A maioria das informações coletadas por profissionais do planejamento urbano é um emaranhado de dados complexos e de difícil representação – muito diferente dos gráficos e tabelas simplificadas de jogos de simulação do tipo SimCity. Mas uma nova iniciativa da Sidewalk Labs, uma subsidiária da Alphabet, o conglomerado de empresas do Google, promete mudar isso.
O projeto, batizado de “Replica”, permite que órgãos de planejamento tenham acesso aos padrões de mobilidade de cidades inteiras. Assim como em SimCity, a ferramenta “fácil de usar” do Replica faz uso de simulações estatísticas para mostrar como, quando e onde as pessoas se deslocam dentro dos centros urbanos. É uma ferramenta promissora para os profissionais que trabalham com planejamento de transportes e ordenamento de uso do solo. Nos últimos meses, os órgãos do setor de transportes de Kansas City, Portland e Chicago se inscreveram no programa. Mas existe um porém: ninguém sabe exatamente de onde vêm esses dados.
Normalmente, os planejadores urbanos dependem de pesquisas e contagens volumétricas, procedimentos caros, demorados e com equipamentos muitas vezes antiquados. Já o Replica se alimenta de dados de localização de celulares coletados em tempo real. Como explica Nick Bowden, da Sidewalk Labs, “o Replica oferece um amplo leque de dados de deslocamento que são muito difíceis de se obter atualmente, como o número de pessoas em uma via expressa ou rede de ruas locais, o meio de transporte utilizado (carro, transporte público, bicicleta ou a pé) e o propósito da viagem (ida ao trabalho, às compras ou à escola)”.
Para fazer essas medições, o programa coleta e desidentifica a localização de telefones celulares, obtida junto a fornecedores não especificados. Por sua vez, esses dados anônimos alimentam uma série de simulações, criando uma população virtual que replica com precisão os padrões de mobilidade do mundo real, mas, como diz Bowden, “não revela os hábitos de cada pessoa no mundo real”.
O Replica surge em um momento de grande preocupação com o uso de nossas informações pessoais pelas empresas de tecnologia – e levanta novos questionamentos sobre a intrusão cada vez maior do Google no mundo físico.
Como a Sidewalk Labs tem acesso aos padrões de movimento das pessoas antes de gerar seu modelo artificial, não seria possível descobrir a identidade delas com base em seu local de trabalho ou descanso?No mês passado, o New York Times revelou como os dados de localização dos nossos smartphones são coletados por terceiros – muitas vezes com pedidos de permissão pouco claros ou até sem a autorização do usuário. No início de janeiro, uma investigação da revista Vice foi ainda mais longe e descobriu que operadores de telefonia vendem nossa localização a stalkers e caçadores de recompensas dispostos a pagar pela informação.
Em tal contexto, qualquer iniciativa de coleta em tempo real e comercialização de dados de localização vai deixar algumas pessoas ainda mais inquietas. “A questão da privacidade é uma grande preocupação. A localização de um telefone celular é uma informação extremamente delicada”, diz Ben Green, especialista em tecnologia urbana e autor do livro The Smart Enough City (não publicado no Brasil).
E essas preocupações não são apenas teóricas. Uma reportagem da Associated Press revelou que o site e os aplicativos do Google continuam rastreando os usuários mesmo após a desativação do histórico de localização. O portal de notícias Quartz descobriu que o Google rastreava usuários de Android usando os endereços de torres de telefonia mesmo com todos os serviços de localização desabilitados. A empresa também foi flagrada usando os veículos do Street View para coletar dados de localização de redes de internet sem fio de celulares e computadores.
É por isso que a Sidewalk Labs criou mecanismos consideráveis de proteção à privacidade – antes mesmo de começar a gerar sua população artificial. Todos os dados de localização já chegam à empresa anonimizados – através de métodos como generalização, técnicas de privacidade diferencial e até a exclusão de comportamentos singulares. Bowden explica que nos dados obtidos pelo Replica não estão incluídos os identificadores de dispositivo, que podem ser usados para revelar a identidade do usuário.
No entanto, certos planejadores urbanos e especialistas em tecnologia, embora elogiem os conceitos inovadores e elegantes do programa, continuam céticos com relação a esses mecanismos de proteção. Uma das questões levantadas é como a Sidewalk Labs define que informações permitem ou não identificar o usuário. Tamir Israel, especialista jurídico do Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic, diz que é muito difícil impedir a reidentificação de certos dados. Como a Sidewalk Labs tem acesso aos padrões de movimento das pessoas antes de gerar seu modelo artificial, não seria possível descobrir a identidade delas com base em seu local de trabalho ou descanso? “Vemos muitas empresas aplicando métodos grosseiros de desidentificação para poder coletar dados. Mas já foi demonstrado que é muito fácil reidentificar dados de localização, muito mais do que outros tipos de informação”, afirma. “É muito fácil identificar quem vai dormir em tal endereço e trabalhar em tal escritório das 9h às 17h todo dia”, exemplifica. Um estudo que hoje é referência na área revelou que bastam quatro pontos de dados para reidentificar informações aparentemente anônimas.
Outra questão é a forma pela qual os fornecedores da Sidewalk Labs obtêm o consentimento dos usuários. Como demonstrado pelo tsunami de escândalos de quebra de privacidade do ano passado, muitas pessoas não sabem que seus dados estão sendo rastreados e vendidos para terceiros, anunciantes e programas como o Replica. “Precisamos ser mais rigorosos para garantir que a forma de obtenção do consentimento dos usuários seja condizente com o grau de confidencialidade dos dados coletados”, acredita Israel. O conceito de “consentimento” sempre foi definido em termos de uso vagos e genéricos, graças aos quais, aproveitando-se de intrincados detalhes técnicos, as empresas levam vantagem sobre usuários sem tempo de ler – e muito menos coompreender – o obscuro jargão das políticas de privacidade. A reportagem do New York Times descobriu, por exemplo, que “as explicações que as pessoas recebem antes de dar seu consentimento costumam ser incompletas ou enganosas”. Muitos aplicativos não informam claramente os usuários de que seus dados de localização podem ser compartilhados ou vendidos.
É difícil determinar se os dados foram obtidos com autorização dos usuários quando não se sabe ao certo de onde tais dados vieram. A Sidewalk Labs explica que os fornecedores do Replica são companhias de telecomunicações e empresas que agregam dados de localização de diversos aplicativos. “Monitoramos as práticas de nossos fornecedores para garantir que os códigos de conduta do setor sejam respeitados”, diz Bowden. “Não usamos dados do Google. Nosso amplo processo de auditoria inclui relatórios frequentes, entrevistas e avaliações para garantir que os fornecedores atendam os requisitos de privacidade e consentimento”, afirma.
Porém, como a origem exata dos dados não é revelada, não podemos saber se o Replica se alimenta de aplicativos não regulamentados que se aproveitam de políticas de privacidade imprecisas para rastrear e comercializar a localização dos usuários. Documentos públicos das cidades que compraram ou estão experimentando o Replica dão informações conflitantes sobre as fontes do Replica. Um comunicado do Departamento de Transportes de Illinois afirma que o programa recebe “dados de operadoras de telefonia celular, dados de localização de agregadores e dados do Google para gerar informações de mobilidade para uma determinada região”. Essa amostra de dados, acrescenta o documento, “não se limita a dispositivos com Android”, sendo “coletada durante meses seguidos, o que permite estabelecer padrões de deslocamento consistentes”. Em Portland, documentos da Câmara Municipal afirmam que os dados vêm de “telefones com Android e aplicativos do Google”. Funcionários do Gabinete de Transportes de Portland disseram à imprensa que uma parte dos dados de localização do Replica também podem vir de outras fontes ainda desconhecidas. Na ata de uma reunião de planejamento de transportes de Kansas City, alguém observa que o programa pode coletar dados “de coisas como o Uber e o Lyft”, e uma apresentação de slides do município afirma que a ferramenta “se baseia em dados do Google”.
O que está em jogo com o Replica é o potencial lucrativo de agregar dados sobre nossos deslocamentos e vendê-los aos órgãos públicos. Inicialmente, o programa foi vendido como uma ferramenta “de apoio ao desenvolvimento” de Quayside, a controversa “cidade inteligente” projetada para a orla leste de Toronto. Um porta-voz da Sidewalk Labs disse ao The Intercept que não há planos para levar o Replica à cidade, mas seus habitantes estão preocupados com os planos da empresa. Alguns veem o projeto como um exemplo de como as ferramentas e técnicas desenvolvidas pela Sidewalk Labs em Quayside poderiam ser aplicadas em outras cidades, mas sem gerar nenhum benefício econômico adicional para os moradores que produzem esses dados.
“O Replica é um exemplo perfeito do capitalismo da vigilância, que lucra com informações pessoais dos usuários de produtos que se tornaram parte de nossas vidas”, diz Brenda McPhail, diretora do Projeto de Privacidade, Tecnologia e Vigilância da Associação Canadense de Liberdades Civis. “A sociedade precisa refletir se deve continuar permitindo modelos de negócios baseados na exploração de nossas informações pessoais sem o nosso consentimento”, completa.
Tradução: Bernardo Tonasse
The post Empresa do conglomerado do Google quer vender dados de localização de milhões de telefones celulares appeared first on The Intercept.
Tragédias como as de Mariana e Brumadinho, no final das contas, saem barato para gigantes como a Vale. Basta acompanhar o mercado de ações.
O preço das ações de uma empresa na bolsa de valores, uma medida básica sobre o valor da própria empresa, é determinado por uma infinidade de variáveis. Uma, porém, se destaca: a expectativa em relação ao lucro da empresa, por parte dos investidores.
Imagine que uma empresa abre seu capital, oferecendo 100 ações. Se, por qualquer motivo, os investidores acreditam que essa empresa terá um aumento nos seus lucros, os papéis serão um bom investimento. Haverá um aumento na demanda por eles, e o preço unitário das ações sobe. Se por outro lado a expectativa é de queda no lucro da empresa, o público vai querer se livrar desses papéis, provocando uma queda no valor dessas ações.
Uma parte importante dos compradores e vendedores dessas ações é formada por aquilo que chamamos de especuladores. Isto é, indivíduos que não estão interessados no lucro da empresa daqui cinco ou 10 anos, mas estão em comprar as ações a um preço baixo e vender a um preço alto, sendo que tais operações podem ocorrer no intervalo de um único dia.
O valor da Vale já vinha em queda desde 2012. Mas, após a tragédia de Mariana, em novembro de 2015, a empresa – que é dona de 50% do capital da Samarco – perdeu 8% de seu valor de mercado em uma única semana. Naquele ano, aliás, a Vale foi a empresa de capital aberto que mais perdeu valor na bolsa brasileira, com uma queda da ordem de R$ 45,9 bilhões. Essa desvalorização se deveu não apenas à tragédia de Mariana, mas também à queda da cotação do minério de ferro no mercado global.
Mas, a partir de então, as ações da Vale voltaram a subir. No final de 2018, o valor de mercado da empresa fechou em R$ 263 bilhões, quase três vezes mais do que em 2014, antes do desastre, quando era de R$ 107 bi. Tudo leva a crer que deve ocorrer o mesmo com a tragédia de Brumadinho. Tudo será como antes.
Os cadáveres soterrados para sempre naquela lama têm importância mínima para a empresa e seus investidores. Eles são custos já precificados pelos investidores da Vale.
Torcida a favorDesastres como o de Mariana e Brumadinho são didáticos para contemplar a pior face do capitalismo brasileiro. Neles, se somam ganâncias privadas, a captura do legislativo estadual e federal por poderosos interesses econômicos e a brutal incompetência, corrupção e vistas grossas do poder público.
No meio disso tudo, no trajeto do rio de lama, há não “uma pedra” (como no poema do poeta de Itabira), mas uma flora e uma fauna – incluídos aí os humanos sem nome que, para os atores graúdos envolvidos, não têm importância comparável aos bônus de fim de ano distribuídos pela empresa.
Na economia de mercado, as empresas buscam mais lucros e menos custos. Tratar rejeitos de mineração (ou “dejeitos” no léxico presidencial) é custo, não é receita. Como alertou o professor Bruno Milanez, da Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, as mineradoras cortam custos exatamente nessa área ambiental quando sua rentabilidade cai.
A única forma de forçar a empresa a se comportar é por meio da legislação e da pressão social. O público pode se recusar a comprar produtos de uma empresa poluidora, forçando o empresário a se preocupar com o meio ambiente. Esse cenário, porém, não vale para a Vale. Seu comprador é a China, que está a milhares de quilômetros de distância de Minas Gerais. E os governantes que podem puni-la dependem dos seus impostos para pagar os funcionários públicos – o governo de Minas, em especial, está em situação falimentar e não pode abrir mão desse dinheiro.
Segundo dados divulgados pela própria Vale, no primeiro semestre 2018, a empresa pagou R$ 676 milhões em tributos para o governo de Minas, além de ter realizado compras da ordem de R$ 4,9 bilhões – 77% de empresas daquele estado (R$ 3,8 bi). Em 2018, o minério de ferro respondeu a 8,4% das exportações brasileiras – é o terceiro produto mais importante, atrás apenas da soja e do petróleo – e a 30% das de Minas Gerais, o principal produto de exportação do estado. Em 2017, a participação do ferro foi ainda maior: 34% das exportações de Minas.
Ainda que a economia dos mineiros seja bastante sofisticada, especialmente para os padrões brasileiros, é evidente que a mineração é ainda muito importante para sua economia. E poder econômico se traduz sempre em poder político.
Precisando desses recursos e dos empregos diretos e indiretos gerados por projetos da Vale, políticos são incentivados a atender aos desejos dessa empresa gigantesca, inclusive facilitando a concessão de licenças ambientais ou fazendo vista grossa para irregularidades.
Nas eleições de 2014, por exemplo, a Vale “doou” quase R$ 30 milhões para campanhas de deputados federais, notadamente de Minas, Bahia e Pará. Tais doações se dividiram entre PMDB (R$ 13,8 mi), PSB (R$ 5,7 mi), PT (R$ 4,3 mi), PSDB (R$ 3,6 mi) e PP (R$ 1,7 mi). Isso deixa claro que o poder econômico da empresa irriga quase todo o espectro político brasileiro.
Na Assembleia de Minas, o deputado tucano João Vítor Xavier tentou aprovar um projeto que endurecia as regras para liberação de barragens das mineradoras. O texto, amplamente discutido com técnicos e representantes da sociedade civil, foi derrotado, em favor de um projeto virtualmente escrito pelas próprias mineradoras.
Num mundo hipotético – que em nada lembra o Brasil, felizmente –, uma empresa rica pode simplesmente subornar os agentes envolvidos no processo. Desde um simples fiscal de um órgão público, a um juiz encarregado de alguma demanda de seu interesse, passando pelo governador ou presidente. Uma hipótese remota.
É hora de comprar?Nas páginas especializadas, já há matérias do tipo “É hora de comprar ações da Vale?” Não sou trader, mas eu diria que sim. Afinal, já sabemos que as punições são leves em termos monetários (R$ 250 milhões de multa ambiental, como se diz pela avenida Paulista, é peanuts) e ninguém vai para cadeia (ninguém graúdo, pelo menos).
O que preocupa mesmo os compradores de suas ações é o apetite dos chineses por minério de ferro.
E só.
The post Os mortos de Brumadinho custam barato para a Vale. O que importa mesmo é a China. appeared first on The Intercept.
#RedforEd, the national teacher-led movement that started last year, continues to flex its muscles. On the heels of a successful six-day strike in Los Angeles, teachers in Virginia, Colorado, and elsewhere in California are voicing their demands for better working conditions, and, in some cases, threatening to strike.
On Monday, thousands of public school teachers flooded into Richmond, Virginia, for a one-day demonstration to pressure state lawmakers to increase funding for public education. The Richmond day of action was organized by a grassroots educator group, Virginia Educators United. It came after about nine months of planning, according to a Virginia Educators United spokesperson, and was backed by an “independent coalition” of stakeholders who support public schools, including union members, non-union members, educators, parents, administrators, and policymakers. Like the teacher uprisings in other states, supporters wore red in solidarity.
The teachers’ demands for increased funding come amid a steep drop in resources over the last decade. According to the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis, a Virginia think tank, per-pupil state funding for the 2018-2019 school year was 9.1 percent lower in real dollars than in 2008-2009.
The march garnered local and national teacher union support. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, marched in Richmond on Monday alongside Lily García, president of the National Education Association.
Greetings from Richmond, Virginia, where an enormous crowd of thousands of teachers marched to the state capitol today to demand higher pay and school funding. #Red4Ed #redforedva #VirginiaEducatorsUnited #RedForEd
Here’s @rweingarten and @Lily_NEA leading the charge: pic.twitter.com/9y3a1HCvbN
— Graham Vyse (@GrahamVyse) January 28, 2019
“Our folks, we’re not big in Virginia, but we’re mighty, and we have three or four very active locals that have been working closely with the Virginia Educators United,” said Weingarten in an interview Monday afternoon. “Virginia is a pretty rich state, but actually spends about a billion dollars less in education than it did before the recession, which means its priorities need to be reordered.”
Weingarten said the last straw for many Virginia educators was seeing how readily lawmakers were able to come up with a “bountiful set of tax breaks” for Amazon to open its HQ2 in the state. If the state can competitively invest in business development, the teachers say, it should be able to invest in its schools and teachers. According to data from the NEA, Virginia ranks 34th nationally when it comes to teacher pay, with the average teacher earning $51,049.
Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam expressed support for the rallying teachers.
Wonderful to see so many Virginia educators raising their voices today #RedforEd https://t.co/gVCz1OWSEz
— Ralph Northam (@GovernorVA) January 28, 2019
About 1,670 miles west, in Denver, teachers are also preparing to go on what would be their first strike since 1994. While the strike was scheduled to take place on Monday, last week, Denver’s public school district requested state intervention, a move that could delay the strike for up to 180 days. Democratic Gov. Jared Polis has 14 days to decide if he will intervene, and his office has so far said he is undecided. If the state intervenes, Polis could call for a neutral fact-finder to assist in negotiations, or offer resources like arbitration or mediation. A strike in the middle of state intervention would be illegal, and teachers, guidance counselors, and nurses could face financial penalties and even the revocation of their licenses.
Lisa Calderón, a Denver mayoral candidate, urged Polis to stay out of the situation. “This is not a state issue, this is a local workers’ issue,” she said recently.
The Denver school district and union are at odds over teacher pay, as well as the size of bonuses for educators who work in schools where there are high levels of poverty among students. Denver educators are also highlighting the fact that administrative spending remains much higher in their city than in other parts of the state. Throughout 2018, there were signs of growing teacher militancy in Denver, and many parents, community members, and teachers began talking about the likelihood of a strike months ago. This past April, thousands of teachers descended on Denver, the state capital, to call on lawmakers to increase funding for public education. These demonstrations weren’t technically strikes (educators called them “walkouts”), as most school districts closed down beforehand in support of the teachers.
Teacher pay in Colorado ranks 31st in the country, and last year, the average educator earned just under $53,000, according to the state’s education department. Pay can vary widely across Colorado, with some districts averaging salaries above $70,000 and others with pay closer to $30,000. Last year in Denver, the average teacher pay (before bonuses) was $50,757.
In Northern California, the Oakland Education Association has called for a four-day strike authorization vote to begin Tuesday. Oakland educators, like their counterparts in LA, have been calling for smaller class sizes, more school nurses and counselors, and higher pay. They have been working without a contract since July 2017. In 2010, Oakland teachers went on strike for one day, and in 1996, they took the streets for 26 days.
Los Angeles teachers returned to work last Wednesday after a six-day strike, their first labor stoppage since 1989. Following the strike, 81 percent of United Teachers Los Angeles members voted to ratify their new contract, which includes new caps on class sizes and commitments to hire more nurses and librarians. The union also won a commitment from the Los Angeles Unified School District to develop a plan to reduce the number of standardized tests and explore limits on charter school growth, a big point of contention in the strike. Teachers also agreed to salary increases of 6 percent, which is what the district had offered prior to the strike.
The post Coming Off LA Strike Victory, a New Wave of Teacher Protests Takes Hold appeared first on The Intercept.
Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., said that what she saw Monday morning while accompanying a New York immigration activist to his mandated check-in at the New York field office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement left her with serious concerns about the agency’s secrecy and the way it treats the people it summons to its offices.
“It is very clear to me that there has been some skirting of the law, that the free flow of the public has been obstructed arbitrarily and unilaterally to create a pressurized environment in which human rights could be violated,” Clarke told the immigration activist’s friends and supporters at Foley Square, outside the federal building where the ICE check-in had taken place.
“It is very clear to me that there has been some skirting of the law, that the free flow of the public has been obstructed arbitrarily and unilaterally to create a pressurized environment in which human rights could be violated.”Clarke was accompanying Ravi Ragbir, the executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City, whose attempted deportation by ICE a year ago during a check-in generated a massive street protest and a strident condemnation from the federal bench. Ragbir has several ongoing legal proceedings — including a First Amendment lawsuit alleging that ICE is targeting him for deportation based on his political speech — and federal courts in both the 2nd and 3rd Circuits of the U.S. Court of Appeals have issued stays forbidding ICE from deporting him until those proceedings are resolved.
Even so, Ragbir’s supporters weren’t entirely sure that ICE officials wouldn’t attempt to deport him anyway, and so they asked elected officials, including Clarke and current as well as former members of the New York City Council, to escort Ragbir when he kept his appointment at 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan.
Elected officials have joined Ragbir for many of his ICE check-ins in recent years. While there’s no telling whether their presence has made a difference in his treatment, it’s done a great deal to shine a public light on the quotidian workings of the deportation bureaucracy.
When Ragbir attended a check-in in 2017, then-City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito was moved to tears by her conversations with mothers and children waiting without legal representation for meetings that could end in deportation. City Council Member Jumaane Williams called the spectacle “the most un-American thing I’ve seen.”
The City Council members were ordered to leave the hallway afterward by a man who, though he would not identify himself at the time, proved to be Scott Mechkowski, who as deputy director of ICE’s New York field office oversaw the attempted deportation of Ragbir last year. According to Ragbir’s First Amendment lawsuit, Mechkowski later told Ragbir’s lawyers that he still felt “resentment” over the encounter, naming Mark-Viverito and identifying Williams as “that guy from Brooklyn.”
In the interval, ICE has changed its policy, restricting access to the ninth-floor waiting room where people present themselves to find out whether they are being deported. Sara Gozalo, an organizer with the New Sanctuary Coalition, which organizes volunteers to accompany people to their ICE check-ins, said the restrictions began in the summer of 2017. “Their excuse was capacity issues,” Gozalo said, “but I personally accompanied people when the waiting room was empty, and was told I couldn’t go in.” Next, she said, ICE began denying family members entrance to the waiting room, making them wait three floors below in the sixth-floor cafeteria. “I’ve been with people just waiting in the cafeteria for hours, and they don’t know anything until they get the phone call saying their spouse is being deported,” Gozalo said. (ICE did not respond to emailed questions.)
Barring family and supporters from the waiting room isn’t just cruel to people facing difficult circumstances, Gozalo said. “It’s a way for ICE to continue doing their work in the shadows, like secret police,” she said. “It’s much easier to detain someone when nobody’s watching. You don’t have to account for what you’re doing, or deal with a family breaking down, or acknowledge all of the damage you’re doing.”
“It’s a way for ICE to continue doing their work in the shadows, like secret police. It’s much easier to detain someone when nobody’s watching.”When Ragbir took the elevator to the ninth floor this morning, he was accompanied by his lawyers; his wife, Amy Gottlieb; and Clarke. Outside the waiting room, an officer in a Department of Homeland Security uniform, who refused to identify himself beyond the first name “Matt,” informed the group that they had been instructed specifically that only Ragbir and one of his lawyers, Alina Das, would be allowed in. “The wife can’t go in,” the DHS officer said.
Das asked whose order the officer was enforcing, and whether she could speak to him. The officer disappeared briefly, then returned and reiterated the order: The lawyer and the client could go in. Ragbir’s wife and the elected officials supporting him could not. As for the request to discuss the matter, the DHS officer said the ICE supervisor wouldn’t speak to Ragbir’s entourage. “He says he doesn’t have to talk with you,” the DHS officer said of the person giving the orders.
“That’s not true,” responded Clarke, who was recently named to the House Homeland Security Committee, now controlled by fellow Democrats. Clarke eventually made it past the guards, where she began pressing ICE officials to justify the ban. A delegation of current and former City Council members, including Williams and Mark-Viverito, soon joined the delegation on the ninth floor, but were again refused access by the Homeland Security officer.
“I remember last year, it was supposed to be civil, and it wasn’t civil,” the officer said, presumably referring to the street protest that attempted to block Ragbir’s unlawful deportation last January. “So I’m being pre-emptive.”
If the officer remembered some members of the delegation, they remembered him as well. Rhiya Trivedi, one of Williams’s defense lawyers in his trial on obstruction and disorderly conduct stemming from last January’s protest, recognized the officer from the hours of video of the protest she reviewed in preparation for the case. “He’s all over the tape shoving people,” Trivedi said.
After a quarter-hour or more, Clarke emerged into the hallway to announce that after her conversation with ICE officials, Gottlieb and the elected officials would be allowed into the waiting room. But she was quickly countermanded by the Homeland Security officer, and the stand-off continued until Ragbir and Das emerged from the meeting room. He was free to go, but must check in again in six months.
Back downstairs, Clarke said she found the entire episode troubling.
“I observed what I believe are a number of unilateral policies that aren’t necessarily in law or statute that we’ll be reviewing,” she said. “I am not casting aspersions on the workers here at all; they are simply following instructions. I found it interesting that in the back and forth about the public space, a call was made to Washington for guidance. So we know where these unilateral decisions are coming from, and it is now my responsibility, along with my colleagues, to get this right. Every elected official here should have the right to be by Ravi’s side observing the governance of this place. Amy, his wife, deserves to be by his side during this time of trial.”
Clarke, who was returning to Washington immediately, said her first order of business would be to speak with the new Democratic Homeland Security Committee chair “about the policies, practices and procedures in respect to removal, due process, and public accommodation for those who have to utilize the services of the Department of Homeland Security.”
Looking drained after the morning’s events, Gottlieb, Ragbir’s wife, said the new rules are needlessly cruel. “If there’s no public safety reason to not have people in there, why do this, except with the intention to really dehumanize?” she asked. “ICE refuses to be subjected to any oversight, and we’re going to continue to do everything we can to expose that.”
The post A Member of Congress Tried to Go to an Immigration Activist’s ICE Check-in. ICE Tried to Block Her. appeared first on The Intercept.
Today in Silicon Valley: privacy glitches and starvation optimization. A rogue bug with the video-calling app FaceTime can lead iPhone users to listen, and even watch, calls before they are answered. Apple is quickly patching up the glitch, but it validates festering paranoia that technology can’t be trusted. The en vogue trend in Silicon Valley is extreme dieting that can supposedly hone productivity, but it could ultimately reinforce the potentially dangerous idea that all personal choices should be in service of accomplishing more work.
Genetically, humans are nearly identical to chimpanzees. That has led scientists to wonder about a major way in which we differ from our biological twins: violence. Humans the world over are far less violent within their communities, and one theory posits that the difference could in fact be evolutionary; that killing violent individuals over time played a key role in how we tamed ourselves.
White Christians have long used religion to rationalize bigotry and racism. That unsavory history, which includes supporting slavery and propping up Jim Crow laws, was long ago, but the writer Jemar Tisby suggests in his new book, The Color of Compromise, that white Christians still have a lot to do to reckon with the racism in their ranks. It’s a clarifying attempt by Tisby, who is black and Christian, to reach and speak to his white counterparts in a way that they’ll accept and understand.
Evening Reads
(Jeff Chiu / AP)
Was gym class a traumatizing part of school that still brings back shivers about that one particularly menacing bully? New research backs up what all too many of us already know: P.E. is kind of the worst:
Analyzing data out of the state’s Texas Fitness Now program—a $37 million endeavor to improve middle schoolers’ fitness, academic achievement, and behavior by requiring them to participate in P.E. every day—the researchers concluded that the daily mandate didn’t have any positive impact on kids’ health or educational outcome. On the contrary: They found that the program, which ran from 2007 to 2011, actually had detrimental effects, correlating with an uptick in discipline and absence rates.
→ Read the rest.
Tell us: What was your childhood P.E. experience like? Write to us at letters@theatlantic.com, and we may feature your response on our website and in future editions of The Atlantic daily.
(Leonhard Foeger / Reuters)
Since at least The Jetsons, people have been eyeing a future in which flying cars zip us around to work and back. But there’s a reason that the technology has proven elusive:
Cities aren’t about to let hastily trained pilots commandeer thousand-pound machines and human passengers. The alternative, which is to let autonomous pilots commandeer thousand-pound machines and human passengers, is no more likely. If the world has learned one thing about autonomous technology in the past decade, it’s this: Autonomy is hard. It’s really, really hard. Even self-driving advocates admit that in 2018, the hype around driverless cars came “crashing down.”
→ Read the rest.
(Shizuo Kambayashi /AP)
Our partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing urban dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie shares today’s top stories:
Could California’s ambitious but troubled high-speed rail project ease the state’s housing crisis? According to a new study, proponents should look to Japan—where bullet trains lowered housing prices.
“In lieu of gifts, please make a down payment on our new home.” When tying the knot, many couples realize they don’t want more things—so they’re asking friends and family to chip in for something bigger.
Uber has promised to reduce road congestion. But David Zipper argues that its new rewards program—which offers upgrades and free rides to frequent riders—will do the opposite.
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If the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, can run for president in the already crowded 2020 Democratic field, why shouldn’t the mayors of New York and Los Angeles? After all, each city is bigger and more complicated than plenty of states. But there’s just one thing that Bill de Blasio, who’s not ruling out a race, and Eric Garcetti, who just did, ought to remember about the last time the mayors of the Big Apple and the City of Angels decided they were best suited to topple a controversial Republican president: It didn’t turn out so good.
The year was 1972, and Richard Nixon looked vulnerable. Mayor Sam Yorty of L.A.—a conservative Democrat known as “Travelin’ Sam” for his peripatetic publicly financed travel—had spent nearly half his time away from his city in the last half of 1971 before launching a quixotic campaign in which he sought to out-Nixon Nixon on law and order. Yorty complained that his hometown was “an experimental area for taking over of a city by a combination of bloc voting, black power, left-wing radicals, and if you please, identified communists.”
Yorty received the backing of William Loeb, the extreme right-wing publisher of the Manchester Union-Leader newspaper in New Hampshire, who thought Nixon had gone soft on Vietnam. But Yorty won just 6 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, never got any traction, and dropped out of the race just before the California primary, begging voters to support Hubert Humphrey instead of the “radical” George McGovern, who would become the party’s nominee.
[Read: How to run for president while you’re running a city]
John V. Lindsay’s campaign started out with more promise. The charismatic, patrician Republican who had walked the streets of Harlem to keep the peace when other cities burned in the 60s switched his party registration in 1971 to mount a campaign that proclaimed, “While Washington’s been talking about our problems, John Lindsay’s been fighting them.” No less a hardened cynic than Hunter S. Thompson professed to be impressed.
“If you listen to the wizards, you will keep a careful eye on John Lindsay’s action in the Florida primary,” Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. “Because if he looks good down here, and then even better in Wisconsin, the wizards say he can start looking for some very heavy company … and that would make things very interesting.” And if nothing else, Thompson hoped, the potential presence of both Lindsay and Ted Kennedy in the race might turn that summer’s Democratic Convention in Miami “into something like a weeklong orgy of sex, violence and treachery in the Bronx Zoo.”
But despite a cadre of loyal campaign aides that included a young Jeffrey Katzenberg and the speechwriter turned journalist Jeff Greenfield—and despite spending half a million dollars in Florida—Lindsay finished fifth, with just 7 percent of the vote.
[Read: Bill de Blasio and Gavin Newsom may give restrictionism new life]
“A disgruntled ex-New Yorker hired a plane to fly over Miami with a sign reading ‘LINDSAY MEANS TSURIS,’” which is Yiddish for trouble, Greenfield recalled in an email this week. The Brooklyn Democratic leader Meade Esposito, still contemptuous of the mayor’s party switch, declared, “Little Sheba better come home,” a reference to the popular Broadway play in which a forlorn housewife pines in vain for her lost dog.
But Lindsay pressed on to Wisconsin, and Sam Roberts, who covered the campaign for the New York Daily News, still recalls “the mixture of hope and desperation.” Lindsay’s poll numbers were in the gutter, so to build momentum, he adopted a new slogan: “The switch is on.”
“I remember naively buying into the optimism,” Roberts remembers. “I wrote a story for the Daily News that Wisconsin was not likely to be Lindsay’s last primary. As the story was transcribed in New York, the word ‘not’ was dropped. When it was published, I must have seemed prescient. The switch was on all right, but to other candidates. Lindsay ran sixth. The next day, he dropped out of the race.”
[Read: New York Mayor John Lindsay. Remember him?]
The political world is different today, of course. So Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend may dream of presidential glory—and his big-city counterparts, including former Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, can, too. But the track record is not encouraging. Remember President Rudy Giuliani? Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland, and Calvin Coolidge were all mayors, but all first held other higher offices before winning the White House. Maybe, Greenfield suggested, that’s because the job of mayor “is seen in terms of picking up garbage and fixing the streets.” On the other hand, in Donald Trump’s Washington, that might be just what America needs.
Dixie Lambert has lived in the small fishing village of Cordova, Alaska, for 36 years. She knows almost everyone in the community—most of them U.S. Coast Guard employees and their families. During the 35-day shutdown, Lambert observed how many of these furloughed families struggled to make ends meet, so she began soliciting public donations at the local grocery store.
The filmmaker Derek Knowles, who was in the area filming another documentary project, met Lambert and was immediately struck by her personality and spirit. “She knew everyone who came into the store and transformed the grim backdrop of the shutdown into an occasion for good-humored action,” Knowles told The Atlantic. He decided to film Lambert for the better part of a day as she provided Cordovans with assistance buying groceries. “I felt like I got a window into Cordova itself and the power that can come from a genuine community, where everyone knows one another and cares for his or her neighbor,” said Knowles.
Alaska has one of the highest per capita rates of federal employees in the nation. As a result, it was hit especially hard by the economic effects of the shutdown. Even though the government has now temporarily reopened, Knowles said that many residents of Cordova are anxious that the deal won’t last long.
“We’re not even trying to guess what will happen next,” Lambert recently told Knowles.
It’s Tuesday, January 29. The State of the Union, which would have been broadcast tonight, has been rescheduled for February 5. Democrats have tapped a familiar name—the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams—to deliver their rebuttal.
President Donald Trump’s longtime friend and informal adviser Roger Stone also pleaded not guilty to charges of obstruction and witness tampering brought in connection with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Trump Eyes Venezuela: Trump has threatened to use military force against a country before. But now he’s surrounded by advisers who actually believe in regime change—most notably John Bolton, who could be the deciding force in whether the Trump administration pursues military action in Venezuela.
Negotiation Station: Russian officials reportedly tried to make a deal last year with North Korea, offering the country a nuclear power plant in the midst of ongoing U.S.-North Korea nuclear negotiations. Reports of the secret proposal come shortly before a second summit between President Trump and Kim Jong Un, currently planned for next month.
Signs From the Shutdown: Though federal workers have returned to work, the shutdown underscores just how unstable many Americans are financially. Vann R. Newkirk II writes that while the shutdown might have ended, the structural inequalities it exposed—including wage stagnation, an ongoing savings crisis, and a threadbare safety net—still persist.
A 5G Cold War: As the White House prepares to host Chinese officials for trade talks on Wednesday, the Department of Justice has unsealed its indictments of the Chinese technology giant Huawei, which allege that Huawei engaged in industrial espionage against American companies like T-Mobile. The implication of the indictments?: “In 2019, you can’t separate mobile technology from national security,” writes Alexis Madrigal.
Green No Deal: Democratic progressives have recently rallied around a Green New Deal. Here are seven reasons Democrats probably still won’t pass it.
Striking Teachers: Hundreds of teachers rallied in front of the Virginia state capitol yesterday demanding higher pay, continuing an unprecedented year of labor activism for teachers.
— Olivia Paschal and Madeleine Carlisle
Snapshot
A migrant man, part of a caravan of thousands traveling to the United States from Central America, loads his belongings on top of a van during the closing of the Barretal shelter in Tijuana, Mexico. Shannon Stapleton / Reuters
Ideas From The AtlanticAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez Understands Politics Better Than Her Critics (Shadi Hamid)
“This focus on shifting the contours of the national debate is sometimes referred to as expanding the ‘Overton window.’ It is altogether possible that Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t think that a 70 percent marginal tax rate is realistic in our lifetime—she might not even think it’s the best option from a narrow, technocratic perspective of economic performance—but it doesn’t need to be.” → Read on.
Why Flying Cars Are an Impossible Dream (Derek Thompson)
“Instead of accepting defeat, the mobility-tech world is shifting its laser beam of optimism from self-driving Earth taxis to self-driving air taxis.” → Read on.
Blame Democrats for the State of the Union Circus (Daniel Foster)
“The first State of the Union address—George Washington’s in 1790—was just 1,089 words. That’s shorter than this essay … Historically, it has been Democratic presidents who have liked the sound of their own voice best.” → Read on.
Why Tom Brokaw’s Comments About Assimilation Were Wrong (Reihan Salam)
“If the yardstick for successful assimilation is whether an immigrant speaks English, has a diverse group of friends and loved ones that isn’t solely composed of co-ethnics, and is capable of supporting herself without relying on safety-net benefits or wage subsidies, there is no question that educated and affluent immigrants will be more likely to measure up than their disadvantaged counterparts. But is that because they’re working harder at assimilation, as Brokaw might have it, or because their disadvantaged peers have more to overcome?” → Read on.
◆ Democrats Weigh Whether Wall Street Money Is Still Allowed in 2020 (Emily Stewart, Vox)
◆ Who’s Afraid of Howard Schultz? Just About Everyone, and They’re Right to Be (Nick Gillespie, Reason)
◆ Kamala Harris’s Choices (Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker)
◆ At Least 30 People Allege Abuse by This Baton Rouge Ex-priest: How One Survivor Turned His Life Around (Andrea Gallo, The Advocate)
◆ In Polarized Washington, a Democrat Anchors Bipartisan Friendships in Faith (Jack Jenkins, Religion News Service)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily, and will be testing some formats throughout the new year. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
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The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the driest place on Earth, a parched rockscape whose inner core supports zero animal or plant life. Only a few hearty species of lichen, algae, fungi, and bacteria can survive there—mostly by clinging to mineral and salt deposits that concentrate moisture for them. Still, it’s a precarious life, and these microbes often enter states of suspended animation during dry spells, waking up only when they have enough water to get by.
So when a few rainstorms swept through the Atacama recently, drenching some places for the first time in recorded history, it looked like a great opportunity for the microbes. Deserts often bloom at such times, and the periphery of the Atacama (which can support a little plant life) was no exception: It exploded with wildflowers. A similar blossoming seemed likely for the microbes in the core: They could drink their fill at last and multiply like mad.
Things didn’t quite work out that way. What should have been a blessing turned into a massacre, as the excess water overwhelmed the microbes and burst their membranes open—an unexpected twist that could have deep implications for life on Mars and other planets.
The Atacama has been arid for 150 million years, making it the oldest desert on Earth. Its utter lack of rain can be traced to a perfect storm of geographic factors. A cold current in the nearby Pacific Ocean creates a permanent temperature inversion offshore, which discourages rainclouds from forming. The desert also lies in a valley that’s wedged between the Andes Mountains on the east and the Chilean Coastal Range on the west. These mountains form a double “rain shadow” and block moisture from reaching the Atacama from either side. The desert’s driest point, the Yungay region, receives fewer than 0.04 inches (or 1 millimeter) of rain a year. Death Valley in California gets 50 times more rain annually, and even the driest stretch ever recorded there still averaged 0.2 inches a year.
[Read: Climate change is hurting desert life]
That’s why the recent rainstorms in the Atacama—two in 2015 and one in 2017—were so startling. They left behind standing lagoons, some of which glowed a lurid yellow-green from the high concentration of dissolved mineral. Nothing like this had happened in Yungay since at least the days of Columbus, and possibly much earlier. No one quite knows what caused the freak storms, but climate change is a likely culprit, as the cold sea currents have been disrupted recently. This allowed a bank of rainclouds to form over the Pacific Ocean. The clouds then plowed over the Chilean Coastal Range and dumped water onto Yungay and surrounding areas.
Five months after the June 2017 storm, a group of scientists led by Armando Azua-Bustos, a microbiologist at the Universidad Autónoma de Chile, and Alberto Fairén, a planetary scientist at Cornell University, visited the Atacama to sample three lagoons. They wanted to study the microbes that had gotten swept into them and document how well they were handling this precious influx of water.
Not very well, it turned out. As detailed in a recent paper, the scientists found that the majority of microbes normally present in the soil had been wiped out—14 of 16 species in one lagoon (88 percent), and 12 of 16 in the others (75 percent)—leaving behind just a handful of survivors. On a local scale, the rains were every bit as devastating as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, which killed off 70 to 80 percent of species globally.
The scientists traced this massacre back to the very thing that allows the microbes to survive in the Atacama: their ability to hoard water. Under normal conditions, this miserliness pays off. But when faced with a glut of water, they can’t turn off their molecular machinery and say when. They keep guzzling and guzzling, until they burst from internal pressure. Azua-Bustos and Fairén’s team found evidence of this in the lagoons, which had enzymes and other organic bits floating around in them—the exploded guts of dead microbes.
Water in the Atacama, then, plays a paradoxical role: It’s both the limiting factor for life as well as the cause of local extinctions. And while the death of some bacteria and algae might not seem like a big deal, these microbes are actually famous in some circles as analogues for life on Mars.
We don’t know whether Mars ever had life, but it seemed like a promising habitat for its first billion years, with vast liquid oceans and plenty of mineral nutrients—not much different than Earth. One billion years probably wasn’t enough time for multicellular life to arise, but Martian microbes were a real possibility.
Starting around 3.5 billion years ago, however, our planetary cousin went through a severe drying-out and began to lose its water. Some was sucked deep underground, and most of the rest got dissected into H2 and O through various chemical reactions. Eventually these processes turned most of Mars’s surface into one giant Atacama Desert, forbiddingly dry and dotted with mineral deposits. NASA in fact uses the Atacama landscape to test rovers and other equipment for Mars missions.
But there’s an important wrinkle here. The great drying-out didn’t happen instantly; it took eons. And during the transition, when Mars was fairly parched but still had some liquid water, it experienced floods that would have made Noah blanch. We can see evidence of them on the surface of Mars today: The dry riverbed channels and alluvial fans that those floods left behind are the largest in the solar system.
This tumultuous state—a hyper-dry climate, punctuated by massive washouts—would have been catastrophic for life on Mars. The slow drying-out would have choked off the vast majority of microbes, grinding them into dust. Any that managed to pull through, scientists have argued, probably would have resembled those in the Atacama today: water-hoarders clinging to oases of mineral deposits in a vast red desert.
But if Martian microbes did resemble their Atacama counterparts, then the washouts probably finished them off, swelling them with water and bursting them like balloons. After a certain point, in other words, Mars might have been too wet to sustain the life that evolved there.
[Read: The search for alien life begins in Earth’s oldest desert]
It’s possible, of course, that a few lucky pockets on Mars escaped flooding entirely, allowing microbes there to survive until today. But if so, Azua-Bustos and Fairén point out, our current approach to finding these holdouts could be doomed to fail. NASA sent the famed Viking lander to Mars in 1976, for example, largely to search for life there. To this end, the lander scooped up several soil samples for analysis—and immediately doused them with water. Viking might have come up empty anyway, but given the Atacama results, it also might have killed off the very thing it was looking for.
What applies to Mars applies to other worlds as well. Over the next decade, several new space telescopes will expand the hunt for life beyond our solar system, to planets orbiting distant stars. Scientists are especially keen to find planets that have liquid water, since as far as we know, liquid water is essential to life.
But that statement might need qualification. Water can give life, certainly. As planets change, however, and life evolves in tandem, it can also snatch life away.
Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, doesn’t eat for 22 hours of the day, and sometimes not at all. Over the weekend he tweeted that he’d been “playing with fasting for some time,” regularly eating all of his daily calories at dinner and occasionally going water-only for days on end. In many cases, severe and arbitrary food restriction might be called an eating disorder. And while researchers are hopeful that some types of fasts may be beneficial to people’s health, plenty of tech plutocrats have embraced extreme forms of the practice as a productivity hack.
Dorsey’s diet was widely criticized on the website he runs, but Silicon Valley has an obsession with food that goes far beyond the endorsement of questionable personal-health choices. Intermittent fasting is a type of biohacking, a term that includes productivity-honing behaviors popular among Silicon Valley power players for their supposed ability to focus a person’s energy to work longer and more efficiently. To enhance themselves personally, tech leaders have adopted everything from specially engineered nutrition shakes to gut-bacteria fecal tests.
[Read: The harder, better, faster, stronger language of dieting]
What and when most people choose to eat is no one’s business but their own, but someone like Dorsey isn’t most people: He leads a platform with hundreds of millions of active users, built for the quick, contextless dissemination of ideas. As biohacking’s most powerful disciples become more committed and more evangelical, what does that portend for the vast workforces they employ, and for the far larger populations whose lives are affected by their products and policies?
Intermittent fasting, like most health-and-wellness behaviors, can exist anywhere on a spectrum that runs from very dangerous to potentially beneficial, depending on who’s doing it and how it’s implemented. Fasting in one form or another has been a part of human eating behavior for millennia, and although scientific research on it is still preliminary, early studies suggest it might help reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. For people with eating issues, though, fasting can be a very risky trigger for anorexia or bulimia. For most people, exploring Dorsey’s lengthy, everyday fasts without oversight from a doctor or nutritionist is probably unwise. (Dorsey and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
On his Twitter account, Dorsey doesn’t mention anything about long-term disease risk or even weight loss, which is a purported benefit of fasting that’s gained the practice a lot of attention over the past several years, including from celebrities such as Kourtney Kardashian and Chris Pratt. Instead, Dorsey focuses on how much time slows down when he hasn’t eaten anything. Considering the demands of his job, it’s not surprising that a longer day would be important to him: Silicon Valley is, by and large, always looking to find a way to do a little bit more work. The tech industry also employs a younger-than-average workforce, full of burned-out Millennials who are expected to performatively hustle in order to curry professional favor and advance their career, creating what’s potentially an ideal environment for unhealthy “health” practices to proliferate.
Whether any Silicon Valley tech companies have implemented biohacking behaviors as an expectation for their employees is hard to know, but the industry itself produces a lot of diet programs and products, and it has a history of coercive eating policies for its workforce. Many big tech companies have on-site employee cafeterias that provide food for free or reduced cost. “By helping your employees make healthier decisions, your business benefits with reduced absenteeism and more productive energy,” wrote Andrea Loubier, the CEO of Mailbird, in a 2017 op-ed that encouraged other tech execs to follow Google’s lead and provide employees with certain types of food in-house, as well as with calorie-counting information. These policies are usually framed as a win-win for employers and their workforce—who doesn’t want a free lunch?—but in the end, they still tend to keep employees close to their desk and working as much as possible.
[Read: The myth of the cool office]
For companies that can’t build on-site food service for their employees, it’s possible to take a strong-arm approach to moderating their workforce’s diet and physical activity in other ways. Office wellness programs are popular and widespread even outside of the tech sector, with many of them featuring things such as office weight-loss challenges that encourage employees to restrict their eating for fun and prizes. As the journalist Angela Lashbrook argues, these programs can act as employer surveillance masquerading as health. “It’s perfectly legal to increase health-care premiums based on the failure of a customer or their partner to achieve certain benchmarks in an insurance-affiliated wellness program,” she writes.
In collecting detailed data about weight or physical activity, workplace wellness takes another step toward punishing failures that don’t necessarily show up in the quality of a person’s work, helping make an ever larger portion of a person’s existence fodder for performance reviews.
Certainly, it’s possible for executives to keep their personal-health practices separate from what they expect of others. But tech as a business sector has long been notorious for its bad boundaries between the personal and the professional. Silicon Valley can give the impression that all personal choices should be made for the end goal of doing ever more work and generating ever more money for founders or venture capitalists, which is part of why so many people find it unnerving to watch a man with so many employees decide that not eating is a valuable practice. If everyone above you on the organizational chart refuses to eat in order to squeeze a little more work out of an already long day, consuming your sad desk salad might be a little higher-stakes than you thought. The person who signs your paychecks might be watching.
Many conservative Christian denominations have spent the past several years reckoning with their legacy of white supremacy. The darkest parts of American history are full of Christian characters, including scores of pastors and theologians. A number of still-existing denominations, among them the Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church in America, were first formed to defend slavery. Some well-respected Christian scholars dedicated their lives to rationalizing racial hierarchies with the Bible. And terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan claimed an explicitly Protestant identity, with some pastors openly supporting their cause.
To reconcile this past, contemporary pastors have gathered at annual conventions to pass numerous resolutions opposing racism, albeit with occasional stumbles. A flagship Southern Baptist seminary published a report in late 2018 detailing its own long history of support for slavery and Jim Crow policies. “We knew, and we could not fail to know, that slavery and deep racism were in the story,” wrote R. Albert Mohler Jr., the seminary’s president. “We comforted ourselves that we could know this, but since these events were so far behind us, we could move on without awkward and embarrassing investigations and conversations.” The denomination’s first apology for its slavery-promoting past came in 1995.
Repenting for the sins of forefathers is much easier than recognizing the racism embedded in religious institutions and cultures today, however. In The Color of Compromise, the writer Jemar Tisby challenges the notion that white supremacy is merely a legacy, and not a present reality, in the church. “Christian complicity with racism in the 21st century looks different than complicity with racism in the past,” he argues. “It looks like Christians responding to black lives matter with the phrase all lives matter. It looks like Christians consistently supporting a president whose racism has been on display for decades.” Perhaps, he writes, “Christian complicity in racism has not changed much after all.” While Tisby is nominally writing for the church at large, he is specifically focused on its conservatives—“Bible-believing” Christians who come out of traditional theological backgrounds similar to his own.
(Zondervan)A broad range of conservative Christian leaders, such as Mohler, apparently yearn to repent for their racist inheritance. Their failures—in the eyes of Tisby, who is part of an emerging generation of activists in the church—illustrate how people who think in Bible verses and call one another “brother” and “sister” sometimes misunderstand the issue of racism. This book is partly an attempt to clarify what racism actually means. But ultimately, the writer’s goal is larger. Tisby calls on his fellow Christians to take full responsibility for their complicity in white supremacy, and to commit to changing America.
While Tisby’s take on this topic is not exactly new, it is timely: The racial divide within American Christianity has been exacerbated under Donald Trump. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, white evangelical Protestants have consistently favored the president since he was elected, with roughly 72 percent of them expressing support in the fall of 2018.
By contrast, three-quarters of black Protestants said they viewed him unfavorably in the same poll. Black Christians expressed despair when the president was elected, both because of his racist rhetoric and past and because they felt ignored and even antagonized by their white peers. Evidence suggests that some have left majority-white churches. And yet, prominent white Christian leaders have celebrated Trump’s presidency: One Texas church, First Baptist Church of Dallas, composed and premiered an original “Make America Great Again” hymn in the summer of 2017.
Tisby has spent years working to start conversations among white Christians about racism. He runs a blog about the black Christian experience and hosts a podcast, Pass the Mic, on the same subject. His writing has been published widely in popular outlets, and he speaks frequently on racial reconciliation at churches and universities. More recently, however, Tisby has leaned on history to help him in his work against racism. After earning his seminary degree, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program in history at the University of Mississippi, focusing on race, religion, and social movements in the 20th century. In The Color of Compromise, he seems to see history primarily as a tool of persuasion and advocacy. “Paradoxically, although this is a book about the past,” he writes, “it is really about the future of the American church.”
Tisby’s historical frame is helpful in another way: It offers white conservative Christians language for talking about racism in a way they can accept and understand. Tisby invites these readers to walk with him through America’s past, crafting a narrative that feels safely apolitical and can be understood with scholarly remove. As Tisby gets closer to the present, however, he shows that the sins of the past may not be so different from those of today.
Instead of simply chronicling the horrors of racism, Tisby shows white Christians’ indifference toward it. In the lead-up to the Civil War, Tisby writes, the influential theologian James Henley Thornwell framed slavery as a “political” issue that fell beyond Christianity’s moral ambit. In Thornwell’s worldview, the church could “merely assert what the Bible teaches,” according to Tisby, and “must remain silent on that which the Bible is silent.”
This worldview shows up throughout The Color of Compassion. As the civil-rights movement began taking shape in the 1950s and ’60s, “people of faith may not have given their full support to the most extreme racists,” Tisby says, “but neither did they oppose racists outright or openly disagree with racist objectives.” Six decades later, closer to the present tense, Black Lives Matter activists protested police violence toward African Americans. “Many white Christians viewed the killings … as isolated events,” Tisby writes. “They could not understand why black people and other keen observers had such strong reactions.”
Because many traditions teach that salvation is personal and individualized, Tisby argues, some Christians often frame racism as a matter of individual sin rather than systemic bias. This can engender blindness or skepticism toward theories of structural racism, which help explain the vast gaps between white and black Americans in wealth, educational outcomes, and rates of incarceration. “Many white Christians wrongly assume that racism only includes overt acts, such as calling someone the ‘n-word’ or expressly excluding black people from groups or organizations,” Tisby writes. In his view, this is wildly insufficient: “Being complicit [in racism] only requires a muted response in the face of injustice or uncritical support of the status quo.”
Tisby calls on “Bible-believing Christians” to educate themselves about racism, develop interracial relationships, and commit to supporting activism against racism. He encourages churches to distribute reparations from their collections, to declare a “year of Jubilee” for black members, or to fund black-led church plants. Perhaps most challengingly, he calls for firm resolve on race-related issues that some consider strictly personal or politically inflammatory: Take down Confederate monuments. Don’t send kids to schools that have become segregated through zoning codes or high tuition. Oppose police violence toward people of color. And don’t support a president who has “obvious racist tendencies.”
As Tisby himself acknowledges, these recommendations might seem painfully obvious to some, especially his activist peers. But Tisby’s ideal readers may be the people who are ready to pick up a book about Christianity and racism and be challenged by what they read. Step-by-step instructions for reducing racism are useful only if they reach people who don’t already agree with Tisby’s ideas.
In the final anecdote included in the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s report, the authors detail a 1961 visit to the seminary by Martin Luther King Jr. Hundreds of students crowded into the campus chapel to hear him speak; a group of them later called on the city’s mayor to desegregate its restaurants. Members of white churches around the South were appalled. White southerners wrote letters to protest King’s appearance and voted to withhold funds from the institution. Eventually, the school’s president, Duke McCall, apologized for King’s visit.
The authors of the 2018 report describe McCall as a “moderate” who wanted to maintain the “honorable middle ground” on civil rights and segregation. This is where the seminary report ends—without extending the analysis to the current day. Then, as now, white Christians were willing to consider issues of racism, but wanted to do so with the comfortable backing of consensus. Then, as now, activists in the church were sidelined: Tisby writes that he and his peers are often called divisive, offensive, radical, misguided, and more.
Fifty-five years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and 154 years after the end of slavery, it is true that racial dynamics are different in America, and within the American church. Still, the patterns of history, and the tug of moderation, remain the same. That’s where this book offers value: Tisby is the rare writer on race who could have impact in rooms where progressive consensus cannot be assumed.
After just experiencing the warmest December on record, much of Australia is still enduring a sweltering January, with many new high-temperature records being set. The brutal heat waves have resulted in health warnings being issued, telling residents to stay indoors and to take special notice of animals in their care. Overtaxed power grids have failed several times, leaving thousands without power; wildfires are burning in Tasmania; and wild animals are suffering as watering holes dry up. Last week, the town of Port Augusta set a new record high of 121 degrees Fahrenheit (49.5 degrees Celsius). Forecasts have the heat lasting at least through the end of January, possibly leading to yet another hottest-month record.
Melissa Herrington, artist
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain forever altered and scandalized the established art world, challenging the very definition of art. But what if the founding father of conceptual art was actually a woman? Recent speculation is that Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the forgotten pioneering feminist, may be responsible for the most significant work of art of the 20th century.
Cynthia Herrup, history and law professor, USC
For duration, extent of damage, and betrayal of trust, no scandal matches the Catholic Church’s exploitation of authority over sexuality.
Jenna Glass, author, The Women’s War
Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse of more than 300 young gymnasts is a crime, not a scandal. But the massive cover-up; the length of time it went on; and the number of adults who made excuses, ignored complaints, and chose to protect institutions instead of the gymnasts? That’s the biggest sports scandal ever.
Graham RoumieuKitty Kelley, biographer
A scandal is a soul-destroying event that rains down shame and disgrace. The most recent moral repugnancy is the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was dismembered in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul last year.
Kristin Hahn, writer and producer, Dumplin’, and author, In Search of Grace
Drag queens being outlawed in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy)—because a good drag show does the Lord’s work by celebrating the feminine in all of us.
Reader ResponsesLeslie Ellen Brown, Spring Mills, Pa.
The bargain of 1877 between supporters of the Republican presidential candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Southern industrialists, restoring Southern power to the federal government.
Roger L. Albin, Ann Arbor, Mich.
The South Sea Bubble of 1720 was probably the first major financial crisis. It had everything: massive overvaluation of a questionable asset, dramatic collapse with deleterious systemic consequences, insider trading, bribery, and ineffectual subsequent regulation. We never learn.
Graham RoumieuMaida Follini, Halifax, Nova Scotia
During and after his term as vice president, Aaron Burr conspired with the British to set up an independent country in the southwestern United States and parts of what is now Mexico. He was arrested for treason, but found not guilty.
Sanjiv Maheshwari, New Delhi, India
The Opium Wars, which Britain and France waged against China in the mid-19th century, with the aim of continuing to sell opium to the Chinese people. In the process, the imperial summer palace in Beijing was burned, and the Chinese ultimately ceded Hong Kong to Britain. The Chinese recall this period in their history as the “century of humiliation.”
Elinor Adams, Phoenix, Ariz.
The affair between Alexander Hamilton and Maria Reynolds created the first major sex scandal in the U.S., and completely destroyed Hamilton’s political career.
Richard Marcovitz, Toronto, Ontario
The Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish French army captain was wrongly convicted of espionage. He was partially exonerated after political and intellectual leaders convinced many of their countrymen that Dreyfus was innocent—and that members of the ethnic majority should not collude to blame a problem on a member of a minority group.
Harvey Karten, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Peter Minuit’s conning the Lenape tribe in 1626 to sell Manhattan Island for 60 guilders’ worth of trade goods, or no more than $15,000 in today’s dollars. The value of real estate across Manhattan today is more than $1 trillion.
Want to see your name on this page? Email bigquestion@theatlantic.com with your response to the question for our May issue: What is the greatest act of courage?
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah—Three weeks after the initial airing of Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly, the 2019 Sundance Film Festival saw the premieres of two separate documentaries that chronicle previously reported allegations of sexual abuse. The director Ursula Macfarlane’s Untouchable threads together numerous accounts of the film mogul Harvey Weinstein’s alleged systematized predation. Leaving Neverland, a two-part docuseries from the director Dan Reed, follows two men as they attempt to reconcile the effect that the late Michael Jackson’s alleged abuse has had on their lives. Though they vary in form and aesthetic sensibility, both new productions are jarring works that call attention to the wide-ranging effects of alleged sexual abuse and the silence that often follows it.
The men implicated in all three recent productions repeatedly denied allegations of abuse and, in some cases, intimidated alleged victims before they could speak out. But the #MeToo-era documentary is a fraught genre for reasons that extend beyond the ire of the accused (or in Jackson’s case, an estate). To captivate audiences and shift public perception, a documentary must offer new reportage, deep analysis, or a freshly cohesive vision of its subject. Moving viewers with stories of sexual assault—without veering into sensationalism or kitsch—is a delicate task. It requires thoughtful aesthetic pairing, compassionate interviewing, extensive research, and a thorough understanding of how systemic abuse can work. There are many ways to err.
Perhaps the most common, and most troubling, pitfall of the sexual-misconduct documentary is the extraordinary emotional excavation it demands of alleged victims. The director dream hampton’s Surviving R. Kelly, for example, is a powerful six-hour series characterized largely by gut-wrenching testimony from women who say that the singer abused them mentally, physically, and sexually. Many of them are visibly shaken as they speak. At times, such as when Asante McGee breaks down upon visiting the house where she alleges Kelly held her hostage, the footage can feel nearly impossible to stomach—particularly when contrasted with the more relaxed tone of others who appear in the documentary: the men who have supported Kelly throughout his career.
Macfarlane’s Untouchable relies on similarly strenuous labor from women who accuse Weinstein of assaulting them (and on the symbolism of having premiered at Sundance, where the actress Rose McGowan alleges Weinstein raped her in 1997). The women featured in the documentary recount stories that span decades, tearily indicting themselves in front of the camera for having been ensnared by Weinstein’s alleged traps. But where Surviving R. Kelly takes care to contextualize the onscreen accounts with expert testimony from psychologists and social scientists who explain foundational concepts such as grooming and social isolation, Untouchable doesn’t grant its sources that same narrative courtesy. It provides no clear reminder that these women were not foolish or negligent to have been around Weinstein, or that many serial abusers disarm their victims with power, charisma, or force. Without that kind of intra-textual framing from the filmmakers, the women’s testimonies are particularly vulnerable to misinterpretation by those viewers less familiar with the psychological and social ramifications of abuse.
Leaving Neverland, however, is a deeply empathetic work. Its two main subjects, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, now in their late 30s and early 40s, respectively, speak with candor and clarity throughout the four-hour documentary about meeting Jackson as children and being lured into his show-business orbit. They are remarkably self-possessed as they recount not just sexual abuse, but also the anguish of experiencing manipulation by a trusted figure. Both men repeat that Jackson was larger than life, that receiving attention from him made them feel unimaginably special. They allege that Jackson intentionally intermingled affection and abuse, referring to them as “best friend” or “little one” to keep them enamored of him even as he grew close to other boys. Their personal recounting is buttressed by archival footage, old photographs of the singer in their homes, and even copies of faxes he apparently sent to Robson, signed “apple head.”
Though Jackson’s alleged abuses have been reported since 1993, when he was first accused of child molestation, Leaving Neverland offers a striking new lens through which to see the late singer’s legacy: the effect it continues to have on those he allegedly groomed. The documentary is a thorough, brutal accounting of Robson’s and Safechuck’s psychological states both as children and as adults, attempting to name what they say happened to them. In that sense, it functions less as a work of journalism—or even a heated takedown of Jackson himself—and more as a thoughtful narrative rendering of the two alleged victims’ stories.
Both Robson and Safechuck have publicly defended Jackson against abuse accusations in the past, a detail that most detractors immediately reference when expressing skepticism about the men’s accounts. But Leaving Neverland meticulously explores the trauma that the men say kept them from acknowledging, even to themselves, the effects that Jackson’s alleged behavior had on their lives. (The film is also careful to note that both men only began to reckon with the alleged sexual abuse after the birth of their sons.) In a post-screening Q&A session at Sundance, Robson and Safechuck addressed the question that’s hovered over the project (and the lawsuits they filed against the Jackson estate, which were dismissed on technical grounds): Why now?
Robson, who says Jackson began abusing him when he was 7, noted that the law is one of two arenas in which victims can hope for their accounts to be taken seriously. The other, he suggested, is storytelling. “I’ve never had that opportunity to tell it in this detail, at this length, and for me the biggest hope [is] that it could offer some comfort to other survivors,” Robson said. “And hopefully by being able to tell the story in this detail and all the complexities, to try and raise some level—any level—of awareness for parents and for teachers and for anybody that’s responsible for children to make any level of impact on prevention.”
Safechuck, who says that he met Jackson when he was 10, spoke in a more quietly pointed tone: “It’s an act of fighting back, and the law is the stage for us to do that,” he said. “Those are the tools that we have as victims, so it’s an act for me to fight for the little James.”
Outside the theater, though, protesters waged a kind of counterattack. (The screening itself began late due to extended security measures.) Demonstrators stood bearing signs that characterized Leaving Neverland as mean-spirited propaganda: SEEK TRUTH THINK FOR YOURSELF, one read. Another quoted the late singer himself: LIES RUN SPRINTS BUT THE TRUTH RUNS MARATHONS. The Jackson estate, which has always defended the late singer against allegations of abuse, issued a statement referring to the documentary as a “public lynching,” language that recalls defenses of both R. Kelly and the embattled Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Protesters outside a screening of Leaving Neverland (Hannah Giorgis)Jackson supporters’ public objections to Leaving Neverland mirror the protests that arose, particularly in Chicago, following the premiere of Surviving R. Kelly. Kelly celebrated his birthday at a crowded nightclub that same weekend and referred to the docuseries as the product of a “vendetta” against him. Fans took to the streets to express their continued admiration for the singer, even as the documentary gained national attention. (Many also gathered under the umbrella #MuteRKelly to call for the music industry to abandon him.) Even the heightened security attention at the Salt Lake City showing felt eerily familiar: An early screening of Surviving R. Kelly had been evacuated following a gun threat.
That threat ultimately didn’t derail Surviving R. Kelly from being aired, and the documentary has since spurred significant backlash against the singer. In the time since its release, he’s been dropped by his label, RCA Records; denounced by numerous former collaborators; and become the subject of criminal investigations. He’s also seen his radio play diminish, which DJs and program directors have attributed to the documentary’s influence. Though organizers and the film’s creators continue to push for further accountability from the artist and those who have reportedly enabled him, the documentary’s impact on R. Kelly’s legacy and on call-ins to sexual-assault-reporting hotlines is undeniable.
Untouchable will likely have a more questionable impact on the Weinstein story. Allegations against Weinstein are both recent and widely reported; for the film to serve as a meaningful addition to the larger discussion of his behavior, it likely would have needed to be a stronger visual project. Its uncomfortably dramatic score and soft-focus re-creations of alleged encounters (including numerous fuzzy shots of hotel hallways) lend the documentary the tone of a Cold Case Files episode. The dissonance between the women’s emotional testimony and the film’s aesthetic choices is unfortunate, a missed opportunity to have expanded upon the existing Weinstein reportage with nuance and care. (Worth noting, however, is the documentary’s most affecting narrative choice: how centrally it foregrounds testimony from Hope Exiner D’Amore, a former University of Buffalo student who says that Weinstein raped her in a New York City hotel decades ago, an allegation that points to a pattern of behavior that would have begun well before his Miramax empire.)
Of these projects, Leaving Neverland, which is set to premiere on HBO in the spring, most rigorously and compassionately captures its chosen subject. For viewers, especially the late singer’s most ardent fans, it will undoubtedly be difficult to process. But in devoting time to not just the explication of the trauma that Robson and Safechuck say they suffered but also their ongoing process of recovery, the documentary avoids the missteps of both Surviving R. Kelly and Untouchable. The alleged victims do not simply bare their difficult stories for audiences to gawk at; they are given space to insist that a path forward exists. Or, as Robson said, “I’m hoping that those wounds will turn into new opportunities for healing.”
It’s almost too easy to satirize physical education, better known by its eye-roll-inducing abbreviation P.E. From Clueless to Superbad to Spiderman: Homecoming, parodies of gym class are a pop-culture darling. Perhaps that’s because they speak to one of America’s fundamental truths: For many kids, P.E. is terrible.
A recent working paper focused on a massive P.E. initiative in Texas captures this reality. Analyzing data out of the state’s Texas Fitness Now program—a $37 million endeavor to improve middle schoolers’ fitness, academic achievement, and behavior by requiring them to participate in P.E. every day—the researchers concluded that the daily mandate didn’t have any positive impact on kids’ health or educational outcome. On the contrary: They found that the program, which ran from 2007 to 2011, actually had detrimental effects, correlating with an uptick in discipline and absence rates.
As for why this particular P.E. program was counterproductive, Analisa Packham, an economics professor at Miami University in Ohio who co-authored the study, points to bullying as one potential reason. Students are more likely to be bullied in middle school than at any other point in their academic careers, and P.E. presents a particularly ripe opportunity for abuse, whether because the class forces them to use a locker room, where adult supervision is limited, or because it facilitates the teasing of overweight or unathletic kids.
[Read: The cost of cutting high-school athletics]
The paper posits that by subjecting participants—namely low-income kids, as the Fitness Now grants targeted campuses serving disadvantaged populations—to these circumstances on a daily basis, the P.E. requirement made students less inclined to go to school. “These adolescents were not enjoying the daily P.E. requirements and would’ve rather skipped school,” suggests Packham, who as an economist has focused her research on the outcomes of health programs. The Fitness Now program required that students participate in at least 30 minutes of physical education every school day. Schools that took part in the grant received $10,000 on average to help improve their P.E. programs by adding classes, for example, or hiring coaches and fitness instructors. They also used the money to purchase equipment such as stopwatches, jump ropes, and free weights.
According to the study, the program resulted in a roughly 16 percent increase in the number of disciplinary actions for each student. The study also found that the proportion of misbehaving students went up by more than 7 percent.
The findings of the study, which has yet to be published in an academic journal, are limited in scope. Still, the new paper adds much-needed nuance to the body of research that has evaluated the effectiveness of various approaches to P.E., complicating the findings of studies that generally assert the importance of school policies that encourage regular opportunities for physical activity.
It’s hard to argue that a given P.E. program is anything but well intended, particularly when considering that children spend most of their waking hours—and meals—at school, and that childhood obesity is a national crisis. But the kind of strategy taken by many of the Fitness Now schools may not be the most effective way to achieve the purported goals.
To be effective, a P.E. program typically needs to be multifaceted and holistic, suggests a 2013 book on America’s physical-education landscape that was co-edited by Harold Kohl, a professor of kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas at Austin. That might involve healthy-living and nutrition classes, parent education, and frequent opportunities for unstructured play—all on top of more conventional “gym class.” This may help explain why, for example, one 2012 study based on data from the National Survey of Children’s Health found that required P.E. alone generally doesn’t have any noteworthy impact on boys’ physical-activity levels or obesity, though it did have a marginal impact on girls’. Similarly, an earlier 2015 study on Texas’s Fitness Now program found it to be largely ineffective, resulting in slight improvements to kids’ fitness skills and having no impact on BMI or academic achievement.
The results of Packham’s paper on the Fitness Now program support the basic takeaway that the design of P.E. courses is what’s most consequential, and they hint at two interconnected factors that experts suggest tend to undermine the impact of such curricula. For one, P.E. programs often rely on a superficial notion of gym class—conceiving of physical activity as little more than a timed run around the track, for example, or a game of kickball—and this results in worse offerings. And then, when students feel forced to take these basic offerings, they may resent the classes more than they would otherwise. “Older kids have already formed these important eating and exercising habits, and changing their daily decisions is more complicated than just providing money for jump ropes,” Packham says.
Despite greater recognition of the academic benefits of physical activities—including guidelines from agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stressing that kids should get at least an hour of such activities a day—schools began to deprioritize P.E. about two decades ago, and the cuts have persisted in many cases, suggests Kohl. Accompanying this shift has been a movement away from casual activities such as recess, which experts argue is one of the more effective means of promoting children’s physical health. An immense body of research demonstrates the positive benefits of increased recess time, which schools started to cut after No Child Left Behind was signed into law, because of the policy’s emphasis on academic subjects such as reading and math.
Justin Cahill, a veteran P.E. educator who’s taught at an Atlanta-area private school for the past decade or so, stresses that it’s the typical application of physical education rather than the fundamental concept that results in bad outcomes. Until the past few years, P.E. classes tended to focus on kids’ acquisition of skills, such as dribbling a ball, and the fulfillment of universal benchmarks, such as the ability to run around a track three times within some specific amount of time. This approach, he says, “breeds stagnation and disinterest—the kids are like, ‘Yeah, this is ridiculous.’” It can also, as Packham’s study suggests, breed resentment: After all, in this “old school” version of P.E., certain kids are bound to struggle.
Cahill maintains that many P.E. programs are high caliber, successful in both engaging students and producing positive health and wellness outcomes. Echoing the findings outlined in Kohl’s book, he says that positive results are contingent on a multifaceted and holistic design—what he defines as programs that inspire children to exercise without realizing they’re exercising, that simply ensure they’re constantly moving, during recess, frequent “brain breaks” to get out “the sillies,” morning jogs, and, yes, regular P.E. class. Positive results are also contingent on experienced, empathetic P.E. teachers—those who know to modify a curriculum to meet a certain student’s needs, and to give kudos to that child who can’t run around the track. After all, research shows that people can get a good workout even when walking, and the more important thing is to create a healthy relationship with exercise that can last for decades.
Cahill’s own observations at annual conferences—and in his Facebook group for physical-education teachers across the country looking to exchange research on best practices and their own anecdotal advice—make him confident that P.E.’s reputation will improve in the years ahead. “I think P.E. is in a very good place right now,” he says, comparing it with the norm of earlier decades, and even of the early 2000s, after the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. “Teachers are enlightened. The arrow is flipped.”
Still, even if P.E.’s bright spots are evolving into the status quo, both Kohl and Packham argue that P.E. has been scapegoated for public-health problems concerning children, including obesity. “It’s been a false flag that we’ve only looked at P.E.,” Kohl says, “when in fact it’s not the only way that kids can get physical activity.
“By making kids sit and be quiet and learn rather than allowing them to be physically active, we may actually be holding their test scores down,” Kohl continues. “We may be kidding ourselves by making kids sit in classrooms all the time.” For Kohl, the ideal P.E. program would still be five days a week—but unlike the Texas requirement, it would be more focused on building active recess periods into the day and include opportunities before and after school to, say, ride one’s bicycle or walk to and from school and participate in sports.
PARK CITY, Utah—For more than six years, the former Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones led an investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs after 9/11, sifting through thousands of pages documenting torture, abuses of power, and the lack of accountability during the George W. Bush administration. But when Jones talks about his experience, he doesn’t come off as a cynic about the United States. “Over the years, you travel a lot, you talk to a lot of foreign governments, you talk to a lot of citizens,” he said Monday at the Sundance Film Festival, reflecting on a career that also included a stint as an international FBI agent. The United States is “a beacon, whether you want us to be or not … The building of post–World War II institutions, we’re responsible for that. In the War on Terror, we slipped.”
Jones is the subject of a new film written and directed by Scott Z. Burns called The Report, which debuted at Sundance on January 26 and has already been acquired by Amazon for a reported $14 million. A frequent collaborator of Steven Soderbergh, Burns is best-known for his meticulous, fact-based screenplays for films including The Informant! and Contagion. In his new movie, Burns takes Jones’s 6,700-page report and somehow boils it down to a comprehensible narrative. Adam Driver stars as Jones, while Annette Bening plays his boss, Senator Dianne Feinstein. Burns and Jones spoke with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in Park City, Utah, on Monday about the making of the film, the delicate political lines it crosses, and the Obama administration’s role in trying to suppress the report.
What Jones uncovered was that the CIA had long misrepresented the success of its “enhanced-interrogation procedures,” which some 119 prisoners were subjected to during the Bush era. The protocols—which included waterboarding, placing people in stress positions, sleep deprivation, and simulated burials—were devised by the Air Force psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, neither of whom had any prior experience with real interrogation. The psychologists said they had reverse engineered highly specific military training designed to prepare soldiers for being questioned as prisoners of war, and claimed that the process was scientific. In reality, as Jones found, enhanced interrogation never secured any crucial information in the War on Terror and more often than not would produce false answers or cause prisoners to totally shut down. Because the prisoners “looked a little different, spoke a different language, it made it easier” for CIA agents to torture them, Jones said.
The desperation for information post–9/11, along with the CIA’s tradition of secrecy, even within the agency, helped keep the program alive without much scrutiny—Jones alleges that Bush himself was not briefed about it until 2006. “Bureaucracies get such a bad name, but they prevent bad ideas from” being carried out, Jones said. “In the CIA, you lack bureaucracy.”
Burns weaves a sense of compartmentalization into every part of the film. The scenes of torture themselves take place in secret black sites, blank environments where accountability is the last thing on anyone’s mind. CIA discussions, led by a composite character played by Maura Tierney (largely modeled on now–CIA Director Gina Haspel), are clinical and remote. Polite boardroom conversations with figures such as John Yoo (Pun Bandhu), who wrote the notorious “torture memos,” help justify waterboarding and abuse by quietly manipulating legal language. And Jones’s own quest to investigate takes place in a series of oppressive, often windowless office spaces, anonymous concrete buildings near the nation’s capital that resemble torture chambers.
The Report is just as tough on the Obama administration, presenting Barack Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough (Jon Hamm) and the CIA head John Brennan (Ted Levine) as infuriating roadblocks to Jones’s pursuit of the truth. McDonough, and by extension Obama, seeks mostly to leave the past in the past, acknowledging the CIA’s failures while redacting the most demoralizing parts of the report. Brennan, meanwhile, sticks to the company line that torture was effective at points, while admitting the agency’s overreach. “The allegiance that these people have to that organization supersedes a lot of things,” Burns said. “It’s not even clear to us … how widely known the enhanced-interrogation program was within the CIA. It was not something everybody knew [about]. But they tend to protect their own.”
[Read: Telling the truth about CIA torture]
Brennan has since become an icon among some for his voracious criticism of Donald Trump, who last year revoked the CIA lifer’s security clearance. “I love the fact that John Brennan and a lot of these people are leading the charge against what’s going on in our government right now,” Burns said. But the filmmaker still wanted The Report to be brutally honest, even if that meant taking aim at more beloved figures. “Most of [Brennan’s] dialogue in the movie I took from the CIA’s official response, from speeches he’s made, from his comments at the Council on Foreign Relations. I didn’t make that up,” Burns added.
In another pointed moment, The Report negatively references Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, which suggests that torture played a role in providing information that eventually led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. When asked about the movie, a slightly chagrined-looking Burns said he was a friend and admirer of Bigelow and the film’s screenwriter, Mark Boal, but that he felt the movie was rooted in a false CIA narrative. “Hollywood people don’t always fact-check stories,” he said. “I don’t think the narrative is accurate … But [Bigelow and Boal] were fed a narrative by very credible people … I think they made an amazing film about the story they were given.”
The pop-culture heroism of Zero Dark Thirty is at the root of what the real-life Jones is still looking to dispel (the movie’s version of Jones derides the TV show 24 for its frequent endorsement of ends-justify-the-means thinking). The Report is a film whose champion is not a brawny soldier or a secret agent, but a thorough, committed, pencil-pushing investigator, someone searching for moral clarity in a decade suffused with confusion and dread. “As [Jones is] trying to [compile] this report, this story [about the usefulness of torture] springs up in popular culture, and everybody embraces it. We all embraced it,” Burns said ruefully. His film aims to undo that narrative—thoughtfully, methodically, and quite powerfully.
During a recent appearance on Meet the Press, Tom Brokaw, the renowned television journalist, offered a number of observations about immigration that have proved intensely controversial. In the course of a panel discussion on the politics of immigration and why voters in states where immigrants are relatively rare are so deeply concerned about immigrant inflows, Brokaw attributed Republican misgivings about Latin American immigration to concerns about “the intermarriage that is going on and the cultures that are conflicting with each other.” Pointedly, he spoke of people who’d said to him, “Well, I don’t know whether I want brown grandbabies.”
Speaking extemporaneously is always fraught with peril; I’m sure I’ve been less than precise when doing the same thing. But Brokaw’s remarks, and the furious reaction they provoked, help illuminate why the subject of assimilation is so contentious.
First, consider the supposed threat of grandbabies of mixed ancestry. Though Brokaw’s claim that elderly white conservatives are deathly afraid of having brown grandbabies comports with the widespread belief that immigration restrictionists are chiefly motivated by fears of racial dilution, this line of argument has an obvious problem. High levels of intermarriage are an indication that putatively distinct cultural communities are not, in fact, in conflict with one another, and indeed that the boundaries separating them are blurring. Judging by the growing literature on “ethnic attrition,” a phenomenon in which individuals choose not to identify with an ethnic group despite having ancestors who belonged to that group—think of a third-generation American with three grandparents of Scots-Irish extraction and one born in Mexico who identifies as non-Hispanic white—it is quite possible that many of the brown grandbabies Brokaw’s interlocutors have in mind will grow up to identify as white, assuming they don’t already do so.
[Read: Should immigration require assimilation?]
Ethnic identity is not fixed, and my impression is that restrictionists are more concerned about immigrants and their descendants who don’t intermarry than about those who do. That is why restrictionists often observe that immigrant inflows replenish culturally distinct communities, which in turn tends to reduce intermarriage. For example, one could argue that the main difference between the Italian American and Mexican American populations is simply that while large-scale Italian immigration to the United States ended more than 80 years ago, the Mexican influx is of more recent vintage, and it has only slowed down in recent years as Mexico’s population has aged. An overwhelming majority of Italian Americans are native-born, and they don’t generally find themselves in social worlds dominated by recent Italian immigrants. Among Mexican Americans, by contrast, the immigrant influence remains strong enough to shape how almost all Mexican Americans are perceived, whether native- or foreign-born. This will likely change as Mexican immigration continues to diminish and as the rising second generation comes of age, a process that will take time.
Granted, Mexican Americans won’t necessarily blend into whiteness in exactly the same way Italian Americans did in an earlier era. For one, there is evidence that at least some multiracial individuals are willing to shift their ethnic identity in response to changing incentives, such as the availability of racial preferences in access to selective colleges and universities. But this is a case in which white grandparents might actually welcome the idea of their grandbabies identifying as brown, not lament it. All in all, the notion that immigration anxieties among whites are rooted in the fear that their descendants will have partial Latin American ancestry doesn’t strike me as terribly convincing. Far more potent, I suspect, is the fear that one’s descendants, regardless of ethnic admixture, will be outnumbered by people who have no particular affection for the American cultural inheritance.
Brokaw’s claims that “the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation” and, relatedly, that they ought to “make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities” were foolhardy generalizations. Rather than making an observation about how a certain group is perceived, as he did in the parable of the brown grandbabies, Brokaw was in this instance judging an entire group as guilty of not having done its part to fit in. Critics have observed, correctly, that second-generation Americans of Latin American origin overwhelmingly speak English as their dominant language, and a large proportion are in fact monolingual English speakers. In short, Brokaw is wrong to fret about whether Latin American immigrants are making sure their kids are learning English.
[Read: Losing identity during the refugee crisis]
But there is more to assimilation than mastering the English language. In an influential study of the Mexican American assimilation experience, the sociologists Richard Alba, Tomás Jiménez, and Helen Marrow observed that while some Mexican immigrants and their descendants were being incorporated into the American cultural mainstream—into the part of society where ethnic identity is seen as symbolic or optional, not as central to one’s way of life—others were becoming part of a marginalized minority, which suffers from persistently low levels of educational attainment and income. The difficulty is that it’s not how hard one works at assimilation that determines whether one is incorporated into the mainstream or consigned to the margins of American society.
In my book Melting Pot or Civil War?, I elaborated on how the skills and social networks immigrants develop in their native country can shape their assimilation trajectory in the United States. Mexico, for example, is an enormously diverse and unequal society. Some Mexican immigrants to the U.S. are highly educated bilingual professionals who enter the U.S. on skilled-worker visas to take jobs that are stimulating, remunerative, and might entail managerial responsibilities. Others are monolingual Spanish speakers with little in the way of formal education who toil in low-skill, low-wage occupations that don’t offer opportunities for advancement, many of whom don’t have work authorization.
Even if we were to limit our analysis to those Mexican immigrants who enter the United States lawfully, these class differences have enormous implications for where an immigrant might live, whom she might befriend, and how she’ll be seen by others, both inside and outside her ethnic community. If the yardstick for successful assimilation is whether an immigrant speaks English, has a diverse group of friends and loved ones that isn’t solely composed of co-ethnics, and is capable of supporting herself without relying on safety-net benefits or wage subsidies, there is no question that educated and affluent immigrants will be more likely to measure up than their disadvantaged counterparts. But is that because they’re working harder at assimilation, as Brokaw might have it, or because their disadvantaged peers have more to overcome? The evidence points to working-class immigrants trying at least as hard, even in the face of longer odds.
The strongest case for an immigration policy that would favor skilled immigrants over the less-skilled is not that working-class immigrants are any less virtuous than their better-educated counterparts. That’s plainly false. Nor are they somehow impervious to the charms of the English language. Rather, it is a case rooted in humility. At a time when the U.S. economy is growing more stratified, and when many observers are convinced that offshoring and automation will limit the future prospects of low-skill workers, regardless of their provenance, we ought to admit immigrants only if we are prepared to accept the responsibility of providing for them and their posterity in the face of rapid change. This is a responsibility that can be borne lightly in the case of skilled immigrants, who arrive positioned for economic success. The same can’t be said of the less-skilled, and that is the real dilemma at the heart of our immigration-policy debates.
On Monday, as Donald Trump’s administration ratcheted up its pressure on the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro, the White House wanted Maduro to know that sanctions on the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, might not be the end of the road.
“Look, the president has made it very clear on this matter that all options are on the table,” National-Security Adviser John Bolton said during a White House briefing. He also said that violence against not only U.S. personnel in Venezuela but also the National Assembly and Juan Guaidó, whom the U.S. has recognized as the country’s legitimate leader, would be “met with a significant response.”
Bolton declined to say quite what that meant. “We’re not going to define it, because we want the Venezuelan security forces to know how strongly we think that President Guaidó, the National Assembly, the opposition, and most importantly American personnel [should not be] harmed.” (In either an elaborate mind game or a stunning display of absent-mindedness, Bolton also allowed photographers to see a legal pad on which was scrawled, “5,000 troops to Colombia.”)
[Read: Trump almost always folds]
This was, on the one hand, a remarkably blunt intimation of military action, especially coming from the administration of Donald Trump, who ran for president while criticizing foreign military adventurism. On the other hand, it was yet another threat from an administration that has often failed to follow through on them. The question is whether Venezuela will be different, and whether the presence of veteran regime-change advocates such as Bolton and Elliott Abrams will make the difference.
As I’ve noted before, Trump has a long pattern of talking a big game and then caving. Most recently, he agreed to end the government shutdown on Friday with no promise of funding for his border wall, despite having previously said that he would not reopen the government unless Congress agreed to wall spending. (In earlier cases, Trump had folded on funding for the wall as well.) After vowing to do so, he decided not to brand China a currency manipulator. He said he’d go after the NRA on gun control, then didn’t. He announced he would withdraw funding to countries that voted against the U.S. at the UN, then didn’t. He has threatened full-scale military action against Iran, Syria, and North Korea, and has not made good on any of those threats.
Of course, Trump has sometimes followed through. He pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Paris climate accord. After several flinches, he eventually went forward with the trade war with China that he wanted. And his threats have on occasion appeared to work. He seems to have rattled NATO enough to make other nations worried about their contributions to the alliance. His threat of “fire and fury” in North Korea arguably helped bring Pyongyang to the negotiating table, though the material results since then have been basically nothing.
This is also not the first time Trump has threatened military action against Venezuela. In August 2017, he suggested it publicly, with little warning.
“They have many options for Venezuela—and, by the way, I’m not going to rule out a military option,” Trump said. “We’re all over the world, and we have troops all over the world in places that are very, very far away. Venezuela is not very far away, and the people are suffering, and they’re dying. We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary.”
Trump’s focus on Venezuela is perplexing. As my colleague Uri Friedman has written, the support for Maduro’s ouster is one of the least Trumpy things that the president has done, from the support for regime change to the international cooperation involved. The president has no obvious reason for being so focused on the country. Though he’s used Venezuela as a shorthand for what he sees as the failings of socialism, Trump has otherwise evinced little interest in Latin America outside of immigration.
So why would the threat that Bolton delivered Monday be any different? One factor is that Trump has just suffered a humiliating defeat at home, on the shutdown, that involved his folding. When presidents are stymied at home, they often look overseas for a chance to accomplish something quickly and without the pesky limitations of the legislature and judiciary. They often see a quick and decisive military action abroad as a good way to bolster sagging poll numbers, another constant Trump bugaboo. And while Trump has lamented American deployments to the faraway Middle East, he himself noted Venezuela’s proximity in 2017.
[Read: The White House’s move on Venezuela is the least Trumpian thing it’s done]
The other big factor is personnel. When Trump made his threat in 2017, he was flanked by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, and National-Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, all of whom looked on uneasily as he spoke. All three are gone now; Tillerson and McMaster were unceremoniously fired, and Haley left of her own accord. Tillerson has been replaced by the more hawkish Mike Pompeo, but the real changes are at the National Security Council. Bolton, McMaster’s replacement, has long favored regime change, most famously in Iraq.
In an echo of the case that George W. Bush’s administration, in which Bolton served, made for the Iraq War, Bolton warned of “Iran’s interest in Venezuela’s uranium deposits.” Assisting Bolton is another veteran of the Bush team, Elliott Abrams, who was just named special envoy for Venezuela. Abrams has ample experience in Latin American regime change dating back to the 1980s, when he helped support the Contras, a right-wing group attempting to topple the Nicaraguan government. (Abrams pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress in the Iran-Contra affair.)
The simple presence of Bolton and Abrams doesn’t mean that military intervention is a lock. Trump might decide against intervening directly for any number of reasons. Threats might also help erode support for Maduro, ending his regime and obviating a U.S. deployment. If Trump does follow through on threats of military force, though, the fresh faces around the president are likely to be a major factor.
“Why do you keep calling me with FaceTime instead of, you know, normal calls?” my Georgia Tech colleague Charles Isbell asked me the other week. “I don’t even mean to,” I answered. “For some reason, it just does it that way!”
We thought it was a nuisance that introduced confusion, ringing the phone in a different and unexpected way. But a serious FaceTime bug revealed on social media this week indicates that the service—Apple’s voice and video telephony software—could have been used for more nefarious ends.
The bug allows users to listen in on, or even watch, the person they are calling before that party has answered the call. It doesn’t even require any technical knowledge or esoteric hacking. As 9to5Mac showed, following a few simple steps to add the ringing call to a group chat is sufficient. Apple has taken the group-calling service offline until a software update can be provided. In the meantime, if you have an iPhone, it’s probably a good idea to turn off FaceTime until a fix arrives.
I can’t believe I’m saying that, but here we are. It’s not just significant because a giant, wealthy tech company introduced a bad and seemingly careless bug in the core software of the most important kind of computer on Earth. It’s also notable because the exposure, which is real, substantiates and mainstreams long-running paranoid fears about the inherent untrustworthiness of computer hardware. You know those paranoiacs who told you to cover your laptop camera with tape so hackers couldn’t spy on you? They were right, in a way: Your computer might be out to get you, even if it doesn’t mean to be.
Trustworthy is hardly a word many people use to characterize big tech these days. Facebook’s careless infrastructure upended democracy. Abuse is so rampant on Twitter and Instagram that those services feel designed to deliver harassment rather than updates from friends. Hacks, leaks, and other breaches of privacy, at companies from Facebook to Equifax, have become so common that it’s hard to believe that any digital information is secure. The tech economy seems designed to steal and resell data.
[Read: Embracing Apple’s boring future]
Apple has largely risen above this fray. The company makes most of its money from hardware sales, not advertising, so it has little reason to collect or cheat you out of your data. A 2014 leak of celebrities’ private iCloud photos offers an exception, but successful phishing attacks led to that breach, not a defect in Apple’s servers. Because Apple wants consumers to buy more phones more often, previous controversy has mostly been limited to accusations of planned obsolescence. Last year, Apple launched a low-cost battery-replacement program to make up for one such irritation. It would turn out to come at the worst time, as iPhone sales slowed, cratering Apple stock at the end of the year.
This FaceTime bug arrives on the heels of Apple’s apparent fall from grace, and that makes it a sign of something relatively new. Hardware and software systems are more complex than ever, and bugs are bound to arise. Most are accidental, the unexpected combination of instructions given by humans to computers, which do exactly what they are told. But given Apple’s billions of dollars in the bank and thousands of engineers, the public will lean hard on its promise of trust, which Tim Cook, the CEO, has used to distinguish his company from competitors such as Google and Facebook.
The paranoia will increase, too. Couldn’t the FaceTime exploit have been purposely added, as a backdoor for the government or for the lulz of a disgruntled engineer, some might wonder? Yes, that’s possible, if unlikely. (Apple has yet to respond to a request for comment from The Atlantic about the origins of the bug, but in an earlier statement, the company told journalists, “We’re aware of this issue and we have identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week.”) The origins of the bug may not matter, because paranoia is a jealous sentiment: The moment it even seems possible that some dark force is out to get you, those who would embrace and amplify that worry won’t let it go. And all the other, justified worries about Big Tech only worsen that condition.
[Read: The Chinese motherboard hack is a crisis, even if it didn’t really happen]
The bug should also raise concerns about the ongoing drive to turn everything that once worked well into a less reliable and secure, if more convenient, computational equivalent. FaceTime isn’t expressly necessary. It’s a convenient way to make calls, especially video calls, but there are others, such as Skype. FaceTime Audio does sound better than a traditional phone call, because it’s sampled at twice the rate, making higher-frequency voices and sounds more audible. That’s an improvement, but many people would prefer more certain privacy over being able to hear the sighs of the person on the other end of the telephone.
These services slowly seep into contemporary life, often without us even noticing what’s happening. I looked into why calls to my colleague Charles were routing through FaceTime; as best I can tell, I once used it to call him, probably when I had poor cellular coverage. Afterward, pressing the “audio” button, emblazoned with an old-school telephone handset, appears to have sent the call through FaceTime. Initiating a traditional call now requires many more button presses.
This is how snowballs form. A deliberate accident leads to a realization that FaceTime audio quality is better, which might inspire me to use it more often, and more deliberately. Eventually, as millions or billions of people do so, the relevance of the public switched telephone network might degrade, making Apple a telco as much as anything. (Microsoft aspired to a similar assault on telephony when it bought Skype and then transformed it into a corporate service.)
It’s unlikely that FaceTime will take over for telephone calls anytime soon, if ever. It’s a proprietary service of Apple, and the company needs a lot more of those services to keep consumers on its high-profit devices. But slow, steady change makes services proliferate. That’s how Facebook or Google or LinkedIn went from obscurity to necessity. You can’t buy a laptop without a camera that might or might not spy on you, and you can’t buy an iPhone without FaceTime. And with it, all the foibles and defects that service brings.
Eventually, and soon, Apple will release a fix for this bug. News about it will dissipate into the background, until eventually it will be largely forgotten. But behind the scenes, the issue will persist. Apple might be able to alter the behavior of FaceTime at the server level, but any changes that need to run on the client—that’s your iPhone—would still require that the user install the software update. If you (or someone else in your house) tend to put off updating to the latest version, you could still be at risk if the bug remains operative, or if other exploits arise. Often these sorts of problems encourage people to look for more security holes, whether for actual spying or just to amuse themselves by terrorizing the computer-using public with the fear of violation. And with every software update—arriving with increasing frequency—old problems vanish, but new ones also appear.
[Read: The iPhone is dead. Long live the rectangle].
For another part, no matter its cause, this breach of trust will stack atop all the others that have come before, further eroding the foundation of computation. Times have changed for tech, and the default feeling people have for their devices and the services they provide is no longer eager excitement, but anxious concern. The paranoiacs were once on the fringes, spinning incredible tales of targeted persecution at the covert hands of corporate or government scoundrels. The truth turns out to be more boring, and therefore even more terrifying: When you constantly tweak computers and the software that runs on them in the hope of winning more customers using them more often, there’s more opportunity for something to go wrong.
There’s not much any one person can do about that state of affairs. You can obscure your laptop camera, but if you want to lead a normal and productive life in the world today, you can’t tape over your whole iPhone.
The longest government shutdown in American history is over. After 35 days and two missed paychecks, this week government services have returned and federal workers will be paid. Though the relief is only temporary, as Congress begins negotiations to prevent another shutdown in three weeks, normalcy will return for now.
That normalcy, however, is tinged with foreboding. While the gears of government will start to grind on, largely as if nothing happened, the shutdown highlighted tensions in American life that amount to a political time bomb. The shutdown made apparent not only the federal safety net’s inherent weaknesses, but also the precariousness of federal workers’ and contractors’ finances. And Trump-administration officials revealed a lack of understanding of how the closures affected American workers and the economy. A shutdown that began as an impasse over federal funding for a border wall became a warning sign, over its month-long course, of creeping instability.
For days, political observers have debated what the tipping point was for Trump in his decision to temporarily reopen the government. Was it the mass stealth strike from reinvigorated and mobilized federal labor that won the day, in the form of the air-traffic controllers who called in sick, leading to delays on Friday at multiple major airports? Or was the shutdown’s end already well in motion before the Federal Aviation Administration started grounding flights, thanks to congressional and political pressure from a strengthened Democratic Party?
[Read: Why unpaid federal workers can’t strike during a government shutdown]
While both dynamics played a major role in finally shutting down the shutdown, interclass disgruntlement and a fragile economy may have had some part in the resolution, too. Especially during the last week of the closures, Trump-administration officials seemed unable to grasp what the shutdown was actually doing to families. First, the White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told CNBC that he did not think the economy had been seriously affected by the federal furloughs and that he expected “a snapback right away” when the government reopened, even as billions of dollars in economic activity slipped away and lines at local food pantries grew. A few days later, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross expressed puzzlement that federal workers would need to visit food banks, saying that “there really is not a good excuse why there should be a liquidity crisis” and urging workers to seek out bridge loans from credit unions in order to make up missed pay. Later that day, Trump himself said that banks and grocery stores would “work along” with struggling federal employees, suggesting that the institutions might somehow waive interest on loans or provide food on credit.
These comments give weight to the critique that the federal government is currently run by ultra-wealthy politicians who have little connection to the experiences of working people. That perception seems to have already damaged Trump’s appeal among the electorate. His approval ratings dropped during the shutdown, and in a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, half of Americans blame him directly for the closures and their negative effects. The administration, at least, attempted to walk back some of its messaging: Public backlash to Ross’s and Kudlow’s initial statements were what led Trump to his own ham-handed attempt at clarification. By the time he announced a deal to end the shutdown on Friday, Trump had mostly abandoned his earlier spin, telling federal workers that “many of you have suffered far greater than anyone but your families would know or understand.”
But the administration’s missteps were more than just a public-relations fiasco, and the “suffering” that Trump mentioned extended far beyond just the full-time federal workforce. There were deeper structural issues at work. Across the country, federal transportation employees lined up at food banks, indicating a rapid destabilization of the public sector. (Lines reached “[Hurricane] Katrina-like” lengths for employees of Atlanta’s Hartsfield Jackson International Airport, the city’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, told me.) Functionally, one to two missed paychecks sent many federal workers—many of whom have solidly middle-class or upper-middle-class incomes—temporarily into the ranks of poverty. They looked to other means to pay their bills: Some tapped into retirement accounts, some took on interest from bridge or payday loans, some racked up debt on credit cards, and some even resorted to pawn shops. For many federal workers, the gap between paychecks was enough to qualify them for monthly food-stamp benefits.
[Read: Many middle-class Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck]
Even for many of those workers not officially on federal salaries, the shutdown represented a squeeze. Federal contractors also went without pay, and it’s unclear whether they will receive back pay at all. Many of those contractors—for example, maintenance or custodial workers—are themselves members of the working poor.
And that’s not to mention the shutdown’s implications for those on federal assistance. On multiple fronts, the shutdown likely exacerbated ongoing struggles with income and wealth inequality. For poor and low-income people across the country, the shutdown meant real or threatened constrictions on housing and nutrition programs. The closures revealed that many housing authorities lack the reserves to survive any prolonged disruption of federal funds, and shrinking food support began to strain food banks and local grocers. The shutdown was especially difficult for people who depend on more than one federally subsidized program, including low-income contractors who may live in subsidized housing and qualify for food assistance.
The Trump administration didn’t seem to see these disruptions as serious or permanent, viewing any loss of economic activity as recoverable and any hardship among workers as easily remedied. As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote last week, “In this telling, the shutdown is an economic event like a hurricane”: It might disrupt economic activity during the disaster, but afterward, economic indicators will quickly return to normal. But as the country has learned after multiple natural disasters over the past two years, crisis events can widen underlying structural inequalities, and can expose areas where systems lack long-term resilience.
[Read: The shutdown deal is the same one Trump previously rejected]
The shutdown, for example, exposed an ongoing savings crisis among public-sector workers, of whom two-thirds have liquid savings that amount to less than a month of income. The problem is unlikely to be fixed anytime soon. In August, Trump announced plans to cancel federal workers’ upcoming pay raise, after granting them a 1.9 percent pay increase in 2018, less than the 2.1 percent that was expected. Their lean circumstances mirror a broader savings problem among low-income workers and follow a long period of real-wage stagnation, even as profits for partnerships and individual-owned companies—many of which are operated by wealthier Americans—have risen. The closures also exposed how, in some places that sharply limit eligibility for assistance, the safety net has been rendered threadbare, with food programs appearing especially inadequate.
That wobbly foundation was given a few extra wobbles by the shutdown. Federal employees and contractors now going back to work face the prospect of another shutdown in three weeks, even as some of them manage higher debt and ruined credit. Income inequality more broadly continues to rise. Public trust in government and the economy is faltering. According to the University of Michigan’s ongoing poll, consumer confidence this month plummeted by almost eight points, erasing almost all of the gains built since 2015.
Perhaps those Americans whom the university polled see storm clouds on the horizon, and maybe the shutdown brought them into full view. Perhaps respondents are losing faith in an administration whose representatives have shown themselves to be out of touch, and one that’s pursued a domestic economic agenda of tax cuts and cuts to the safety net. Their discontent, and that of federal workers and their elected representatives, helped end the shutdown. That ending said much for the endurance of everyone affected, but perhaps not much for what they have left.
Today, the most geopolitically significant technology spat in the world ratcheted up a few notches.
The Department of Justice unsealed two separate court cases against Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications company, which is headquartered in China. One indictment accused Huawei and the company’s CFO, Meng Wanzhou, of creating a “fraudulent financial scheme” that allowed the company to sell technology to Iran, breaking U.S. sanctions. The other newly unsealed indictment documents the 2012 theft of trade secrets from T-Mobile that took the form of designing and operating a phone-testing robot called Tappy.
The current Huawei saga has all the trappings of a Cold War espionage thriller, but reengineered for our current moment. Instead of Russia, it’s China. Instead of arms, it’s mobile technology. Instead of Iran, it’s … no, it’s still Iran, actually.
Americans are generally unfamiliar with Huawei because the U.S. government has tried to keep the company out of the market. Around the world, however, Huawei and a few Western companies are vying to become the preferred backbone of the world’s wireless infrastructure. It’s a huge business, and it’s core to every country’s national security. American officials have long argued that, if push came to shove, Huawei would bend to the needs and desires of the Chinese government, not its customers in other countries.
[Read: Beijing wants to rewrite the rules of the internet]
This particular moment is also significant because the new generation of mobile infrastructure—termed 5G—is due to be built out over the next few years. A relatively small group of companies can provide the technology to do 5G, and Huawei is globally competitive, especially given that many countries could see American companies as equally entangled with the nation’s national-security apparatus as Huawei is with China’s.
Even without American business, Huawei has grown tremendously in size and influence. American officials are working their hardest to keep Huawei out of its allies’ networks, but the company is “flourishing in Europe.”
The U.S. government has a long-expressed distaste for the Chinese telecom giant. In 2005, a congressional report averred that “industrial espionage is an active tool of China’s strategy for technological development.” In 2009, congressional opposition scuttled a proposed deal between Huawei and the American networking company 3Com. The year 2010 saw Sprint Nextel refuse bids from Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese tech company. And in 2012, a different congressional report recommended that American telecom companies refrain from buying equipment from Huawei because of national-security risks. Huawei, for its part, has denied being a tool of the Chinese government.
“Unfortunately, over the past 10 years, as we have been investing in the United States, we have encountered a number of misperceptions that some hold about Huawei,” the company wrote in a 2011 open letter. “These include unfounded and unproven claims of ‘close connections with the Chinese military,’ ‘disputes over intellectual property rights,’ ‘allegations of financial support from the Chinese government,’ and ‘threats to the national security of the United States.’”
At the same time, the ongoing trade war with China adds weight to every China-related action by the Donald Trump administration.
In early December 2018, Canadian officials detained the Huawei CFO, who is also the company founder’s daughter. The U.S. is pressing to extradite her on fraud charges related to misrepresentations she allegedly made about Skycom, a company that the U.S. says Huawei secretly operated in Iran as a subsidiary, to financial institutions. That’s created a three-way diplomatic incident with the Canadian and Chinese governments.
The indictment regarding Tappy is less complex. According to the legal document, the Huawei China engineers who are building a similar robot straightforwardly asked Huawei USA engineers working with T-Mobile to gather detailed information all the way down to the “shape, diameter, and hardness” of the little tip that Tappy used to simulate fingers touching phones. After many different entreaties, they eventually smuggled a robot arm out of a T-Mobile facility, then returned it, and allegedly faked an investigation into the incident.
To announce the newly available indictments, a coterie of Trump administration officials each took turns slapping at Huawei in a press conference in Washington. “These cases make clear that, as a country, we have to carefully consider the risk that companies like Huawei pose if we’re going to allow them into our telecommunications infrastructure,” Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker said.
[Reihan Salam: How Trump can challenge China ]
Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia immediately and firmly endorsed the new tough line. “There is ample evidence to suggest that no major Chinese company is independent of the Chinese government and Communist Party—and Huawei, which China’s government and military tout as a ‘national champion,’ is no exception,” he said in a statement. “It has been clear for some time that Huawei poses a threat to our national security, and I applaud the Trump Administration for taking steps to finally hold the company accountable.”
In 2019, mobile technology cannot be disentangled from national security, and the ramifications of that will continue to reverberate throughout the world.
In the 11 months since 17 teachers and students were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, campuses across the country have started spending big on surveillance technology. The Lockport, New York, school district spent $1.4 million in state funds on a facial-recognition system. Schools in Michigan, Massachusetts, and Los Angeles have adopted artificial-intelligence software—prone to false positives—that scans students’ Facebook and Twitter accounts for signs that they might become a shooter. In New Mexico, students as young as 6 are under acoustic surveillance, thanks to a gunshot-detection program originally developed for use by the military to track enemy snipers.
Earlier this month, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission released its report on the safety and security failures that contributed to fatalities during last year’s shooting. The report recommended giving police real-time access to the school’s surveillance cameras and allocating more resources to students who are “high utilizers of mental health services.” Outreach to these students, the report reads, “needs to be proactive” so that officials “obtain information about concerning behavior before they manifest into actual threats.”
Privacy advocates tend to warn that this kind of heightened surveillance can lead to overzealous punishments for minor infractions, or have a chilling effect on students when they know they’re being watched. But the balancing act between privacy and surveillance holds a different meaning in a community still trying to understand the mechanisms that failed it and its children.
The report details the miscommunications, unaddressed safety-code violations, and uncontrollable panic that contributed to the death toll when Nikolas Cruz, a former MSDHS student, brought a gun to the school last February. A faulty fire alarm sent students into the hallways while Cruz was still in the building. The lack of a functioning PA system made it impossible to direct students to safety once they began to flee. SWAT members on the scene mistook video footage of Cruz as live; in fact, it was played with a 26-minute delay.
The Broward County School Board has now given law enforcement real-time access to surveillance video, according to one member of the board, Lori Alhadeff. She ran for and was elected to the school board after her daughter, Alyssa, was killed during the shooting. “These shootings, they happen in six minutes or less,” she told me. “Time equals life. The seconds matter.”
Granting real-time video access to police is only part of a top-to-bottom overhaul of surveillance within Broward County’s schools. With funding from a Department of Justice grant, MSDHS has signed a $621,000 contract with Avigilon, a Vancouver-based video-surveillance company that promises “the future of protection through innovative high-definition surveillance solutions.” Avigilon software analyzes real-time footage using “appearance search” technology, which lets users highlight a person of interest in surveillance-camera video and then scans the footage for all of the instances when the individual appears, making inferences based on clothing and body shape. Florida’s Sun Sentinel reports that 116 cameras equipped with the software are planned for 36 schools in the district.
The report also recommends that the school district “create a centralized ‘data repository’ and analytics resources to improve access to information from sources including social media, the Department of Children and Families, the Department of Law Enforcement, the Department of Juvenile Justice and local law enforcement agencies.” In addition to information about whether students have been sentenced to juvenile detention and if guidance counselors have flagged their behavior, the report recommends a tool that “will scan social media to identify signs of bullying, self-harm, or threats of violence against students, employees, and schools.” The proposed database would be operated by the Office of Safe Schools, a division of the Florida Department of Education.
The “misunderstanding and overapplication of privacy laws,” the report argues, contributed to school officials and the FBI failing to act on the red flags on Cruz’s record, among them: photos of guns posted to his Instagram in the weeks before the shooting, prior medical treatment for severe behavioral issues, and viewing a series of YouTube videos titled “I put spongebob music over a school shooting.”
Cruz’s case is exceptional, and privacy scholars caution that at the scale of hundreds of students, differentiating between online behavior that is troubling or immature and actions that are criminally threatening isn’t easy. Amelia Vance, the director of education privacy and policy at the Future of Privacy Forum, told me that besides privacy concerns, enhanced social-media monitoring misses the point.
“An interesting aspect of the Florida case is that those signs were seen and they were reported; they just weren’t acted on. And so to act as though more monitoring is the answer seems an odd solution,” she said. Vance provided public comment on the Department of Education’s federal report on school safety, which also called for social-media monitoring and enhanced data collection. Both the federal report and the one by MSDHS’s school-safety commission call for easing FERPA and HIPAA laws, which restrict access to private student data.
“This is significant, new data collection that could create the literal permanent record of students doing stupid things online without any sorts of protections on how long that’s kept and who can access it,” Vance said.
But Parkland’s parents told me they’re more concerned about doing anything they can to prevent another mass shooting than with unintended consequences. Max Schachter’s son, Alex, was killed during the shooting. Schachter is part of the group of parents and officials that coordinated the Department of Justice grant application, but he says camera surveillance alone, though essential to a coordinated police response, won’t save lives.
“Are cameras going to prevent a murderer from walking on campus with an AR-15? Of course not,” he said. To him, the proposals don’t go far enough. “I am certainly in favor of advanced camera systems, but I doubt the systems are in place to be able to utilize an advanced camera system in Broward County,” Schachter said. “If you don’t have the right people, train the right staff, and a crime center and [safety] procedures in place, you basically have $600,000 worth of cameras that are basically just gonna be forensics to identify dead bodies.”
Alhadeff explained that since the shooting, she and other school-board members have been working to implement recommendations from varying sources: the commission’s report, along with a risk-assessment report from Safe Haven, a security company, and federal reports from the FBI and the Department of Education. Proposed changes include a new PA system, fire alarms, panic buttons, apps to report anonymous tips, and additional training for teachers and staff.
“It’s not a Happy Meal package,” Aldaheff said. “People think you get your cameras and you’re ready to go, you’re safe. It’s our job to implement all these strategies, but we’re up for the job.”
Antoine MaillardWhen I was studying for my doctorate, in the late 1960s, we budding anthropologists read a book called Ideas on Human Evolution, a collection of then-recent papers in the field. With typical graduate-student arrogance, I pronounced it “too many ideas chasing too little data.” Half a century and thousands of fossil finds later, we have a far more complete—and also more puzzling—view of the human past. The ever-growing fossil record fills in one missing link in the quest for evidence of protohumans, only to expose another. Meanwhile, no single line emerges to connect these antecedents to Homo sapiens, whose origins date back about 300,000 years. Instead, parallel and divergent lines reveal a variety of now-extinct hominids that display traits once considered distinctive to our lineage. For example, traces of little “Hobbits” found in Indonesia in 2003 show that they walked upright and made tools; less than four feet tall, with brains about a third the size of ours, they may have persisted until modern humans arrived in the area some 50,000 years ago.
As data pile up, so do surprises. Microscopic methods indicate that certain marks on 2.5-million-year-old bones were probably made by sharp stone tools; scientists had previously assumed that such tools came later. The dental tartar caked on the teeth of Neanderthals suggests that the brawny, thick-boned people (almost-humans on one of the parallel lines) probably ate cooked barley along with their meat; these famously carnivorous folks were really omnivores, like us. DNA from tiny fragments of bone—for instance, the tip of a pinkie many thousands of years old—has brought to light a whole new humanlike species that once interbred with us, as Neanderthals did. Charles Darwin drew evolution as a bush, not a tree, for a reason.
The study of human evolution is by now about much more than bones and stones. In 1965 a remarkable book—Irven DeVore’s collection Primate Behavior (which led me to study with DeVore)—made what then seemed a radical claim: We will never understand our origins without intensive study of the wild world of our nonhuman relatives. A handful of scientists, including Jane Goodall, set up tents in distant jungles and savannas. Following monkeys, apes, and other creatures in their habitats, these scientists turned their notes and observations into voluminous, quantitative data. DeVore and others devoted themselves just as rigorously to the remaining human hunter-gatherers, found on every habitable continent except Europe—our biological twins, living under conditions resembling the ones we evolved in.
The multifaceted effort was new and ambitious, but the idea was old. DeVore had hanging in his office an 1838 quote from Darwin’s notebook: “Origin of man now proved … He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” It’s an aphorism that calls to mind one of my favorite characterizations of anthropology—philosophizing with data—and serves as a perfect introduction to the latest work of Richard Wrangham, who has come up with some of the boldest and best new ideas about human evolution.
PantheonIn his third book, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, he deploys fascinating facts of natural history and genetics as he enters a debate staked out centuries ago by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (among other philosophers), and still very much alive today: how to understand the conjunction of fierce aggression and cooperative behavior in humans. Why are we so much less violent day-to-day within our communities (in pretty much all cultures) than our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are within theirs? At the same time, how is it that human violence directed toward perceived enemy groups has been so destructive?
Wrangham, who teaches biological anthropology at Harvard, was mentored by both Goodall and DeVore. He was in a sense working toward this latest venture in his two previous books, which explore the opposing poles of behavior. Renowned for his meticulous fieldwork, especially with chimps in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, Wrangham showed just how common chimp brutality is. Goodall had acknowledged with frank regret that her beloved chimpanzees could be quite violent. One mother and daughter killed the infants of other females in their group. Males often coerced and beat females, and would sometimes gang up and attack a chimp from another group.
At Kibale, large groups of chimps range together, and aggression escalates accordingly. Wrangham observed as these bigger parties of males got excited and went out on “patrol” in what looked like an organized way: They walked along their territorial border, attacking lone chimps from neighboring communities when they came across them en route. In his 1996 book, Demonic Males, co-authored with Dale Peterson, Wrangham recapped this and other evidence to draw a dire portrait of humanity (the male version) as inherently violent by evolutionary legacy. Here was vivid support for a Hobbesian view of human nature, rooted in genetics.
Wrangham’s 2009 book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, pursued a very different hypothesis. Based on archaeological evidence, he made the case that our ancestors mastered fire much earlier than most of us had believed—perhaps closer to 2 million rather than 800,000 years ago—which changed everything for them. In particular, cooking made possible a much more diverse diet, by allowing the consumption of fruits, leaves, and other plant foods with toxic potential when eaten raw. It made meat, too, safer and easier to digest. As a major bonus, fire extended the day into the night. Given how important we know conversations and stories told around the fire are to human hunter-gatherers, it’s easy to see how this process could have accelerated the evolution of language—an essential ingredient for less physically aggressive interactions.
In his new book, Wrangham grapples fully for the first time with the paradox of the title. Over the decades during which he has focused mostly on the dark side of human nature, evidence has steadily accumulated that humans, from early on in their development, are the most cooperative species in the primate world. Put apes and humans in situations that demand collaboration between two individuals to achieve a goal, as a variety of experimenters have done, and even young children perform better than apes. Meanwhile, classic work on chimps has been complemented by new studies of bonobos, our other close relative. No more removed from us genetically than chimps are, they are a radical contrast to them, often called the “make love, not war” species. Some of our nonhuman kin, such fieldwork has revealed, can live and evolve almost without violence.
Wrangham draws on this trove of material as he pursues yet another ambitious hypothesis: “Reduced reactive aggression must feature alongside intelligence, cooperation, and social learning as a key contributor to the emergence and success of our species.” (By reactive aggression, he means attacking when another individual gets too close, as opposed to tolerating contact long enough to allow for a possible friendly interaction.) He also applies his evolutionary logic to studies of a wider array of animals. He dwells in particular on some marvelous experiments that explore the taming of wild foxes, minks, and other species by human-directed artificial selection over many generations.
Such breeding efforts, Wrangham notes, have produced “the domestication syndrome”: a change in a suite of traits, not just the low reactive aggression that breeders have deliberately singled out. For instance, in a fox study begun in Russia in the early 1950s, the pups in each litter least likely to bite when approached by humans were bred forward. Yet a variety of other features appeared in tandem with docility, among them a smaller face with a shortened snout and more frequent (less seasonally circumscribed) fertile periods, as in some other similarly domesticated species.
Enter the bonobos, to whom Wrangham turns as he considers how diminished aggression may have been selected for in the evolution of humans. Once thought to be a type of chimpanzee, bonobos are now known to be a different species. The standard view holds that they separated from chimps 1 to 2 million years ago, and were isolated south of a bend in the Congo River. Female bonobos form strong coalitions—partly based on sex with each other—that keep a lid on male violence. The “trust hormone” oxytocin is released during female sex: You could say that the partners are high, in both senses of the word, on trust. Because females run things, males don’t attack them, and even male-on-male violence is extremely limited. Bonobos also display the other traits common to the domestication syndrome, which suggests—as in the case of the foxes—a broad genetic dynamic at work.
Wrangham accepts the consensus that the difference between bonobos and chimps is fundamental, genetic, and evolutionary. His distinctive explanation of the divergence reflects his training in ecology: He has learned that over many generations, ecological realities create species-specific behavior. In the case of bonobos, he suggests, a lush habitat in which they were protected from competition with either chimps or gorillas gave them the luxury of decreasing their own reactive aggression. Other examples of nonhuman self-domestication in the wild exist—for instance, the Zanzibar red colobus monkey diverged from the mainland African red colobus in similar ways during its island isolation—but bonobos are the closest and most relevant to us.
In fact, Wrangham’s notion of human evolution powered by self-domestication has an ancient lineage: The basic idea was first proposed by a disciple of Aristotle’s named Theophrastus and has been debated several times since the 18th century. This latest version, too, is bound to provoke controversy, but that’s what bold theorizing is supposed to do. And Wrangham is nothing if not bold as he puts the paradox in his title to use. In his telling, the dark side of protohuman nature was enlisted in the evolution of communal harmony.
Central to his argument is the idea that cooperative killing of incurably violent individuals played a central role in our self-domestication. Much as the Russian scientists eliminated the fierce fox pups from the breeding pool, our ancestors killed men who were guilty of repeated acts of violence. Certainly all-male raiding parties have operated in some groups of humans, seeking out and killing victims in neighboring villages (which recalls the patrolling chimps that Wrangham reported on earlier in his career). The twist in his current theory is that such ambushes are turned inward, to protect the group from one of its own: They serve as a form of capital punishment. Wrangham cites a number of examples of anthropologists witnessing a group of men collaborating to kill a violent man in their midst.
The idea is intriguing, and it is indeed true that human hunter-gatherers, whose societies exist without governments, sometimes collectively eliminate bad actors. But such actions are rare, as the Canadian anthropologist Richard Lee emphasized in his extensive studies of the !Kung, which include the report of an unusual case: After a certain man killed at least two people, several other men ambushed and killed him. My own two years with the !Kung point to a more robust possible selection process for winnowing out aggression: female choice. Women in most hunter-gatherer groups, as I learned in the course of my experience in the field, are closer to equality with men than are women in many other societies. Evolutionary logic suggests that young women and their parents, in choosing less violent mates through the generations, could provide steady selection pressure toward lower reactive aggression—steadier pressure than infrequent dramas of capital punishment could. (Female bonobo coalitions would seem primed to serve a similar taming function.)
Although he downplays such a comparatively domestic story of self-domestication, Wrangham has nonetheless highlighted a puzzle at the core of human evolution, and delivered a reminder of the double-edged nature of our virtues and vices. “Human nature is a chimera,” he concludes, evoking both the hybrid monster of mythic lore and the biological phenomenon of genetically hybrid organisms. In a closing meditation on a 2017 visit to Poland, he writes, “I walked around Auschwitz. I could feel the chimera at its best and worst.” Violence and virtue, he recognizes, are not opposites but powerful, not always reliable allies. “So much cooperation,” he notes of the smoothly operating human machinery of mass murder—“it can be for good or bad.” To protect us from danger, which now arises mainly from our own inclinations and actions, clear-eyed wisdom like that is surely what we need.
This article appears in the March 2019 print edition with the headline “How Humans Tamed Themselves.”
On Monday, Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, reiterated a position that cuts against the core of the Constitution. President Donald Trump “must” invoke emergency powers to construct a border wall, he wrote, “if the White House and Congress fail to reach a deal.” The comment allies Graham with some immigration hard-liners in the Republican Party and is perhaps intended to avert another pointless government shutdown. But it marks a betrayal of Congress.
A border wall would be a major budget item, a transformative piece of infrastructure, and an impingement on the property rights of thousands of American citizens. “Less than one-third of the needed land is currently owned by the federal government,” explains Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University. “The rest—as much as 1,300 miles—is held by private owners, Native American tribes, and state governments, many of whom are unlikely to sell voluntarily. Even if the wall does not cover the full 2,000 miles because it excludes some areas, such as those that have ‘natural’ barriers, many property owners will have to be displaced.”
[Read: Lindsey Graham’s shifting sands on the shutdown]
Even when Republicans held both houses of Congress, they failed to approve funding for the wall that the Trump administration wants to build. What’s more, “nearly two-thirds of Americans surveyed in a new poll said they are against President Trump declaring a national emergency to direct the construction of a wall along the southern border,” The Hill reports, “almost twice the amount of those in favor of it.” The prospect of a president embarking on a major initiative unilaterally, against the popular will, and seizing thousands of parcels of private property in the process is why we have a Congress to check him.
The Framers assumed that those elected to the co-equal branch would jealously guard their power, at times even to excess. Instead, Graham has become so focused on currying favor with the president that he is betraying one of his core constitutional responsibilities in order to play sycophant. In doing so, he is exacerbating an imperial presidency that grew under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. “Each abuse builds on the next,” writes David French, who concludes, “The loser is our constitutional republic.”
It is bad enough when presidents, their staffers, and their apologists undermine the separation of powers in favor of the executive branch. It is even worse when a legislator joins in undermining his own branch. There is only one position for a responsible U.S. senator: If the White House fails to reach a deal with Congress on a border wall, it simply doesn’t happen.
Readers of detective fiction look forward to a big reveal: Whodunit? Readers of campus fiction hold out for a quieter pleasure. If a character is an academic, at some point the author will divulge the topic of the character’s book or dissertation. Generally speaking, writers don’t let this opportunity go to waste. You know how dogs look like their owners? The bouncy, athletic guy matches his golden retriever, and the tall, skinny lady with a long nose, her greyhound? Likewise, fictional academics resemble their work.
Perhaps because creative writers have reductive opinions of their scholarly counterparts, though, the question What breed is this academic? tends to yield one of only two answers. Many works in progress expose that the academic is a Tesman or a Lovborg.
Those labels are a reference to Henrik Ibsen’s realist masterpiece, Hedda Gabler, the story of a bored and jealous newlywed who destroys everything she touches (my subjective interpretation). The play contains two topic-reveal moments, with the second giving a whole new meaning to the first. Hedda’s husband, the aspiring professor George Tesman, explains that his book “will deal with the domestic industries of Brabant during the Middle Ages.” His aunt exclaims, “Fancy—to be able to write on such a subject as that!” A few scenes later, Eilert Lovborg, Hedda’s former lover and Tesman’s rival-in-scholarship, says that his book “falls into two sections. The first deals with the civilizing forces of the future. And here is the second … forecasting the probable line of development.” Tesman exclaims, “How odd now! I should never have thought of writing anything of that sort.”
No, he wouldn’t have. A book on at-home labor in one region in one time period, versus a book on the future of civilization: Ibsen’s not generally thought of as a humorist, but that contrast is as funny as it is obvious. Knowing nothing else about these characters, a reasonably astute reader would surmise, accurately, that Tesman is dull and reliable, Lovborg brilliant and extravagant.
As often as not, authors play the topic-reveal for laughs. Of course that’s how Kingsley Amis approaches the moment in Lucky Jim, the tale of a two-bit lecturer at a middling British university, because he plays just about everything in that novel for laughs. When a colleague asks Jim Dixon the title of his article, the narrator goes off: “It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems … The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485.”
Was Amis thinking of Tesman when he came up with that? I have to think he was. Such specificity, such drudgery, such a waste of time. Granted, Dixon, who has a flair for the romantic, isn’t nearly as yawn-enforcing as his topic. In this case the dissertation doesn’t reflect the character so much as his dim view of his chosen profession; Dixon believes that the ivory tower rewards Tesmans, so he has strategically chosen a Tesmanian topic. Yet Dixon and Tesman do have this in common: a total inability to inject the spark of life into their work.
The campus novel furthest from Lucky Jim in sensibility is probably Stoner, by John Williams, a depressing cult classic about a man born into a Missouri farming family who develops an abiding passion for literature. William Stoner’s dissertation, which he eventually reworks into a book, is not obviously woeful: “The Influence of the Classical Tradition Upon the Medieval Lyric.” Stoner’s particular sphere of interest, however, is as death-infused as the novel he animates. “He spent much of the summer rereading the classical and medieval Latin poets,” the narrator says, “and especially their poems upon death. He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death … and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living.”
At the end of the novel and of his days, Stoner reaches for his book, the great production of his intellectual life, which he must now leave behind. Although, like the classical and medieval Latin poets, Stoner accepts his death, readers will find it hard to come away with anything other than bitterness and a feeling of mockery when the narrator notes that “the book was forgotten and that it served no use.” In Stoner’s final line, the book falls “into the silence of the room,” like its author into the silence of the universe.
A small, forgettable book by a small, forgettable man. Definitely on the Tesman side of the Lovborg-Tesman spectrum.
Grandiose Lovborgs crop up fairly often, too. The title character of Saul Bellow’s Herzog is an intellectual historian and the author of the book Romanticism and Christianity. Oh, is that all? In Changing Places, by David Lodge, Morris Zapp embarks “with great enthusiasm on an ambitious critical project: a series of commentaries on Jane Austen which would work through the whole canon, one novel at a time, saying absolutely everything that could possibly be said about them.” How greedy. If a sure sign of a Lovborgian personality exists, it’s “absolutely everything.”
Perhaps the greatest Lovborg of them all is Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. Although Frankenstein hardly qualifies as an academic novel, the man who propels the narrative is certainly a scholar—a scholar-scientist, to be precise, who develops a technique to impart life to nonliving matter. He succeeds, as everyone knows, but his creation is monstrous, as everyone also knows. It annoys purists to no end when readers refer to the creature as Frankenstein. (That’s not his name; he doesn’t have one.) To me, though, the error serves as a convenient reminder that fictional scholars have a God-to-Adam—or owner-to-dog—relationship with their work. Lovborgs choose Lovborgian topics, and Tesmans choose Tesmanian topics.
I wrote a novel set on a college campus and, as I revised this piece, I finally bothered to ask myself: Is my protagonist, Anna Brisker, a Tesman or a Lovborg? My first thought was that Anna fits into neither category; I’m obviously far too original for typecasting, I said to myself. But no, I must admit that I fell into the binary trap. Anna’s researching an intellectual history of inspiration—roughly, other people’s ideas about how words get on the page—which she can’t finish, because she isn’t disciplined enough to ground her airy notions in a specific case study. She’s a Lovborg, that is to say, who’s fallen behind because she lacks Tesmanian focus.
Something weird is happening in American politics: People are excited about climate policy again.
Since November, progressives have rallied around a Green New Deal, a package of policies aiming to slash carbon emissions while renewing the U.S. manufacturing sector. Though its finer details remain hazy, think tanks have begun to explore how it might work, and Democrats with White House ambitions have rushed to endorse it.
At least a decade has passed since climate change commanded so much political attention in the party. “If your 2020 platform doesn’t include a Green New Deal, are you really running for president?” teased Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a few weeks ago.
Yet for every imaginative proposal or boisterous protest, there is an unavoidable truth: Passing a Green New Deal is going to be really, really, really hard.
The reason for this difficulty is so simple and straightforward, it feels almost silly to mention. Success will require Democrats to control the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate—and then find a policy that will pass all three.
[Read: The Green New Deal hits its first major snag]
That is, of course, how you pass a law. But Democrats could very well find legislating a Green New Deal to be more arduous than achieving other progressive goals, such as Medicare for all or a wealth tax on super-millionaires. Not once, during the modern era of climate politics, has a major emissions-cutting bill made it through this gauntlet. And a Green New Deal has an urgency distinct from other party aspirations: The sooner it’s in place, the more time it will have for the marathon work of attacking emissions.
Thirty-one years have elapsed since the NASA scientist James Hansen told Congress that global warming was under way. Democrats controlled both the White House and Congress during four of those years, and twice—in 1993 and 2010—passed an ambitious climate-related bill out of the House only to see it die in the Senate. “The Senate,” concluded the writer David Roberts, “is where dreams go to die.”
In the next six years, immutable political facts will make passing anything out of the Senate especially difficult. Yet the next six years are the period that Green New Deal advocates must care most about. They have explicitly adopted the goal of limiting Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which would require global carbon emissions to be cut almost in half by 2030. That already appears next to impossible. It will be risible fantasy if no law is on the books by 2025, if not much earlier.
Below, I’ve described one path that Democrats must walk to turn any ambitious climate policy into law. It will require the party to make an unlikely journey. It might require mainstream Democrats to endorse far more aggressive governance than they would have ever once considered. But if the past few years have shown anything, it’s that the unlikely, the aggressive, and the unprecedented can come to pass.
What must Democrats do to pass a Green New Deal in 2020?
1. A Democrat must win the White House in 2020.
If Republicans retain control of the executive branch, the next opportunity to pass a Green New Deal would not come until after the 2024 election. It could still do much good then, but the window for policy to prevent 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming would have likely closed.
2. Assuming a Democrat is president, Democrats must retain control of the House of Representatives in 2020.
3. Democrats must also win the Senate in 2020. Because the vice president is a Democrat in our thought experiment, the party will need to win at least 50 seats to control the 100-member upper chamber. (The vice president can vote in the Senate in the event of a tie.) Thirty-five senators who caucus with the Democrats are not up for election in 2020. To control the Senate, the party must win at least 15 seats.
Where do those seats come from? Democrats are considered a lock to win seven states in deep-blue territory. Four more races in bluish states (Virginia, Minnesota, Michigan, and New Hampshire) will feature popular Democratic incumbents. And figure that Democrats win Colorado, which broke for Hillary in 2016.
That’s still only 12 seats, and Democrats need at least three more. So they will likely try to capture at least three of the following eight states: Arizona (where a Democrat won in 2018), Alabama (where the incumbent Democrat Doug Jones is running), Maine (against the popular GOP senator Susan Collins), Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Texas, and Montana. With the exception of Maine, Trump won all those states in 2016 with at least a 3.5-percent margin.
Yet those eight states are crucial only to winning back the Senate, not the presidency. If Democrats regain their usual footing in the Great Lakes—as they already did in the 2018 midterms—then they could still win 270 electoral votes without making a dent in the Senate. But then hope for any legislative Green New Deal would be dashed: The GOP Senate majority leader could simply decline to bring any Democratic proposal to the floor.
4. Let’s say Democrats pull it off—but just barely. By January 2021, a Democratic president is addressing a joint session of a Democratic House and a meager, 51-person Democratic Senate majority. Now it is, at least, possible to pass a Green New Deal. But party leaders must be willing to play hardball.
Under current Senate rules, most federal legislation must receive at least 60 votes to pass out of the chamber. This is not due to some constitutional requirement—any simple majority can pass a bill—but due to the filibuster, which requires a 60-vote “supermajority” to end debate on a measure. Because the filibuster is enshrined only in the Senate rules, not in the Constitution, Democrats could repeal it with 51 votes. The Senate has already repealed the filibuster when voting on Cabinet nominees and federal judges, but has so far preserved it when considering new legislation.
[Read: What to do before the Green New Deal]
In our thought experiment, the Senate will not have 60 Democrats, period. And party leadership will struggle to find nine Republicans who will vote to end debate on a Green New Deal package. So if Democrats want to pass it, they will likely have to choose to end the legislative filibuster.
But will Democrats have the stomach for doing so? It’s not clear. “If you don’t have 60 votes, it just means you haven’t done enough advocacy,” the senator and Democratic primary candidate Kirsten Gillibrand said on a recent episode of the podcast Pod Save America. (She also refused to say that she would push for its repeal as president, though it’s quite possible she was noncommittal only so she could ding Republicans if they repeal the rule first.)
5. Democrats do have one way to try to work around the filibuster. They might try to pass a Green New Deal through “budget reconciliation,” an odd loophole that allows roughly one bill per fiscal year to pass out of the Senate with a simple majority of votes. But reconciliation can only be used to pass a bill that directly pertains to the federal budget—and it cannot be used to do anything that would significantly increase the federal deficit in 10 years’ time. So the most ambitious Green New Deal ideas would likely be ruled too broad to qualify for reconciliation. (Though the policy scholar Mike Konczal has suggested that passing Medicare for all in reconciliation could free federal funds for climate policy.)
6. But suppose Democrats ditch the filibuster. Then they must advance a Green New Deal bill that wins the support of every Democratic member (assuming that they only hold 50 seats). The party’s caucus will likely include several newly elected moderate Democrats—and it will almost certainly include Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin, who has deep ties to the coal industry, has not been a friend to climate policy. When he first ran for Senate in 2010, he cut a campaign ad where he shot a hole through President Barack Obama’s favored climate bill. Yet he would need to support any party-line vote with a 51-member Democratic caucus.
7. Winning over Manchin explicitly for a Green New Deal is not the party’s only option: Democrats could change their own math in the Senate. Assuming they repeal the filibuster, Democrats would only need 51 votes to add a new state to the union. Luckily for them, two Democratic-leaning states would love to join: the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. If Congress and the White House welcomed both D.C. and P.R. to the Union, Democrats could immediately pad their majority with as many as four new senators. And those senators could even be seated immediately. But this plan would also require the support of Manchin and any new moderates like him.
Or maybe every contingency here will fall through in 2021. Say that Democrats choose not to ditch the filibuster, not to use reconciliation, and not to add D.C. and Puerto Rico as states. Instead, they look ahead to the 2022 Senate election, possibly the most favorable cycle for Democrats in years. It offers the chance to seize some purple seats that Republicans won in 2016, with elections in Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio. Democrats finally enhance their majority.
Yet Democrats might come into their new Senate majority exactly as it becomes legislatively useless. Assuming a Democrat holds the White House, history suggests that the party could stand to lose dozens of House seats in 2022—and possibly control of the chamber, too. As Gallup wrote before the 2018 election: “The president’s party almost always suffers a net loss of U.S. House seats in midterm elections.”
With that loss, the Green New Deal will meet the same fate as Democratic climate policies before it. It will fail. The United States will neither cut its emissions via policy nor pour hundreds of millions into clean-energy R&D. And the planet’s temperature will keep soaring, well past 2 degrees Celsius.
Or maybe not—I’ve only given one scenario here, after all, and reality could differ in countless ways. Every additional Senate seat that Democrats take in 2020 could help them pass a Green New Deal. Sudden demographic change—such as a surge in enthusiasm among young voters—could push electoral math in Democrats’ direction. And if a Green New Deal fails, the party could also make a “second go” at climate policy before the 2022 election—trying for something like the carbon-fee-and-dividend scheme endorsed by many Democrats, some Republicans, and most oil companies.
The technological outlook could also shift. In 2007, few predicted that the sudden success of fracking would alter the next president’s energy policy. Yet it did. A breakthrough on a technology like carbon capture—which is financially supported by many oil firms—could rapidly scramble the partisan politics of climate change, making the GOP more willing to negotiate on a round of federal spending.
Yet none of these possibilities changes the basic fact that a Green New Deal will be really, really, really hard to pass in the coming years. And if we want to avert disastrous climate change, the coming years are the most important ones we have.
Most Americans—myself included—probably don’t have a well-thought-out position on whether a 70 percent marginal tax rate is a good idea. But it probably doesn’t matter whether it is, or whether it would “work.” To argue that “workability” is secondary might sound odd to many Democrats, particularly party leaders and experts who have long prided themselves on being a party of pragmatic problem-solvers. This, though, could be the most important contribution so far of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the new crop of progressive politicians—the realization that the technical merits of a particular policy aren’t the most relevant consideration. For these new Democrats, the purpose of politics (and elections) is quite different.
Commentators often note that, when it comes to policy, the differences between the Democratic Party’s left-wing and center-left are minimal. Referring to young progressives like Ocasio-Cortez who challenged establishment politicians, David Freedlander writes, “The policy differences … are microscopically small. Nearly all Democrats favor tackling income inequality, raising taxes on the wealthy and the minimum wage, and reforming the criminal justice system.”
This misses the point in a rather fundamental way. Few people actually vote based on policy. As I recently argued in American Affairs, even the better educated don’t primarily vote based on policy. In fact, higher levels of education can increase polarization. (In other contexts, such as the Middle East, the advent of universal education and higher college attendance fueled ideological divides.) As the political scientist Lilliana Mason notes, “Political knowledge tends to increase the effects of identity as more knowledgeable people have more informational ammunition to counter argue any stories they don’t like.”
[Derek Thompson: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has the better tax argument]
People’s politics tend to determine their policy preferences, and not the other way around. In one example from the 1960s, as Christopher Achens and Larry Bartels write in Democracy for Realists, even southerners who supported racial integration left the Democratic Party. Once they became Republican, they then adjusted their views on race and affirmative action to fit more comfortably with their new partisan identity. Put another way, if a person with no prior partisan attachments decides to become a Republican, he is likely to become pro-life. If that same person, with the same genetics and life experience, decides to become a Democrat, he is likely to become pro-choice.
Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives appear to understand instinctually what this growing body of research on voter preferences suggests. And its implications are potentially far-reaching. Once you accept that voters are rationally irrational, you can’t help but change how you understand political competition. Incidentally, this is one reason that right-wing populists across Europe (and India and the Philippines and many other places) have been surprisingly—or unsurprisingly—successful: They seem to have relatively little interest in what works. Instead they are concerned with altering the political and ideological imagination of ordinary voters and elites alike, to make what once seemed impossible, possible. In their case, it often involves normalizing Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry. They have managed to drag the center-right further rightward on issues such as immigration and how to integrate (or not integrate) Muslim minorities. But this same approach can be used by left-wing and center-left parties for more constructive ends.
This focus on shifting the contours of the national debate is sometimes referred to as expanding the “Overton window.” It is altogether possible that Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t think that a 70 percent marginal tax rate is realistic in our lifetime—she might not even think it’s the best option from a narrow, technocratic perspective of economic performance—but it doesn’t need to be. As the Open Markets Institute’s Matt Stoller notes, “One thing that [Ocasio-Cortez] has shown is that political leadership matters. Just proposing a 70 percent marginal tax rate has restructured a debate over taxes. Obama’s presidency was defined by self-imposed limits.”
[Read: How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s plain black jacket became a controversy]
Today, in a way that hasn’t been true for decades, more Americans are at least aware of something that might otherwise have been ignored as either overly wonky or, well, crazy. The 70 percent figure proposed by Ocasio-Cortez was a subject of debate—and derision—at Davos. But by joking about it, billionaires and aspiring billionaires, in effect, helped legitimate it. After all, if the richest people in the world are worried about it, it might just be a good idea. (And Dell CEO Michael Dell unintentionally helped remind the audience that the United States had a 70 percent marginal rate as recently as the 1970s). The economist William Gale, my Brookings colleague, wrote a piece responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal, taking issue with the 70 percent figure but agreeing with the underlying principle: “Ultimately, if we want more revenue from the rich, we should broaden the base and boost rates. Raising taxes on the rich is an idea whose time has come, receiving consistent support in polls over the last few decades.”
This new style of Democratic politics is a far cry from the technocratic “what works-ism” that has dominated in center-left parties since the 1990s. The incrementalist approach, by its very nature, preemptively accepts policy and ideological concessions in the name of prudence. It prioritizes being sensible and serious. But why is being sensible an end in itself? As Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, the 32-year-old Saikat Chakrabarti, said regarding another seemingly unrealistic idea, the Green New Deal: “If it’s really not possible, then we can revisit. The idea is to set the most ambitious thing we can do and then make a plan for it. Why not try?”
I don’t feel strongly about a 70 percent marginal tax rate, but I don’t need to. I might even conclude that it simply “feels” too high. But that just means that if and when a Democratic candidate for president proposes a 50 percent tax rate on income that’s more than $10 million, I’ll be impressed with how “moderate,” reasonable, and sensible it sounds.
The flying car is the Godot of technology: always on its way, never here. Ninety years ago, Henry Ford envisioned an experimental one-seat airplane called the sky flivver, only to abandon the project when one of the first prototypes crashed, killing the pilot. In the 1950s, the U.S. Army commissioned the development of “flying jeeps” with private-sector partners like Chrysler. The project never amounted to much. Today, flying cars figure most prominently not in urban skylines, but in venture-capital tag lines, as in Peter Thiel’s motto: “We wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters.” (James Fallows has for many years chronicled the ascendant hopes and stalled realities of air-taxi development around the world.)
Now tech firms again insist that their Godot is finally coming—but, seriously. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, the most buzzed-about product was probably Uber’s autonomous air taxi. The ride-hailing company has said that it hopes to roll out an air-travel business by 2023. And last week, Boeing debuted a “personal air vehicle,” an electric-plane prototype.
“Global transit is going 3-D in the next 10 years,” Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, on a panel with the chief executives from Uber and UPS. “Advanced propulsion, low-orbit travel, space tourism,” he went on, listing a variety of forthcoming airborne technology: “We know how to do this.” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi agreed that urban transportation is at an inflection point—from cars and trains to drones and planes. “We want to make the city three-dimensional,” Khosrowshahi said, echoing a theme.
But flying cars, air taxis, or to employ the industry term, “vertical takeoff and landing technology,” have their share of doubters. Elon Musk, who typically serves as Big Tech’s mascot of industrial optimism, has said that flying-car dreams have a “fundamental flaw”: They’ll always be too inconvenient for urban commuters to rely on for daily transportation. (Musk has founded at least two transportation companies, but they’re focused on digging urban tunnels and rocketing to Mars.)
Cities aren’t about to let hastily trained pilots commandeer thousand-pound machines and human passengers. The alternative, which is to let autonomous pilots commandeer thousand-pound machines and human passengers, is no more likely. If the world has learned one thing about autonomous technology in the past decade, it’s this: Autonomy is hard. It’s really, really hard. Even self-driving advocates admit that in 2018, the hype around driverless cars came “crashing down.” And speaking of crashing down, the consequences of a self-driving error for an air taxi would be calamitous: a machine the size of a small car hurtling hundreds of feet per second toward a skyscraper, house, or crowded intersection.
“I think the idea of air taxis is kind of bullshit,” Carlo Ratti, an architect and urban theorist who serves as director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, told me. “Technology can change many things, but it cannot change physics. Helicopters are loud and expensive and, for most forms of transportation, inconvenient.” As near-silent electric and hybrid cars take over the road, the sound of a fleet of flying vehicles buzzing overhead will be even more obvious.
To address this noise problem, companies such as Boeing, Airbus, and Uber are plowing billions of dollars into technologies such as electric propulsion, which could be quieter and more reliable than a combustion engine. But building a fleet of electric-powered aircraft that shuttle passengers hundreds of miles between charges would require heroic advances in battery-energy density.
The chief executives at Davos acknowledged these challenges—and identified others. What kind of city infrastructure would be necessary for autonomous flying machines to take off and land (and charge) within the city? Why would dense, expensive cities like San Francisco approve the construction of dozens of vertical platforms if simply building sufficient apartment buildings is already difficult? How would companies like Boeing achieve the economies of scale required to efficiently manufacture tens of thousands, if not millions, of air taxis without clear signals of consumer demand and city regulatory approval? Good questions.
Several years ago, technologists and transportation companies insisted that self-driving cars would be significant parts of the urban landscape by the early 2020s. That hope is proving illusory. But instead of accepting defeat, the mobility-tech world is shifting its laser beam of optimism from self-driving Earth taxis to self-driving air taxis.
[Read: How self-driving cars could ruin the American city]
“The last 30 to 40 years in technology have been about digitizing the physical world,” Ratti said. “Experimentation has been easy for tech, because in the digital space, you can test and test infinitely. But the next 30 years will be about building technology that bridges the digital and the physical worlds. It’s a much harder challenge.”
If flying cars have a near-term future, it’s probably not urban. Rural areas—where commutes are long and interruptive skyscrapers are scarce—are the more likely initial setting for airborne technology. Once drones and flying cars prove out in Idaho, perhaps they will migrate to Manhattan. Or not. Flying cars might ultimately be the rare Davos dream that actually makes more sense for a small town like Davos than it does for the major cities its attendees represent.
The executive is duty bound to provide the legislature with information and recommendations “from time to time,” as the State of the Union clause in Article II of the Constitution so vaguely puts it. The Framers were surely right to make the president accountable to Congress in this way. They were also probably right not to overthink it.
The State of the Union is not mentioned in James Madison’s Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787. It pops up in The Federalist Papers just once, in Alexander Hamilton’s “Federalist No. 77,” and only to be discharged as one of the presidential powers he’s not even going to bother defending, as it would require an “insatiable avidity for censure to invent” objections to it.
Of course, in the absence of firm constraints, this little bit of our institutional order has—like almost all of the others—mutated into something bigger, dumber, and more dysfunctional than the Framers ever could have imagined; a spectacle with bloated, forgettable prose, guest galleries full of tokens and totems, and a full hour of competitive hand clapping.
It wasn’t always thus.
[Read: The language of the State of the Union]
The first State of the Union address—George Washington’s in 1790—was just 1,089 words. That’s shorter than this essay. It was also, by contemporary standards, noticeably, even comically, lacking in specifics. It reads like the general forgot it was due until the morning of, and in a panic started scribbling half-remembered phrases from the Constitutional Convention onto a hempen scroll during the carriage ride to Federal Hall.
Uh, “… in resuming your consultations for the general good …” yada yada “… and to secure the blessings which a gracious Providence has placed within our reach …” et cetera and so forth, ummm … “Among the many interesting objects, which will engage your attention, that of providing for the common defense will merit particular regard …”
What isn’t throat-clearing or platitudinous nevertheless bears Washington’s customary comportment, his humility and reserve. In a thoroughly passive voice, he offers only “reason to hope” that tribal attacks on the frontier will be attended to; he suffices to “trust” that Congress will employ “all proper means” to promote agriculture and commerce; he merely “cannot forbear intimating” his belief that “due attention” be paid to building new postal roads.
[Read: The State of the Union is unrecognizable]
Ten years later, President Thomas Jefferson’s first State of the Union address swelled to some 3,200 words and had a little more sex appeal, including punchy descriptions of the U.S.S. Enterprise’s successes off the Barbary Coast. But Jefferson also famously began the practice, uninterrupted for a century hence, of delivering the State of the Union as a letter to be read by House and Senate clerks, thinking an in-person address unpalatably kingly.
Jefferson, a populist, nevertheless had his good points, and that was one of them.
When the 45th president gives his second State of the Union (now scheduled for February 5), he will doubtless stay clear of reserve and humility, and include at least one brute imperative: “Build the wall.” Or at least “Build the wall or steel barrier.” Or maybe “Build wall” if you’re into Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen’s whole brevity thing.
Another safe bet is that his SOTU will be long. Much longer than Washington’s or Jefferson’s. Last year’s address was more than 5,000 words and took an hour and 20 minutes to deliver.
Historically, it has been Democratic presidents who have liked the sound of their own voice best. The Congressional Research Service has the data: In the years since the State of the Union has been televised, you’ll be shocked to know that one William Jefferson Clinton gave the longest speech by delivery time, an hour and 29 minutes for his 2000 swan song; and that Clinton’s 1995 address was the longest in-person speech by word count, at 9,190. In 1981, Jimmy Carter delivered only a written message on his way out the door, but it smashed the word-count record, at 33,667, or roughly one Chronicle of Narnia. By contrast, the Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan delivered the shortest addresses of the era, taking just 29 and 31 minutes in 1972 and 1986, respectively.
[Read: Nancy Pelosi’s power move on the State of the Union]
In fact, all of the presidents who did the most to enlarge and embellish the State of the Union were Democrats. Woodrow Wilson revived the in-person delivery and dispensed with the notion that the speech should be a report on the executive departments and not a rallying cry for the president’s agenda. After “Cool” Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover reverted to written messages, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered 11 of his norm-shattering 12 State of the Union addresses in person, all broadcast over the radio. Harry Truman’s 1947 speech was the first to appear on television. And Barack Obama (with an assist from Associate Justice Samuel Alito) at last pulled the judiciary branch into the whole sorry circus that the event had by that time become.
As someone whose admiration for Democratic presidents is limited, it gives me some pleasure to note this through line, but not as much as you might think. The impulses on display in these presidents’ treatment of the annual address—Wilson’s and FDR’s imperiousness and impatience with the constitutional restraints on their power; Clinton’s unctuousness and his and Obama’s lofty pedantry—are all impulses shared by the current, Republican president.
One of the few fringe benefits of this presidency has been the withering of certain institutions built on professional Washington’s enormous self-regard. Absent a “cool” president, or at least one who’ll play along, we’ve seen the end of the celebrity-studded Kennedy Center galas and the auto-destruction of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi canceled her initial invitation to deliver the State of the Union in light of the government shutdown, I nurtured hope that the president would respond by deflating its importance, as well.
Absent that, I thought he might at least replace the event with a kind of “Taco Bell Presents SOTU Fest 2019: Live From the Rose Garden and With a Special Performance by Nickelback.” That would have achieved a similar purpose.
[Read: Mapping the State of the Union]
Alas, POTUS seems to view the SOTU as such a valuable brand property that he was willing to pretty much publicly beg Pelosi to give it back to him.
It’s too bad that she did.
Under the old monoculture—with Meet the Press and Firing Line and an hour’s worth of evening news to engage with politics before Perry Mason—making a to-do of the speech may have had some value. In that world, getting everyone together once a year to talk big picture might have made sense.
But ours is an era in which pretty much everyone participates in pretty much every political discussion, pretty much all day, pretty much everywhere. Social media is a Sartrean nightmare of bad vibes and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweets (I swear, blocking her made it worse), and you can’t stare at any glowing rectangle for more than 20 minutes without some stooge or grifter from one side or the other getting up in your grill.
In such an environment, we need less pageantry, not more. If Pelosi and the president were real patriots, they’d put the modern SOTU out of its misery, and us out of ours.
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