(cache) Donald Trump Reportedly Eavesdropped on Staffer Calls at Mar-A-Lago

Russian President Vladimir Putin stands in the snow at a wreath laying ceremony. — Sergei Karpukhin / Reuters

What Putin Is Up To

Strobe Talbott and Jessica Brandt

And why he may have overplayed his hand

Each year on December 20, the Russian intelligence community pays homage to its enduring guardianship of the Motherland. It was on this date in 1917, six weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution, that Vladimir Lenin established the Cheka, an acronym for “Emergency Commission.” Over the ensuing decades, the commission’s nomenclature and organization chart mutated: It became the OGPU from 1923 to 1934, the NKVD until the early 1950s, and then the KGB for nearly 40 years. After the collapse of the USSR, the sprawling institution was split into separate foreign and domestic agencies. Operatives of both are still called chekists, and they share Lenin’s original purpose: countering Russia’s enemies at home and abroad.

President Trump's Untruths Are Piling Up

Conor Friedersdorf

The need for Congress to figure out why he and his team keep misleading the public about Russia grows more urgent by the day, even if they are ultimately exonerated.

Let’s be clear from the start: There is no evidence that Donald Trump or his campaign coordinated with Russia to hack the Democratic National Committee’s emails or funnel them to Wikileaks; no evidence that they are puppets of Vladimir Putin; and no proof that the Kremlin possesses kompromat on the president.

There are suspicions voiced by members of Congress, leaked by parts of the intelligence committee, held by journalists at respected publications who are investing lots of time and money chasing down leads, and of concern to millions of Americans.

And that status quo is unhealthy for American democracy.

I would welcome proof that Trump is innocent of any wrongdoing in this matter, because the alternative is a compromised president, the possibility of a constitutional crisis, and consequences that are hard to predict.

U.S. State Department — Win McNamee / Getty

The State of Trump's State Department

Julia Ioffe

Anxiety and listless days as a foreign-policy bureaucracy confronts the possibility of radical change

The flags in the lobby of the State Department stood bathed in sunlight and silence on a recent afternoon. “It’s normally so busy here,” marveled a State Department staffer as we stood watching the emptiness. “People are usually coming in for meetings, there’s lots of people, and now it’s so quiet.” The action at Foggy Bottom has instead moved to the State Department cafeteria where, in the absence of work, people linger over countless coffees with colleagues. (“The cafeteria is so crowded all day,” a mid-level State Department officer said, adding that it was a very unusual sight. “No one’s doing anything.”) As the staffer and I walked among the tables and chairs, people with badges chatted over coffee; one was reading his Kindle.

Can Millennials Save the Democratic Party?

Ronald Brownstein

The 2020 election is projected to mark the first time in more than 40 years that baby boomers aren’t the largest generation of eligible voters.

Facing a bleak electoral landscape after 2016, the brightest spot for Democrats may be President Trump’s continued weakness with members of the Millennial generation—who are poised to surpass the more Republican-leaning baby boomers in 2020 as the largest generation of eligible voters.

Polls early in his presidency consistently show Trump facing lower job-approval ratings, and greater resistance to his key ideas, among Millennials than among any older generation. Those findings are fueling Democratic hopes that Trump’s agenda of bristling nationalism on issues like immigration will stamp the GOP as a party of racial exclusion, not only for the increasingly diverse Millennials, but for the first post-Millennials who will enter the electorate in 2020.

Zika Makes Microcephaly 20 Times More Likely

Julie Beck

A new CDC report begins to quantify the devastating effects the virus has on children.

Microcephaly is typically a very rare condition, causing about seven babies per 10,000 births to be born with undersized heads. This can lead to vision and hearing problems, seizures, and other developmental issues. But microcephaly was thrust into the spotlight by the Zika epidemic, as one of the birth defects that can happen if a pregnant woman is infected with the mosquito-borne virus. Zika increases the chances that a fetus will develop microcephaly and/or other birth defects, particularly if the mother is infected during the first trimester.

New numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention help quantify that risk: Researchers found that the rate of birth defects in children born to Zika-infected mothers is 20 times higher than normal. The birth defects they looked at included microcephaly as well as eye abnormalities, neural tube defects, and other unspecified central nervous system dysfunctions.

The Trick Smoothies Play on the Stomach

James Hamblin

Strategic blending can delay hunger.

Imagine you have a glass of water and a plate of chicken, broccoli, and mushrooms.

If you were already imagining that, keep imagining it. Then consider a non-trivial question: Would it be better to eat it as it is, or blend it all together and drink it?

Not many people choose the latter. But among them would be hunger expert Robin Spiller, director of biomedical research at the Nottingham Digestive Diseases Centre in the U.K. And he has data and a deeply considered health argument on his side. Spiller and his team compared the two options head to head in a study, and they found that when people who drank the blended “soup,” it kept them from feeling hungry for about an hour longer than the whole-food meal.

Today's News: March 4, 2017

The Editors

Malaysia expels the North Korean ambassador over the killing of Kim Jong-nam, and President Donald Trump accuses his predecessor of tapping his phones.

—President Donald Trump, in a tweet, accused former president Barack Obama of tapping the phones at Trump Tower headquarters, but offered no evidence.

—Malaysia has expelled the North Korean ambassador over the death of Kim Jong-nam, half-brother to Kim Jong-un.

—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).

How to Build an Autocracy

David Frum

The preconditions are present in the U.S. today. Here’s the playbook Donald Trump could use to set the country down a path toward illiberalism.

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It’s 2021, and President Donald Trump will shortly be sworn in for his second term. The 45th president has visibly aged over the past four years. He rests heavily on his daughter Ivanka’s arm during his infrequent public appearances.

Fortunately for him, he did not need to campaign hard for reelection. His has been a popular presidency: Big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits have worked their familiar expansive magic. Wages have grown strongly in the Trump years, especially for men without a college degree, even if rising inflation is beginning to bite into the gains. The president’s supporters credit his restrictive immigration policies and his TrumpWorks infrastructure program.

When Factory Jobs Vanish, Men Become Less Desirable Partners

Alana Semuels

Declines in manufacturing employment are shaping the structure of the American family.

In many small towns across the country, there aren’t very many good jobs these days. Once there were factories that employed millions and paid decent wages. Today, young men are scraping by working at local bars or in lower-paid temp jobs. Many of these men are single, and new research suggests that those two things—their poor economic status and their singleness—are not unrelated.

It’s no wonder, then, that the changes wrought by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs helped elevate the platform of Donald Trump, who won 67 percent of white workers without a college degree. Their malcontent comes not just from their economic struggles, but from the dramatic changes to their personal lives that the decline of manufacturing have created.

‘Artificial Intelligence’ Has Become Meaningless

Ian Bogost

It’s often just a fancy name for a computer program.

In science fiction, the promise or threat of artificial intelligence is tied to humans’ relationship to conscious machines. Whether it’s Terminators or Cylons or servants like the “Star Trek” computer or the Star Wars droids, machines warrant the name AI when they become sentient—or at least self-aware enough to act with expertise, not to mention volition and surprise.

What to make, then, of the explosion of supposed-AI in media, industry, and technology? In some cases, the AI designation might be warranted, even if with some aspiration. Autonomous vehicles, for example, don’t quite measure up to R2D2 (or Hal), but they do deploy a combination of sensors, data, and computation to perform the complex work of driving. But in most cases, the systems making claims to artificial intelligence aren’t sentient, self-aware, volitional, or even surprising. They’re just software.