes to The Atlantic Daily. We welcome your thoughts as we perfect the newsletter. Click here to share your feedback.

Did you get this newsletter from a friend? Sign yourself up.

Rosa Inocencio Smithhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/rosa-inocencio-smith/?utm_source=feedJim Urquhart / ReutersCounterprotesters and police stand near a white-nationalist rally in Washington, D.C., on August 12.The Atlantic Daily: 'Literally Unreal'2018-08-13T17:55:42-04:002018-08-13T17:59:08-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567428Marchers at a white-nationalist rally were far outnumbered by counterprotesters. Plus how roommates relate, confronting diet culture, and more.https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2018/08/the-atlantic-daily-august-13-2018/567428/?utm_source=feed
Turkey's central bank moved on Monday to shore up the declining lira, as the trouble with the country's currency threatened to spread to the broader economy—and the global financial system. But it took no steps to address the issue of interest rates, which economists say must be raised to deal with the crisis.

The central bank announced it was lowering the amount of funds maintained by commercial banks, and added that it will "provide all the liquidity the banks need." The lira, which had declined to about 7.20 against the U.S. dollar on Sunday, recovered slightly to about 6.61 after the announcement. This year, the lira has lost 41 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar.

The central bank's decision came three days after Donald Trump announced the doubling of tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminum imports. U.S.-Turkey relations have been tense since the July 2016 coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. They have only grown worse since Turkey declined to free Andrew Brunson, the American pastor who was arrested in Turkey in the aftermath of the failed coup and charged with espionage. Trump's announcement caused the beleaguered lira to lose 14 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar on Friday alone.

'U.S. relations with Turkey are not good at this time'

Erdoğan reacted angrily to the U.S. actions, telling his supporters Friday that "there are several campaigns being carried out" against Turkey. He continued with that messaging Monday: "Turkey is under siege in the economy, as in other areas," he said, adding that the country's "economic dynamics are solid, strong, and intact." Of the United States, he said: "You act on one side as a strategic partner, but on the other, you fire bullets into the foot of your strategic partner.  We are together in NATO, and then you seek to stab your strategic partner in the back." His words were coupled with the country's public prosecutor's warning of a possible crackdown on news reports and social-media posts that "serve as economic attacks."

Erdoğan's reaction to the crisis mirrors his responses to other crises in Turkey under his leadership. This is the same man who, long before the advent of President Trump, accused a "deep state" of conspiring against him, and oversaw in the early 2000s charges against more than 100 people in connection with a coup plot that may or may not have existed. More recently, Erdoğan blamed the United States and others of backing the 2016 coup attempt, and blamed Western nations for not doing enough to oust Syria's Bashar al-Assad. The Turkish leader is now bringing that approach to bear on his response to the currency crisis. His government's public response suggests it believes that the lira's woes are the result of outside machinations rather than economic mismanagement.

Although the lira's decline stemmed from a number of factors, the actual chain of events leading to the crisis is fairly straightforward. Turkey's economic growth came on the back of low interest rates and foreign capital. The low rates allowed Turkish companies to borrow money cheaply to finance projects. But corporate debt swelled to 70 percent of gross domestic product—one of the highest shares among major economies. Much of this borrowing was done in foreign currencies like the U.S. dollar—not in liras. This factor is one reason why Turkey's broader economy could be vulnerable as the lira continues to slide. The loans incurred by Turkish companies in U.S. dollars and other foreign currencies will now be more expensive to repay; profits will also be hit because of the depreciation.

"This is a foreign currency crisis in its origin, but given the reliance of Turkey—both in the government and corporate sectors—on external finance, this could turn into a debt crisis which engulfs its banks," Hasnain Malik, the head of equity research at Exotix Capital, said Monday in a research note. "Because of the high participation of foreign banks and portfolio investors in Turkey, there are clear risks of contagion."

Investors would like to see Turkey's central bank raise interest rates (its benchmark rate is at 17.75 percent), address inflation (which is at 16 percent), and engage with multilateral lenders to keep the crisis from spreading. Erdoğan, however, has railed against higher interest rates. Turkey's central bank has stayed mum on rates, casting doubts about its independence. Erdoğan's appointment of his son-in-law as the country's finance minister hasn't inspired confidence either.

Economists worry that Turkey's troubles could cause investors to start pulling money from other emerging economies. Other currencies fell Monday against the U.S. dollar, including the Indian rupee, which hit a record low, and the South African rand. Markets in Asia and Europe fell as well on Monday before recovering.

Erdoğan, meanwhile, found others to blame for the lira's slide. "There are economic terrorists on social media," he said Monday. "They are truly a network of treason. We will not give them the time of day … We will make those spreading speculations pay the necessary price."
Krishnadev Calamurhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/krishnadev-calamur/?utm_source=feedKayhan Ozer/ Presidential Palace / ReutersErdoğan Tilts at Windmills as Lira's Decline Continues2018-08-13T14:32:52-04:002018-08-13T14:45:37-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567380The central bank took steps to halt the slide of the currency—but stayed mum about raising interest rates.https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/turkey-lira/567380/?utm_source=feed
On August 14, 2003, a series of faults caused by tree branches touching power lines in Ohio, which were then complicated by human error, software issues, and equipment failures, led to the most widespread blackout in North American history. More than 50 million people across eight northeastern U.S. states and parts of Canada were left without power for at least 24 hours, and many of them were in the dark for weeks. In New York City, thousands of commuters were stranded when the power cut out late on a Thursday afternoon. Memories of the 9/11 attacks only two years earlier were fresh in people's minds as scenes of thousands of people evacuating Manhattan on foot were replayed.
Alan Taylorhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/alan-taylor/?utm_source=feedPeter Morgan / ReutersPhotos: 15 Years Since the 2003 Northeast Blackout2018-08-13T13:48:06-04:002018-08-13T14:11:27-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:382-567410On August 14, 2003, more than 50 million people across eight U.S. states and parts of Canada were left without power for days in the most widespread blackout in North American history.https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/08/photos-15-years-since-the-2003-northeast-blackout/567410/?utm_source=feed
Noelle Singleton challenges any swim-cap maker who claims a swimmer's hair won't get wet with their caps to send her one. She'll post a review on social media of her swimming a 100-meter individual medley in it.

Swim caps matter for Singleton, a 30-year-old black swim coach in Georgia with a thick, full-moon-shaped afro. Known on her AfroSwimmers Instagram account as Coach With the Fro, she has been offering swim lessons that target the black community for 16 years. The first question she always gets from female clients, she says, is: "What do I do with my hair?" She gives them tips, including which swim caps to buy. But, "I tell them up front: Please expect your hair to get wet," Singleton says.

Historically, swimming pools have played a murky part in racial segregation and disparity in the United States. Despite a public-pool boom in the 1950s and '60s, generations of black people have not learned how to swim. In 2017, a report from the USA Swimming Foundation found that 64.2 percent of black adults said they had no or low swimming abilities, versus 39.7 percent of white people. Among the black parents in that group, 78 percent said their children had no or low swimming abilities, too.

Numerous factors contribute to why blacks are less likely to swim: a lack of lap pools to learn in, a lack of representation in water sports, a fear of drowning, and a lack of affordable swim lessons. But one thing that's often overlooked is that swim caps aren't designed to protect common hairstyles among black women, adding yet another barrier to their participation in swimming, kayaking, water polo, diving, and other aquatic activities. "It's an epidemic," Singleton says of their exclusion.

For black women, hair is a long-standing point of pride, self-expression, status, and heritage. Some women will spend hundreds of dollars—and sit for hours—to get box braids or install a weave. That's not including the hair products required for daily maintenance. All this makes swimming risky. Chlorine can damage the softness of an afro, the tightness of a box braid or sisterlock, or the clean scalp hidden under a sew-in weave. For some hairstyles, the prospect of starting over with washing, conditioning, sitting under a hair dryer, combing or picking out hair, and restyling in general is frustrating.

While doing research for an earlier version of the USA Swimming Foundation report, Carol Irwin, an associate professor at the University of Memphis School of Health Studies and one of the lead researchers on the study, remembers asking black women around campus if they swam. Most said they did not, because of their hair and chemicals that dried out their skin. So Irwin and her colleagues put the hair question on the 2010 survey, "thinking it might be significant." Black respondents reported significantly greater concern about getting their hair wet, and about the negative impact of chemicals on children's appearances, than white respondents did.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black children drown at 5.5 times the rate of other children. Drowning was the second-leading cause of unintentional deaths among black boys and girls under 18 in 2016. Still, as Irwin points out, the drowning rates are higher among the boys. "I truly believe [black women] avoid the water like the plague," she says. "They might get into the shallow end and splash around, but it has to be limited because of their hair. Maybe their hair is saving them, I don't know."

Swim caps have conventionally been designed as one size fits all for straighter, less curly hairstyles. They help with resistance in the water, but are not meant to keep water fully out. Singleton tells her students that the most important factor in choosing a swim cap is size and type, not brand, but she says many students don't know how to put on a swim cap properly in the first place. There's little instruction on the internet on what to do if they have afros or dreadlocks. "I've had black girls that have had the entire backs of their hair broken off from breakage, or [from] not having the right moisturizers because of the chemicals and the rubbing of the caps," she says.

But recently, the cultural push for products that accommodate diverse bodies and hair types has begun to permeate the aquatics world. Some swim caps now do exist that are designed for dreadlocks, braids, afros, and more. And swim caps are now made of silicon instead of latex, which helps keep the cap from rubbing off hairline edges.

In 2014, a client told Stella Walker, a hairstylist in North Carolina, that she was looking for swim caps to accommodate her sisterlocks. Walker, who specializes in the style, started looking online for options. She soon found herself reaching out to companies manufacturing swim caps to see if they could help her create larger sizes. She never heard back from them, she says, so she looked to China to make them. "People pay a lot of money to have those styles, so those folks definitely don't jump at the opportunity to get in a pool without a cap," Walker says.

Just like hairstylists who sell weave hair or shampoos as side revenue, Walker now sells her jumbo and extra-large Lock Journey caps in online stores including Etsy and Amazon. Her caps are designed for traditional, waist-length locks, but she says anyone with long hair can use them. She says the key for her caps is that they create a seal along the hairline and are worn below the ear for a tighter fit.

Walker has heard some clients say they would squeeze on two or three traditionally sized swim caps to protect their hair. She shudders when she comes across advice like not wearing a cap at all, or not applying moisturizing products when swimming without a cap. Chlorine can cause dryness, hair breakage, or color damage, Walker warns. And adding moisturizer before putting on a swim cap causes it to slide around, allowing water to get inside.

Singleton, the swim instructor, sees this rise in entrepreneurs as positive. But she worries when she hears companies say their larger caps keep all water out of women's hair. "If you have the proper swim cap that has the correct fit, it is possible to help eliminate the amount of water your hair will absorb while swimming," she says. "But to make something that says it keeps your hair dry, it's false advertising and inaccurate."

Despite the hair issue, Singleton says she's starting to see a growing number of black parents putting their children in swim lessons, and even getting into the pool themselves. The statistics seem to back her up: Even though 64.2 percent of black people said they have no or low swimming abilities in the 2017 report, that number was still close to five percentage points less than in the 2010 report. (For white people, the number dropped about two percentage points over the same time period.)

"The parent can't swim, so they don't go to the pool or swim," Singleton says. "I'm seeing a lot more people step off that train of thought and say 'I don't know how to swim, but I don't want my child to not have opportunities.'"
Marissa Evanshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/marissa-evans/?utm_source=feedKirby Lee / ReutersThe Olympic gold medalist Simone Manuel swims in a heat at the 2014 USA National Championships.Swim Caps Are Keeping Black Women Out of Pools2018-08-13T13:41:00-04:002018-08-13T15:26:21-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567398Their limited design is yet another contributor to America's racial disparities in swimming.https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/08/swim-caps-black-women/567398/?utm_source=feed
Every day, John Correia combs through dozens of violent attacks caught on mobile phones, security cameras, CCTV, and police body cameras. The videos are sent to him by a legion of fans across the globe who seek his advice. After carefully analyzing each one, Correia breaks down lessons in self-defense videos, which he posts to his YouTube channel.

A former evangelical minister, Correia is on a mission to teach his followers how to avoid, survive, and "win" any violent altercation they may encounter. "If you can't be safe, be dangerous," says Correia in this new documentary from The Atlantic.

Read more about Correia in Graeme Wood's profile in the September 2018 issue of The Atlantic.

Nicolas Pollockhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/nicolas-pollock/?utm_source=feed'Lessons' From the Internet's Most Violent Videos2018-08-13T12:11:46-04:002018-08-13T12:15:45-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:178-567389With more than a million followers on YouTube, John Correia educates the masses in self-defense.https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/567389/john-correia/?utm_source=feed

Andy Friedman

Someday John Correia will meet Jesus. As an ordained pastor, he has thought about how their first conversation will go. That is why he keeps his Heckler & Koch VP9 loaded with a 9-mm magazine in pristine condition. "You're only going to draw a gun on the worst day of your life," Correia told me. "You want to make sure the equipment works. I treat these mags like babies." If he drops one and dents it, he never carries it again. "I don't want Jesus to look at me and go, 'How come you didn't test your equipment, dummy?' " Better to be shot dead in a fair fight. "At the very least I want him to say, 'He smoked you! He was better than you!' And I'll say, 'Yes, Lord, I got smoked.' "

Until two years ago, Correia, who is 42, was not well known outside Phoenix, where he was raising four kids, tending a conspicuously well-armed flock at West Greenway Bible Church, and teaching part-time at Arizona Christian University. (He co-wrote a book about the Koine Greek word pistis, or "belief.") I had come to visit him in Phoenix because in 2016 he was born again, professionally, as YouTube's top expositor of mayhem, a subject in which I take both personal and professional interest. "I'm the John Madden of on-camera violence," he says. About once a day, he posts a video depicting graphic real-life violence. Then he slows down the video and explains what happened, and how the good guys might have prevailed, or avoided the confrontation altogether. If you have never seen a person stabbed, shot, or (in one case) bludgeoned with a fish tank, go watch the 800 videos Correia has edited and analyzed. His popularity on YouTube has made him a minor celebrity at gun conventions. In deep-red states, people recognize his bearish, jovial figure on the street and greet him. "They're always nice," he says. "Maybe that's because they know I'm probably armed."

Correia's transformation began when he asked his self-defense teacher how to guard against a knife attack. "The way we practiced didn't seem right," he told me. On YouTube, Correia had watched a few real-life stabbings caught on surveillance video, and "they didn't look like what we were training against." In the safety of the dojo, Correia and his classmates were practicing for an attacker who would extend his blade with one elegant thrust, like an Olympic fencer. "There was no energy, no resistance, no ill will," he added. A real killer, the surveillance footage suggested, will hook you by the neck with one arm and plunge the knife into you repeatedly with the other, shredding your belly into strips of human bacon and chitterlings. "I asked him, 'What do we do about this?' " The sensei, normally hard to stump, didn't have an answer. "Right now," he shrugged, "we die."

Since then, Correia has watched approximately 13,000 more videos of deadly and near-deadly encounters, in an effort to bring reality to a field distorted by fantasy. As violence has become rarer, fewer people have had the misfortune of becoming personally acquainted with it. We harbor illusions about how muggings, gangland slayings, and bar fights go down, and about what we can do to intervene or protect ourselves. The new ubiquity of video surveillance could force gun nuts and gun haters alike to confront reality. Correia says he is "an evidence-based self-defense trainer"—a sabermetrician of violence who, having cataloged the events of each video, can tell you with nerdy accuracy that a third of attacks involve multiple assailants. Pepper spray works about 90 percent of the time. Twenty-three percent of the videos come from Brazil, so if you don't want to be stabbed on camera, don't go to Rio.

"Every situation is a snowflake," he says. "But the same principles show up again and again. All I do is to teach people and give them a vocabulary for what to do." In Correia's most popular video, which is from Venezuela, an armed robber approaches his victim, an off-duty cop, in an ATM line. After dropping his wallet and necklace on the ground, the cop falls back, lets the mugger stoop to pick up the loot, and takes advantage of his distraction to draw a pistol and shoot the criminal four times. There are "some significant lessons here," Correia says. He approves of the distraction. "This was incredibly wise … Give [the mugger] something else to think about. Don't just stand there and fight him when he's strong." He commends the cop for "concealing his draw." (The cop hid, somewhat ungallantly, behind a civilian for a few seconds to do so.) "This guy did a great job."

Video: How to Win a Gun Fight

"If you can't be safe, be dangerous," says Correia in this Atlantic documentary.

Correia's narration is notable for its sanity and practicality, and (a rarity in the gun world) for not viewing all problems as solvable with more and larger guns. He used to carry more than one gun on his person, plus a spare mag in case he needed to reload. But in his study of violent encounters, he has seen zero emergency reloads and zero uses of a backup gun (or bug, in gun lingo), so he seldom carries extra mags anymore and has stopped carrying an extra gun altogether. He replaced them with a first-aid kit—which he has used twice, once to save a life—and pepper spray, which he has used twice to defend himself against stray dogs.

Overwhelmingly, the lesson of his videos is to avoid violence in the first place. "The answer to most social violence is: Check your ego," he told me. Give up your valuables. Don't kill to save your car, and don't die to save your wallet. Don't play "the monkey game," an escalating display of dominance, often but not always between two drunk men. Many of the videos take place at ATMs or in what he calls "transitional spaces," such as convenience stores and parking lots. He enumerated for me his "rules of stupid": "Don't do stupid things with stupid people at stupid times."

Fans have come to love his folksy catchphrases. His pepper-spray canister is a "spicy-treat dispenser." When a woman pulls a gun from her purse and sends a mugger scrambling, the mugger is experiencing the "fibsa factor" ("Fudge, I'm being shot at"). A victim who disarms his assailant then pummels him for good measure is administering (against Correia's advice) an "educational beatdown." When uniformed cops jump on a suspect, it's a "polyester pileup." Armed robbers killed by their victims have "taken the room-temperature challenge." Murder victims remind us, Pastor John says, of the need for "spiritual fitness"—mental preparedness for the possibility that "today might be your last, and you need to be right with your loved ones and right with God."

"If you know how many guns you own," Correia told me, "you don't have enough guns." I have watched nearly all of Correia's videos but do not carry a gun, or wish to. (I once owned one—a single-shot assassination tool, designed to look like a Montblanc pen—but couldn't manage the paperwork necessary to bring it home from Pakistan.) Nevertheless, before we parted, I asked him to teach me to shoot, so he took me to a gun range for a lesson.

Like a flight attendant, Correia started the session with a litany of safety measures, reminding his assistant and me to keep our guns pointed downrange, to always treat them as if they were loaded, and to exercise trigger discipline (which is to say, keep your finger off the trigger when you're not aiming downrange). He started by sending about 30 rounds through a human silhouette on a paper target, clustering them with each burst around the head and the heart. He liked the gun, an H&K P30sk, and admired its polymer-based frame. He used to carry a Glock, he says, but has become an H&K "fanboy" and a brand ambassador for the company. ("I prefer German murder-plastic to Austrian murder-plastic.")

The jokes ended when Correia turned and offered to let me fire a few rounds. He handed the gun to me ritualistically, repeating verbatim his earlier safety reminders. Before he placed it in my hand, he popped out the magazine and invited me to probe the chamber with my finger, to satisfy myself that the gun was empty. "Nothing in there, right?" My finger emerged a little blackened. "Nothing," I said, and he handed me the gun and a fresh magazine. I loaded it and aimed.

"Press the trigger slowly," he said. "Let it go off. Let it surprise you."

I lined up the iron sights with my left eye and the target. I snaked my finger around the trigger and applied pressure like he'd suggested, with the slow, deliberate squeeze of a python's tail. Boom. The first shot poked an ovoid hole in the target's epigastric region. "You're a fast learner," he said, generously. "That was about as perfect a shot as existed. We're going to make an honorary Arizonan out of you." The next two shots landed off-center. Correia remained encouraging.

On Second Amendment issues, Correia is very nearly a gun-rights absolutist. But he advised me, as gently as possible, that if I didn't intend to put in time at the range, I might be safer unarmed. "You should be able to put five shots in five seconds in that circle," he said, indicating an area seven yards away and about the size of a dinner plate. I could probably have hit a dinner table at that distance. A plate would've taken some work.

I don't think I'm an especially incompetent shot. I'm just lazy and unwilling to spend hours at the range on the off chance that I run into a killer in a dark Brazilian alley. In Correia, however, I saw the perfect concealed-weapon carrier: someone who has trained to a high standard, who will avoid confrontation whenever possible, and who is much more eager to save lives with his first-aid training than to take lives with his VP9.

As Correia drove me to the airport, I told him about a news story I once read about a man, described as a "Good Samaritan," who saw a kidnapping under way in a Walmart parking lot in Kansas. This was an armed Good Samaritan, and he killed the aggressor on the spot. I told him I remembered the biblical Good Samaritan story going differently, with the Samaritan administering first aid and nourishment rather than hot lead.

Correia, unsurprisingly, had thought a lot about how a Christian life might be reconciled with instruments of death. "I look forward to a day when there's peace on Earth and goodwill toward men," he told me. "That's not going to happen till Jesus comes back."

It sounded like a cop-out. But Correia wasn't finished. "I have devoted my life to two things," he said, his eyes on the road. The first was pastoring, and the second was armed self-defense. "And if my theological commitments are correct, neither of them will exist in the perfect state in which we'll find ourselves later. If the picture of the afterlife that the Bible presents is true, we won't be sitting on a cloud strumming a harp. There will be some continuity with the current world, but living in perfection."

I asked whether there would be guns in heaven.

"No," he said firmly. "When everyone follows the Lord and knows him and loves him and doesn't have any problems, we won't need guns." (He later allowed that heaven might have target shooting, but only for recreation, not in training for self-defense.) "We won't need preachers," he added. "I'll be out of work. I will have to find a new profession in eternity."

This article appears in the September 2018 print edition with the headline "The Minister of Self-Defense."
Graeme Woodhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/graeme-wood/?utm_source=feedAndy FriedmanThe Gun Guru of YouTube2018-08-13T11:00:00-04:002018-08-13T12:37:58-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:39-565739John Correia wants you to prepare for the worst day of your life.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/john-correia-self-defense/565739/?utm_source=feed
Over the past few days, the news for Republican congressional candidates has been almost unremittingly bleak. Troy Balderson, a state senator running in a central Ohio district that had long been considered rock solid for the GOP, is only narrowly ahead of the Democrat Danny O'Connor, a relative newcomer who has yet to concede defeat. In Washington State's jungle primary, which winnows candidates of all parties down to the top two vote winners who then go on to contest the November general election, Republican candidates badly underperformed expectations. Seemingly safe Republican seats, such as southern Washington's sprawling Third District, currently represented by the erstwhile rising star Jaime Herrera Beutler, now appear to be in jeopardy. Hopes that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the tight labor market would together lift the fortunes of the incumbent party have dimmed, and Republicans are turning to a more urgent message as the midterms approach: If the Democrats win, the Donald Trump presidency will be imperiled.

So suggested Representative Devin Nunes of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and one of President Trump's most zealous defenders, to a closed-door gathering of donors late last month. Steve Bannon, the right-wing impresario once considered Trump's chief ideologist, is speaking in similarly apocalyptic terms, warning that the first thing Democrats will do if they secure a House majority is move to impeach the president. In an interview with New York magazine, he claimed that while Democrats were committed to removing Trump from office, regardless of the findings of the Mueller investigation, they were shrewd enough to avoid campaigning on doing so: "Because they've seen the same data I've seen. The way to get the deplorables out is very simple: It's talking impeachment. They want to shut you up, and they want to impeach Trump. So if you like Trump, you gotta show up. It's very simple." Elsewhere, in an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, Bannon made his point more plainly, insisting that Trump voters back GOP candidates in the fall, even when said candidates were, in his words, "RINOs" or "establishment figures." This is a far cry from the bravado of months ago, when Bannon was busily orchestrating primary challenges against supposed RINOs and establishment figures in Senate races around the country, and it ignores the fact that there is no scenario in which Democrats could successfully remove the president from office without a substantial number of Republican votes in the Senate.

The RINO hunters become the hunted

Of course, there is a more plausible version of Bannon's argument. Short of removing the president from office, a Democratic majority in the House could subject the Trump administration to heightened scrutiny. The Framers of the Constitution had assumed that in the normal course of events, the legislative and executive branches of the federal government would engage in a constant tug-of-war, thus checking the tendency to overreach on the part of either or both. In practice, as the legal scholars Daryl J. Levinson and Richard H. Pildes have documented, this expectation has been honored mostly in the breach. Partisan political competition has long since taken precedence over competition between the legislative and executive branches. Though some Republican lawmakers have endeavored to constrain Trump in various ways, most have been reluctant to do so, seeing him less as an institutional rival and more as the paramount leader of their party coalition, in keeping with modern practice.

Indeed, one could argue that Republicans must hold the House and the Senate to protect Trump from an endless series of investigations that would, even short of impeachment proceedings, cripple his ability to advance his domestic policy agenda. Fair enough. But this leaves us with still more vexing questions. What exactly is Donald Trump's agenda going forward? And is pursuing it consistent with Republican success?

Just as Democrats in Congress can't remove the president from office without the aid of Republicans, Republican lawmakers need Democratic votes to effect deep and lasting changes to, for example, U.S. immigration policy, one of the president's priorities, or to finance the upgrading of American infrastructure. There is very little that can be done without bringing along some number of swing-state and rural Democrats, and as Republican fortunes decline, said Democrats feel ever less inclined to cooperate. After the midterms, the Democratic senators who manage to win reelection in notionally Republican states will be further emboldened. The window for a Trump legislative agenda is closing.

There are steps that can be taken by executive fiat, to be sure, but as a number of journalists have reported, there is a consistent pattern linking together many of the Trump administration's more ambitious efforts to overhaul rules and regulations over which it has considerable sway: These efforts have been pursued so shambolically that they are often vulnerable to legal challenge. Andrew Wheeler, the acting head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is reportedly making an effort to ensure that his agency's new policy initiatives are on firmer ground than those pursued under his much-ridiculed predecessor, Scott Pruitt. But he has met with resistance from the Trump White House. And why is that? Josh Barro, writing in Business Insider, offers a novel hypothesis: that the president's objective is less to patiently lay the groundwork for a comprehensive rethinking of environmental regulation than it is to pick visible fights with the left that have the potential to energize the president's base. The point of picking the fight is not to achieve some policy breakthrough, as Wheeler might have it. Rather, the point of picking the fight is to fight, and to fight endlessly if possible.

Why Scott Pruitt's critics will miss him

As a presidential candidate, Trump appealed to Republican primary voters who were less ideological than the avowed conservatives who flocked to Ted Cruz and other more doctrinaire candidates. He did so by presenting himself as a master of the art of negotiation. Yet his real talent, then as now, has proven to be his knack for negation, as Martin Gurri, the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, has argued. According to Gurri, the politics of negation is a style perfected in online communities. By way of illustration, he writes, "If you asked an indignado or an Occupier or a Tea Partier what they stood against, you would get long, long lists of grievances. If you asked what they stood for, you'd get throat-clearing noises and generalities like 'social justice' or 'the Constitution.'" The creation of a positive program of reform is almost beside the point. Revolt is its own reward. Even when Trump's policy prescriptions are perfectly banal, he frames them in an exaggerated and pointedly polarizing manner, as if it were his goal to stoke outrage. And for now, a decent-sized slice of the electorate welcomes his politics of negation, or is more fearful of the new modes of negation that are arising in response to Trump than they are of him.

Where does that leave the hapless Republican politicians seeking to represent voters who've come to identify with Trump's brand of negation? Though many Republicans are uncomfortable with the president and his often erratic behavior, they won't divorce themselves from him, for the simple reason that he continues to enjoy widespread support in their electoral constituencies—that is, among the women and men who've voted for them. To rebuke the president is one thing. To persist in doing so once it becomes abundantly clear that your objections have done nothing to diminish support for him among your voters is another thing entirely. It is at that point that you either stay true to your convictions, fully aware that doing so will mean your own political doom, and your replacement by someone who is more responsive to public preferences, or you swallow your pride and accommodate the changing political mood. The alternative is to deem voters who see Trump as their flawed champion—despite caveats, disagreements, and misgivings—as unworthy of representation.

Can Trump's Republican critics find strength in numbers?

But this is not a counsel of inaction, or of intellectual paralysis. The logical course of action for Republicans in the Trump era is to do the hard work of building a more constructive populism, in the not-unreasonable expectation that the obsessive, furious rejection of the status quo found among Trump's voters exists alongside a longing for something more substantial. The raw materials have been there for the taking. Though no one would accuse Trump of having crafted a coherent and actionable policy agenda, a few things separated him from his Republican rivals: He recognized that the welfare state is here to stay; that the reigning model of global economic integration had lost its legitimacy; that the GOP was an increasingly blue-collar party; that the socially liberal upper-middle-class constituted a part of society that had a bad habit of mistaking its narrow interests for those of the whole of American society; and that the Rust Belt was open, albeit tentatively, to a more egalitarian politics of the right.

In office, the president has done little of substance to build on these insights. But that was entirely predictable. Trump is the master of negation, not creation. The job of creation belongs to the many politicians who badly want to represent the tens of millions of Americans who still stand by the president, yet who know in their bones that he can't give them what they want and need. How might Republican lawmakers have built on these insights? There is no shortage of examples. To name but one, it would have been trivial for Republicans to have tweaked the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act by boosting the value of the earned-income tax credit. Expanding the credit by 10 percent, an amount far short of the more ambitious proposals, would have cost Treasury no more than $7 billion a year, a pittance when compared with the legislation's total impact on federal revenue. Yet this modest idea was never seriously considered, despite the fact that it would have almost surely been welcomed by Trump, not to mention that it would have given embattled Republican candidates something to crow about on the stump.

If the Democratic landslide does come this November, rest assured that Republicans will blame the president and his politics of negation for their fate. Know that this will be at best only half of the truth—the deeper fault lies with a congressional GOP that has utterly failed to rise to the challenge of binding America's wounds.
Reihan Salamhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/reihan-salam/?utm_source=feedCarlos Barria / ReutersThe Master of Negation2018-08-13T10:17:22-04:002018-08-13T16:41:22-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567386Trump makes clear what he's against. But unless congressional Republicans can explain to voters what they stand for, they face bleak prospects in November.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trump-is-a-master-of-negation/567386/?utm_source=feed
Alex Schelldorf shares a sunny Chicago apartment with a man who creates messes but who doesn't, Schelldorf says, clean them up. His roommate also leaves doors open long enough for Schelldorf's Shiba Inu to escape and has a habit of making what Schelldorf considers to be insensitive offhand comments to guests. But Schelldorf won't have to deal with these annoyances much longer. This roommate, who declined to comment on their relationship, is not renewing the lease, and Schelldorf, 31, who works for an education-and-health-research nonprofit, again finds himself back at square one: on the internet advertising for a roommate.

His search for a compatible roommate hasn't been a complete bust, Schelldorf says, but it has made him reconsider the way the assorted people he's lived with have affected his life, both emotionally and financially. Over the course of eight years, he's moved 11 times and has lived with 10 roommates. He's also lived alone three times. But with student loans, a high cost of living in the cities where he's resided—including Washington, D.C., and Tampa, Florida—cohabitation has been beneficial for his lifestyle and, he says, for his mental health.

"I genuinely enjoy living with other people," Schelldorf says. "It sounds weird to say this, but just [having] another warm body in the house is sometimes good."

For many Americans, cohabitating is a necessity, not just a preference. In decades past, many 20- and 30-somethings shared a household with their spouse—nearly half of the adult population lived with a spouse as recently as 2007—but lately, delayed marriage rates, climbing student-loan debt, and rising housing costs have led to increased numbers of doubled-up households, a term used by demographers to describe homes that include additional adults other than the householder or their partner. This includes people who live with roommates or parents. In 2015, about a quarter of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 lived with roommates, up from 23 percent a decade prior, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Nearly 32 percent of the overall American adult population lived in a shared household in 2017, an increase from about 29 percent in 1995, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data. In examining housing trends among young adults, Jonathan Vespa, a U.S. Census Bureau demographer, noted that by 2015, most adults between the ages of 18 and 34 were not living alone, or with a spouse or an unmarried romantic partner, a dramatic shift from the decade prior when most young adults in most of the country lived independently.

Vespa discovered that, on average, the type of person most likely to live with roommates is between the ages of 18 and 24, has completed some college, but is usually enrolled in school. People who are unemployed are more likely to live with roommates, Vespa found, and rent either a single-family home or an apartment together.

The trend may have been spurred by the 2008 recession, when unemployment rates peaked at 10 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it seems like a recovering economy hasn't led young people to change course. Shacking up with roommates has persisted "despite an improving labor market, despite more young grads getting jobs," says Aaron Terrazas, a senior economist for the real-estate-and-rental website Zillow. In a survey, Zillow found that 30 percent of American adults aged 23 to 65 lived with roommates, up from 21 percent in 2005. "We thought this would be a cyclical phenomenon, but it's turned out to be quite durable, which is quite surprising."

One possible explanation is that many young adults and recent graduates who flock to expensive coastal cities for job opportunities find themselves shacking up with friends, or sometimes complete strangers, to cut costs. Zillow found that Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco were among the top cities for adults living in doubled-up households; nearly half of adults in Los Angeles lived with a non-partner. "You think of people moving to booming job centers and they don't have a family network to rely on in these areas," Terrazas says.

The United States has seen this phenomenon before. As people moved to cities seeking work in the 19th century, boarding houses became hubs where diverse residents—immigrants, single men and women, workers of all kinds—could live affordably and mingle with others in shared spaces. Now, as housing becomes increasingly scarce and rents continue to rise (cities like Orlando, Salt Lake City, and Knoxville are experiencing the fastest rent growth in the country), the boarding-house experience is back, just at a smaller scale. Along with it comes the proliferation of a unique sort of relationship—sharing your home life, and all its little intimacies, with someone, or multiple someones, who you aren't related to, and who you may not even be friends with.

Susan Fee, a Seattle-based therapist and the author of My Roommate Is Driving Me Crazy!, hears her fair share of roommate woes. Living in a city where many young people move for work, she says, has impacted the way adults in their 20s and 30s live. "This is not out of loneliness," Fee says. "They really have no choice; they can't afford it any other way."

What's surprising to Fee though, is when renters don't take the proper precautionary measures to vet potential roommates on important topics like expectations of cleanliness and how to handle disagreements. When things go sour, "they see it as any other sort of rejection," Fee says, "and it hurts and it makes them wary of people." Instead, she believes framing these conflicts as social lessons provides a unique benefit. By learning from the shortcomings of one living situation—like a lack of chore division or poor communication—and not placing blame on the other person, Fee explains, being a roommate can allow for individual growth.

To smooth the social boundaries, Fee suggests taking a pseudo-dating mind-set when interviewing potential roommates and inquiring about past living situations. Because these relationships are not necessarily as intimate as friendships or romantic partnerships, it's imperative to have clear definitions on if cohabiting is purely a "financial transaction," or if the roommates expect to have a social relationship, too, Fee says.

Alex Schelldorf, the nonprofit worker in Chicago, thought he took the necessary screening precautions with his current roommate. But he ultimately ended up feeling like they weren't on the same page about chores, which Schelldorf says he did the bulk of. These housekeeping items were routine chores growing up in a southern household, he says, and there was an expectation for each family member to do their fair share. If disagreements arose, "in family situations, people yell, you argue, but you still love each other."

Schelldorf translates the lack of cleaning cooperation as a lack of respect. The fact that the two housemates aren't relatives—or even friends, for that matter—has led him to wonder what emotional responses, if any, are appropriate when tensions are running high. "That sucks a lot, to know that someone doesn't care about you enough to take out the trash or to put something in the dishwasher," he says. "How is that supposed to make me feel as somebody who has to breathe the same air as you?"

"In relationships in general, we tend to blame a lot of what happens on other people," says Amy Canevello, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "The data suggests that really we have a whole lot of control over how we feel about things" based on how we perceive certain actions. "It's objectively not [about] what the roommate is doing, but how I'm orienting myself in that situation."

In research examining social dynamics and motivations within non-romantic cohabitation, Canevello found that the motivations behind roommates' behaviors—like not taking out the trash or bringing home dinner for the group, for example— often don't align with how other housemates view them. One roommate may perceive a well-intentioned gesture as manipulative, for example. Instead, she theorizes that roommates perceive their household in one of two ways: as a socially dynamic ecosystem, where each household member feels supported, or as a self-serving "egosystem" in which fellow roommates' actions are seen as either helping or hindering your ability to fulfill your needs—like respect and belonging. In the case of a roommate who never takes out the trash, "the ego response is 'This person doesn't care enough about me,'" Canevello says, "versus an eco response to that can be 'Maybe I haven't explained to them enough and they don't understand,' or 'There's something that's keeping them from doing it that I don't know about.'"

Taking these different perspectives, Canevello says, can help explain why people may have difficulty interpreting their roommates' intentions. "I think that when other people are sending signals that they care about you, that's very clear—that's not something I'm going to reject easily," Canevello says. "When somebody is sending a signal that they may or may not care about your feelings or care about your needs, it's confusing."

After a few months of living with a woman new to Philadelphia, Anna Lockhart began to question her roommate's motives. The two women connected via Craigslist in late 2016 and began living together without having met before. From the get-go, Lockhart says, she and her housemate, Caroline, avoided confrontation, frequently hiding objects they had broken rather than owning up to the deed, and silently removing artwork from the walls. "She had put some horrid plywood art on the wall and I did hate it," Lockhart explains, "but I only took it down because I got a wall hanging in the mail from Etsy when she was out of town, put it up to see what it would look like, and forgot about it."

Part of the problem, they both say now, was that they had differing expectations for their relationship: Lockhart had an established social life in Philadelphia, one that Caroline, who works in education in the Philadelphia suburbs, probably wasn't going to grow into. "I really didn't want to put in an emotional effort to get to know her," Lockhart, 31, says. "I got the sense that we weren't going to be super tight friends."

"The ideal situation in my mind was this person and I are going to end up being really close and wanting to spend time with each other and will be interested in going out to dinner together," Caroline, 31, who asked not to share her last name since she works in education, says now, "but at the end of the day, you never know."

One day, after living together for six months, Lockhart discovered on Twitter that Caroline had written an essay about their relationship, in which she detailed ways living with Lockhart "cramped her style," citing Lockhart's preferences of keeping the house warm and living without cable. "I have come to realize that the one thing standing between me and all of my housing dreams coming true," she wrote, "is this person I still don't fully know, a woman who leaves half full coffee mugs around the house and has a boyfriend that comes over basically every Sunday night."

It wasn't Lockhart's actions specifically, Caroline says, that drove her to write the piece, but more a desire to return to living solo, which she had been prior to moving to Philadelphia. Caroline didn't share her plans to publish the essay; Lockhart never mentioned to Caroline that she had seen it, either. They finished out the lease and parted ways peacefully after living together for a year, they say. Caroline now lives by herself in the house and Lockhart, who is an editor at an academic publishing company, lives with her boyfriend.

While shacking up with a stranger may be a sound financial decision, it seems that people don't always realize the social implications of these living situations until after the fact. Lockhart says she wasn't the ideal roommate either. She also notes that the conditions in which the two women lived—in close quarters and with a stranger— though not unprecedented, weren't common in every generation. "We're in a time where everyone kind of laments our [generation's] social skills because they're being usurped by social media," Lockhart says, "but we really are navigating a lot of social spheres."

Living with nonfamily may make people feel like they have to police their actions and emotions more carefully. "You have these relationships that are close relationships—you're living with somebody—but the problem is you don't have this relationship where you can say whatever you want to that person necessarily, kind of like mother-in-law relationships," says Claire Kamp Dush, a professor of human sciences and sociology at Ohio State University. "I can't say whatever I want to my mother-in-law, but I can say more to my mom. They're not in your family, you're not related to them, there's not this expectation that you're going to be there for each other no matter what."

While this gray area may be socially tricky for some, it's where Hafeez Baoku thrives. Inspired by compelling conversations with his various housemates over the course of a decade, Baoku, 27, founded the podcast The Roommates, and co-hosts it with his roommate, Chris Below. The two discuss topics like dating, pop culture, and politics.

Baoku took a chance on his housemates when first moving to Houston in 2016. A friend recommended Baoku stay with mutual acquaintances, including Below, now 24, in the city while visiting from Dallas for a job interview. He never left. The five men in Baoku's house have varying backgrounds and personalities, and Baoku says the dynamic forced him to become a more empathetic person. He considers his roommates close confidantes, and not just people to help split the cable bill: "They're actual human beings that I'm invested in and I care about their lives."

What makes their roommate relationship unique, Baoku says, is their ability to remain friends and partners despite occasionally not seeing eye to eye. Recently, for example, Baoku "went on a little rant," saying his roommates didn't appreciate his dishwashing efforts and that he felt he should be exempt from household chores. Faced with criticism, he snapped: "I was like, you guys should apologize to me because you're ungrateful of the job that I did." The exchange left Below with a bad taste in his mouth since he feels he does his fair share of domestic work. He discussed the encounter later with Baoku.

"I'm usually the type of person who doesn't hold onto grudges," Below says. But "I'm not going to live in a house where I have to continue to explain to somebody about the same thing over and over again. I don't want to come home angry all of the time. Either I have to adjust to what's happening or I leave."

"My personality is to be oblivious to how other people feel," Baoku explains. "It wasn't about the dishes; it was about me being insensitive."

Over the past two years of living together, Baoku and Below say they have made many of these minor adjustments to course correct their relationship and to grow together both in service of the podcast and the household. Though there was never a time the pair was so badly hurt by each other they considered moving out, they say it was the culture of open communication that cemented their bond. "It brought us closer together instead of driving us apart, " Baoku says

And then there are those for whom living with a roommate feels like living with family. In households where longtime friends, or even respectful strangers, are living harmoniously—what Canevello refers to as an "ecosystem"—the effect can be uplifting. "We see less anxiety and depression," she says. "I'm in my ecosystem and I'm getting all my [emotional support] that I need from other people and that's making me happier. I'm in my ecosystem and I'm contributing to other people's happiness and making sure that other people are doing well and that leads me to be less anxious and depressed."

Kyle Petty, a TD Bank employee from Bay Shore, New York, says his relationship with his roommate Steve is one of the most important in his life.

Petty lost touch with his family after coming out as gay about 12 years ago and turned to his inner circle of friends for the support typically provided by relatives. Though the 33-year-old and his roommate have been friends for a decade, they've only been living together for a year. He takes solace in their companionship and their routines, from carpooling to events to a bathroom schedule. It's a dynamic Petty says is akin to family, not without its challenges, but intimate, loving, and supportive.

"Obviously our bond is not at all romantic but I do look forward to coming home," Petty says. "Oh Steve's home? I can't wait to tell him about my day and I can't wait to hear about his day."
Allie Volpehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/allie-volpe/?utm_source=feedJanice ChangThe Strange, Unique Intimacy of the Roommate Relationship2018-08-13T10:00:00-04:002018-08-13T13:56:21-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567296More and more American adults are sharing their homes with people other than family members or spouses—an arrangement that can be anywhere from harmonious to downright hostile.https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/08/the-strange-unique-intimacy-of-the-roommate-relationship/567296/?utm_source=feed
In HBO's Sharp Objects, the troubled journalist Camille Preaker returns to her small Missouri hometown to investigate a string of murders—as well as the mystery of her own family's past. She does so, in large part, as the ominous rock of Led Zeppelin surges from her headphones and car speakers. At the mansion of her mother, Adora, and stepfather, Alan Crellin, more demure sounds play: contemporary classical, mid-century lounge singers, French jazz.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, the series uses music in surprising and thematically rich ways, and its soundtrack is diegetic, which is to say part of the story itself. The director Jean-Marc Vallée executed this distinctive approach with the help of Susan Jacobs, who won the first-ever Emmy for music supervision last year and whose career in film music stretches back to She's Gotta Have It in 1986.

On Tuesday, I spoke with Jacobs to hear about how she created the show's sonic world. This conversation has been edited.

Spencer Kornhaber: Sharp Objects' title sequence opens with a record player, and music is part of the show's story itself. How does that change your job?

Susan Jacobs: Because Jean-Marc doesn't use a composer, everything is planned ahead of time. A lot of things that are in there are things we were working on before we even shot. And the music always comes from a source [on-screen]. It's funny, I've run into people who challenge me: "That opening sequence is off of a score." I say, "No it wasn't. It was something from Camille's iPod."

The studio people were really concerned about something with a thriller aspect to it—or mystery or murder—not having a score. People are very used to scoring the tension. And we're using the iPods to provide that.

Kornhaber: Franz Waxman's "Dance and Angela" gets reinterpreted as a different genre of music during the title sequence each week. How did that song get picked in the first place?

Jacobs: It came from the collection of Alan Crellin, really. Jean-Marc decided, "Let's start with the music of Alan, and branch out from there." Because that's the voice of the house: Alan's record player is going 24/7.

Kornhaber Can you tell me about "Cupcake Kitty Curls," the hip-hop interpretation of "Dance and Angela"?

Jacobs: [laughs] Which is blowing up on Shazam—people are obsessed!

That was created by Mark Batson, a longtime collaborator of mine and a wonderful artist and producer in his own right. When we were thinking about a hip-hop version, I was like, "Oh, I know exactly where I'm going to go." Mark asked this question on his Facebook: What do these words mean and where did they come from? Have you thought about that yourself?

Kornhaber: Are they things that are written on Camille's body?

Jacobs: Yeah. We just gave him a bunch of words from her body and he chose those words and put them in a rhythm. He's actually made an extended version of that using all the words, so we'll get that out because people just went crazy for it.

Kornhaber: That song is just tonally so different than the rest of the show. How much were you thinking about trying to create a sense of surprise?

Jacobs: Well, everything in the main titles is really a mirror of something already going on tonally. We have hip-hop in the show: Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Eminem. The Acid did one after we featured the band's "Tumbling Lights." Everything's purposeful with Jean-Marc.

The music is really this internal voice of Camille and Alan. They're both people struggling in relationships with Adora, and they both escape into their music. That's the whole thing about this iPod that she keeps with her. Alan is in that room playing those records all day long trying to survive that marriage. He's been marginalized by Adora, and she clearly is more interested in the town sheriff than her own husband.

So the music is all about surviving. And then we do have a theme in there of "Mama" songs [like Steve Miller Band's "Motherless Children" and Tupac's "Dear Mama"]. Because everything is about Adora: She's the person that they're all trying to work around.

I mean, this show is subtle. It's something that people, when they go back and they watch it a second and third time, they're going to see things.

Kornhaber: Tell me about Led Zeppelin. Why is that the voice of Camille?

Jacobs: Led Zeppelin was something that Jean-Marc said to me really early on, This would be my dream if you could make that happen. And "making it happen" is the big part of that equation because Led Zeppelin's known for being extremely restrictive: one song per movie, and all of those things.

That was one of the bands that many people escaped into through their teen years. Jean-Marc thought, I wouldn't have gotten to 21 without those guys. A lot of us that grew up in the '70s, that was really the band that narrated our lives. You could put on any one of their songs and your mood would be instantly transported to somewhere else.

We knew that Camille was going to listen to something that had a lot of weight, in order to have power in that scene in Episode 3 where [her roommate] said, "Oh, come on, girl. No wonder you're in here. You don't know how to use music." It had to be something with history, that a lot of people could feel, or that was so powerful that people don't need to know who Led Zeppelin is. When she put "Thank You" on, it blew me away. How many bands can you go to that are that substantial?

Kornhaber: Do you want viewers to also be thinking about the backstory of this music? I've seen some writing about how Led Zeppelin is thought of as macho or even misogynistic, and there's maybe an interplay between that and Camille's character. Is that on your mind?

Jacobs: No. This was pure escapism. I haven't seen any of that narrative, and people read things into everything these days. But no.

Kornhaber: Camille really didn't listen to music before that iPod incident at the hospital. Do you know anyone like that in your life? What do you think of people who don't listen to music?

Jacobs: I do know people like that. They'll hear it in a restaurant in background, but they don't really understand the power of it. I mean, I don't know where I'd be if I didn't have music. It's such great perspective. The way that Jean-Marc uses it is, "Well, I can put this song on and feel that way and put that song on and feel this way." It's like if the person stands still and everything in the background changes.

These days, the kids' relationship to music is so much different than my generation's. Because we had a certain set of songs that you heard over and over again, and we were all having the dialogue about the same artist: Whether you liked The Who or you didn't like The Who, Rolling Stones over the Beatles, that kind of dialogue. There wasn't the volume that there is now, and we were all experiencing music together.

That's changed because people are experiencing music individually and through algorithms, which scares the hell out of me. I still listen to most of my music on vinyl, and what I love is the things that pop out if you're too lazy to get up. You're not going to just sit there with a 45 and play one song and take it off and put in another 45. So you would get exposed to a whole thought of an album and realize that what you first responded to is definitely not ending up your favorite song. I mean, "Little Red Corvette" might've been great, but then you go deeper.

Kornhaber: You mention the famous difficulty of securing rights to Led Zeppelin. How did you get them to come around?

Jacobs: That process was really about explaining that what Sharp Objects does is, hopefully, for some kids, change their relationship to music. You can have anxiety and mental-illness problems and bullying, and you can go inwards and change that narrative through putting on headphones or sitting in your room and playing records. I wanted kids to understand that music is more than just that thing that's in the background of a restaurant.

I think [Led Zeppelin's team] went, Yeah, that's right. That's why we made this.

Kornhaber: So in this process of negotiating rights you're actually having deep conversations about the role of music.

Jacobs: Yeah. I wasn't trying to sell anything. I was just thinking that any band should feel really lucky to be portrayed that way. Some girl out there is [using their music] saying, You don't even need to be in this hospital. You can get out of here.
Spencer Kornhaberhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/spencer-kornhaber/?utm_source=feedAnne Marie Fox / HBO'The Music Is All About Surviving': Inside the Sonic World of Sharp Objects2018-08-13T09:00:00-04:002018-08-13T12:49:32-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567302Susan Jacobs, the curator of the HBO series's distinctive soundtrack, explains why Led Zeppelin became the protagonist's voice of escape.https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/susan-jacobs-sharp-objects-music-supervisor-interview/567302/?utm_source=feed
Immerse yourself in the pro-immigration literature of Democratic Party thinkers, and you will notice a curious pattern of argument: High levels of immigration have awakened the racism and bigotry that have fueled the rise of right-wing populism, but it is nevertheless best to press forward with the policies that have ostensibly produced this fearsome reaction. Why? Because slowing the pace of immigration would be a callow surrender to bigotry. But also because, in the fullness of time, a unified coalition of college-educated white liberals, African Americans, and working-class immigrants and their descendants will vanquish the aging rump of reactionary whites.

The dream of a so-called rainbow coalition has been part of the liberal imagination since at least the presidency of Richard Nixon, when the left envisioned it, albeit prematurely, as a counterpoint to his "southern strategy." The term itself was coined in 1968 by the activist Fred Hampton, who hoped to build a multiracial alliance devoted to revolutionary socialism, but it entered the mainstream in the 1980s, when Jesse Jackson endeavored to make racial justice a central tenet of the Democratic Party's platform. Democrats have consistently been more supportive of social programs that benefit low-income people of color, including immigrants, than have their Republican rivals, which has helped cement their minority support.

In recent years, meanwhile, the white working-class share of the electorate has dwindled, in part because of rising education levels, low native birth rates, and an influx of working-class immigrants—trends documented by Ruy Teixeira, the political demographer and prophet of rainbow liberalism, in his new book, The Optimistic Leftist. The promise of the rainbow coalition thus seems ever closer to fruition. Among true believers, every liberal defeat, up to and including the 2016 presidential election, is best understood as little more than the dead-cat bounce of white resentment politics.

Confident pronouncements about the coming triumph of the liberal coalition tend to neglect an awkward question, however. Who will be in control of this bloc when it finally achieves its inevitable victory? Will it be college-educated white liberals, who play such an outsize role in shaping the left's ideological consensus today, and who dominate the donor base and leadership of the Democratic Party? Or will it be working-class Latinos, whom white liberals are counting on to provide a decisive electoral punch?

In the age of Donald Trump, college-educated white liberals consider right-wing white populists in small towns and outer suburbs to be the gravest threat to their values and, sotto voce, their power and influence. Many seem to assume that rainbow liberalism will remain deferential to the demands of avowedly enlightened, well-off people like themselves—yielding a future in which student loans for graduate degrees are forgiven, property values in gentrified urban neighborhoods and fashionable inner suburbs are forever lofty, service-sector wages never quite rise to the point where hiring help becomes unaffordable, and, of course, rural white traditionalists are banished from the public square.

But what if working-class Latinos aren't especially interested in serving as junior partners in a coalition led by their self-proclaimed white allies? What if they instead support new forms of anti-establishment politics, rooted in grievances and vulnerabilities that place them at odds with liberal white elites?

To see why members of the Latino second generation might turn against rainbow liberalism, note the essential role their parents play in today's stratified American cities. The mostly white professional classes of the country's prosperous coastal enclaves depend on immigrant laborers to be their helpmates; these laborers, in turn, depend on these employers for their livelihood. Most of these immigrants aren't laying the groundwork for socialist revolution, for the obvious reason that they are more concerned with providing for their families. Relative to native-born workers, newcomers are more inclined to accept low-wage work and to live in insalubrious conditions.

This is especially true of low-skill immigrants, who greatly increase their income by moving to the United States, even when doing so places them among the poorest of America's working poor. Rather than look at other Americans, they typically compare their lot with that of other impoverished immigrants, or with that of the loved ones they've left behind in their native country. To be an immigrant is to be the author of one's own fate—and to accept diminished status, low pay, and even dangerous working conditions as the price of economic betterment.

The political influence of the working-class newcomers is muted. Few low-income immigrants become naturalized, in part because the cost can be prohibitive. In any case, naturalized citizens vote at lower rates than the native-born. As for unauthorized immigrants, they have even less political influence. If they were citizens, they would undoubtedly demand better wages and working conditions from their employers, and they'd have the political muscle to get their way at least some of the time. Instead, they are forced to toil in the shadows.

But the children of immigrants, born and raised on American soil as American citizens, will have a different experience. They're more likely to compare their economic circumstances with other Americans' than with those of the people their parents left behind. The comparison paints an unflattering picture. As the economists Brian Duncan and Stephen Trejo have observed, on average, first-generation Latino immigrants are burdened by a very low level of formal education. Seventy percent of Latino infants in the U.S. are born to mothers with a high-school education or less. Though this deficit grows smaller in the second generation, it remains strikingly large relative to native-born whites.

A campaign poster for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive candidate who won a congressional primary against a Democratic Party stalwart in June (Scott Heins / Getty)

The immigrant's rise from an impoverished upbringing to middle-class prosperity is one of the great glories of modern American history, and a comforting precedent. Some people insist that the children of today's working-class Latino immigrants will fare just as well as those of the working-class European immigrants who settled in the U.S. during "the Great Wave" of immigration, which stretched from the 1880s to the restrictionist legislation of the 1920s. But there are many differences between that era and our own.

In mid-20th-century America, a flourishing manufacturing sector was desperate for low-skill labor, which provided many children of Great Wave immigrants with an opportunity for economic uplift. In recent decades, offshoring has given manufacturing employers an alternative to relying on domestic sources of low-skill labor. Service-sector employment has filled the breach, but many of these jobs are precarious and pay poorly. As I write this, at a time when the labor market is notably tight, wage growth for non-college-educated workers remains dismally slow.

American society has also grown more unequal; the social distance separating the children of working-class immigrants from those of well-off natives has become a chasm. On average, Latino immigrants are at least as well educated as the Great Wave immigrants from Europe were. The difference is that educational attainment among the U.S.-born has increased substantially. Closing this gap in a single generation will not be an easy feat. Among second-generation Latino adults, 47 percent have no more than a high-school diploma.

This painful reality will, I suspect, engender cynicism about whether U.S.-raised Latino youth can expect to live the American dream. That cynicism is already beginning to reveal itself. In December, Conor Williams, a progressive policy researcher and former schoolteacher, interviewed a group of high-achieving students of color at a Brooklyn charter school. All were from immigrant families. One of them, Esther Reyes, told Williams: "The American dream we see in movies or in shows or in books, it's an American dream for white people." She added: "I don't think it exists."

In June, we saw a glimpse of what this cynicism might augur politically. Representative Joseph Crowley of New York, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, was ousted in a primary by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old former organizer for Bernie Sanders and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. "What I see is that the Democratic Party takes working-class communities for granted," Ocasio-Cortez said a few days before voters went to the polls. "They take people of color for granted, and they just assume that we're going to turn out no matter how bland or half-stepping [their] proposals are." Despite having been vastly outspent by her long-tenured opponent, the Latina candidate won the majority-minority New York City district handily.

The logic of rainbow liberalism says that the anger of working-class Latinos and other marginalized minorities ought to be directed at hateful working-class whites in the heartland. But it's not hard to imagine second-generation Americans choosing a different target for their ire: the white overclass of coastal America.

This class has heretofore been able to count on the support of immigrants, in part because of their commitment to helping that group gain access to the safety net that the Democratic Party has championed and fought to protect. But second-generation Americans may have less patience than their parents for a status quo that offers them little hope of advancement, and for a strain of liberalism that talks about redistributing wealth without delivering the more sweeping changes promised by Ocasio-Cortez and others like her.

A key principle of rainbow liberalism is that the solution to working-class woes is hiking taxes on the rich to finance a generous suite of wage subsidies, social services, and, for the truly ambitious, basic-income grants. But will white liberals be as enthusiastic about sharp increases in their taxes if they become something other than theoretical? Immigrants in New York, for instance, live in a state where the Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, recently championed a tax reform designed to sharply reduce the total tax burden facing his state's wealthiest residents while stymieing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's efforts to raise taxes on the city's ultrarich. Cuomo did so as New York's transit infrastructure was in crisis and rising rents were exposing tens of thousands of families to the risk of eviction.

These betrayals sting in the present. But in the near future, such efforts will be undertaken in the midst of "the Great Wealth Transfer"—in which trillions of dollars in accumulated cash, homes, and other assets will be transmitted from disproportionately white, native-born, college-educated Baby Boomers to their long-waiting heirs. In this context, a brown populism might emerge, one that is sharply to the left of today's rainbow liberalism. Just as Donald Trump appeals to the ethnic self-interest of rural whites, a tribune of working-class Latinos could call attention to the dearth of Latinos in the uppermost echelons of American society and promise to do something drastic about it, such as redistributing the inherited wealth of privileged whites. In the post-civil-rights era, many charismatic African American politicians—and activists like Fred Hampton—promised to redress the racial injustices plaguing majority-black cities by confronting an ostensibly liberal white elite. Brown populism would pledge to do the same, but from a position of far greater electoral strength. Latinos already outnumber whites in California, and aren't far behind in Texas; the electorates of the two most populous states will soon have a Latino plurality.

Yet brown populism could also take a rightward turn. The demands for decent wages and a modicum of respect will run counter to elites' appetite for humble, disciplined workers willing to cater to their needs. This appetite has traditionally been met by immigration, and Latinos have for the most part been favorably disposed toward immigration policies that benefit their co-ethnics. Indeed, this shared enthusiasm for immigration has helped keep the rainbow coalition together. Now we find ourselves on the cusp of a possible reversal.

The foreign-born share of the Latino population is falling fast, and despite the ferocious controversies over Central American migration that have defined the Trump era thus far, the aging of Latin America ensures that future immigration flows will be less Latino in the years to come. For the foreseeable future, it is Africa and South Asia that, in light of their youthful and relatively fast-growing populations, will generate the greatest migratory pressures. And this shift could have seismic consequences.

According to the historian Brian Gratton, America's major restrictionist movements have emerged in response to a dramatic increase in immigration levels coupled with a change in the ethnic origins of new immigrants. Both factors are important. If a dramatic increase in immigration levels occurs but natives by and large see the newcomers as their cultural kin, the reaction might be muted, as cultural affinity overrides other considerations. If a dramatic increase occurs and the newcomers are culturally distinct, however, intergroup tension is all but inevitable. Gratton's thesis partly captures why older whites have been so resistant to Latino immigration.

But as Latino immigration slows, and as working-class Latino Americans come into their own politically, Gratton's work leaves us with an irony-laden prediction about what is to come: A coalition of cosmopolitan whites, Asian Americans, and blacks may well fight to open the U.S. labor market to growing numbers of desperate people from Asia and Africa, whether out of class interest, ethnic loyalty, or devotion to rainbow liberalism as an ideology—but these new immigrants could be met by a coalition of working-class whites and Latinos who favor closed borders.

If you doubt that second-generation Latinos who are being raised in disadvantaged circumstances will ever embrace a more hard-edged politics, whether of the right or the left, I can hardly blame you. To believe it would be to accept that the ultimate consequence of working-class Latino immigration will be not merely the availability of low-cost services and the infusion of new cultural energies into our communities but also, in time, a wrenching redistribution of wealth and respect from privileged white liberals to a rising generation of justly dissatisfied outsiders. The question we face now is how to lay the groundwork for this future: Will we face up to the challenge of delivering the American dream to the millions of working-class newcomers who already live among us, even if that means sacrificing a measure of comfort in the present? Or will we continue to sentimentalize their struggles, confident in the self-serving belief that working-class immigrants and their children will forever accept second-class status?

This article appears in the September 2018 print edition with the headline "The Next Populist Revolution."
Reihan Salamhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/reihan-salam/?utm_source=feedEdmon de HaroThe Next Populist Revolution Will Be Latino2018-08-13T08:00:00-04:002018-08-13T12:31:29-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:39-565730Democrats are betting on a diversifying electorate to secure their party's future, but second-generation Latinos won't willingly accept a deeply unequal society.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/the-next-populist-revolution-will-be-latino/565730/?utm_source=feed
Editor's Note: Every Monday, Lori Gottlieb answers questions from readers about their problems, big and small. Have a question? Email her at email@example.com.

Dear Therapist,

I recently discovered that my husband and a female colleague of his have a texting streak going back as far as 2016. I found this out when I saw his phone. While there's nothing sexual in their messages, and he assures me they are only friends, I have repeatedly expressed my displeasure and discomfort about the situation. I have also repeatedly asked for this behavior to stop. He lies and tells me they no longer text, until he gets caught red-handed again.

We have been seeing a marriage counselor regarding this and other issues. He has lied to the counselor about his texting relationship with his colleague. Interestingly, while I've known she exists as his "colleague," he has never introduced me to her even though I know all of his other work "friends."

He tells me I am overreacting and that I should get over it. I am considering separating from him if his behavior doesn't stop. What do you suggest?

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

Here are two different ways to look at your situation:

1) Your husband is a no-good liar and you should leave him.

2) You two need to have a different conversation, one that doesn't involve assumptions and ultimatums.

Let me say upfront that what I'm about to suggest in no way condones your husband's dishonesty; lies chip away at trust, eventually eroding it altogether. But what my suggestion might do is help you see another way to move through this impasse and understand it better before you make any decisions about your marriage.

First, about the lying: Sometimes people lie because the person requesting the truth makes the truth telling so aversive. I want the truth, the person asking says, but if you tell me the truth, I will shame or judge or abandon you. If you tell me the truth, I will deny your needs. If you tell me the truth, I will try to control you. They want the truth, then punish the person for telling it. Of course there are consequences to people's behavior, but there are also consequences to creating an environment where it can't come to light.

You don't trust your husband—and for good reason—but he may not trust you either, in the sense that he may not trust your capacity to acknowledge his truth were he to share it openly with you. There's a difference in a relationship between privacy (space that everyone needs in healthy relationships) and secrecy (which tends to be corrosive). What may have started off as privacy—texts between friends—has now moved into secrecy, not necessarily because he's doing anything wrong, but because of something going on between the two of you. You say that you're in marriage counseling for other issues, so I wonder about your husband's relationship with his colleague not so much in terms of betrayal—as you do—but in terms of what it reveals about the dynamics in your marriage.

Often when people feel betrayed, they're so wrapped up in hurt and anxiety that they lack curiosity about the person they feel betrayed by. Similarly, they're so wrapped up in anger and self-righteousness that they lack curiosity about themselves.

By curiosity, I mean that instead of arguing about your husband's texts, have you been able to step back and try to understand why this friendship is important to him; what he's getting from it that he may be missing in other parts of his life (perhaps feeling seen, understood, respected, enjoyed?); why he feels he has to hide it from you; and how your requests that he end it affect his feelings toward you? I wonder, too, if you've been able to step back and ask yourself why his platonic texts (that you have seen and say aren't sexual) feel so upsetting or threatening to you (perhaps you wish you shared this easy rapport with him, too?). Can you be less curious about his texts and become more curious about what you can do to create more connection with him?

Right now your position is: End the texting or I'll leave. But ultimatums don't do much—they might seem to resolve the dilemma, but often they simply drive the real issue underground. Ultimatums won't solve the actual problem (whatever's going on in your marriage) that created this problem (lying about the texts) in the first place. And it's the actual problem that needs addressing.

All this is to say, maybe your husband is crossing a line and not telling you, or maybe he's not and your demands are simply pushing him away. Either way, you won't be able to have a conversation about his texting that will be helpful to you individually or as a couple until a deeper understanding is reached. First, you need to ask and answer the kinds of questions I mentioned above while giving each other the space to be honest with yourselves and each other. If you want to create not just trust but closeness in your marriage, you'll need to allow room for the truth by inviting it in. And once there's more space for the truth, there will be more understanding and compassion on both sides that will move you out of your respective corners and help you resolve the texting impasse.

Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
Lori Gottliebhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/lori-gottlieb/?utm_source=feedDear Therapist: My Husband Keeps Texting With a Female 'Friend'2018-08-13T07:00:00-04:002018-08-13T12:18:50-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567272He's lying about it, too. What should I do?https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/08/husband-texting-female-friend-coworker/567272/?utm_source=feed
Two Donald Trump supporters were recently photographed at a rally wearing shirts emblazoned with the phrase I'd rather be Russian than a Democrat. To some supporters of President Trump, praising Russia and denigrating Democrats is simply a means of expressing tribal loyalties, or of goading liberals. However, as heated political rhetoric becomes part of the media landscape, such fringe views are becoming more mainstream, displaying an increasing convergence of interests between Vladimir Putin's Russia and the views of Trump supporters.

While many Americans are concerned that the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election, Trump's outright convergence of interests with Putin's Russia may well prove far more damaging for U.S. interests in the long run. Convergence can be defined as distinct groups doing the same things for different reasons, or as a unity of interests evolving from separate starting points. Both Putin and Trump seek to inject chaos into the U.S. political system. They support an assault on U.S. foreign-policy elites, encourage fringe and radical groups, and envision a United States untethered from traditional allies. They also share a willingness to utilize informal and semi-legal means to achieve their goals. The common interest shown by Russia and the alt-right in exploiting fears surrounding the routine Jade Helm military exercise in Texas in 2015? That's convergence.

As the Trump T-shirts signify, even collusion can be easy to justify if you view your domestic opponents as the real enemy. But having a U.S. president who shares character deficiencies with the president of Russia is one thing. Becoming the enemy is worse. Trumpism shares a disturbing amount in common with Putinism, including promoting racist hatred of outsiders; the belief that the rich are above the law; the reflexive use of propaganda lies and denial; and the shredding of legal and political norms.

The end of Trump won't be the end of Trumpism.

Trump has been consistent in his support of Russian talking points and his unwillingness to acknowledge the Russian attack on the 2016 election. The United States spends billions on the largest and most effective intelligence apparatus in world history. Submarines; aircraft; land, sea and space sensors; listening posts; satellites; a worldwide network of diplomats, law-enforcement sources and spies combined with the insights of allies, academics, and media experts provide the president and his administration with a clear picture of Russian perfidy. As David Sanger and Matthew Rosenberg recently outlined in The New York Times, Trump has been told the truth and shown the facts over and over, even prior to taking office. As president-elect he was provided multiple streams of well-sourced evidence of Russian interference, including specific e-mails and comments by Putin. Further, the level of detail released to the public in the Justice Department indictments of Russian intelligence officers provides a glimpse of what the intelligence community knows about Russian subversion.

Perhaps more troubling than a president peddling a narrative that he knows to be untrue is that the narrative aligns with that of the Kremlin. Indeed, Trump and Putin are similar in many ways. Both Putin and Trump share a fundamental grievance—they feel looked down upon and disrespected. They distrust experts and the political elite, instead surrounding themselves with cronies chosen for their personal loyalty. In turn, they allow their cronies to get rich as long as they do the boss's bidding. They create scapegoats and blame others for their troubles. They trade in conspiracy theories and lie without compunction. They insist on loyalty, embrace vengeance, shun outsiders, and exhibit the instincts of gangsters. They are bullies.

Most importantly, both instinctively make everyone around them complicit, creating an informal system of personal obligation and threats. Alena Ledeneva of University College London recently explained the system of unspoken rules, or sistema, in Putin's Russia to The New Yorker's Adam Davidson:

Each actor in sistema faces near-constant uncertainty about his status, aware that others could well destroy him. Each actor also knows how to use kompromat to destroy rivals but fears that using such material might provoke an explosive response. While each person in sistema feels near-constant uncertainty, the over-all sistema is remarkably robust.

In some ways, the impulse of Trump and his supporters to view Russia as a natural ally is very American. Every post–Cold War American president has tried to "reset" or reenergize relations. President George W. Bush even peered into Putin's soul. This week Senator Rand Paul traveled to Moscow seeking to "open lines of communication," implicitly suggesting that the problem between Russia and the United States is equally shared by both sides and is simply a matter of poor communication.

We've even seen it inside the Central Intelligence Agency. The day after 9/11, senior CIA officials charged with fighting terrorism briefed Bush at the White House. They provided a plan to tackle al-Qaeda, explaining that the Russians would be key allies in the fight. The next day, CIA Director George Tenet came to those of us managing the CIA's Russia program asking for additional material to provide the White House on what assistance to expect from the Russians. Unaware that the topic of Russia came up at the White House, we were dumbfounded. Those of us who had worked on Russian issues for years knew that there was no way the Russians would be real allies. The years that followed proved us right.

Russia's bloody experience with Islamic terror and its own long war in Afghanistan might suggest it would be a natural ally of the United States and Europe. However, shared goals do not necessarily translate into a common outlook and approach. Russia may be determined to stamp out radical terrorism inside Russia, but it is equally comfortable supporting those terrorist groups at war with the U.S., including the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hezbollah in Syria. Despite the Kremlin's claims, the Russian military in Syria is not targeting ISIS but is allied with Iran and Hezbollah in an effort to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

How Trump could sell out Syria to Putin

A former colleague who was leading the effort to engage Russia in the War on Terror compared the periodic desire to work with the Russians to someone who buys a baboon as a pet, only to be surprised to have his face ripped off. Then, after recovering, he goes out and buys another baboon. "How many times do we have to get our faces ripped off by the Russians before we realize that we have fundamentally different goals?" my colleague asked.

Further, the disconnect between the United States and Russia is not our fault. The basic problem is that Russia is more interested in doing damage to America than helping us solve the terrorism problem. Like many before him, Paul this week promoted the notion that the U.S. and Russia could work together to defeat terrorism. As with all the previous efforts over the past 17 years, the Russians will likely provide nice words but do little. The United States is a bigger enemy than ISIS.

There is also a darker side to the notion that Russia is a natural ally. White nationalists and other right-wing groups are attracted to the belief that Russia represents a socially conservative European nation guided by a Christian, anti-immigrant, and anti-gay agenda. The recent arrest of the Russian activist Maria Butina, who allegedly exploited the appeal of Russia to conservatives, shed some light on this mind-set.

Vladimir Putin, conservative icon

Of course, those who view Russia as a conservative nirvana are mistaken. Traditional conservative values of small government and individual rights find no home in present day Russia. Abortion is still a primary means of birth control, such that Russia has one of the highest rates of abortions among women of child-bearing age in the world. Christian values are protected as long as you belong to the Russian Orthodox church, and gun rights are severely limited. Tyranny is what Russia does best.

More importantly, Putin's Russia hates us. Putin's core interests are directly opposed to those of the United States. He has framed himself as the leader of a global anti-U.S. movement. He doesn't care a whit about Trump, Republicans, or Democrats; he pursues a zero-sum foreign policy, premised on the belief that anything that hurts the U.S. is good for Russia. When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was recently asked which of the two governments in Libya the Russians would support, he answered, "Whichever one the U.S. is against." Short of surrendering to Putin's view of the world, no U.S. administration is likely to meaningfully change Russian behavior.

Putin's goal is to stoke hyper-partisan fighting, weaken U.S. institutions, split the U.S. from its allies, and have the U.S. pull back from its international obligations. The United States, though, remains a more prosperous and more powerful nation, an advantage built on its commitment to its founding values. The greatest concern for Americans shouldn't be that Trump may have colluded with Russia; it's that under his guidance, we may be converging.
John Sipherhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/john-sipher/?utm_source=feedKevin Lamarque / ReutersConvergence Is Worse Than Collusion2018-08-13T06:00:00-04:002018-08-13T16:40:46-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567368Trump and Putin share many more goals than just Trump's election.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/convergence-is-worse-than-collusion/567368/?utm_source=feed
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Last year's "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, ended in the brutal murder of a 32-year-old counterprotester, Heather Heyer. This year's event ended with a tiny turnout, two and a half hours ahead of schedule.

The city had been preparing for the rally's sequel for weeks, and the anticipation was palpable. Several downtown streets were cordoned off early Sunday morning, and police—hundreds of them—were everywhere, on horseback, on bikes, on motorcycles, in vans. There was talk of a confrontation with Antifa, the militant leftist group that has become a regular presence at rallies like these. Counterprotesters gathered at the top of the Foggy Bottom metro station at 2 p.m., waiting for the white-nationalist rallygoers to arrive from Vienna, Virginia. "Can we tase them when they get to the top?" one shirtless and sunburned man asked a police officer.

Washington, D.C., Is the Next Front for the Alt-Right

In the end, though, only about two dozen Unite the Right marchers ascended the escalator from the metro platform—all men, except for one bandana-clad woman. It was a dismal showing for a group that, only a few days before, had been expected to turn out in the hundreds. Both the 2017 Unite the Right rally and this year's were organized by Jason Kessler, a 34-year-old who identifies not as a white nationalist but as a "white civil rights" leader. Kessler had set up Sunday's event to keep the momentum going for the movement—but after last year's tragedy, and the ensuing bad publicity, most alt-right groups chose to stay away.

When the tiny crew of rallygoers reached the top of the escalator, the hot bubble of suspense encompassing the nation's capital finally popped. Everyone assumed their roles: The white supremacists held up their flags and walked, surrounded by police, down 23rd Street. Counterprotesters, fazed only slightly by the small numbers of their opposition, chased after them, chanting and screaming, all the way to Lafayette Square across from the White House. "Fuck you, Nazis!" they shouted. "Justice for Heather!"

"This is my community, and I think it's important, when Nazis come to town, you have to show them they're not welcome," said Bridget Todd, a 33-year-old African American woman from D.C., and one of the hosts of the Stuff Mom Never Told You podcast. She was walking quickly down 23rd Street, shouting at the small group of white supremacists. "They're terrible at organizing," Todd said, laughing. "I had more people at my niece's baby shower than this."

Christine Roberts, a 55-year-old white woman who came three and a half hours from New Jersey to protest the rally, was surprised by the turnout. "I thought there would be more of the protesters," Roberts said. "I didn't realize there would be so many counterprotesters, so I'm really kind of thrilled."

At Lafayette Square, the Unite the Right rally was separated from the counterprotesters by a large expanse of grass, dozens of police officers, and a fence. Al Stankard, a dark-haired man in khaki pants and a gray fedora, was standing on a raised platform and speaking about "antiwhite scapegoating," but hardly anyone was listening. The press outnumbered the white nationalists three to one, and the rallygoers were dispersed across the lawn, talking to reporters and posing for pictures with their MAGA hats, flags, and bandanas. Across the grass, the hordes of counterprotesters pushed against the fence holding them back, screaming, "Shame! Shame! Shame!" Thunder boomed, and rain started to fall.

"I've been gettin' this my whole life," said David, a 66-year-old who describes himself as a "pro-white" activist and drove from Texas to attend the rally. David, who declined to give his last name, said he believes there are too many nonwhite people living in the United States. What does he want to do about it? "The way you do it is like Trump's doin' it," he explained, matter-of-factly. "You don't actually kick people out … You steer the policy in a way that people think, 'Maybe it's time for me to go on back.'"

It was on this idea that many on Lafayette Square were able to agree: Donald Trump is helping further the cause of white supremacists. As examples, counterprotesters pointed to the administration's implementation of a ban on visitors from several Muslim countries, its "zero tolerance" immigration policy that resulted in family separations, and its push to limit citizenship for legal immigrants. Both groups say they were proven right last year, when Trump told a group of reporters that there were "some very fine people on both sides" of the violence in Charlottesville.

The day's events, in other words, weren't just about the Unite the Right marchers and their white civil rights. They were about Trump, too.

The White Nationalists Are Winning

"We're out here to stand against that, against the Trump administration, against white supremacy," said J. B. Barney, a 39-year-old D.C. native. Barney, a tall black man wearing a Wakanda Forever t-shirt, was standing in the middle of Lafayette Square with his arms crossed, glaring at the rally across the park. "It's like two Americas right now. There's white America, and there's the rest of America, and I'm standing on the side of the rest of America."

It began to rain in earnest at 5 p.m., and the Unite the Right protesters were ushered away quietly by their police escort. They paused to wait for one of their members, who had gotten caught, bewildered, in the throng of reporters. Across the square, behind the fence and the line of police horses, the counterprotesters didn't even notice they had left.
Elaine Godfreyhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/elaine-godfrey/?utm_source=feedMadeleine Carlislehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/madeleine-carlisle/?utm_source=feedLucas Jackson / Reuters'Unite the Right' Fizzles Amid a Boisterous Counterprotest2018-08-12T23:58:53-04:002018-08-13T15:29:37-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567374Only two dozen white supremacists turned up for a much-anticipated rally in Washington, D.C., where thousands of angry demonstrators shouted them down.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/unite-the-right-fizzles-amid-a-boisterous-counter-protes/567374/?utm_source=feed
Behind a locked door in the basement of the West Wing, the White House Situation Room is one of the most iconic, secure, technologically advanced places in all of American government. Created in 1961 by the Kennedy administration after the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Situation Room is where presidents direct troops overseas, monitor international crises, and supervise domestic responses to hurricanes and wildfires.

No photograph quite captures the setting like Situation Room.  White House photographer Pete Souza caught that vibe on May 1, 2011, as President Barack Obama and members of his Cabinet and military-command staff watched the takedown of Osama bin Laden in real time. Obama sits crouched forward in his chair, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton covers her mouth with her hand to hide her concern.

It's in this storied context that Omarosa Manigault Newman, once President Donald Trump's aide and liaison to the African American community, claimed Sunday morning on Meet the Press that she had been unceremoniously hauled into the Situation Room in December by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and fired. And she produced a tape she made to prove it. What exactly to call this Situation Room first, beyond jaw-dropping, or perhaps tawdry? And it's worth noting that the Situation Room is equipped with sensors in the ceiling that detect unauthorized cellular signals, though presumably not anodyne recording on one's cellphone. Here's part of what Kelly tells Newman, according to the tape:

It's come to my attention over the last few months that there's been some pretty, in my opinion, significant integrity issues related to you and use of government vehicles and some other issues … And the issue that you may or may not have a full appreciation for, but I think you do, this would be a pretty high level of accountability … Meaning a court-martial. We're not suggesting any legal action here … I'd like to see this be a friendly departure. There are pretty significant legal issues that we hope don't develop into something that'll make it ugly for you … You know you can look at your time here in the White House as a year of service to the nation. And then you can go on without any type of difficulty in the future, relative to your reputation.

Manigault Newman made it clear in her interview with host Chuck Todd that she considered Kelly's reference to "reputation" a threat. "They take me into the Situation Room, the doors are locked, they tell me I can't leave, and they start to threaten me," she said. When Todd asks her, incredulity rising, about her decision to tape the chief of staff in the Situation Room, she doesn't back down. "I protected myself because this is a White House where everybody lies," she said. "If I didn't have these recordings, no one in America would believe me."

Her appearance on Meet the Press comes in the context of her forthcoming tell-all book about her year in the Trump White House, Unhinged, due to go on sale Tuesday. In the book, Manigault Newman describes all manner of unflattering behavior by Trump and alleges she's heard a tape recording of him using the N-word during taping of his reality show, The Apprentice. Unlike the recording of her firing, she doesn't have this tape and so far hasn't been able to prove that it exists. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, claims the book is filled with lies.

And so a familiar script begins. Manigault Newman's early efforts to promote the book leads to Sanders's denials and Trump's insults, calling the former Apprentice participant a "lowlife" on Saturday to a group of reporters. The first, much-hyped "inside" account from the Trump White House, Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, had a very short half-life. A forthcoming work by Bob Woodward is likely to be taken far more seriously. On Tuesday, outtakes from Unhinged will be all the talk, no doubt, for at least a little while. Where any of it goes, and whether any of it has any lasting impact on Trump, time will tell. But there is one indication that the Trump White House is concerned about what Manigault Newman knows, and possibly what else she may have on tape: The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey has reviewed a document confirming that after her firing she was offered a $15,000-a-month job working for the Trump reelection campaign. And as part of the familiar script, of course, the deal required that she sign a nondisclosure agreement promising that she would say nothing about what went on in the Trump White House. It is, it now seems, way too late for that.

Vernon Loebhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/vernon-loeb/?utm_source=feedOmarosa's Bold Claim of Breaching the Situation Room2018-08-12T15:08:41-04:002018-08-12T20:45:04-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567365Ex-Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman said she has a secret recording from one of the most iconic, secure, technologically advanced places in all of American government.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/omarosas-situation-room-firing-on-tape/567365/?utm_source=feed

Eleanor Shakespeare; Dex R. Jones; Jess Chen; Dimitrios Kambouris

The poetry world would hardly seem a likely place for a "race row," the phrase The Guardian applied in 2011 to a blunt exchange of literary verdicts. The celebrated (and white) critic Helen Vendler had disparaged the celebrated (and black) poet Rita Dove's selections for the new Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Dove, Vendler wrote, had favored "multicultural inclusiveness" over quality. She'd tried to "shift the balance" by choosing too many minority poets at the expense of better (and better-known) writers. The poems were "mostly short" and "of rather restricted vocabulary," the presiding keeper of the 20th-century canon judged. Over at the Boston Review, the (also white) critic Marjorie Perloff, the doyenne of American avant-garde poetics, weighed in too. She lamented what she saw as new poets' reliance on a formulaic kind of lyric already stale by the 1960s and '70s—a personal memory dressed up with "poeticity," building to "a profound thought or small epiphany." Her example: a poem by the acclaimed (also black) poet Natasha Trethewey about her mother's painful hair-straightening routine.

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Dove took strong exception to a pattern she saw in the response of established white critics. Were they, she demanded, making

a last stand against the hordes of up-and-coming poets of different skin complexions and different eye slants? Were we—African Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans—only acceptable as long as these critics could stand guard by the door to examine our credentials and let us in one by one?

It's been a long time coming, but the door has since been blown off its hinges. Skim the table of contents of the major literary journals, including white-shoe poetry enterprises like Poetry magazine, and even general-interest weeklies with vast reach such as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Scan the recipients of the prestigious and sometimes lucrative fellowships, awards, and lectureships granted annually to the most promising young poets in the country. They are immigrants and refugees from China, El Salvador, Haiti, Iran, Jamaica, Korea, Vietnam. They are black men and an Oglala Sioux woman. They are queer as well as straight and choose their personal pronouns with care. The face of poetry in the United States looks very different today than it did even a decade ago, and far more like the demographics of Millennial America. If anything, the current crop of emerging poets anticipates the face of young America 30 years from now.

These outsiders find themselves, at the very start of their careers, on the inside—and not just of a hermetic realm of poetry whose death knell someone sounds every April, when National Poetry Month arrives. At literary festivals, many of these poets are drawing big crowds, as I saw in November when what looked like hundreds of people waited in the rain to hear Danez Smith and Morgan Parker discuss "New Black Poetry" at the Portland Art Museum, in Oregon.

When I spoke this spring with Smith, who uses plural pronouns, they were just back from a United Kingdom tour for their collection Don't Call Us Dead, a National Book Award finalist. The British press had marveled at poetry that could win critical notice in The New Yorker and rack up 300,000 views on YouTube. There are "a lot of stories that we've been telling that are now being told in more public ways," Smith said, noting the collective energy of this generation, and of poets of color and queer poets more broadly. Each new book and accolade spurs a fruitful competition to do and dare more. "I don't want to be the one to show up wearing the bad dress," Smith went on. "A win for somebody is really just a win for poetry, the people that read it, and the people that we come from."

More than a few of this generation's bright lights found poetry first through performance, or come from communities where "spoken word" and "poetry" are not separate lanes. Other poets have shown a talent for building an audience in less embodied ways. Before Kaveh Akbar published his strong 2017 debut collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, he had established himself through his interview series on the website Divedapper, which offers intimate and engaging introductions to new American poets. He also tirelessly shares what he is reading with his 28,000 Twitter followers, posting daily screenshots of pages from books that have excited him.

Emerging poets of this digital-native generation are ready to work at getting their words and their names out there. A number of them have agents and publicists (this is not, historically speaking, normal!). Some are genre crossers, bucking poetic insularity. Saeed Jones (Prelude to Bruise, 2014) is a public presence as an on-camera host of a BuzzFeed News show. Fatimah Asghar (If They Come for Us, 2018) wrote and co-created a popular web series, Brown Girls, now being adapted for HBO. Eve L. Ewing (Electric Arches, 2017) is a sociologist and commenter on race with a massive social-media presence.

Poets a little older may grumble at the networking and exposure, but their juniors respect the hustle, convinced that poems, with the right push, can "enter the jet stream of the ongoing national discourse," as Jones has put it. They are onto something: A recent survey by the National Endowment for the Arts revealed that poetry readership doubled among 18-to-34-year-olds over the past five years.

The energy on display is about more than savvy marketing or niche appeal. "From what I'm seeing," says Jeff Shotts, the executive editor of Graywolf Press, who edited three of the 10 collections that made it onto the long list for the 2017 National Book Award in poetry, "this is a renaissance." And most striking among the many forces propelling that renaissance is a resurgence of the first-person lyric—just what the "language poets" of the late 1970s declared obsolete. Too narrowly experiential, too sentimental, too accessible, inadequate to the task of engaging with a postmodern, media-saturated culture—this was the verdict of a previous avant-garde that abandoned "the speaker" in favor of a recondite poetics that appealed to an ever more exclusive audience. But the rising generation—while embracing avant-garde techniques (the use of radical disjunction and collage, the potpourri of "high" and "low" cultural references)—hasn't bought the message. Having come of age in the heyday of identity politics, the diverse poets now in the spotlight are reclaiming "the democratic 'I,' " in the words of the poet Edward Hirsch.

This "I," reared on multiple languages and dialects, could not be said to suffer from a restricted vocabulary, as Vendler complained. Lyric, for this generation, definitely needn't mean short. Making their debut in the wake of Claudia Rankine's best-selling Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), poets dare to tackle project books, with historical sweep and hybrid form, right out of the gate. This "I," aware of the variously marginalized "we"s to which it belongs, marries the personal to the ambitiously political. Its ascendancy has raised poetically energizing questions about identity. The young poets who stand out have helped make race and sexuality and gender the red-hot centers of current poetry, and they push past as many boundaries as they can. They strain to think anew about selfhood and group membership. Drawing on eclectic traditions, they mine the complexity latent in the lyric "I." At its best, the last thing this "I" aspires to deliver is tidy epiphanies.

The labor of removing the hinges from the door in fact began decades ago. While the language poets were upending late-20th-century American poetry—trying to subvert the powers that be by flouting expressive conventions—minority poets were pushing to integrate the literary world and the canon, as well as championing alternatives. The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and '70s, and the numerous organizations it spawned, advocated independent outlets for black, Asian American, and Latino artists. But by the '80s, the drive was on to claim a seat at the table—which meant demanding a bigger table.

That wasn't easy in a poetry culture that was white in its present and white in its past, and not exactly eager to confront this fact. In 1988, tired of feeling like tokens in poetry workshops, two Harvard undergraduates and a composer friend formed the Dark Room Collective in a yellow Victorian house in Cambridge, establishing a space in which to foster the work of young black poets. Over the next decade, a remarkable array of talent found a home there, including Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith (both future U.S. poet laureates), Kevin Young, Carl Phillips, and Major Jackson. Ambition ran high, and so did a restless urge not simply to fit in but to call new shots. "Even if we were all published in The New Yorker, would that be the point?" Young, then a Harvard senior, told The Harvard Crimson in 1992. "You're missing the point if it's a new driver driving the same old truck."

Within a few years, new faces were, if not at the wheel, more welcome and visible in the poetry world. In 1993, Rita Dove became the U.S. poet laureate. That same year, in his introduction to The Open Boat, the first anthology of Asian American poetry to be edited by an Asian American, Garrett Hongo could point to progress in mainstreaming: "These days, some of us even serve on foundation and [National Endowment for the Arts] panels, sit on national awards juries, teach in and direct creative writing programs, and edit literary magazines."

In a landscape of poetry by then dominated by M.F.A. programs, a spreading network of supportive institutions soon offered young poets from marginalized groups a supplemental world of free workshops and mentorship. Cave Canem, founded in 1996 to serve emerging black poets, was followed by Kundiman (for Asian American writers) and CantoMundo (for young Latino and Latina poets). The Lambda Literary Foundation has provided similar backing to LGBTQ poets. The traditional gatekeepers of poetry—big journals, respected publishing houses large and small, prize-giving committees—now know where to turn to find a broad spectrum of already vetted work.

But mainstreaming rarely happens without turbulence. The Dark Room alumni have come in for their share of sharp critiques as they have taken seats at a table that has been extended but is still very much within establishment walls. With inclusion among the dominant "we" comes pressure to produce and promote more broadly accessible or depoliticized work. The Open Boat anthology was soon taken to task for presenting Asian American poetry through a narrow lens of familiar immigration and assimilation narratives. Kevin Young's recent arrival as The New Yorker's poetry editor at age 47 raises the inevitable question of how new and different the truck will look and sound.

Tensions have thrummed within even the coziest, most supportive of the various minority enclaves, from the Dark Room onward: Embracing the outsider "we" and its group narratives comes with its own pressures. Poets have chafed at—as well as thrived on—them. Of course they have: How else does poetic ferment happen? Carl Phillips has written recently of feeling that he was effectively exiled from the Dark Room because he "wasn't writing the kind of poems that were correctly 'black.' " In an essay called "A Politics of Mere Being," he wonders about the effects not just of a call to be politically correct, but of "a push to be correctly political"—that is, to address a particular set of "issues of identity, exclusion, injustice." Shouldn't "poets of outsiderness, of whatever kind," he suggests, resist the notion that "resistance" alone defines what is political?

A quarter of a century younger than Phillips, the Iranian American poet Solmaz Sharif—whose first collection, Look (2016), was a finalist for the National Book Award—also sees the value of a voice that is "continually outside, questioning and speaking back to whatever supposed 'here' or 'we' or 'now' we've created." Her poetic ideal is "a nomadic presence, or a mind that is consistently on the run, and preventing these political moments from calcifying." As a stab at summing up the mutable and provocative new lyric "I," it would be hard to do better. The quest to truly contain multitudes—to probe the protean self and the society that shapes and reshapes it—within a coherent lyric is still a radical experiment.

"Am I a gay black man when roasting a chicken at home for friends?" Carl Phillips asks in "A Politics of Mere Being," and he answers, "Sure. But that's not what I'm most conscious of at the time. Am I necessarily, then, stripped of political resonance at that moment?" The 29-year-old Chinese American poet Chen Chen confidently embraces the realm of chicken roasting—of quotidian routines and ruminating—as he stakes a poetic claim to the "politics of mere being" in his 2017 debut, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which was long-listed for the National Book Award.

As the title suggests, in Chen's work the new lyric "I" is open-ended, cumulative, marked by potential. His poems boast the frank ease of a late-night Gchat with a bright, emotionally available friend, and the terrain is, at least overtly, more personal than political. At the same time, the conversational tone (in tune with an era in which many of our conversations are typed) offers a welcome into a world that is neither insular nor stable.

Chen, who left China with his family when he was 3 and grew up in Massachusetts, shows little interest in patrolling the no-man's-land between the "I" and the author. Several key poems deal with a central event in the speaker's—the poet's—life: coming out to his parents as a teen and the violent scene that follows. The speaker runs away, climbs a tree, scales a wall, falls back to Earth—eventually hobbling home to face abiding parental disappointment.

Chen joins an array of other talented young poets (among them Ocean Vuong, Hieu Minh Nguyen, and Fatimah Asghar) whose work explores the challenges of being a queer Asian American in an immigrant family. For Chen, poetry is "a way for those different experiences to come together, for them to be in the same room," but without any predetermined expectations of how they may interact. In the face of a mother who wants her sons "to gulp up the world, spit out solid degrees, responsible grandchildren ready to gobble," Chen's speaker dreams instead "of one day being as fearless as a mango. / As friendly as a tomato. Merciless to chin & shirtfront."

Like the great mid-century New York poet Frank O'Hara, Chen has an avid eye for everyday details that bridge emotional, domestic, and cultural landscapes. O'Hara once invented a fake movement called "Personism," in which "the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages." Many of Chen's poems display a similar yearning to connect with the "you" they address, though the speaker knows that the space between never quite vanishes. When the poems do tread close to familiar child-of-immigrant tropes—"forgiving / the Broken English of Our Mothers"—they still manage to be more tender than trite or ironic:

 I don't know what to tell you. I thought I could
 tell this story, give it a way out of itself. Even here, in my fabulous
 Tony-winning monologue of a New York, I'm struggling to get
 to the Joy, the Luck. I tell you my mother still
 boils the water, though she knows she doesn't have to anymore.
 Her special kettle boils in no time, is a feat of engineering.
 She could boil my father in it
 & he'd come out a better person, in beautiful shoes.

It's a bracingly wry meta-reflection on his story of identity—the loving particulars balanced by a dose of filial bitterness. Chen is a rarity among this new cohort of poets, many of whose debuts deal in justifiable rage, plunge into agony, flash with fleeting moments of ecstasy. "I'm keenly aware of the political forces, the layers of artifice, the whiffs of strategic essentialism, and the bouts of slippery fragmentation that go into group identity formation," he has said. But the "I" that rides the crosswinds of "queer Asian American," while also telling a personal story, conveys a daring and unusual suppleness: When I Grow Up permits itself both to dwell in realms of everyday sadness and to champion the lesser virtues of amusement, curiosity, and delight.

Not long ago, at a packed reading in Los Angeles, Aziza Barnes introduced a poem whose title posed a version of Carl Phillips's question, implying a starker answer: "my dad asks, 'how come black folk can't just write about flowers?' " A few knowing laughs rose from the audience before Barnes launched into the poem and everyone grew quiet. Barnes, too, deals in the quotidian—the over-policing of black life, the under-investigation of black death, routine harassment—but in a register worlds away from Chen's. The speaker in the poem is walking with friends near her own house. Her "milk neighbors," as she calls her street's pale new residents, "collaborate in the happy task of surveillance": They call the police, three squad cars appear, and an officer begins interrogating. For the poem's speaker,

it didn't make me feel like I could see less of the gun in her holster because she was blk & short & a woman, too. she go,

this your house?
 I say yeah. she go,
can you prove it?
 I say it mine.
 she go ID? I say it mine.
 she go backup on the sly

Despite this trajectory, the poem ends not in tragedy, rage, or even reconciliation. Instead, it settles in a place of bone-deep weariness. "I'm bored & headlights quit being interesting," Barnes intoned, "after I called 911 when I was 2 years old because it was the only phone number I knew by heart." Somehow, resignation feels more damning than any high dudgeon the poet might have brought us to.

Make no mistake: An Aziza Barnes poem can scorch the earth without breaking a sweat. A figure on the poetry-slam circuit who grew up in L.A. and studied at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and the University of Mississippi's M.F.A. program, she has won praise for her "swagger and verve"—and her "screaming, precise, incisive" language, in one critic's words, is indeed vital to her poems. "I love being able to be mean or curt in my poetry," Barnes has said, and her lyric "I" can level invective that rivals the weird specificity of a Yiddish curse:

In the next life

 I pray you the one plant

 Ain't pollinate.

But if that makes Barnes—who has described her work as "quite black and quite gay"—sound like an assertive preacher, she is not. Solmaz Sharif's "mind … constantly on the run" is more like it. "Poetry is the best medium for the self to be subverted / performed / exploded," Barnes has said. The title of her debut collection, i be, but i ain't, points to contradictions within the "I" that need subverting, performing, and exploding.

In the midst of emotionally—and racially and politically—charged territory, Barnes does not hesitate to take unexpected paths, create her own forms, and explore them at her own pace. The book moves through the discomforts and complexities of identity and history, the baseline fear felt by a young black person in America, the poet's unconventional relationship to her assigned gender. But the poems rarely land where their opening salvos suggest they are heading.

One poem of Barnes's that I keep returning to starts with a minor domestic scene: The speaker finds a centipede near her writing desk. In lines that span the width of the page, broken up by white spaces, the poem proceeds to cover a vast territory—apartheid, colonialism, a fascination with the bodies of saints, bodies in extremis—before arriving at a quiet indictment of the poet herself for killing the creature she can't be bothered to understand. The opening poem of the book, it's a wandering lament for a basic human failing. Squashing the insect is not equivalent to the acts of cruelty, ignorance, and injustice—great and small—that bear on this particular poet's place in the world, but the impulse prompts a recognition of their common seed.

Many of the poems in i be, but i ain't beg to be experienced viva voce, and it's easy to imagine them bellowed in front of the footlights, or slung coolly back and forth in front of the camera. Though to praise "performance poets" for their voice and "literary poets" for their prosody is something of a cliché—reinforcing a distinction that fits this generation poorly—Barnes has pushed a talent for enacted speech further than most of her poetry peers. In December, her play, BLKS, about four 20-something black women living in Brooklyn and looking for love, opened to glowing reviews at the Steppenwolf Theatre, in Chicago, and will move off-Broadway next spring. Poetry readers can only hope that Barnes's growing stature on the stage doesn't pull her too far away from the lyric she's capable of breathing such life into.

While performance seems to suit the strengths of Barnes's work, Layli Long Soldier's poetry is harder to separate from the page—which doesn't mean that it rests there comfortably. Quite the contrary. Midway through WHEREAS (2017), her debut collection and a National Book Award finalist, the speaker states, "I will compose each sentence with care, by minding what the rules of writing dictate." The declaration is noteworthy because, up to this point in the book, as an epigraph announces, Long Soldier shows little inclination to mind the rules:

Now
 make room in the mouth
 for grassesgrassesgrasses

The language of WHEREAS enacts the struggle of its project: the sheer weight of representing an "I" that is both a self and a part of a highly diverse collective—American Indians—whose identity has largely been imposed from without. For Long Soldier, an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux tribe and a visual artist who has taught at Diné College, in the Navajo Nation, syntax itself strains and cracks under the burden.

The vow to compose sentences with care comes from "38," a five-page poem that acts as a fulcrum between the shorter poems in the book's first section and the longer "Whereas Statements" of the book's second and final section. "38" is an account of the largest "legal" execution in U.S. history: 38 Sioux prisoners hanged, with President Abraham Lincoln's approval, following the 1862 Sioux Uprising. The poem builds force with stark, declarative sentences, each standing as a stanza or paragraph on its own.

The hanging took place on December 26, 1862—the day after Christmas.

 This was the same week that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

 In the preceding sentence, I italicize "same week" for emphasis.

The Sioux fought because they were starving: They hadn't received the payments agreed to in treaties with the U.S. government, they had lost their hunting grounds, and local traders refused to extend them credit to buy food. One of the traders was supposed to have said, "If they are hungry, let them eat grass." After a raid by Sioux warriors, this trader's body was found with his mouth stuffed with grass. Some might call this poetic justice. Long Soldier goes further:

I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem.

 There's irony in their poem.

 There was no text.

"Real" poems do not "really" require words.

Then she reconsiders: After all, the trader's words initiate the poem, "click the gears of the poem into place." It's telling that even in the most straightforward portion of the book, Long Soldier deploys language to mark its own limits, to probe its utility, to take its measure against concrete and tangible actions.

Long Soldier's fitful, yearning relationship to the language of her father and older relatives—her palpable "ache of being language poor" when it comes to Lakota—embodies that sense of inadequacy, of constantly reaching and failing to connect or express. "I climb the backs of languages," she writes, "ride them into exhaustion—maybe I pull the reins when I mean go." Because even with Long Soldier's rich command of it, English is a fraught instrument for exploring the dark legacies of the U.S. and the Sioux's shared history, which Long Soldier, as a dual citizen, is heir to. Her visual artistry at work, she avails herself of the spatial elements of text—ellipses, disjunction, concrete poetry, blank space—to convey uncertainty and instability. This grasping at the elusiveness of sense-making can be thrilling, but it demands that the reader weather discomfort, abstraction, and incompleteness—and not flinch from asking, with Long Soldier, about the whole endeavor: Is poetry up to the task?

For Long Soldier, language and the body are not really separable. Apology is at the heart of the book, and physical gesture is at the heart of apology. As she tells us, "In many Native languages, there is no word for 'apologize.' The same goes for 'sorry,' " yet there are ways to admit error and make amends. The title, WHEREAS, comes from the careful, official language of a federal apology to American Indians—a series of toothless "whereas" clauses in a Senate resolution that was later cut to half a page and tucked into a defense appropriations bill, signed by President Barack Obama one December weekend in 2009, with no announcement and no tribal representatives present. The U.S. government's apology to American Indians is almost the definition of an empty gesture.

Long Soldier sets this in contrast to a quiet moment with her estranged father over breakfast in her kitchen. A little sound escapes him, and then: "He pinched his fingers to the bridge of his nose, squeezed his eyes. He wiped." What seems at first to the speaker like a sneeze is an almost-silent sob—a prelude to words of remorse for decades of absence and inattention. "WHEREAS when offered an apology," Long Soldier writes:

I watch each movement the shoulders
 high or folding, tilt of the head both eyes down or straight through
 me, I listen for cracks in knuckles or in the word choice, what is it
 that I want? To feel and mind you I feel from the senses—I read
 each muscle, I ask the strength of the gesture to move like a poem.

A nation cannot pinch its fingers to the bridge of its nose, but there are ways of giving flesh to language. Long Soldier's lyric "I," at once fractured and centered within its fissures, attempts a poetry that can bear grief and make something new—just as the poet wishes that her young daughter, learning Lakota and Navajo and beginning to appreciate the fragments that make up her identity, may someday come to understand

 wholeness for
 what it is, not for what it's not, all of it the pieces;

"Largely white-run literary institutions," Claudia Rankine remarked in an essay she co-authored with the writer Beth Loffreda, "can always remind you you're a guest." When I spoke with Danez Smith, the poet stressed that if a renaissance is to continue, the publishing world—meaning editors and publicists, and reviewers, too—has to better reflect the writers whom it is now delivering to a growing readership. But Smith was sanguine: "We have a long way to go in terms of who is celebrated and who is lifted up and who is noted, but I think we can keep making strides." So far, this generation has shown little patience, which may be what saves it. Poets who know their worth and throw themselves into convincing us of it may be just the poets to expand and sustain an art form.

When Nicole Sealey, the executive director of Cave Canem and author of Ordinary Beast (2017), marvels at the "dynamic sense of urgency" she sees in this generation, I think of the young Honduran-born poet Roy G. Guzmán, whose debut is forthcoming from Graywolf. Just days after the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub, Guzmán published "Restored Mural for Orlando," a long, discursive meditation on death, familial love, queer brown bodies in congregation, and a city you visit "to fantasize about the childhood you didn't have."

Forget William Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquillity": Guzmán's poem was an almost instant eulogy, and deeply affecting—Exhibit A of the power of the new lyric "I" to anchor a broad public response in the crosscurrents of complex, marginalized identities. Young poets are producing work that taps intimate veins, and responds to the headlines with impatience, nuance, compassion, and sometimes fury; with historical breadth and sharp critique; with unapologetic stabs at beauty; with ambition; and—above all—with the expectation of an audience. This is poetry that firmly believes it is necessary.
Jesse Lichtensteinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/jesse-lichtenstein/?utm_source=feedEleanor Shakespeare; Dex R. Jones; Jess Chen; Dimitrios KambourisHow Poetry Came to Matter Again2018-08-12T10:40:39-04:002018-08-13T16:33:31-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:39-565781A young generation of artists is winning prizes, acclaim, and legions of readers while exploring identity in new ways.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/chen-chen-aziza-barnes-layli-long-soldier/565781/?utm_source=feed
Modern life is full of potentially terrifying "What if?" possibilities. What if a pharmacist decided to substitute morphine pills or strychnine for the next prescription you pick up? What if a school-bus driver decided to swing the wheel, and plow a full load of children head-on into incoming traffic, or off an overpass?

What if a FedEx or UPS courier decided to deliver a box full of explosives, or anthrax spores, to an office building, rather than business supplies? What if a disturbed student, teacher, or parent walked into a public school and opened fire on everyone in sight?

The last possibility is a reminder that there are risks some societies will define as acceptable. All the rest illustrate the reality that our lives hang by threads that someone else could decide to cut. The ability to inflict harm, whether intentionally or accidentally, rises more or less in pace with the technological complexity and interdependence of modern life.

Every modern city dweller depends for daily well-being and even survival on systems that make up the hard and soft infrastructure of society: water, power, sanitation, public health, and on down the list of services no one notices until something goes wrong. Most are run by people we don't know, whose competence and good intentions we have no choice but to take for granted. As for people determined to do harm—the pharmacist who wants to poison customers, the bus driver intent on suicide—the only absolute protection would be surveillance and regimentation on a draconian scale. (Want to avoid the risk that any bus driver, ever, could do something rash? Send them all through full FBI criminal-background checks, plus psychological testing, and then staff every bus with both a driver and a co-driver, each to keep an eye on the other. Any school system could do this. None that I'm aware of does, since it would price bus service out of the realm of practicality.)

Thus sane approaches to security have been careful to set the goal of reducing risks, rather than eliminating them. The first is possible, and it naturally leads to discussions of cost, practicality, and the trade-offs between security and liberty. The second is in most cases impossible, and it naturally invites "security theater"-style posturing in fending off threats, and "How could this have happened???" overreaction when something inevitably goes wrong. (For more of The Atlantic's case against security theater, especially involving the early years of the TSA, see pieces by Jeffrey Goldberg here, here, and here, and by me here and here. )

So we come to the bizarre, frightening, and tragic episode on Friday night in Seattle, in which a ground-staff baggage employee of a regional airline got into an empty twin-engine turboprop, started it up and took off without permission, flew dramatic aerobatic maneuvers over Puget Sound, and then crashed on an island off Tacoma, killing himself in an apparent suicide.

Bizarre, frightening, and tragic this certainly was. But was it a sign of an alarming failure in security practices, as some press accounts immediately asserted? (For instance, from the United Kingdom's The Telegraph, soon after the event: "It has raised fundamental questions about airline security at America's major airports after the mechanic was able to board the plane, taxi onto the runway and take off without being stopped. Aviation experts questioned what the authorities would have been able to do if the pilot was determined to fly the plane into a city rather than do loop-the-loops.")

Maybe this will be the appropriate response when more facts are known. For the moment, as is usually the case with aviation disasters, many of the most important questions about what happened are impossible to answer right away. Here are some of the aviation details, known and still puzzling, and then my hypothesis as to how this could have happened. (I trained for and got my instrument rating at Boeing Field in Seattle in 1999, and flew frequently in Seattle airspace when I lived there in 1999 and 2000.)

The specifics: The most useful overall summary I've seen is in The Aviationist. It gives details about the plane (a Horizon Air Bombardier Dash 8, with no passengers aboard but capable of carrying more than 70); the route of flight; the response of air traffic control; and the dispatch of two F-15 fighter jets from the Oregon Air National Guard's base, in Portland, which broke the sound barrier en route toward Seattle and were prepared if necessary to shoot down the errant plane.

The real-time drama: A video of the plane's barrel rolls and other maneuvers, plus the F-15 interception, from John Waldon of KIRO, is here.The recordings of the pilot's discussions with air traffic control (ATC) are absolutely riveting. A 10-minute summary, featuring the pilot's loopy-sounding stream-of-consciousness observations in what were his final moments of life, is here. A 25-minute version, which includes the other business the Seattle controllers were doing at the same time, is here. The pilot makes his final comments at around time 19:00 of this longer version. A few minutes later, you hear the controllers telling other waiting airline pilots that the "ground hold" has been lifted and normal operations have resumed. In between, the controllers have learned that the pilot they were talking to has flown his plane into the ground.

How did he do it? Part 1: The Dash 8, which most airline passengers would think of as a "commuter" or even a "puddle jumper" aircraft, differs from familiar Boeing or Airbus longer-haul planes in having a built-in staircase. When the cabin door opens, a set of stairs comes out, and you can walk right onto the plane. This is a very basic difference from larger jets. The big Boeing and Airbus planes require a "Jetway" connection with the terminal, which is the normal way that passengers, flight crew, and maintenance staff get on and off, or an external set of stairs. Also, big jets usually require an external tug to pull or push them away from the Jetway and the terminal, before they can taxi to the runway. They cannot just start up and drive away, as the Dash 8 did. Was the Dash 8's door already open, and the stairs down, so a ground-staff member could just walk on? Did he have to open the door himself? I don't know. But either way, anyone who has been to a busy airport knows that it's normal rather than odd to see ground-crew members getting into planes.

How did he do it? Part 2: However the pilot started the plane (switches? spare set of keys?), the available ATC recordings suggest he didn't fool the Seattle controllers into giving him permission to taxi to the runway or take off. He just started taxiing, rolled onto the runway, accelerated, and left. As you can hear from the 25-minute recording, ATC at big, busy airports is an elaborately choreographed set of permissions—to push back from the gate, to taxi to a specific runway, to move onto the runway, to take off. For safety reasons (avoiding collisions on the runway), in this case the Seattle controllers had to tell normal traffic to freeze in position, as the unknown rogue plane barged through.

How did he do it? Part 3: In the 10-minute ATC version, you can hear the pilot asking what different dials mean, saying that he knows about airplanes only from flight simulators, and generally acting surprised about where he finds himself. But the video shows him performing maneuvers that usually require careful training—for instance, leveling off the plane after completing a barrel roll. Was this just blind luck? The equivalent of movie scenes of a child at the wheel of a speeding car, accidentally steering it past danger? Was his simulator training more effective than he thought? Did he have more flying background than he let on? At the moment I've seen no explanation of this discrepancy.

How everyone else did: I challenge anyone to listen to the ATC tapes, either the condensed or (especially) the extended version, and not come away impressed by the calm, humane, sophisticated, utterly unflappable competence of the men and women who talked with the pilot while handling this emergency. My wife, Deb, has written often about the respect she's gained for controllers by talking with them in our travels over the years. These are public employees, faced with a wholly unprecedented life-and-death challenge, and comporting themselves in a way that does enormous credit to them as individuals and to the system in which they work. In addition to talking to the hijacker pilot, Seattle ATC was talking with the scores of other airline pilots whose flights were affected by the emergency. See if you detect any testiness, confusion, or exasperation in those pilots' replies.

What could have happened next? The two F-15s were in range of the plane within a few minutes of its takeoff. They were awaiting orders to shoot or force it down, if the pilot had turned toward Seattle or Tacoma rather than away from them.

Could this have been much worse? Clearly it could have. If a ground-crew member had been purposeful, better trained, and able to haul explosives or other damaging cargo with him onto the plane, he could have reached downtown Seattle before the F-15s got to him. That's a plainly possible "What if?" like the strychnine, anthrax, and school-bus examples with which I began. And even if the resulting toll were "merely" comparable to that of a large-scale American gun massacre—it could not have been comparable to the 9/11 attacks, since a commuter plane like this is so much smaller and carries so much less fuel—the psychological impact of airplane-borne threats is always greater than sheer numbers would indicate. (Airline travel in the United States is statistically about the safest thing you can do; many people are nonetheless afraid of flying.)

Could it have been avoided altogether? We'll see what the details show. As with the Germanwings crash of 2015, in which a depressed 28-year-old airline pilot deliberately flew himself and 149 other people into the ground, the easiest break point would have been someone noticing how disturbed a staff member had become.

As for (even) greater screening and supervision of airport and airline staff members, that is sure to come. One reason North American and European airlines are now so exceptionally safe is that they view each crash, death, or even near miss as the occasion for systematic learning and error reduction, to address the vulnerability that has just been revealed. Because decades of refinement have eliminated so many air-safety problems, the crashes that do occur tend to involve some previously underappreciated point of failure—for instance, the autopilot and crew-management issues that led Air France Flight 447 to plunge into the Atlantic Ocean. (Think of how different this is from car-crash investigations or the stories of mass shootings, where the background factors are so familiar that most people can guess them before the full details come in.)

I hope that, when the facts are in, the response to this odd, sad incident will resemble what the aviation system usually does with its failures, rather than the way the political system typically behaves. That is, I hope it serves as a source of guidance for further threat reduction, rather than as fuel for panic and finger pointing about the modern reality that some "What if?" peril will always remain.
James Fallowshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/james-fallows/?utm_source=feedReutersThe Lessons of the Seattle Plane Crash2018-08-12T10:09:04-04:002018-08-13T15:20:27-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-567359It's not possible to eliminate all risks from modern life—but airlines and regulators work hard to reduce them after each new incident, anyway.https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2018/08/the-lessons-of-the-seattle-plane-crash/567359/?utm_source=feed