In politics, you need a good villain. It is far easier for environmentalists to rail against Donald Trump for weakening the Clean Water Act than it is to rail against Proposed Rule 83 FR 32227. And it was far easier for Democrats to criticize Scott Pruitt—the former EPA administrator who resigned in June under not so much a cloud of corruption as a thundering cumulonimbus of it—than it has been for them to focus attention on Andrew Wheeler, his quieter and more effective replacement.
In new year, Ryan Zinke, the Secretary of the Interior, seemed certain to catapult into that top tier of political nemeses for Democrats. Like Pruitt, Zinke excels at generating bizarre scandals; also like Pruitt, his own heroic vision of himself seems to survive any amount of bad press. House Democrats, salivating over their new oversight power, had already promised to subpoena Zinke over a number of issues, including a sweetheart $300-million contract for electricity in Puerto Rico that he allegedly gave to a small power company based in his home state of Montana.
But Zinke’s star turn is not to be. On Saturday morning, President Trump announced that Zinke will step down at the end of the year. David Bernhardt, the current deputy secretary and a former oil lobbyist, will take over the department.
Little is likely to change under Bernhardt. The Interior Department oversees the nation’s public lands, encompassing nearly a quarter of its total area. This makes it a kind of extra-powerful environmental regulator, especially out West, where it owns 47 percent of the territory. The department also includes the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Under Zinke, the agency has gone on a spree of deregulation. It has cut more than 1 million acres of wilderness out of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah; with help from Congress, it has opened up 19 million acres in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. The agency is also in the process of overhauling the Endangered Species Act, the muscular 1973 law that helped save the bald eagle, the gray wolf, and the American crocodile from extinction.
Many of Zinke’s efforts seemed particularly helpful for fossil-fuel companies, which can lease public land from the government and then sell the oil or coal they find there. Near the end of his term, President Obama blocked Interior from releasing any land for coal mining. Zinke, by contrast, has sped up the process of obtaining these leases for new oil and gas drilling.
Every single one of these initiatives is almost certain to continue under Bernhardt. What will not continue is Zinke’s penchant for publicity. The man embraced his role as the Cabinet’s cowboy. He arrived to his first day at the department on horseback, wearing a stetson. A former SEAL, he transplanted an arcane military ritual onto his new life as a downtown bureaucrat: Whenever he walked into the Interior Department’s downtown D.C. headquarters, he ordered his staff to fly a special flag.
In practice, he was less Outdoorsman, more Hapless Dad. He struggled to rig a fishing reel correctly. One of his minor scandals involved MAGA-branded socks. Last summer, he reportedly threatened Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican of Alaska, over her vote against Obamacare repeal. Then, seemingly after realizing that she is in charge of funding the Interior Department, he promptly backtracked. (Zinke has called the claim that he threatened Murkowski “laughable,” but his threats were first reported by Dan Sullivan, Alaska’s other Republican senator.)
That hubris made him a terrific target for Democrats. They hoped to use his personal misdeeds to point to the larger pattern of deregulation and industry friendliness at his department. Maybe, eventually, some day, when the public hated him enough, they could force him to resign.
Zinke went and resigned for them. “After 30 years of public service, I cannot justify spending thousands of dollars defending myself and my family against false allegations,” he said Saturday.
In resigning, Zinke reveals the power of Democrats’ new ability to oversee the Trump administration. Zinke is the first casualty of the 2018 blue wave: the first Cabinet official who stepped down in the face of subpoenas. He left, in fact, to avoid facing subpoenas. Yet in resigning, he also shows the limits of that same new power. Democrats can no longer use Zinke’s hubris to get people to pay attention to the Trump administration’s larger set of policies at Interior.
Zinke, with all his antics, was set to be the great environmental villain of 2019. Now Democrats will need to find a new one.
At 2 a.m., Ivy Deng’s iPhone pings. Her boyfriend is messaging her again. Bai Qi is a contemplative policeman, Deng’s favorite of the men she’s dated recently. Tomorrow morning, he’ll pick her up on his motorcycle.
Sort of. Bai doesn’t actually have a motorcycle, or even a real body. And he’s just one of Deng’s four boyfriends, all of whom are virtual characters in the Chinese mobile game Love and Producer. Li Zeyan is an egotistical CEO. Xu Mo is a scientist. Zhou Qiluo is a cloying, cutesy pop star.
In the two months after its launch in December 2017, Love and Producer, in which users play a female TV producer, was downloaded more than 10 million times, mostly by women. The app is free, but users can pay to advance the plot through text messages, or phone calls or “dates,” which employ recordings of voice actors. For a while, Love and Producer was the most talked-about game on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Last January, a fan bought a $39,000 LED billboard ad in Shenzhen to wish the character Li a happy birthday.
Why are these women so keen to carry on fake relationships with virtual boyfriends? After all, China’s now-abandoned “one-child policy” created a country where men outnumber women by nearly 34 million—which should make finding mates outside a mobile game easy for heterosexual women.
But the policy also granted girls, once seen as less of a priority than their brothers, unprecedented access to parental resources, particularly in urban areas. As these highly educated and financially independent women have come of age, many don’t want to marry as young as their parents did. Over the past five years, China’s marriage rate has dropped by almost 30 percent. In 2012, the average age of marriage for women in Shanghai was over 30 for the first time. And dating—highly discouraged for young people until they reach college—can feel inaccessible or frightening, even for 20-somethings. According to Joy Chen, the Chinese American author of Do Not Marry Before Age 30, which was a runaway hit among young women in China, the appeal of Love and Producer is the “wish fulfillment” it provides—the thrill of dating “without all the risks, potential humiliation, tragedies, and comedies.”
Still, that’s not the only reason the game draws millions of women. Married women confess to playing Love and Producer—describing it as a sort of guilty pleasure, like reading a trashy romance novel or watching reality TV—while their husbands are sleeping or out.
The most devoted fans take the game to bed with them. One special Valentine’s Day package allowed users to purchase a limited-edition voice recording of the boyfriend of their choice. In his 20-minute recording, Bai Qi, the policeman, asks, “Why are you sleeping so far from me?” Sheets swish. “You’re in a bad mood,” he murmurs. “It’s my fault. Tell me, honestly, is this why you weren’t able to fall asleep?” Long pauses pepper the conversation, presumably for the player to fill. “What kind of woman do I like?” Bai asks, giggling. “I’d say you.” He counts sheep for nearly 10 minutes. “Are you asleep, my little sheep?”
“I don’t even think it’s anything sexual,” Deng says. “I’m just attracted by the voice, and maybe like the illusion that there’s really this police guy, handsome looking, with a sexy voice, talking to me, counting to 100 sheep with me.”
This article appears in the January/February 2019 print edition with the headline “Imaginary Boyfriends.”
Kay Coles James’s family was adamant that she pursue an education. James attended the historically black Hampton University, where she studied history and education. Growing up with an emphasis on education and self-sufficiency led her to a career in public policy and then the Heritage Foundation.
Coles James served during the George W. Bush administration as the director of the Office of Personnel Management. She began serving on the board of trustees for the Heritage Foundation in 2005, and became the president in 2017. In September, the White House named her to the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission. I recently spoke to Coles James about growing up in a “dysfunctional family,” her experience at Hampton University, and serving as the first black woman president of the Heritage Foundation. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Lola Fadulu: Could you tell me a little bit about your parents’ work background, what jobs they were doing when you were growing up?
Kay Coles James: I came from what would be called today a dysfunctional family. My father did odd jobs. He was a guard. He worked unloading ships when he was younger. He did maintenance work. My mother was a dental tech for part of her life, working for her brother-in-law, and the rest of the time she was a domestic, cleaning houses and caring for people. So they were hard-working folks, but not with steady jobs or glamorous careers by any stretch of the imagination.
Fadulu: Did they have a specific profession that they wanted you to go into?
Coles James: I was the only girl out of five boys, and I think they were more interested in making sure that I had a good, solid education because with that, there would be lots of opportunities to do any number of things. My father left home when I was around 4 years old, and I ended up being raised by my aunt and uncle. They were professional people. He was a businessman, and she was a schoolteacher, but she suffered under the debilitating disease of alcoholism. And as a result of that, even as a young child, I had to learn to be self-sufficient and independent around the house.
So I learned domestic skills rather early: I could cook and clean and care for not only myself, but at a very early age took care of my aunt as well.
Fadulu: Did you have any jobs outside of the home before going to college?
Coles James: Not very much before college. I can tell you that being raised by an African American schoolteacher, even though she was a working alcoholic, she had all the values of a middle-class schoolteacher, and education was key. And my uncle, who was sort of the rock of the family, was very adamant about the fact that I was to get a good-quality education, and he felt that once that was done, then his task was done in that he would have equipped me for life.
[Read: The wisdom of going back to school in retirement]
So when I went off to college, he said, “No, you don’t have to work. No jobs, get your education, get that done and don’t get married. Don’t get serious about any guys. Focus.” Education was key. I grew up hearing about the United Negro College Fund. The slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” I think I had my first job outside the home when I was in college, and I went to work for the Richmond public schools as an assistant for a summer reading program, where I was doing clerical work. When you are in college and you’re doing that kind of work, your job is pretty much to do everything in the office that nobody else wants to. And that’s what I did.
Fadulu: How did you cope with that?
Coles James: I didn’t expect to come in and be the manager or the supervisor or run the company initially. I expected to pay my dues. I expected to learn from the folks who were there and more experienced and older than I was. I expected to have a work ethic. The way I was brought up is, you get there early, you leave last, you do the best job possible, and all the doors will be opened for you. So for me, it wasn’t very much about coping. Those were the values that I was raised with. That was what I expected. And I heard every inspirational phrase one could hear in that kind of environment: The cream always rises to the top. The early bird catches the worm. Work hard and it’ll pay off in the end. Those were the things that were whispered in my ear from the time I was young. And so I grew up with those values and with that ethic.
Fadulu: I know that you went to Hampton. Were you considering other schools?
Coles James: I was considering other schools at that time. But I had had lots of incredible experience integrating the schools in the city of Richmond and had been through so much in the largely all-white environments that I really felt like I wanted the nurturing, caring environment of a historically black college and university, where I did not stand out as different, where I knew that the professors and instructors had my best interests in mind and at heart. They were committed to my education, and I think by the time I finished at Chandler Junior High School and John Marshall High School, I was ready for that environment. So while I had the opportunity to go to other colleges and universities, I specifically chose Hampton University because it was an HBCU and I wanted that environment.
I wanted to not be one of the two or three black kids in one class; I wanted to experience the rich culture and history and heritage, and I’m grateful for it. It came at a time in my life where I needed that.
Fadulu: Is there anything that you wish college prepared you for in your first jobs after college or your career in general?
Coles James: Well, if you know anything about Hampton University, you know that their motto is “Education for life.” And so at Hampton, not only did we get the academic skills that we needed and the knowledge, but we also got the other training that I think was so helpful for the first job. Hampton was then and probably still is now very strict about dress codes and about demeanor—about how you carry yourself on campus, how you carry yourself in the classroom—which can then translate into a work environment. And quite frankly, I’m not sure I would have gotten as much of that if I had gone to a predominantly white institution.
I think even with my middle-class upbringing, it was good to have those values reinforced, and they have served me well in a work environment. So the education for life that I received at Hampton University was truly that. It was an education for life.
Fadulu: And what was your major?
Coles James: History, secondary education. I studied history, and then [became] involved in public policy and government and watching history unfold before my very eyes.
Fadulu: To fast-forward to your time as director of the Office of Personnel Management, are there any experiences that are memorable to you from that time that maybe changed the way you view work and yourself as a worker?
Coles James: Well, I must confess that I, like everyone else who was around during that period in our country’s history, was affected in all kinds of ways by 9/11. I was the director of the Office of Personnel Management on 9/11. And on that particular day, I think every bit of knowledge, every bit of skill, every experience that I had, had to come together for quick decisions, for processing information, for inspiring a workforce, for coming together after that to figure out a pathway forward for our country. Being a part of standing up the Department of Homeland Security. And so I think every experience that I had had, and every bit of the education that I had, came together, and it was a seminal moment, I think, that changed me, and I think everyone else who was involved, for life.
Fadulu: You’ve served on the board of trustees for the Heritage Foundation since 2005, so you were already familiar with the organization. How did you feel when you found out that you were going to become president of the foundation?
Coles James: You may or may not know that I was actually chairing the search committee, and as we developed the profile of what the ideal candidate would look like, as we developed the document that talked about the culture of the Heritage Foundation and what was needed in order to preserve and grow that organization, it became clear to several of our trustees that perhaps the person they were looking for was sitting at the table. In my mind I was headed towards retirement, and I was looking forward to watching I Love Lucy reruns and researching ancestry.com, and writing my final book. So when given the opportunity, and it was a very humbling experience, I felt that the stars were perfectly aligned.
I did have a background in public policy, had been the dean of a school of government. I did have the business experience to run a multimillion-dollar institution. I did have the knowledge of government, based on having served at the federal, state, and local levels. And I did have a love for the mission and vision and values of the institution, and as a result of that, when presented with the opportunity, I thought it was an opportunity of a lifetime. I am one of the people that has had the opportunity to do work worth doing, work that I feel passionately about and feel very equipped to do. And not everybody gets that opportunity.
Fadulu: Is there anything that has particularly surprised you about being the president of the foundation?
Coles James: There have been very few surprises as I took over the role of president at the Heritage Foundation. Probably the elephant in the room is an African American female being president of the leading conservative organization in America. I am absolutely convinced that it was a total afterthought. Having been a part of the process, sometimes we just stumble upon the right thing, and I think we did.
Protecting a child’s belief in Santa in 2018 requires a lot of effort beyond leaving behind half-eaten cookies near the fireplace—parents have started to take measures such as installing browser extensions to hide web pages that might reveal the truth. The Santa myth is a stressful tradition that might be more trouble than it’s worth for parents, says the Atlantic staff writer Ashley Fetters. She explores the reasons why families try so hard to preserve their kids’ belief in Santa, and why it might be time to bring the illusion to an end.
The stress of spending money on holiday presents has led a contingent of people to rethink their gift-giving traditions entirely, says the Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker. While lower-income families often opt out of the tradition out of necessity, wealthier people are starting to join them, choosing new customs such as focusing on the holiday’s religious significance, donating to charity, or giving nonmaterial gifts like music lessons.
HighlightsThe United States dominates the world in one peculiar metric: paper-towel consumption. The competition isn’t even remotely close; Americans spend almost as much on paper towels as the rest of the world combined, writes Joe Pinsker. A lot of this obsession has to do with Americans’ high income levels—households with more money can afford more disposable cleaning supplies—but it also says a lot about their desire for convenience.
Asking for “space” in a relationship has become such a common request that it verges on cliché, but in the 1970s, it was completely novel. The idea of putting yourself first didn’t come out of nowhere, writes the Atlantic senior editor Julie Beck—it’s a concept that can trace its roots to the sexual revolution, the women’s-rights movement, and the rising popularity of self-help books.
Dear TherapistEvery Monday, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions about life’s trials and tribulations, big or small, in The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” column.
This week, a 21-year-old reader wants to know how to deal with his parents as they go through a divorce, since they have been dragging him and his brothers into the conflict. He doesn’t want to be his parents’ mediator, but he still wants to help somehow.
Lori’s advice: Set boundaries with your parents, and enforce them firmly.
I know this is a tremendously hard conversation to have, because you may feel like you aren’t offering help to someone you love. But that’s not your role here. The truth is that you can’t help your parents through this, and your involvement won’t only compromise your relationship with one or both of them, but it will also affect your ability to set boundaries in relationships to come. In preserving your relationships with your parents, you’ll also be giving yourself important practice for your future.
Send Lori your questions at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
I was lying on a gurney with my eyes closed. Although I was drifting in and out of consciousness, I could sense that a lot was going on around me, because of me. At one point that night, I looked up and saw a man dressed almost like an astronaut, covered head-to-toe in protective equipment. He was a trauma surgeon.
Hours before, I was at my high school’s first football game of the year. This all happened a long time ago, when I was a teenager, but I can still call to mind the sound of the school bands and cheerleaders. Shortly after the game, a fight broke out in a nearby park. I turned, and saw flashes of light. That’s what I remember about the moment I was shot: flashes of light. Time seemed to slow down. People were screaming and running around me. My white shirt was covered in blood. My friends, frantic, implored me to lie down. My mouth filled with blood, and I began to choke. As I discovered later, the .38-caliber bullet had ripped a hole in my windpipe and injured my carotid artery. I was bleeding into my airway.
The trauma surgeon was named Robert Ahmed. He saved my life that night by punching a hole in my windpipe, a procedure known as a tracheostomy. Dipankar Mukherjee, a vascular surgeon, made an incision in my left leg and removed a piece of vein to form a patch for the hole in my carotid artery.
I spent more than a month in the hospital, figuring out basics such as how to talk with a paralyzed left vocal cord. But long after I recovered, the experience of getting shot stayed with me—and I don’t just mean in the shape of the scars on my neck or in the sound of my voice. It’s not overly dramatic to say that it changed the whole course of my life: That night led to me becoming a trauma surgeon.
[Read: Why can’t the U.S. treat gun violence as a public health problem?]
In the trauma bay, I felt fear, awe, and determination. Fear that I might die, awe at the calm skill of the medical personnel, and determination to give back to the same field that gave me a second chance.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that “giving back” must be about more than applying the skills I learned in medical school or even on the job. Once the gun has gone off, I can do only so much. As a surgeon, I fix damage; the best-case scenario is that the damage never happens to begin with. But, due to a tangled web of political and economic interests, the debate over how we prevent firearm-related injury and death is one that many members of my profession are reluctant to broach. The backlash is all too predictable.
Last month, after the Annals of Internal Medicine published a series of research papers on firearm injuries that included recommendations on how to reduce gun violence, the National Rifle Association said on Twitter that “anti-gun” doctors should “stay in their lane.” The NRA also found it “upsetting” that “the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.”
For me, of course, it’s all just one lane. Back when I was a fellow at a trauma center in Philadelphia, I met with a group of minority high-school students from the city. After a tour of the trauma bay, we gathered in a classroom, and I delivered a lecture about the dire consequences of gun violence. I suppose it was rather dry and the kids weren’t paying attention: They whispered and giggled among themselves. So I dropped the objectivity and told them that I was shot when I was around their age. That got their attention. I told them my story, which held their attention. When I asked if anyone in the room had been personally or indirectly affected by a shooting, nearly every hand went up.
[Read: Americans don’t really understand gun violence]
My story allowed me to go from being an unscathed “doc in a white coat” to someone who could actually relate to the pain and anguish those teens had experienced due to gun violence.
Obviously, most surgeons cannot relate to the problem of gun violence quite so intimately. But it’s incumbent on them not to stay in just one lane—to accept that prevention must be our purview as much as mitigation.
Universal background checks, violence-intervention programs, and red-flag laws can all reduce the incidence of firearm-related injury and death. Trauma surgeons are well aware of these facts. Most—thank God—have never experienced what I did that night in high school, but they’ve attended to countless victims and can explain what they’ve seen in personal terms.
Fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons (especially young sons of color) are shot and killed every day. We have an obligation to tell their stories, to work tirelessly not only in the operating room, but outside it as well.
Updated at 9:40 a.m.
Things are not going well for Saudi Arabia in Washington.
On Thursday, the Senate voted unanimously to blame Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and 56 members—a clear majority—-cast votes to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war effort in Yemen. The rebuke was followed shortly afterward by a revelation about the Defense Department’s refueling of that bombing campaign: According to the Pentagon, the department had somehow failed to bill the Saudis and the Emiratis for at least $331 million in fuel and servicing costs. The Saudis, it appears, never directly paid the U.S. a penny.
The Pentagon’s admission, relayed to the Senate, came a week after The Atlantic revealed “errors in accounting” in how the U.S. had tracked and billed the Saudi-led coalition for refueling costs—a service that was among the most visible and controversial elements of support as civilian casualties grew. Washington’s support began in March 2015 under President Barack Obama, without explicit congressional authorization, and continued under the Trump administration, amid growing outrage in Congress over Saudi conduct. That changed last month when the Pentagon said it had ended aerial refueling at Riyadh’s request. The Pentagon’s acknowledgement puts a number to at least part of the expansive assistance that the U.S. provided to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen over the last few years.
For years, the Pentagon proved slow or altogether unable to accurately inform Congress of the extent of refueling for the Saudi-led campaign—or to fix any issues in its tabulation of assistance. Top military officials also said that the results of American refueling weren’t being monitored: U.S. Central Command chief General Joseph Votel told senators that the U.S. military did not track Saudi or Emirati jets after they were refueled, to see if they carried out strikes that harmed civilians.
It now turns out that there was a lot else they weren’t tracking. It is no coincidence that the Pentagon’s admission came from pressure in the Senate, where legislators have agitated to punish the Saudi regime over Khashoggi’s killing. The sustained pressure signals that the Saudis may not continue to enjoy the level of support from Washington that they have received in years past. In parallel, the Pentagon may also expect further congressional oversight.
“This is good news for U.S. taxpayers and underscores the need for strong oversight of the Department of Defense,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. “The Pentagon is taking action to reduce accounting errors of this nature and Congress must continue to be vigilant and fulfill its oversight mission.”
The Pentagon said that the $331 million shortfall was split between $36.8 million in fuel and $294.3 million in U.S. flight hours. It’s unclear how much the Saudis and Emiratis owe individually. In response to a question about whether either had reimbursed the U.S. at all, the Pentagon stated that the “UAE has provided some repayment for refueling services.” The Pentagon later confirmed that the Saudis have not made any payments —a stunning revelation given the amount of attention the campaign has received. The Saudi embassy did not respond to a request for comment. The Emirati ambassador, Yousef Otaiba, told The New York Times on Friday that “the U.A.E. will cover its bills.”
Part of the confusion stemmed from the fact that for the first year of the campaign, the Saudis didn’t have a servicing arrangement, known as an Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement , in place with Washington. Instead, it was funneled fuel— at least according to Pentagon ledgers—via a preexisting servicing agreement that Washington had with the UAE. As of the most recent defense-spending bill, such third-party transfers are now prohibited. In May 2016, a provisional agreement between the U.S. and the Saudis was put in place, but it was never formalized.
“Department of Defense is in the process of seeking reimbursement from KSA and UAE through their respective Acquisition and Cross-Servicing (ACSA) agreements,” said the Pentagon spokesperson Commander Rebecca Rebarich in a statement. “Our partners have been individually notified about our intent to seek reimbursement, and have been given estimates as to how much they owe."
The Pentagon confirmed to The Atlantic on Friday that there was still no official ACSA in place with the Saudis, only the provisional one that has remained in use since 2016. The Pentagon said this month that the agreement remained incomplete—and therefore led to no congressional notification—-because Riyadh had failed to fulfill “all of its internal procedures necessary for an Agreement to enter into force.”
Even as pressure built on Capitol Hill against U.S. support for the Yemen war, members of Congress struggled to get basic details about the refueling. As late as last year, several congressional offices had been told informally that refueling had ceased; this had not been the case.
In March, Democratic senators made three important requests, formalized in a letter to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. The group, led by Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Senator Reed, asked for details of the servicing agreements with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and the statutorily required congressional notifications that are meant to accompany them. They also asked how Saudi Arabia was offered inflight refueling assistance in the year before it ultimately signed a provisional ACSA in May 2016. Finally, the group asked for “a full accounting of reimbursements by both the UAE and Saudi Arabia for inflight refueling provided since March 2015.”
In April, the military told the senators that it was still calculating the costs; it said the same last week, when The Atlantic reported that “errors in accounting” had led to undercharging. Forty-eight hours after the story was published, the Pentagon told The Atlantic that Centcom had finished recalculating the costs and was notifying the Saudis and Emiratis. That process was evidently complete by Thursday, when the Pentagon informed senators of the $331 million debt.
“The fact that DoD is just now realizing that it had failed to properly bill the Saudi-led coalition after all these years is quite troubling,” said Seth Binder, an advocacy officer at the Project on Middle East Democracy, who focuses on U.S. security assistance in the region.
“Congress must now continue to investigate how such an error could occur and force accountability upon the department as well as fix the loophole that could have allowed this to occur.”
It is far from clear whether the Pentagon has fixed the issues that led to its failures in tracking and accounting. ACSAs are not widely tracked, and their use to fuel the Yemen war made it more difficult for Congress to track American involvement. The Government Accountability Office is expected to release a report on their use this spring.
Meanwhile, the outcry against Saudi Arabia in Washington appears to only be building up steam. The Senate’s historic rebuke on Thursday of the Trump administration’s Saudi policy, while mostly symbolic, showed that Congress appears, at the very least, more willing to scrutinize military cooperation with America’s allies in the Gulf. That may surely mean more bad news for the Saudis.
In the Donald Trump era, some liberals are confounded by their affection for a figure they would otherwise despise. He is known to them, after all, as one of America’s most enthusiastic warmongers—and as the man who first vaulted Sarah Palin to national fame. Yet for all his many episodes of villainy, it’s possible to concede the pleasures of his impish company, especially when he breaks ranks to join your political side. His current career as a pithy critic of the president led liberal Twitter to endow him with a grudgingly affectionate moniker: He is “Woke Bill Kristol.”
Today the magazine Kristol founded, The Weekly Standard, is not awake at all. The owner of the magazine, Phil Anschutz, has snuffed it out. He folded the Standard at the very moment it was enjoying newfound relevance as the house organ of the Never Trump wing of the Republican Party. On the eve of its death, the Standard exhibited a cover-to-cover vibrance that had eluded it for more than a decade.
For many years, I enjoyed The Weekly Standard with a swirl of mixed sentiments, similar to the ones that now greet Woke Bill Kristol. The publication, which Kristol edited until 2016, perfectly reflected his personality and ever-shifting enthusiasms. It carried an amiable wit, albeit one that didn’t always hit the mark. (Covers often featured bombastic cartoons in a style that evoked the work of bar-mitzvah sketch artists, which made political enemies look like abject idiots.) The magazine itself combined high intellectual seriousness with the crass mentality of a political operative. A single edition of the Standard might contain gonzo reportage, erudite cultural essays, and op-eds filled with gross clichés that made you want to force the whole thing down the garbage disposal.
[Read: Can conservative journalism survive?]
Issue One of the Standard appeared in the aftermath of Newt Gingrich’s triumph in 1995, with the speaker heroically portrayed on the front as Rambo in wing tips. Kristol positioned his magazine as the ideological vanguard of American conservatism while never fully swearing allegiance to the movement. One year the Standard might portray itself as a dissident voice at odds with the Republican establishment; the next it might serve as the mouthpiece of the politicians it had just ripped. As a citizen, I can’t say that I really appreciated the magazine’s contribution to politics; but as a reader, I often found myself thoroughly enjoying it, especially in its earliest years.
Editing is Kristol’s paternal inheritance. His father, Irving Kristol, was, of course, the “godfather of neoconservatism.” Whatever one thinks about that movement, Kristol père presided over some of the most thrilling publications of the postwar period. With the covert backing of the CIA, he edited the journal Encounter. (His primary collaborator, and nemesis, was the English poet Stephen Spender.) Despite the taint of the magazine’s benefactor, Encounter was the finest product of the cultural cold war, filled with timeless essays by the likes of W. H. Auden, Mary McCarthy, and Lionel Trilling. The next publication he launched, The Public Interest, had an entirely different vibe. It posed as a stodgy journal of policy and leveled a supposedly friendly critique of 1960s liberalism, which grew ever less friendly as the decade wore on. (This time Irving Kristol collaborated with the Harvard sociologists Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer.) The Public Interest was bursting with fresh ideas. It had the crackle of a new intellectual movement putting down its arguments for the first time.
Irving Kristol made his name in the world of New York intellectuals, the disillusioned left that turned away from Stalinism. Bill Kristol came of professional age in Dan Quayle’s vice-presidential office. (He was known as “Dan Quayle’s brain.”) That difference in training was plain in every issue of the Standard. The magazine was interested in electioneering, full of journalism about rising conservative politicians, dispatches from Senate races, reports on little-known White House figures. (When Bill Kristol went in search of his Stephen Spender, his partner in editing, he chose the journalist Fred Barnes.) Still, the Standard maintained a connection to Irving Kristol’s firmament. In the early years, it featured a remarkable cast of septuagenarians—James Q. Wilson, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Cynthia Ozick, not to mention Bill Kristol’s brilliant mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb—who began as like-minded New York intellectuals and then wandered into Ronald Reagan’s party, which they never left.
[Read: At least Bill Kristol is trying to stop Donald Trump]
Although the Standard didn’t have the feel of a tightly edited magazine, Kristol created an eclectic atmosphere. To his credit, he maintained a robust section on books and the arts; it was highly uneven, but it made a good-faith effort to preserve the reverence for high culture that his father’s generation had professed. He also had an adventurous taste in writers. Many of the left’s favorite objects of disdain began their career with the Standard. In their earlier incarnations, they produced work that was stylish, unexpected, and full of warmth.
The best features in the Standard sought to combine the easy charm of a Michael Lewis story with the edgier satiric streak of Tom Wolfe. Before The New York Times poached him, David Brooks published his earliest works of “comic sociology” in the magazine—his somewhat glib, entertaining portraits of life at the turn of the millennium. Tucker Carlson is now known for his stage persona as the angriest white man in America, but you wouldn’t really glean that from his early journalism. He modeled himself after Hunter Thompson, an homage he acknowledged explicitly: “At this point, I should add the customary disclaimer about how drugs are bad, a lie and a trap and a destroyer of lives. That’s all true, but not in my case. For me, the whole experience was interesting and fun. I had a great time.” Carlson soaked up anecdotes, which he recounted with turns of joy and biliousness.
One of the curses of the magazine was Rupert Murdoch’s financial backing, which continued until the media magnate bought The Wall Street Journal and shifted his attention to his new plaything. The comfort of Murdoch’s patronage meant that the magazine never had to try very hard. Over the decades, it hardly evolved in its look and feel. Its hugely talented writers—Chris Caldwell, Andrew Ferguson, and Matt Labash—seemed slowly drained of higher ambitions. Kristol never supplemented his original cast with writers of equal talent.
Meanwhile, the war in Iraq overwhelmed the identity of the magazine. At its best, the magazine nurtured writers who were witty and arch. Like all great conservative publications, it couldn’t help but subconsciously borrow from the ethos of London’s The Spectator, with its dyspeptic Toryism. But Iraq was a crusade that brought out a hectoring tone, and it led the magazine to bludgeon its enemies as traitors. (This obsession with war was accompanied by work promoting a bizarre, homophobic cult of masculinity. It extended beyond screeds against gay marriage to a jeremiad about hairless men and an essay on manliness and morality that somehow included the grotesque line “It certainly seems strange that being capable of rape can make a person better qualified for greatness, but it’s probably true.”)
[Read: Breitbart’s anti-Semitic attack on Bill Kristol]
At one point, the Standard tried to injure my career, launching a bad-faith effort to discredit stories about the war I had published as the editor of The New Republic. (My own investigation of the pieces concluded that I couldn’t “be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that [the author] described them,” but the Standard never hesitated to declare with total confidence that they had not.) The magazine was running a political campaign against ideological enemies, not publishing journalism. During the Iraq War, the Standard behaved not so differently from its cousin, Fox News.
I never regularly read the magazine after its campaign against The New Republic—and I find myself a bit surprised by my own nostalgia for it. But it’s worth pausing to consider why a magazine like the Standard can be pleasurable and important, even to those who find its goals and methods noxious. In part, it’s the spectacle of watching lively minds on an expedition. The Standard would go off on quixotic missions, and not all of them in the desert of Iraq. Kristol promoted Colin Powell as a presidential candidate in 1996; then he cheered on John McCain’s challenge to George W. Bush in 2000. The magazine enjoyed making mischief and enemies, which made its pages highly readable.
These days, I find myself subscribing to political magazines on the left because that’s where stylish political-opinion magazines seem to now emanate. There’s Current Affairs, with its foppish progressivism; the Menckenlike spirit of The Baffler; and the more refined cultural criticism of n+1. They are all beautifully produced and aspire to cohesion. Every time an issue arrives, there’s the possibility that an article might shove me from an ensconced position. There’s the exoticism of encountering new arguments, something fresh to turn over in the head. There’s the romantic possibility that in a grubby world driven by material interests and base prejudices, ideas might actually matter. It was a spirit I sometimes found in the Standard, which was never remotely woke but quite often full of life.
Bruce Springsteen is a phony, and he wants you to know it. “I’ve never held an honest job in my entire life,” he shouts early in his one-man stage show, viewable on Netflix Sunday. “I’ve never seen the inside of a factory, and yet it’s all I’ve ever written about. Standing before you is a man who’s become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something [with] which he has had absolutely no personal experience.”
Springsteen’s deceptions, as revealed in the extraordinary Springsteen on Broadway, are many. His rock career began at age 7, when he quit guitar lessons but still put on a show—all posing, no strumming—for his neighborhood buddies. Mr. “Thunder Road” never drove a car until he was forced to, in his 20s, on what sounds like a nightmarish cross-country road trip with his band. The hardscrabble romance of the Jersey Shore, site of action and adventure in his songs? “I invented that!” he calls out, during a segment about how depressing and provincial Asbury Park was when he first set off on his career.
He shares these small gaps between his persona and his reality not to unburden his guilt, nor to humblebrag about what a great fabulist he is—though he does a bit of the latter. (“That’s how good I am,” he cracks after one confession.) Springsteen’s interested in the way that mystique overlays on truth, allowing ordinary life to feel extraordinary. Mythmaking about mythmaking is rock and roll’s whole objective, but while artists like Bob Dylan—a common comparison point early in Springsteen’s career—serially lie to conjure the unknowable, Springsteen does it to help define and sort the world. Springsteen on Broadway is his perfectly crafted, highly emotional explainer video.
He really did perform this show on Broadway, in a 236-date run that just ended Saturday. The no-frills Netflix documentation of one of those performances conveys how difficult it must have been to pull off such live-wire two-and-a-half-hour monologues, night after night. As an actor, he’s awards-worthy, giving a folksy performance of pain, tenderness, and tentativeness—he often appears, but surely isn’t, at a loss for words—that never feels fake. As a writer, Springsteen has a columnist’s knack, distilling his 2016 memoir into rhetorically effective paragraphs that dose out darkness and lightness in canny proportions. There’s humor, too, though often simply in the form of him spitting an unexpected “fuck!” The show is a campfire tale delivered with TED panache, and if there’s a spritz of hokum implied in that description—well, it’s Bruce Springsteen. Of course there is.
Early parts of the show concern themselves with Springsteen’s childhood, in which adults—including Elvis, who came streaming through the TV set, implanting dreams of stardom—were enchanted beings, saints and monsters. One saint was his mom, whose traits he lists with pleasing rhythm: “truthfulness, consistency, good humor, professionalism, grace, kindness, optimism, civility, fairness, pride in yourself, responsibility, love, faith in your family, commitment, joy in your work, and a never say die thirst for living.” The monster was his father. In one amusing-sad passage, Springsteen remembers peering up from under his dad’s barstool and seeing the “legs and the ass of a rhinoceros,” and a face “distorted” from booze. It was his dad’s blue-collar vestments that Springsteen stole to fashion a rock persona, and that identity theft, he says, was largely undertaken to garner its mark’s ever-withheld love.
Springsteen punctuates his unfolding narrative with raw takes on tracks both popular (“Dancing in the Dark,” performed in mournful context) and more obscure (“The Wish,” never released on a proper album). His wife, Patti Scialfa, joins him onstage for two songs, and her relatively reserved manner by his side is oddly charming—a reminder that Springsteen’s performance of humanity is actually superhumanity, and most of us wouldn’t survive five minutes at his level of expressiveness. When Springsteen detours from biography to riff on questions of art and politics, his penchant for communicating in meta-narrative—in slogans and big lessons—is clearest. The forces that propel Donald Trump, he notes, “speak to our darkest angels, who want to call up the ugliest and the most divisive ghosts of America’s past.” Even the messy magic of making art gets explained in a tidy equation: “One plus one equals three.”
The show is an absorbing viewing experience, one that comes with the warm, accumulating feeling that while under Bruce Springsteen’s tutelage, everything makes sense: The mysteries of existence are unwound; rock and roll is knowable, even if Springsteen keeps saying it’s mystical. This feeling comes not because he’s revealing things that haven’t been revealed, but because he so deftly draws from a common well—the Boomer clichés of rebellion, the American ideal of shlepping for success, religion’s reckoning with inevitable death. “I never believed that people come to my shows, or rock shows, to be told anything,” he says, giving up what’s really been his secret all along. “But I do believe that they come to be reminded of things.”
While Environmental Protection Agency Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler was introducing the new rule that will vastly scale back federal water protections, Matthew Starr was preparing to take water samples from the Neuse River.
Starr, one of two official keepers of the North Carolina river, already has a hard job. As a protector of the Neuse, a body of water that has been judged “most endangered” and the nation’s seventh-most polluted river by the environmental group American Rivers, Starr contends daily with pollution from human and animal waste, chemicals, real estate development, storm runoff, coal ash, and wastewater treatment plants. Climate change, which has resulted in more intense and frequent storms, has intensified the river’s challenges.
With the new water rule, which the EPA released on Tuesday, Starr’s job of measuring and cleaning up water contamination in the Neuse is about to get exponentially harder.
Consider what he calls the “poop side of the problem.” In the past few months, Starr has spent much of his time measuring E. coli levels that have increased after raw human feces and urine was released into the Neuse from wastewater treatment plants and sanitary sewers after Hurricane Florence.
Photo: Caitlin Penna for The Intercept
“The storm also dumped a tremendous amount of swine and poultry waste into our water,” said Starr, as he drove his beat-up blue Chevy pickup truck past rows of identical hog barns. It’s easy to see how the liquefied waste of the river basin’s 1.4 million hogs, which is stored in 640 hog waste lagoons, could make its way into the river, which is sometimes just dozens of feet away from the hog farms. Using machines that look like giant metal paint rollers, the farmers spray the waste onto the nearby fields, many of which are cut through by small streams and ditches.
Some of those waterways, which swell and multiply after rainfalls, will no longer be subject to the Clean Water Act when the new rule takes effect. And that means that when Starr finds elevated levels of pollutants, he will have no recourse. Just figuring out which waterways are still covered by the federal law may soon add significantly to his burden.
Wheeler promised that the new water rule, which will replace water protections that the Obama administration put in place in 2015, would simplify water regulation. “Property owners should be able to stand on their property and be able to tell if a water is federal or not without hiring outside professionals,” he said at a press call on Monday.
But the idea that the new rule will be simple to implement is one of several Trump administration narratives about its latest rollback that have begun to unravel in the days since the rollback’s announcement.
Starr and others who work directly with rivers and streams say the EPA’s new definition of Waters of the United States will make it harder rather than easier to tell which waterways are regulated. The new rule takes protections under the federal Clean Water Act away from all ephemeral streams, which depend on rainwater, while likely leaving in place protections for some but not all “intermittent” streams, which flow during only part of the year.
“The idea that people who aren’t scientists can figure out which streams are ephemeral and which are intermittent is laughable,” said Starr. “This is not a simple you walk out and look at it. There’s a lot of science that goes into it. When does the stream have flow? What kinds of flora and fauna does it have? What’s the topography? Does it have a bank or a clear, defined channel?”
Photo: Caitlin Penna for The Intercept
Indeed, the similarity of the two types of water bodies is underscored by the EPA’s own documents. A 2008 report from the agency on the hydrological significance of intermittent and ephemeral streams notes the overlapping roles of both kinds of waterways.
“They perform the same critical hydrologic functions as perennial streams: they move water, sediment, nutrients, and debris through the stream network and provide connectivity within the watershed,” the report noted, going on to warn of the dangers of harming these critical components of our water system. “The disturbance or loss of ephemeral and intermittent streams has dramatic physical, biological, and chemical impacts, which are evident from the uplands to the riparian areas and stream courses of the watershed.”
The difficulty of distinguishing between these two types of waterways was further underscored by the agency’s own slides, which the EPA released in response to FOIA request from E&E News. While Wheeler told reporters on a press phone call hours earlier that it was impossible to calculate the impact of the new rule because the “data doesn’t tell the difference between intermittent and ephemeral streams,” the slides showed that the EPA had already crunched those numbers. According to its analysis, 18 percent of streams nationwide are ephemeral and 52 percent are intermittent. The agency pointed out in a footnote that because many ephemeral streams are “classified as intermittent or are not mapped,” that figure likely underestimates the true number of intermittent streams.
In addition, the new rule would lift federal protections from “isolated” lakes and ponds, which are not directly connected by permanent water to navigable rivers. And depending on the feedback it receives during an upcoming 60-day waiting period, the new rule may wind up stripping protections from intermittent streams and even some stretches of perennial waterways.
An economic analysis of the rule released by the Army and the EPA this week undermines another fiction the agency has put forward about the water rule: that states will protect waterways that the federal government abandons. Wheeler and other proponents of the EPA’s rollback of the water rule put in place in 2015 have celebrated the proposed language as returning water regulation to the states. But, as the report notes, 13 states, including North Carolina, have laws in place that make it impossible for states to pass water regulations stricter than federal ones. Twenty-three other states have laws making it difficult to adopt water regulations that are stricter than the federal law.
Even states where more protective laws remain on the books may not have the funding or political will to enforce them. The difficulties tracking and holding powerful polluters accountable is a large part of the reason that most waterways that have been assessed (including more than 70 percent of ponds, lakes, and reservoirs) already violate water quality standards.
In North Carolina, which has repeatedly slashed funding for its Department of Environmental Quality, the state is already struggling to hold polluters accountable for violations of water laws.
“We have to do a lot of the enforcement work ourselves,” said Starr, as he drove his pickup past a stretch of Lick Creek on a recent Tuesday. Recognizing the muddy flow as the result of sediment pollution, which can threaten fish and drinking water, Starr pulled over so that he could call in the problem to the state’s Department of Environmental Quality.
Starr regularly finds himself doing environmental policing and had even called the state twice before about this particular creek, which is near the site of a large residential development. The state fined a company working on the nearby construction site $210 last year. And, when he called, a representative of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality told Starr that the agency was “working with the company on the problem.” But the sedimentation, which can threaten fish and drinking water there, has remained.
“And this is a regulated waterway,” said Starr. “What will happen when they’re not regulated?”
Photo: Caitlin Penna for The Intercept
The question of enforcement under the new rule is baffling some legal experts, who point out that in many instances it will be extremely difficult to punish polluters even when they release contamination into waterways that retain federal protections.
“Even if it’s technically true that you could hold someone responsible for discharging into a ditch that wouldn’t be a water of the U.S., the argument is that you could nail them when those pollutants flow from the ditch into a regulated water,” said Daniel Estrin, general counsel and advocacy director of the Waterkeeper Alliance. “But that ignores practical realities. Most often that pollution is going to flow miles past many landowners before it gets there. And the idea that you could ever hope to prove where the pollutants entered the stream is a practical impossibility.”
The challenges that the new rule poses to enforcement may explain why so many water-polluting industries pushed so hard for it. The Waters Advocacy Coalition, an umbrella group that spent more than $1 million lobbying to limit federal water protections and had 48 trade group members — including the National Pork Producers Council and the Fertilizer Institute — as of 2017, lobbied for the new rule. Other industry associations that lobbied for it, too, include the National Renderers Association, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the American Farm Bureau, the National Turkey Federation, and the Commercial Real Estate Development Association.
The corporate interest belies yet another myth about the water rollback: that it was intended to bring relief to the small farmer. While the Trump administration worked hand in hand with the beef lobby to assail the 2015 water rule as an assault on small farmers, the rule didn’t actually affect how they operate.
“The Clean Water Act has very clear exemptions for agricultural activities and that wasn’t changed by 2015 rule,” said Betsy Southerland, an environmental scientist who served as director of science and technology, among other positions, during the three decades she worked at EPA. “This is one of those situations where the American Farm Bureau has fostered a false narrative that has scared farmers about the implications of the 2015 rule.”
Now that the new rule has been introduced, it’s environmentalists who are scared.
“It’s hard to overstate how bad this will be for our waters,” said Starr. He is now awaiting the results from the latest round of testing he did on water from the Neuse River. “Though, when the protections go away, the samples will mean jack shit.”
The post EPA’s Own Data Refutes Justification for Clean Water Act Rollback appeared first on The Intercept.
The New York chapter of Extinction Rebellion held its first planning meeting on Thursday. Incensed and terrified by the accelerating climate crisis, activists gathered in Manhattan to discuss how they might replicate some of the successes the direct-action group has had in the United Kingdom.
In London, less than a month after Extinction Rebellion activists blocked roads, occupied bridges, lay down in the street and got arrested to draw immediate attention to the climate crisis, Mayor Sadiq Khan declared a climate emergency, vowing to do “everything in our power to mitigate the risk” of climate catastrophe. Coincidence? Greg Schwedock doesn’t think so.
“That was unthinkable before the Extinction Rebellion,” Schwedock told a standing room-only crowd gathered in a Manhattan co-working space on Thursday night. Dressed in office gear and “Rise and Resist” sweatshirts, accompanied by their children and at least one dog, the attendees came together with the hope that a New York chapter of the group might have similar success in sparking a response commensurate with the dire crisis.
“Getting a million people to D.C. isn’t enough. We need to escalate,” said Schwedock, who emphasized that the group will take the path of disruptive, attention-grabbing civil disobedience, rather than just marching and chanting about the importance of climate change. “We’re not the ‘Extinction Yell About It.’”
The explosive growth of the Extinction Rebellion — which began in England with the support of a group of academics just a few months ago and already has 190 affiliates on five continents — is fueled by the ballooning ranks of people around the world who are frustrated, alarmed, and depressed by the failure to tackle the accelerating climate disaster.
Brian Grady counts himself among them. Grady, a 35-year-old housing coordinator at Housing Works, often has trouble sleeping because of his escalating worry about the climate. A video he came across online recently that showed Extinction Rebellion activists getting arrested “was the first thing that made me hopeful,” said Grady. “It was such a relief. It was like finally someone’s doing something.”
Photo: Sharon Lerner/The Intercept
Drawing inspiration from the civil rights movement, Occupy Wall Street, and HIV/AIDS protest group ACT UP, Extinction Rebellion makes clear demands, among them that the government must “tell the truth about the climate” and “enact legally binding policy measures to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025.” But it also aims to acknowledge and draw on the intense emotions that come with the environmental calamity that’s upon us. “Even while resolving to limit the damage, we can mourn,” is how Gail Bradbrook, one the organization’s founders in England, puts it.
In New York, after observing two minutes of silence on Thursday to acknowledge their collective grief, the activists discussed what they might do on a national day of action coming up on January 26. As you might expect from a grassroots group with no centralized structure, there was a wide range of ideas, including a mock funeral procession, London-style bridge shutdowns, and an action in Times Square, where, as a man with gray stubble pointed out, “cops are loathe to use a lot of violence in front of all the tourists.”
By the end of the evening, a New Jersey chapter had formed, Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping had teamed up with other activists who prefer to voice their protest in song, and a small group had begun discussing how the group might target industrial farming in this country.
“It could have been more organized,” Runar Finn Robinson observed as activists swapped phone numbers and set up next meetings around him. Still, Robinson, who is 11 and attended the meeting with his parents and his 9-year-old brother, Odin, felt the evening was a success. On Monday, they had all participated in a Sunrise Movement climate march in Washington. Altogether, he said, the week was “one of our best family vacations.”
Yasemin Cag also felt encouraged by the gathering. A high school senior, Cag has been beyond frustrated by the measured response to climate change. “The time is passed for people to just spout scientific facts,” said the 17-year-old. The Extinction Rebellion, which she found online, seemed to capture the urgency she felt. At the meeting, she met two other teens who shared her grief and fury — and, like her, had given up meat, dairy, and buying new clothes.
Cag admitted she had taken the train in from New Jersey to attend the meeting without telling her parents. But, as she told her new friends as she left the meeting and headed to the PATH train, any risk she ran of getting in trouble was well worth it.
The post The Extinction Rebellion’s Direct-Action Climate Activism Comes to New York appeared first on The Intercept.
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