We’ve already heard from one reader who was shunned by her family for leaving their church. This reader was shunned by her devout family because of her gender identity:
My name is Julia, and I’m 23 years old. I read a few of the stories in your Notes section about people’s personal experiences with religion, and I saw at the bottom you were looking for reader responses. Well, here’s mine.
We started the week with a photo collection of airplane shadows cast across the U.S. landscape. Here are two more from reader Sam, flying over Columbia, South Carolina:
(America by Air archive here. Submission guidelines here.)
Trump’s one-day evolution on abortion: The Republican presidential front-runner said he favored “some form of punishment” for women who have abortions if they are made illegal. He reversed himself later last night amid an outcry, saying only those performing the abortions should be punished.
Tesla’s mass-market model: The Tesla 3 will be unveiled this morning at 11:30 a.m. ET. You can reserve one at Tesla stores or online. The cars start at $35,000 before tax rebates.
RIP, Imre Kertesz: The Nobel literature laureate was 86.
News from last night here
Here are some generally positive developments from places we’ve visited in our travels.
Fresno: This evening Fresno, California, held its big “State of Downtown” event. You can see the details here. As we’ve reported over the years, Fresno’s bet on re-doing its downtown, made by Mayor Ashley Swearengin and many of the local business and civic leaders, is one of the most consequential in the country. You can hear tonight the update on how it’s going. Here’s a report on last year’s State of Downtown event.
***
Allentown: Allentown, Pennsylvania, is two or three years ahead of Fresno on the downtown renovation cycle. In common with many other places we’ve been, it has an ambitious manufacturing-oriented startup/incubator zone, known as the Bridgeworks Enterprise Center.
Bridgeworks has just released a report on the new businesses that have started there. You can read it here. There’s some much less positive news also coming out of Allentown, as you can read here. We’ll go back there to follow up.
“Kylo and Rey stuck in my mind like popcorn kernels in my teeth,” —Rosie, who writes Star Wars fan fiction.
“The first thing is that a snake talked. After I heard that, I completely gave up on it,” —14-year-old Aiden Smith, on Christianity.
“One day I should probably call her and say, ‘You have 200,000 new friends, you just don’t know it,’” —Dennis Mortenson, who named his company's digital assistant after a woman he used to work with.
American troop boost: The U.S. announced it will increase its military presence in eastern Europe to show “our strong and balanced approach to reassuring our NATO allies and partners in the wake of an aggressive Russia in eastern Europe and elsewhere.” Elsewhere, however, the U.S. has taken a more conciliatory approach to the country it has vowed to isolate politically: Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said yesterday Russia is “playing a constructive role” in the conflict in Syria.
Good news for Trump: The American labor union representing 16,500 border patrol agents has never endorsed a candidate for president—until today. The National Border Patrol Council said it’s backing Trump for being “bold and outspoken as other world leaders who put their country’s interests ahead of all else.” Priscilla has the story here.
Bad news for Trump: The Republican front-runner suggested in an interview with MSNBC that women should face “some form” of criminal punishment for illegal abortions. His remarks drew sharp criticism from liberals and conservatives alike, including Ted Cruz, who pointed to the GOP anti-abortion view that doctors and others who perform illegal abortions are the ones that should be held responsible, not women. Trump changed his position hours later, saying he has not changed his position:
"My position has not changed" pic.twitter.com/gzMVcNmqD4
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) March 30, 2016
News from this afternoon here
That’s what this post hopes to inspire you to do today; its caption reads, “It's #TakeAWalkInTheParkDay!”
It’s Grant Park in Chicago, which is, by all accounts, a real park. But is “Take A Walk In The Park Day” a real holiday? The National Park Service appears recognize it as such, though it acknowledges that “the origins of this holiday are unclear.” If you’re interested in more micro-holidays, Megan wrote about their rise in 2014.
Holiday or not, it’s springtime in the Northern Hemisphere. A walk in the park probably wouldn’t hurt you.
(See all Orbital Views here)
Earlier this week, our video team and I put together a segment exploring how Donald Trump has survived—nay, thrived—despite the thousands of negative political ads aired against him:
One reader offers a simple explanation:
You left out the most obvious reason campaign ads aren’t as effective: No one sees them anymore, because no one watches live TV anymore.
This reader had a similar line of thought:
Campaign ads don’t work because too many people, like me, are accessing media not through television or newspapers. Plus our “news” sources are fragmented and in silos that suit our beliefs. So ads with mindless repetitions are just noise, easily filtered out.
I’m not convinced on the first point. While DVRs like Tivo and services like Netflix have empowered people to skip commercials or drop TV altogether, adults still spend about four-and-a-half hours a day watching live television, according to Nielson. Viewership has dropped among younger people, but people over 65 still watch more than 50 hours a week, and they’re more likely to actually vote.
Matt, a reader in Seattle, has an unsettling selection for the cover series:
This is a probably bit out there, but I was reminded of it as I listened to yesterday’s Track of the Day. The song “Tainted Love” was originally written by Ed Cobb and recorded by Gloria Jones in 1965 (thanks Wikipedia). It became famous with the 1981 synth-pop version by Soft Cell.
Then in 1985, Coil covered it. Slowed it down. Released it as a benefit for an AIDS Charity. The slow version brought out a new meaning in the lyrics:
Once I ran to you, now I run from you
This tainted love you’ve given
I give you all a boy could give you
Take my heart and that’s not nearly allIt captured something of the despair and panic (the name of the b-side) of those early AIDS days in the gay and alternative world, where something terrifying was happening. I wasn’t aware of the video at the time, but it leaves little room for misinterpretation. Thirty years later and the emotion still comes through.
(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here. Submit via hello@)
Thirty-five years ago today, on March 30, 1981, John W. Hinckley, Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton Hotel. Of the six bullets fired by Hinckley, one hit the president in the chest. Here’s ABC News first airing the dramatic footage that day:
When news reached the White House, Reagan’s crisis-management team met in the Situation Room. National Security Advisor Richard V. Allen recorded audio of that meeting on his personal tape recorder. The “previously undisclosed transcripts of the deliberations” were published in the April 2001 issue of The Atlantic. Here’s Allen:
All we knew in the first hour was that the President had been shot. We had virtually no information about the assailant or his motives, or about whether he had acted alone. Vice President Bush was in the air over Texas. … The first assessments by the Pentagon revealed that more Soviet submarines than usual were off the East Coast.
In the transcript, various members of the president’s security team discuss the location of the “football” (“a briefcase containing the nuclear release-code sequences that is always at the President's side”), the location of a Soviet submarine (“two minutes closer than normal”), and infamous line-of-succession gaffe by Secretary of State Alexander Haig (“Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State, in that order...”—nope, the #3 spot is for the House Speaker).
Allen concludes by reflecting on a job well done:
It is important to point out that, despite brief flare-ups and distractions, the crisis-management team in the Situation Room worked together well. The congressional leadership was kept informed, and governments around the world were notified and reassured.
This reader grappled with the age-old question of theodicy—why would a benevolent God allow for so much suffering in the world?—and then decided to leave religion behind:
Four years ago I lost my faith. I grew up a passionate Christian, and this lasted most of the way through college. Following graduation I moved to a new city and stopped going to church because I couldn’t find a congregation that appealed to me, and, frankly, I liked having the extra free time. Although I was no longer as religious, it was still important to me to find a partner with faith. When I met my now-husband, one of the qualities that I admired was his devotion to his Lutheran church.
Then, when I was in my mid-twenties, I spent several months abroad volunteering in Central America.
Newark, Justice Department settle civil-rights investigation: The New Jersey city’s police department was accused of routinely violated civil rights, particularly those of minorities. The agreement includes revised policies and training protocols to ensure police officers conduct stops, searches, and arrests in accordance with the Constitution.
Obama commutes prison terms for drug offenders: Of the 61 inmates whose sentences will be shortened, more than a third are serving life sentences. Most will be released by July 28.
The end of the plan to strip French terrorists of their citizenship: President Francois Hollande dropped the proposed constitutional changes after it became clear that it would not clear Parliament. Our story here.
News from the morning here
Our latest reader contributor and parent of an autistic child strikes a chord with me and my family: Late diagnosis. Check. Solitary life. Check. Crushing rejection. Check. A parent’s desperate dream: “I wish more employers could see past the facade of autism to recognize the smart, hard-working people who simply have minds that are wired differently from the majority of the population.” Here’s our reader in full:
Thanks for sharing so many of these stories. My daughter had some of the typical autism traits as a preschooler, but she was so intelligent, we didn’t think she possibly could be autistic.
We’ve already heard from two gay readers in our special project on religious choice: one who is considering leaving the Mormon Church and one who already left. The next reader we’re hearing from is a straight guy, who states his choice right off the bat:
I left the LDS Church at age 34.
My wife and children, however, are still active, believing members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormon Church. This authoritarian, patriarchal religious organization was at the center of my life from the time I was a child. Beginning in my adolescence, I felt a growing tension between what others told me was true and what my mind and heart was telling me.
Nevertheless, I lived up to the expectations of my parents, my church leaders, and other role models in my religious tradition: I graduated from seminary (a four-year high school program for LDS youth); I earned an Eagle Scout award; I went to Brigham Young University on scholarship; I served a two-year mission for the Church in France and Switzerland; I married my wife in the temple in a private ceremony for only faithful members; I served in many volunteer capacities in my local congregations; I even made my professional career as a faculty member at BYU for five years.
Seattle looms large in all things aviation-related, due mainly to the presence of Boeing. It looms large in my own aviation-related life, since I got my instrument rating while living there in 1999, training with instructor Chris Baker of Wings Aloft at Boeing Field in downtown Seattle; and then in 2000 did seaplane training with instructor Chris Jacob of Kenmore Air, which flies floatplanes out of the local lakes, bays, and inlets.
It also looms large in recent photos in this series. Here is another one via Stu Smith, a colleague of Chris Jacob’s at Kenmore:
This photo was taken by a passenger (I don’t recall the name) in a Beaver [JF note: a very popular floatplane] looking to the southeast. If not for the clouds, Washington State’s iconic Mt. Rainier would be visible on the distant horizon.
When the wind dictates a south departure from Lake Union (as it did in this flight), the climbout takes us past the Space Needle. It’s a pretty spectacular departure, which I’ve yet to tire of after 12 seasons. When the wind shifts to the north, the arrival and landing direction is reversed, taking us past the Space Needle in a descent. I think that tourists looking out from the Space Needle enjoy watching our departures and arrivals as much as the passengers on the plane enjoy watching them watching us!
I got to fly this route sometimes when doing training. It’s reason enough to do pilot training, or at least to take a sightseeing flight.
(America by Air archive here. Submission guidelines here.)
GOP presidential race: At last night’s town hall, hosted by CNN, Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, reversed himself and said he would not support the party’s nominee if someone else wins. He said he had been “treated very unfairly” by the RNC and party’s establishment. The other two Republican candidates also backed away from their pledges to support the eventual nominee—but not explicitly.
Cyprus hijacking, cont’d: A Cypriot court ordered the man accused of hijacking an EgyptAir flight yesterday and forcing its pilots to land in Cyprus to eight days in custody. Seif Eldin Mustafa has been described as “psychologically unstable” by Cypriot authorities.
Myanmar’s new president sworn in: Htin Kyaw, a close aide of Aung San Suu Kyi, is the first elected civilian leader in more than 50 years. Suu Kyi is constitutionally barred from assuming the presidency, but she says she will rule by proxy.
News from last night here
Thanks to the many, many people who have written in today to say that the RSS feeds (which send updates on our web posts, by email) for me, Jeffrey Goldberg, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and possibly some other writers have stopped working.
I have learned that there was indeed a change in our RSS codes over the weekend. Our development team is working hard on updates that it will make it easier / more automatic to re-subscribe to the new feeds. I am very sorry for the inconvenience and for lost readership. I hope we can entice you to re-subscribe. When I get more specific info, tomorrow, on activating the new feeds, I’ll post it here. Thanks for your attention over the years.
Last night, President Obama gave the keynote lecture at an annual dinner to honor excellence in political reporting. The dinner is held once a year to commemorate Robin Toner, a legendary reporter who covered domestic politics for The New York Times until her death in 2008. (Obama recounted one of the anecdotes that has sealed Toner’s legend: over the course of nearly 25 years of reporting for the Times, she filed or contributed to more than 1,900 stories. She was such a meticulous fact-checker of her work that only six of those stories had corrections appended.) Every year, a political reporter is awarded the Toner Prize for his or her work; this year’s winner was Alec MacGillis of ProPublica. My colleague Molly Ball won the award in 2013 for her terrific coverage of the 2012 presidential campaign.
Obama’s remarks came at a somewhat freighted moment for the nation’s political press corps. Countless stories from political reporters and media observers over the past several weeks have posed questions about the appropriate role of the press in covering a candidate like Donald Trump, who is an expert at using critical coverage of himself as a foil to draw more attention from the media and more approval from his supporters.
Although Obama didn’t mention Trump by name, the GOP front-runner’s unique relationship with the media was the implicit focus of the president’s comments (highlighted in the clip embedded above).
Washington, D.C. gets a bad rap for being overly political—a reputation Moisés Naím defended for us yesterday against the French ambassador to the U.S. But until 1961, city residents weren’t even able to vote in America’s biggest political contest: the race for the White House. Fifty-five years ago today, the 23rd Amendment was ratified, granting the District presidential electors. (If you need a refresher on the role of delegates in the presidential race, Yoni and Caty break it down here.)
Some D.C. residents have already exercised that electoral right this year; the city’s Republican primary was held on March 12. Of the 19 delegates up for grabs, 10 were scooped by Marco Rubio, while nine went to John Kasich. Meanwhile, the District’s Democratic contest—with 45 delegates on the line—will wrap up the U.S. primary season on June 14.
We’re back to followup on my March issue story about local-level civic coherence, even at a time of the worst national-level dysfunction in at least a century. Here goes:
1. Salt Lake City: Can’t We Just Get Along?
Until now, I’ve always considered myself on good terms with the “Crossroads of the West,” also known as SLC. Since my first visit there on a Boy Scout trip, I’ve returned many times. My wife Deb and I have put in visiting stints at both Brigham Young University, in Provo, and at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City itself. It’s a great place!
Thus naturally my feelings were hurt by the headline below from the Daily Utah Chronicle, over a story by Emma Tanner:
“If we encountered a group of humans who returned to the same trees over and over and performed the same inexplicable action near them and didn’t seem to have any practical reason to do so, there would be lots of people who would interpret it through the prism of religion,” —Donovan Schaefer, who studies religion.
“Infants don’t have wants. ‘Wants’ assumes a more advanced cognitive awareness. Infants only have needs,” —James Mckenna, who studies breastfeeding.
“I’m amused when I watch Republicans claim that Trump’s language is unacceptable, and ask, ‘How did we get here?’” —Barack Obama, president of the United States.
American security in Turkey: The Obama administration has ordered all family members of U.S. troops and diplomats living in Turkey to leave and return to the U.S., citing security concerns over the threat of the Islamic State. The decision comes after about a dozen Americans were injured in the Brussels attacks last week, including an Air Force officer who was stationed in Europe and his family.
Putin’s other mission accomplished: The Russian president said this month that his forces had done what they’d set out to in Syria, which was help the Assad government go after terrorists. Now it appears Russia’s five-month-long campaign in Syria also yielded some economic benefits: Putin says Russia made more money off exports of military products in 2015 than expected.
On the campaign trail: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich will participate in a town hall hosted by CNN tonight. It’s been a big news day for the Trump campaign. The Republican front-runner’s campaign manager was arrested for allegedly grabbing a reporter’s arm during an event in Florida earlier this month. Trump says he stands by his staffer. David has the story here.
News from this afternoon here
White men without a college degree are the most likely demographic to support Donald Trump. But who could have foreseen that they would reject the GOP to side with a political outsider who built his campaign around economic anxiety, racial resentment, and a bleak assessment of America's future?
Well, how about anybody who read the Washington Post on February 22, 2011?
That’s how reader Gary describes his three amazing stepkids:
I was touched by the note about your son Tyler as I read it this morning. It was forwarded to me by my wife of nine years whose three children have all been diagnosed with ASD [autism spectrum disorder]. Her oldest son is 26 and seeking a bachelor’s degree in mathematics with plans to attend graduate school. She has 13-year-old twins who are seventh graders at a public school right now. One of the twins and the oldest son have Asperger’s while the other twin has a more severe form of autism with speech problems and more challenging behavioral issues.
My wife has struggled tirelessly to help her three kids adjust, adapt, and grow into the wonderful human beings they can become. They are so much better off because of their mom. She has faced many obstacles with each child, yet through her fiery determination and strong will, they have overcome those obstacles and were strengthened as a result.
Your note came at a particularly challenging time for her. Last night, as she lay in bed, she told me that she was not a good parent and that she had failed her younger son.
The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world.
Friday, August 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void—began with a thundering speech given on Obama’s behalf by his secretary of state, John Kerry, in Washington, D.C. The subject of Kerry’s uncharacteristically Churchillian remarks, delivered in the Treaty Room at the State Department, was the gassing of civilians by the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
A child psychologist argues punishment is a waste of time when trying to eliminate problem behavior. Try this instead.
Say you have a problem child. If it’s a toddler, maybe he smacks his siblings. Or she refuses to put on her shoes as the clock ticks down to your morning meeting at work. If it’s a teenager, maybe he peppers you with obscenities during your all-too-frequent arguments. The answer is to punish them, right?
Not so, says Alan Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center. Punishment might make you feel better, but it won’t change the kid’s behavior. Instead, he advocates for a radical technique in which parents positively reinforce the behavior they do want to see until the negative behavior eventually goes away.
As I was reporting my recent series about child abuse, I came to realize that parents fall roughly into three categories. There’s a small number who seem intuitively to do everything perfectly: Moms and Dads with chore charts that actually work and snack-sized bags of organic baby carrots at the ready. There’s an even smaller number who are horrifically abusive to their kids. But the biggest chunk by far are parents in the middle. They’re far from abusive, but they aren’t super-parents, either. They’re busy and stressed, so they’re too lenient one day and too harsh the next. They have outdated or no knowledge of child psychology, and they’re scrambling to figure it all out.
Young Americans might be leaving religion in large numbers, but for some, rules, ritual, and tradition are attractive ways to find meaning in daily life.
HOUSTON—On a typical Friday night in Houston, many young people are out drinking at bars or curled up watching Netflix, grateful to be done with the obligations of the workweek. But in a few Houston homes, Jews in their 20s and 30s have opted to fill these evenings with a different kind of obligation: strictly observing Shabbat, or the Jewish Sabbath. This means no texting, no music, no use of electronics, no driving, no meeting last-minute deadlines, no carrying objects outside of a few hundred square yards. It is a choice to embrace ritual over leisure, a sacrifice of freedom in behavior, diet, and dress for an ancient set of rules.
On its face, this seems like a generation-defying choice. Young Americans are moving away from traditional religious observance in large numbers, and Jews are no exception. Roughly a third of Jews born after 1980 think of their Judaism as a matter of identity or ancestry, rather than as a religion, according to Pew.
As the Republican candidate attempts to solidify his hold on his supporters, it becomes harder for him to gain any ground with other voters.
The Trump treadmill was turned on high during the Republican front-runner’s blustery appearance at a CNN town hall in Milwaukee Tuesday night.
It’s a dynamic that has shaped support for Donald Trump throughout his turbulent rise in the Republican presidential race. A key to Trump’s hold on his constituency is his willingness to say things in public—about groups from undocumented Mexican immigrants to Muslims to women—that others would not say and then to defiantly double-down when criticized. That combative, unflinching talk has helped him convince his heavily working-class coalition both that he’s not a typical politician, and that he will fight by whatever means necessary to reverse the economic and cultural trends that they believe are marginalizing them. But the serrated language and brusque behavior that electrifies his supporters has reinforced doubts about Trump among Republicans outside of his coalition, and especially in the broader voter pool waiting in the general election. This is the Trump treadmill: The faster he runs to solidify his hold on his supporters, the harder it becomes to gain any ground with other voters. For all of his furious activity, he is largely running in place, with any gains among the groups most receptive to him offset—or exceeded—by losses among those most skeptical.
Raw sewage flows into many of Rio’s Olympic venues every day. As the prospect of a full clean-up before the Games dims, the world is left wondering, who will get sick, and how?
RIO DE JANEIRO—Will Brazil’s Olympics be the shittiest ever, as this Fusion article suggests?
That writer isn’t taking umbrage at 2016’s revised steeplechase qualification times. She, and many others, are referring to actual shit. “2016 Olympians Will Be Competing In Poop Water, And The IOC Doesn't Care,” blared Deadspin in August. “Brazil Can’t Clean Up its Shit in Time for the Olympics,” observed Gawker.
Of course, the “Will they be ready?!” media hand-wringing is the opening band to nearly every Olympic main attraction. Beijing battled suffocating air pollution. Sochi had too much sun, then too few hotel rooms.
But this time, the Olympic Cassandras’ warnings seem particularly distressing: Athletes might be sailing and swimming through raw sewage, ruining matches and landing in hospitals as a result.
A Harlem rally served as both reunion and reintroduction for the former senator and Democratic presidential frontrunner.
NEW YORK—Hillary Clinton returned home on Wednesday.
Well, to be more precise, she returned to one of her homes. Over the course of her 68 years, she’s had a few. There was Illinois, where she was born and raised. Then there was Arkansas, where she and her husband launched their careers and raised their only child. There’s also Washington, D.C., which you might call her professional home for most of the last 25 years and where she’s owned a house for the last 15.
New York, however, is Hillary Clinton’s political home. The distinction is an important one both for the primary election she faces on April 19 and likely for the general election campaign she’ll wage in the fall. By dint of birth and unmistakable accent, her main competitors for the presidency have equal if not greater claim to favorite-son status in the Empire State. Unlike Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, she was neither born nor raised here. But it is a place where she, and only she, has twice won statewide election.
Donald Trump succumbs to the age-old temptation to see capitalism not as an economic system but a morality play.
Published in 1987, The Art of the Deal is a fairly recent addition to a long line of books by business titans that double as memoir and modus operandi. From Ben Franklin’s Autobiography to John D. Rockefeller’s Random Reminiscences to Jack Welch’s Straight from the Gut, these books aim, by battle scar and bromide, effrontery and object lesson, to present “the very definition of the American success story.”
That, at least, is how the dust jacket of the The Art of the Deal recommends its author, Donald Trump. Trump was just 41 when the book was published, but he had already enjoyed a decade as a real-estate wunderkind whose big mouth and brash deal-making saw his reputation waver between Elon Musk and Martin Shkreli. Trump was still a few years from fully embracing the anti-hero persona that has commandeered this election cycle—in a 1985 profile for 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace incredulously notes that he presents himself as full of “Boy Scout principles”—but the young tycoon had already suffered enough unpleasant encounters with the Fourth Estate that one imagines he was eager to take his case directly to the public.
Colleges and universities have become a marketplace that treats student applicants like consumers. Why?
This is the third story in a three-part series looking at elite-college admissions. Read the first story here and the second one here.
When the U.S. News & World Report rankings were first published in 1983, they equipped students with what had previously seemed to be top-secret information about colleges and universities. They highlighted the practical role of higher education—something in which students (and their families) were investing to improve their lives. “College is expensive,” said Robert Morse, the chief data strategist for U.S. News, via email. “U.S. News’s mission is to arm students with good data, enabling them to sift through lots of complicated information when deciding which school is the right fit for them.” The rankings allow students to compare schools in an (arguably) apples-to-apples way—allowing students to, according to Morse, “navigate the complex process of choosing the best school for them” and creating “a national move towards greater transparency in the education industry.”
What an Amazon prank can teach us about delight in the Internet age
Yesterday was a strange day full of surprises. The fencing contractor I’d spoken to last week about a site visit for an estimate didn’t show up. Later, when I tried to attend a local community meeting in my neighborhood, I discovered that the indicated room was totally empty at the appointed time—apparently the meeting had been moved without my knowledge.
Oh yeah, and Amazon sent me unsolicited lumber.
The latter point requires a bit of explanation. A while back, my eyes fell upon the name of a new service on social media: Amazon Lumberyard. My heart skipped a beat: Was Amazon providing a delivery service for woodworkers and contractors? As someone who keeps a woodshop at home and often does home-improvement projects, the idea of getting lumber, whether specialty hardwood for craft projects or larger boards for construction, seemed like a dream come true. It’s a pain to find and buy and load and haul and unload lumber. Imagine being able to Prime it instead!
Please make it stop.
Before I started playing Guess the Correlation, I didn’t expect to spend an hour of my Easter weekend obsessing over an 8-bit video game, much less one based on something that many scientists do every day. I also didn’t expect to be hypnotized by graph after graph of black dots, trying to accurately gauge the patterns they concealed, in exchange for points and a place on a leaderboard. And I definitely didn’t expect to have fun doing it.
Guess the Correlation is the brainchild of Omar Wagih, a graduate student at the European Bioinformatics Institute, and nefarious devourer of the thing I once called “my free time.” On paper, it sounds incredibly boring. In practice, it is inexplicably addictive. Try it.
The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world.
Friday, August 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void—began with a thundering speech given on Obama’s behalf by his secretary of state, John Kerry, in Washington, D.C. The subject of Kerry’s uncharacteristically Churchillian remarks, delivered in the Treaty Room at the State Department, was the gassing of civilians by the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
A child psychologist argues punishment is a waste of time when trying to eliminate problem behavior. Try this instead.
Say you have a problem child. If it’s a toddler, maybe he smacks his siblings. Or she refuses to put on her shoes as the clock ticks down to your morning meeting at work. If it’s a teenager, maybe he peppers you with obscenities during your all-too-frequent arguments. The answer is to punish them, right?
Not so, says Alan Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center. Punishment might make you feel better, but it won’t change the kid’s behavior. Instead, he advocates for a radical technique in which parents positively reinforce the behavior they do want to see until the negative behavior eventually goes away.
As I was reporting my recent series about child abuse, I came to realize that parents fall roughly into three categories. There’s a small number who seem intuitively to do everything perfectly: Moms and Dads with chore charts that actually work and snack-sized bags of organic baby carrots at the ready. There’s an even smaller number who are horrifically abusive to their kids. But the biggest chunk by far are parents in the middle. They’re far from abusive, but they aren’t super-parents, either. They’re busy and stressed, so they’re too lenient one day and too harsh the next. They have outdated or no knowledge of child psychology, and they’re scrambling to figure it all out.
Young Americans might be leaving religion in large numbers, but for some, rules, ritual, and tradition are attractive ways to find meaning in daily life.
HOUSTON—On a typical Friday night in Houston, many young people are out drinking at bars or curled up watching Netflix, grateful to be done with the obligations of the workweek. But in a few Houston homes, Jews in their 20s and 30s have opted to fill these evenings with a different kind of obligation: strictly observing Shabbat, or the Jewish Sabbath. This means no texting, no music, no use of electronics, no driving, no meeting last-minute deadlines, no carrying objects outside of a few hundred square yards. It is a choice to embrace ritual over leisure, a sacrifice of freedom in behavior, diet, and dress for an ancient set of rules.
On its face, this seems like a generation-defying choice. Young Americans are moving away from traditional religious observance in large numbers, and Jews are no exception. Roughly a third of Jews born after 1980 think of their Judaism as a matter of identity or ancestry, rather than as a religion, according to Pew.
As the Republican candidate attempts to solidify his hold on his supporters, it becomes harder for him to gain any ground with other voters.
The Trump treadmill was turned on high during the Republican front-runner’s blustery appearance at a CNN town hall in Milwaukee Tuesday night.
It’s a dynamic that has shaped support for Donald Trump throughout his turbulent rise in the Republican presidential race. A key to Trump’s hold on his constituency is his willingness to say things in public—about groups from undocumented Mexican immigrants to Muslims to women—that others would not say and then to defiantly double-down when criticized. That combative, unflinching talk has helped him convince his heavily working-class coalition both that he’s not a typical politician, and that he will fight by whatever means necessary to reverse the economic and cultural trends that they believe are marginalizing them. But the serrated language and brusque behavior that electrifies his supporters has reinforced doubts about Trump among Republicans outside of his coalition, and especially in the broader voter pool waiting in the general election. This is the Trump treadmill: The faster he runs to solidify his hold on his supporters, the harder it becomes to gain any ground with other voters. For all of his furious activity, he is largely running in place, with any gains among the groups most receptive to him offset—or exceeded—by losses among those most skeptical.
Raw sewage flows into many of Rio’s Olympic venues every day. As the prospect of a full clean-up before the Games dims, the world is left wondering, who will get sick, and how?
RIO DE JANEIRO—Will Brazil’s Olympics be the shittiest ever, as this Fusion article suggests?
That writer isn’t taking umbrage at 2016’s revised steeplechase qualification times. She, and many others, are referring to actual shit. “2016 Olympians Will Be Competing In Poop Water, And The IOC Doesn't Care,” blared Deadspin in August. “Brazil Can’t Clean Up its Shit in Time for the Olympics,” observed Gawker.
Of course, the “Will they be ready?!” media hand-wringing is the opening band to nearly every Olympic main attraction. Beijing battled suffocating air pollution. Sochi had too much sun, then too few hotel rooms.
But this time, the Olympic Cassandras’ warnings seem particularly distressing: Athletes might be sailing and swimming through raw sewage, ruining matches and landing in hospitals as a result.
A Harlem rally served as both reunion and reintroduction for the former senator and Democratic presidential frontrunner.
NEW YORK—Hillary Clinton returned home on Wednesday.
Well, to be more precise, she returned to one of her homes. Over the course of her 68 years, she’s had a few. There was Illinois, where she was born and raised. Then there was Arkansas, where she and her husband launched their careers and raised their only child. There’s also Washington, D.C., which you might call her professional home for most of the last 25 years and where she’s owned a house for the last 15.
New York, however, is Hillary Clinton’s political home. The distinction is an important one both for the primary election she faces on April 19 and likely for the general election campaign she’ll wage in the fall. By dint of birth and unmistakable accent, her main competitors for the presidency have equal if not greater claim to favorite-son status in the Empire State. Unlike Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, she was neither born nor raised here. But it is a place where she, and only she, has twice won statewide election.
Donald Trump succumbs to the age-old temptation to see capitalism not as an economic system but a morality play.
Published in 1987, The Art of the Deal is a fairly recent addition to a long line of books by business titans that double as memoir and modus operandi. From Ben Franklin’s Autobiography to John D. Rockefeller’s Random Reminiscences to Jack Welch’s Straight from the Gut, these books aim, by battle scar and bromide, effrontery and object lesson, to present “the very definition of the American success story.”
That, at least, is how the dust jacket of the The Art of the Deal recommends its author, Donald Trump. Trump was just 41 when the book was published, but he had already enjoyed a decade as a real-estate wunderkind whose big mouth and brash deal-making saw his reputation waver between Elon Musk and Martin Shkreli. Trump was still a few years from fully embracing the anti-hero persona that has commandeered this election cycle—in a 1985 profile for 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace incredulously notes that he presents himself as full of “Boy Scout principles”—but the young tycoon had already suffered enough unpleasant encounters with the Fourth Estate that one imagines he was eager to take his case directly to the public.
Colleges and universities have become a marketplace that treats student applicants like consumers. Why?
This is the third story in a three-part series looking at elite-college admissions. Read the first story here and the second one here.
When the U.S. News & World Report rankings were first published in 1983, they equipped students with what had previously seemed to be top-secret information about colleges and universities. They highlighted the practical role of higher education—something in which students (and their families) were investing to improve their lives. “College is expensive,” said Robert Morse, the chief data strategist for U.S. News, via email. “U.S. News’s mission is to arm students with good data, enabling them to sift through lots of complicated information when deciding which school is the right fit for them.” The rankings allow students to compare schools in an (arguably) apples-to-apples way—allowing students to, according to Morse, “navigate the complex process of choosing the best school for them” and creating “a national move towards greater transparency in the education industry.”
What an Amazon prank can teach us about delight in the Internet age
Yesterday was a strange day full of surprises. The fencing contractor I’d spoken to last week about a site visit for an estimate didn’t show up. Later, when I tried to attend a local community meeting in my neighborhood, I discovered that the indicated room was totally empty at the appointed time—apparently the meeting had been moved without my knowledge.
Oh yeah, and Amazon sent me unsolicited lumber.
The latter point requires a bit of explanation. A while back, my eyes fell upon the name of a new service on social media: Amazon Lumberyard. My heart skipped a beat: Was Amazon providing a delivery service for woodworkers and contractors? As someone who keeps a woodshop at home and often does home-improvement projects, the idea of getting lumber, whether specialty hardwood for craft projects or larger boards for construction, seemed like a dream come true. It’s a pain to find and buy and load and haul and unload lumber. Imagine being able to Prime it instead!
Please make it stop.
Before I started playing Guess the Correlation, I didn’t expect to spend an hour of my Easter weekend obsessing over an 8-bit video game, much less one based on something that many scientists do every day. I also didn’t expect to be hypnotized by graph after graph of black dots, trying to accurately gauge the patterns they concealed, in exchange for points and a place on a leaderboard. And I definitely didn’t expect to have fun doing it.
Guess the Correlation is the brainchild of Omar Wagih, a graduate student at the European Bioinformatics Institute, and nefarious devourer of the thing I once called “my free time.” On paper, it sounds incredibly boring. In practice, it is inexplicably addictive. Try it.
