The Overhyped Rise of Stay-at-Home Dads

The People Helped by the Republican Health-Care Bill

Olga Khazan

Though most old and sick people will be worse off under the GOP bill, it might be a boon—real or perceived—for people earning just above the Obamacare subsidy cutoff.

House Republicans unveiled Monday the American Health Care Act, their long-promised plan to replace Obamacare. The bill is similar to, and arguably more generous than, a draft that leaked a few weeks ago, and conservative members are already denouncing it as “Obamacare Lite.”

To wit, it:

Keeps the extremely popular provisions barring insurance companies from discriminating against people because of their preexisting conditions and forces them to continue allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ plans until they’re 26
Does away with the much-loathed individual mandate
Keeps Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion until 2020
Contains tax credits

It’s this last point that will determine whether people on the individual market are richer or poorer under Ryan/Trump/PriceCare than Obamacare. Unlike Obamacare, which determined subsidies for insurance by income, the new plan would weight the tax credits by age and then phase them out in increments by income.

'Obamacare Lite'? Not Quite.

Vann R. Newkirk II

What’s in the House Republicans’ new plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act?

On Monday evening, the House Energy and Commerce and Ways and Means committees released the two long-awaited components of the House GOP’s plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. Although intense secrecy from House aides and a hunt for the bill last week involving Senator Rand Paul and a gaggle of reporters had raised expectations of dramatic changes, the bills that will go into markup Wednesday in the committees look pretty similar to a draft version of the bill that leaked a few weeks ago.

The two components—called the “American Health Care Act” in tandem—are intended to be passed by the reconciliation budgetary process, and as such only contain provisions that pertain to budgetary items, like the amount of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate tax or the Medicaid funding granted to states. The whole bill has yet to be scored by the Congressional Budget Office, a critical step that will determine both the number of people projected to gain or lose coverage under the law, and the amount of spending or saving it would incur.

The Conservative Uprising Against the Republican Healthcare Bill

Russell Berman

The new GOP proposal drew immediate criticism from lawmakers who argued it doesn’t go far enough in erasing the Affordable Care Act.

Updated on March 7, 2017 at 8:50 a.m. ET

House Republicans leaders on Monday embraced a legislative plan to replace the Affordable Care Act for the first time in the nearly seven years since Democrats enacted the transformative health insurance law.

Now, they have to sell it.

That challenge ran into an immediate threat from key conservatives who criticized the new proposal for failing to fulfill the party’s iron-clad promise to rip out the signature policy of former President Barack Obama. “It’s Obamacare in a different format,” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, said in a phone interview. Jordan cited three provisions that conservatives have complained about for weeks leading up to the formal release of the House GOP plan on Monday evening: its extension of Obamacare Medicaid expansion for another four years; its failure to immediately repeal all of the law’s tax increases; and its call to provide refundable tax credits to help people buy insurance, which Jordan labeled “a new entitlement.”

Middlebury Reckons With a Protest Gone Wrong

Conor Friedersdorf

Professors and students—many of whom emphatically disagree with Charles Murray—are concerned about attacks on his right to speak on their campus.

Last week, Middlebury College, a Vermont liberal arts school with about 2,500 students, became the latest campus to make national headlines due to protesters who so detested a speaker that they tried to prevent their classmates from hearing him speak. Some cast the clash as pitting conservatives against liberals. But that isn’t right.

The social scientist Charles Murray arrived on campus at the invitation of a student group to speak about his book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. Two students who extended the invitation, Alexander Khan and Philip Hoxie, had been trying to understand the election of Donald Trump, although neither supported him. Intrigued by Coming Apart’s analysis of the growing cultural gulf between the white elite (from which Middlebury draws many of its students) and the white working class, they felt their campus would benefit from engaging with its author.

'We've Been in Continuous Crisis for 45 Days'

Uri Friedman

The Trump administration hasn’t even faced a major foreign-policy challenge yet.

The spokesman for Vladimir Putin gave a funny answer on Monday when asked about Donald Trump’s claims that Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump’s phones during the 2016 presidential campaign. The Russian government “should not be in any way linked to U.S. domestic issues” and “doesn’t have the slightest inclination or intention to be associated with these affairs,” he said.

The answer was funny because the backstory to Trump’s comments is the Russian government’s brazen interference in America’s domestic affairs—specifically the recent U.S. election—and efforts by American officials to investigate the precise nature of that interference. (The Kremlin denies involvement in the hacks and leaks of Democratic Party emails.)

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous

Gabrielle Glaser

Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in the United States. But researchers have debunked central tenets of AA doctrine and found dozens of other treatments more effective.

J.G. is a lawyer in his early 30s. He’s a fast talker and has the lean, sinewy build of a distance runner. His choice of profession seems preordained, as he speaks in fully formed paragraphs, his thoughts organized by topic sentences. He’s also a worrier—a big one—who for years used alcohol to soothe his anxiety.

J.G. started drinking at 15, when he and a friend experimented in his parents’ liquor cabinet. He favored gin and whiskey but drank whatever he thought his parents would miss the least. He discovered beer, too, and loved the earthy, bitter taste on his tongue when he took his first cold sip.

His drinking increased through college and into law school. He could, and occasionally did, pull back, going cold turkey for weeks at a time. But nothing quieted his anxious mind like booze, and when he didn’t drink, he didn’t sleep. After four or six weeks dry, he’d be back at the liquor store.

Mass Incarceration, Visualized

Jackie Lay, Bruce Western, Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, and Ta-Nehisi Coates

In this animated interview, the sociologist Bruce Western explains the current inevitability of prison for certain demographics of young black men.

Watch Video

A Violent Attack on Free Speech at Middlebury

Peter Beinart

Liberals must defend the right of conservative students to invite speakers of their choice, even if they find their views abhorrent.

My fellow liberals, please watch the following video. It suggests that something has gone badly wrong on the campus left.

The events leading up to the video are as follows. One of the student groups at Middlebury College is called The American Enterprise Club. According to its website, the Club aims “to promote … free enterprise, a limited federal government, a strong national defense.” In other words, it’s a group for political conservatives.

This year, the AEI Club invited Dr. Charles Murray to speak. That’s crucial to understanding what followed. When leftists protest right-wing speakers on campus, they often deny that they are infringing upon free speech. Free speech, they insist, does not require their university to give a platform to people with offensive views. That was the argument of the people who earlier this year tried to prevent ex-Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley. And it was the argument of those who opposed Murray’s lecture at Middlebury. “This is not an issue of freedom of speech,” declared a letter signed by more than 450 Middlebury alums. “Why has such a person been granted a platform at Middlebury?”

‘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.

Strangers In Their Own Land

Olga Khazan

The psychological roots of liberals’ Trump depression—and what comes next.

Every time Genevieve Caffrey hears the words President Trump, “I feel like I was physically punched in the stomach,” she says. “I feel like I’m in an alternative universe that was imagined and made fun of by late-night comedians before the election.”

On election night in her home in Chicago, she invited friends over and told them all to bring champagne. As state after state flipped to red, her friends left quietly, one by one. Caffrey yelled at her husband for being too confident Hillary Clinton would win. She blamed herself for not volunteering more. Then she cried herself to sleep, “thinking about all the people who would die and suffer and become fearful and hated and hateful unnecessarily under a Trump presidency.”