(cache) How Trump Puts His Own Interests Ahead of Counterterrorism

The Death of 'He Said, She Said' Journalism

Peter Beinart

The New York Times responds to a candidate who breaks all the rules by discarding some of its own.

Last Saturday, The New York Times published an extraordinary story. What made the story extraordinary wasn’t the event the Times covered. What made it extraordinary was the way the Times covered it.

On its front page, top right—the most precious space in American print journalism—the Times wrote about Friday’s press conference in which Donald Trump declared that a) he now believed Barack Obama was a US citizen, b) he deserved credit for having established that fact despite rumors to the contrary and c) Hillary Clinton was to blame for the rumors. Traditionally, when a political candidate assembles facts so as to aggrandize himself and belittle his opponent, “objective” journalists like those at the Times respond with a “he said, she said” story.

How Donald Trump Puts His Own Interests Ahead of Counterterrorism

Conor Friedersdorf

The Republican nominee has twisted himself in knots with contradictory claims about Hillary Clinton and national security.

On Monday morning, Donald Trump claimed to his millions of followers on Facebook and Twitter that “Hillary Clinton's weakness while she was Secretary of State has emboldened terrorists all over the world to attack the U.S., even on our own soil.” Many of his fans celebrated the attack on the Democratic nominee. I invite them to give his words a closer look. Those who do will find two reasons for concern.

First, it is important for the president and the American people to understand what motivates Islamist terrorism, an ongoing threat to our safety. Clarity on that subject really could have life or death consequences. And if we take Trump at his word, he believes something that is obviously false: that the secretary of state is a determining factor in whether mass murderers intent on killing Westerners act or not—indeed, Trump’s words suggest a belief that at least one person who already killed Americans on our soil wouldn’t have done so but for Hillary Clinton’s tenure.

The Free-Time Paradox in America

Derek Thompson

The rich were meant to have the most leisure time. The working poor were meant to have the least. The opposite is happening. Why?

"Every time I see it, that number blows my mind.”

Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, was delivering a speech at the Booth School of Business this June about the rise in leisure among young men who didn’t go to college. He told students that one “staggering” statistic stood above the rest. "In 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men [those without a college degree] aged 21 to 30 had not worked at all during the prior twelve months,” he said.

"Think about that for a second,” he went on. Twentysomething male high-school grads used to be the most dependable working cohort in America. Today one in five are now essentially idle. The employment rate of this group has fallen 10 percentage points just this century, and it has triggered a cultural, economic, and social decline. "These younger, lower-skilled men are now less likely to work, less likely to marry, and more likely to live with parents or close relatives,” he said.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump debating — Photo Illustration by Justin Metz*

When Donald Meets Hillary

James Fallows

Who will win the debates? Trump’s approach was an important part of his strength in the primaries. But will it work when he faces Clinton onstage?

The most famous story about modern presidential campaigning now has a quaint old-world tone. It’s about the showdown between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in the first debate of their 1960 campaign, which was also the very first nationally televised general-election debate in the United States.

The story is that Kennedy looked great, which is true, and Nixon looked terrible, which is also true—and that this visual difference had an unexpected electoral effect. As Theodore H. White described it in his hugely influential book The Making of the President 1960, which has set the model for campaign coverage ever since, “sample surveys” after the debate found that people who had only heard Kennedy and Nixon talking, over the radio, thought that the debate had been a tie. But those who saw the two men on television were much more likely to think that Kennedy—handsome, tanned, non-sweaty, poised—had won.

Harris & Ewing / Library of Congress / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

What America Lost as Women Entered the Workforce

Emma Green

Civic organizations were built on the voluntary labor of women. As the demands on women's time increase, communities are suffering.

It’s a shame that Phyllis Schlafly had a corner on skepticism about women’s liberation. “Why should we trade in our special privileges and honored status for the alleged advantage of working in an office or assembly line?” the conservative crusader, perhaps best known for her successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, asked in 1972. “Most women would rather cuddle a baby than a typewriter or a factory machine.”

Schlafly masterfully sold the narrative that women’s rights, including those which would enable their greater participation in the workforce, would hurt women. In the process, she polarized the debate, making conservatives loath to recognize women’s gains, and liberals equally reluctant to acknowledge that progress might entail trade-offs. As more women have joined the workforce and become leaders in traditionally male spheres, gender roles have shifted, and women have lost their exclusive hold over traditionally female spheres. One of these is the home, as Schlafly argued. But women’s dominion over another part of public life has also declined: civil society.

Millennial Voters May Cost Hillary Clinton the Election

Ronald Brownstein

The Democratic nominee hasn't matched the support Barack Obama garnered during his presidential campaigns. Can she turn that around before November?

When Hillary Clinton delivers a speech aimed at Millennials in Philadelphia on Monday, she will be confronting perhaps the most persistent weakness in her career as a national candidate.

Clinton struggled among Millennial voters in her 2008 primary campaign, her 2016 primary campaign, and in the 2016 general election. Against Donald Trump, Clinton has two big advantages—a policy agenda that polls show largely matches Millennials’ own preferences, and an opponent even more unpopular with them than with the public overall. But she also must overcome her own long history of failing to connect with this growing group of voters—a failure that is increasingly worrying Democrats as the overall race tightens.

How One of America's Most Overweight Cities Lost a Million Pounds

Ian Birrell

The mayor of Oklahoma City declared war on obesity, launching health campaigns and implementing pedestrian-friendly new infrastructure. Is this one possible solution to the nationwide epidemic?

When Velveth Monterroso arrived in the U.S. from her hometown in Guatemala, she weighed exactly 140 pounds. But after a decade of living in Oklahoma, she was more than 70 pounds heavier and fighting diabetes at the age of 34. This friendly woman, a mother of two children, is a living embodiment of the obesity culture cursing the world’s wealthiest country. “In Guatemala it is rare to see people who are very overweight, but it could not be more different here,” she said. “I saw this when I came here.”

As soon as she arrived in the U.S. she started piling on pounds—an average of seven each year. In Guatemala, she ate lots of vegetables because meat was expensive. But working from 8 o'clock in the morning until 11 at night as a cook in an Oklahoma City diner, she would skip breakfast and lunch while snacking all day on bits of burger and pizza. Driving home, she would often resort to fast food because she was hungry and exhausted after a 15-hour day slaving over a hot grill. If she and her husband Diego—also a cook—made it back without stopping, they would often gorge on whatever was available rather than wait to cook a decent meal.

Large blue event hall filled with tables of guests — Partnership for Public Service / Flickr

The Oscars, but for Federal Employees

Russell Berman

The FBI’s chief bomb expert, a Secret Service cyber-investigator, and the developer of a life-saving medical computer are among the honorees of annual awards for government service known as the Sammies.

Other than the military, federal employees aren’t often celebrated.

Political candidates dismiss them as overpaid, paper-pushing bureaucrats. They make headlines mostly when something goes wrong—a major health insurance website failing to function, or senior managers spending too lavishly on the public dime. When Congress needs to slash the budget in a pinch, federal employee salary and benefits are frequently the first things it tries to cut.

On one night a year, however, America’s top civil servants get feted Hollywood-style, with a black-tie gala and the presentation of their version of the Oscars—the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, or Sammies. Now in their 15^th year, the awards are the brainchild of the non-profit Partnership for Public Service, which solicits nominations from government departments and agencies, the contractors and associations that work with them on a daily basis, and the public at large.

A mathematics teacher writes on the chalkboard at the Juba One Girls Basic Education School, in South Sudan, in 2012. — Adriane Ohanesian / Reuters

What Math Looks Like in the Mind

Adrienne LaFrance

In a surprise to scientists, it appears blind people process numbers by tapping into a part of their brains that’s reserved for images in sighted individuals.

Humans are born to do math, and they have the brain infrastructure to prove it—including a cluster of specialized nerve cells for processing numbers.

Despite this dedicated cluster, mathematical concepts are often taught in a way that taps into the brain’s visual system. Children might be asked to count the apples in a picture, or to imagine two trains speeding away from one another at different speeds. But just how much does visual experience shape the way that people think about numbers?

To find out, researchers at Johns Hopkins compared brain activity among a group of congenitally blind individuals and a group of sighted individuals—asking all participants to solve a series of math problems and language comprehension tasks.

What O. J. Simpson Means to Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates

His great accomplishment was to be indicted for a crime and then receive the kind of treatment typically reserved for rich white guys.

My reaction to O. J. Simpson’s arrest for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman was atypical. It was 1994. I was a young black man attending a historically black university in the majority-black city of Washington, D.C., with zero sympathy for Simpson, zero understanding of the sympathy he elicited from my people, and zero appreciation for the defense team’s claim that Simpson had been targeted because he was black.

O. J. Simpson wasn’t black. He came of age in the 1960s—the era of Muhammad Ali’s opposition to the Vietnam War and John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s black-power salute at the 1968 Olympics. But the O. J. Simpson I knew, and the one poignantly depicted this year in Ezra Edelman’s epic documentary, O.J.: Made in America, recognized only one struggle—the struggle to advance O. J. Simpson. When the activist Harry Edwards attempted to enlist Simpson in the Olympic boycott, Simpson rebuffed him and later claimed that organizers like Edwards had tried to “use” him. Protest “hurt Tommie Smith, it hurt John Carlos,” Simpson said. Smith and Carlos were “standing on [Edwards’s] platform, [when] they should have been standing on their own platform.”