The latest in the Ralph Northam scandal: A picture—of a man in a Ku Klux Klan outfit and another in blackface—from the Virginia governor’s medical-school yearbook page has thrown his tenure into tumult. Northam quickly apologized for the image, but claimed in a later press conference that he was neither of the people depicted. The revelation is a betrayal of the black voters who propelled Northam to office in 2017, under promises of ushering in a new era in Virginia’s history that would turn a page on its Confederate, white-supremacist roots, Vann R. Newkirk II writes. But more than Northam’s career is at stake: By remaining in office, argues Adam Serwer, he gives current—and future—public servants a way to squirm out of their own racist statements and actions.
Facebook turns 15 today. As the platform aged from scrappy dorm-room start-up to Silicon Valley behemoth, it’s transformed the social lives of millions, if not billions, of people. The platform has created a new category of relationships: the zombie friendship of Facebook friends who only vaguely keep in touch from afar through posts and updates on the site, extending a friendship far beyond its normal life span. Facebook’s meteoric rise has been predicated on a zealous belief in the power of “connection,” but that blinkered faith has led Facebook to undervalue how the site could be misused. (For more: Alexis Madrigal talks to people present for TheFacebook.com’s founding.)
Tell us: How old were you when you first joined Facebook, and do you remember why you joined? Has the way you use it changed over the years? What might cause you to leave the platform for good? Write to letters@theatlantic.com, and we may feature your response on our website and in future editions of The Atlantic daily.
Democrats are getting excited about a topic that makes many snooze: taxes. Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Elizabeth Warren have both put out gargantuan plans to lessen income inequality by massively raising taxes on the über-rich: The former’s plan would hike marginal tax rates to nearly double what they are now, while the latter would target wealth such as property, assets, and even art. Both plans could be stymied by the same problem: an ineffectual IRS. For decades, the tax-collecting agency has been hamstrung by a lack of resources that the wealthy exploit to their benefit, leading to $18 billion in lost government revenue each year.
Evening Reads
(Jae C. Hong / AP)
When Chinese immigrants first moved to the United States, they forged their own ethnic enclaves to stave off discrimination. However, Chinatowns across urban America are now at risk of becoming historical remnants:
But now, as Baby Boomers and Millennials move back into center cities, Chinatowns are some cities’ hottest neighborhoods. Sale prices in Boston’s Chinatown were among the fastest-growing in the city in 2017, increasing by $285,000; one of New York City’s biggest condo projects is a $1.4 billion, 815-unit tower in Chinatown that features a 75-foot swimming pool, an “adult tree house,” and an outdoor tea pavilion. According to an analysis by the website Zumper, rents for a one bedroom in the “historic cultural” neighborhood of Los Angeles, which includes Chinatown, were $2,350 in June 2017—among the highest in Los Angeles, more than listings in popular neighborhoods such as West Hollywood and Silver Lake.
→ Read the rest.
(Mike Segar / Reuters)
Typically, the Super Bowl halftime show is an eye-popping sensory overload that complements the thrill of the game. But this year, Maroon 5’s underwhelming performance couldn’t enliven the most boring Super Bowl in recent memory:
To the extent that this halftime show will be remembered at all, it’ll be for outside factors: a boycott of the NFL triggered by Colin Kaepernick’s protests against racism; Atlanta’s queasy clearing of homeless camps in preparation for the Super Bowl; Tom Brady’s sixth ring; the trauma of seeing the Bud Knight’s skull crushed by a Game of Thrones brute. “Moves Like Jagger” is the sort of prescription-grade jingle meant to jam brain circuitry, but even it couldn’t, on Sunday night, whistle away the show’s dreary context.
→ Read the rest.
Have you tried your hand at our daily mini crossword (available on our website, here)? Monday is the perfect day to start—the puzzle gets bigger and more difficult throughout the week.
→ Challenge your friends, or try to beat your own solving time.
(Illustration: Araki Koman)
Dear Therapist
(Bianca Bagnarelli)
Every Monday, Lori Gottlieb answers questions from readers about their problems, big and small. This week, an anonymous reader writes:
“We recently moved to a new country and my daughter quickly made some friends who make me uncomfortable. Specifically, there is one boy who used spectacularly sexually explicit language with her in a text, which I find degrading and demeaning.
I found this out because after my daughter came home late from an outing with friends for her birthday, I used that as an excuse to go through her phone, as I’d suspected that there was something off about this boy. To complicate matters, he’s the son of a colleague.”
→ Read the rest, and Lori’s response. Have a question? Email Lori anytime at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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It’s Monday, February 4.
President Donald Trump has nominated acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt to lead the department. Bernhardt, an ex–oil lobbyist, will replace Ryan Zinke, who stepped down from the role in December following a year of scandals.
Speaking of Nominations: Trump told The Wall Street Journal over the weekend that he prefers to have acting Cabinet secretaries rather than permanent ones because “it gives me flexibility.” But no matter how much Trump likes flexibility, the Constitution doesn’t, argues David A. Graham.
Testing His Staying Power: Democrats are still urging Governor Ralph Northam to resign after a blog surfaced a photo of two people dressed in blackface and Ku Klux Klan robes in his medical-school yearbook. Northam, despite initially issuing an apology for the photo, now denies appearing in it but reportedly met with aides over the weekend to discuss the possibility of stepping down. If he does, Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax would take over for the rest of Northam’s term. Fairfax, though, is now facing some serious allegations of his own.
Trump’s Greatest Opponent: In the first month after recapturing the speaker’s gavel, Nancy Pelosi has emerged not only as the highest-ranking woman in the history of the republic, but also as the leader best able to frustrate and outfox Donald Trump, writes Todd S. Purdum. “Trump’s a silly man, and she knows it,” says one admirer. “He’s not going to be a problem for her.”
Done Biden His Time?: Former Vice President Joe Biden is leaning toward running for president, reports Edward-Isaac Dovere. But his deliberations now are focused on whether Democrats will support a centrist—especially one of his age. Another septuagenarian’s potential entrance into the 2020 presidential race might be the push Biden is waiting for.
Snapshot
Omar Castillo, an immigrant from Honduras who says that he is an actor, pretends to be President Trump as he sits with other migrants in the back of a platform truck during their journey toward the United States, in Matehuala, Mexico. (Alexandre Meneghini / Reuters)
Ideas From The AtlanticHow to Soak the Rich (Annie Lowrey)
“If the goal is to raise more money for redistributive policies and to ensure that millionaires pay their fair share, Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal isn’t particularly efficient. It might not even raise that much money, instead discouraging employers from paying workers more than $10 million or workers from trying to earn more than that threshold.” → Read on.
The NFL’s Truce With Trump Wasn’t Worth It (Jemele Hill)
“You might think the NFL’s strategic behind-the-scenes groveling and appeals to the president’s ego would have bought the league even more leeway with Trump, but on Sunday, Trump couldn’t resist throwing a jab at the league on its holy day.” → Read on.
Ralph Northam Should Go (Adam Serwer)
“If Northam remains governor, he gives license to any number of future scoundrels to remain in office despite engaging in bigotry against their constituents. There is more at risk here than Northam’s political career.” → Read on.
Democrats Overplay Their Hand on Abortion Rights (Alexandra DeSanctis)
“By defending more expansive abortion rights even in the face of these facts, Democrats are exposing an uncomfortable reality that they would rather not acknowledge: They embrace abortion as a woman’s right to end the life of her fetus at any stage—not the right to end her pregnancy.” → Read on.
◆Lobbyist at Trump Tower Meeting Received Half a Million Dollars in Suspicious Payments (BuzzFeed News)
◆Protesters Try to Storm Federal Jail in Brooklyn With Little Heat or Electricity (Annie Correal, Andy Newman, and Christina Goldbaum, The New York Times)
◆Insider Leaks Trump's "Executive Time"–Filled Private Schedules (Alexi McCammond and Jonathan Swan, Axios)
◆‘There Is Going to Be a War Within the Party. We Are Going to Lean Into It.’ (David Freedlander, Politico)
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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There was a time when Facebook was small. After all, it only existed in one place on Earth: Harvard University, where Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore. He lived in Kirkland House, a square of brick buildings arranged around a courtyard, one side hemmed in by JFK Street. For all the tendrils that Facebook now has snaked across the globe, it feels strange that one can pinpoint the moment it all began: 6 p.m. on February 4, 2004, as the temperature dipped below freezing on another day in Cambridge.
Within weeks, the social network would spread across the school; within months, the Ivy League. High schoolers arrived the next year, then college students across the globe, and finally anyone who wanted to in September 2006. Four years after it was founded, Facebook hit 100 million users. Four years after that, 1 billion. Now 2 billion people use Facebook every month. That’s 500 million more users than the total number of personal computers in use around the globe.
Sarah Goodin was there in Kirkland House too. She was a sophomore like Zuckerberg, and friends with Chris Hughes, another one of the site’s co-founders. So, shortly after it launched, Zuckerberg emailed her and asked her to try his new thing. As far as anyone can tell, she was the 15th total user. “Supposedly, I am the first woman on Facebook,” Goodin, now an exhibit developer and interactive designer at the California Academy of Sciences, told me.
She can’t quite remember her first impression of the site. “It was kind of a nonevent. He made this kind of stuff and we were buddies ... so, I thought, I’ll try it,” she said. “I don’t remember the time I first logged in being like, Oh, wow!”
But something did happen. She got a bunch of her friends to sign up. I don’t know for sure, but she was probably how I ended up on Facebook, because I, too, was in Kirkland House and was friends with Sarah Goodin.
There was no photo sharing, no News Feed, no apps, no games, no events. TheFacebook, in those first few months, was merely a database of profile pages of other people at Harvard. It combined the insularity and intimacy of an elite college with the user-generated network-effect frenzy of what was just beginning to be called Web 2.0. I’d been on the internet for more than 10 years at that point, and I’d never seen anything spread like that, not even Harvard’s anonymously run local file-sharing movie server, Llama, or its other, less couth file-sharing server, which distributed porn. TheFacebook conquered Harvard immediately and completely, and then it did precisely the same thing over and over again, whether it was with fishermen in Tamil Nadu or bus drivers in Ontario or high schoolers in Sarasota. Everything about Facebook has changed from then to now, except Mark Zuckerberg and the network’s ability to spread.
[Read: The education of Mark Zuckerberg]
Let’s stipulate that TheFacebook’s origins are contested by multiple people—famously, the Winklevosses, and less famously, Aaron Greenspan, another Harvard programmer. Local bulletin-board systems (BBSs) and early blogging approximated some of its pleasures. AOL Instant Messenger buddy lists and status updates made a kind of ambient social awareness de rigueur for young people in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Online communities—from The WELL to BlackPlanet to SixDegrees to Friendster to Myspace—predated Facebook by years. And competing systems existed at other universities, including Greenspan’s houseSYSTEM at Harvard and Columbia’s CUCommunity. To take a line from Mark Zuckerberg’s IM conversation with Greenspan discussing his dispute with the Winklevosses: “apparently the winklevoss twins are spreading that i took the idea for thefacebook from them,” he wrote, “as if there was an idea haha.”
And that’s actually right: The idea of the social network clearly was not important. Its features (profiles, statuses, a photo) were basically generic—implemented by scores of other companies—by the time the site was founded. What mattered about TheFacebook was how it worked, which is to say, how it made its users feel and behave.
Fifteen years later, Harvard students and faculty still remember those early months watching the new network generate a new kind of reality, one where your online activity became permanently entangled with your offline self, where a relationship wasn’t real unless it was posted to Facebook, where everyone was assumed to have an online presence.
This was the epicenter, even if we had no idea how big the quake would be.
The computer-science professor Harry Lewis was Harvard’s dean of students from 1995 until June 2003. He’d had Mark Zuckerberg in class, and had seen the young man’s attempts to build interesting things on the web. In late January 2004, a few days before Facebook was incorporated, he received an email from Zuckerberg. The subject line was “6 Degrees to Harry Lewis.”
Zuckerberg had scraped the Harvard Crimson archives and created a network map connecting people who’d been mentioned together in Crimson stories. As Lewis was the dean, he appeared in the paper more than anyone else. So, Zuckerberg wanted to know, would it be okay if he starred as the central node in this network, so anyone could see how they were connected to Lewis?
“I had a very interesting reaction,” Lewis told me recently. “I told him, ‘It’s all public information, but there is somehow a point at which aggregation of too much public information begins to feel like an invasion of privacy.’ So ‘invasion of privacy’ was actually in the very first email that I wrote to Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 in response to the first glimpse of the prototype.”
Lewis liked Zuckerberg. “I wrote back, ‘Sure, what the hell, seems harmless?’” he said. “And then I went on and nudged him, in true professorial style, about the inconsistencies and things that looked like bugs and [how] he hadn’t implemented each thing correctly.”
“Six Degrees to Harry Lewis” was a toy, but Zuckerberg was already looking at doing something real. What he decided to do was incredibly simple: make an online version of Harvard’s paper Facebooks, most famously the one handed to all incoming students, the Freshman Register, a book containing photos of one’s classmates along with their dorm residences—called “houses” at Harvard—and high schools. Other attempts had been made at creating an online version of it, one by Greenspan and others within individual houses.
Charlie Cheever was one of the first Harvard alumni to join TheFacebook, and eventually one of its key early employees. By 2004, he’d already graduated and gone to work at Amazon in Seattle. But he’d worked on the Crimson website while in school and still read the paper, which announced that the site had launched. Why was he reading the old school paper? “It’s hard to remember this, but there just wasn’t really a lot of stuff on the internet.”
But now there was TheFacebook. “You could edit your profile yourself, and the whole school was on it,” Cheever says. Instead of reading the pages of the paper, you could read the pages of your classmates. And that was what people did, clicking through profile after profile.
TheFacebook was a stunningly simple product. “It was really just a directory,” recalled Meagan Marks, another Harvard student who became an early Facebook employee in 2006. “Before [October 2005], you could only even have one picture.”
“There was the physical Facebook,” Goodin said. “This was an enhanced digital version of that. People understood the utility of a Facebook. That core functionality enabled it to spread, and the more that it spread, the more that it was capable of spreading.”
So what did people do now that they had the long-awaited online Facebook? Most of the people I talked with couldn’t really remember. “I don’t remember anything like ‘I’m going on Facebook to do this,’” Teddy Wright, another Kirkland resident, who is now a teaching associate at the University of Washington School of Social Work, told me.
“I remember staring at Facebook in my Harvard dorm room on my giant laptop (before wifi was widespread, back when you still had to be plugged into an Ethernet cable to get online) totally perplexed as to why this site was appealing,” Laura Weidman Powers wrote in an email to me.
Mostly, it seems, people went on Facebook to do nothing. But it was the best way of doing nothing.
They also poked people, which no one ever understood, even way back at the beginning. “My friends and I poked each other a few times to see what the appeal was, and I never got it,” said Weidman Powers, who went on to co-found Code 2040, a nonprofit dedicated to diversifying the technology industry. “However, I do have a friend who met his wife via Facebook poke, so go figure.”
By far the most cited common use was to check on someone’s relationship status, which now suddenly posed a new problem for couples. Defining or ending a relationship meant choosing a new answer in a dropdown; one of life’s enduring human messes now required an answer that a computer could understand.
But there were two features, long since disappeared or buried in obscurity, that were themselves useful, and that hinted at the power the data underlying the service could hold. The first was that you could see who else was in your classes. A new information layer now sat over the top of every class you were in. See someone interesting? Need help with homework? Now there was an entirely new route to reaching people you had class with. The second was that if you listed a band name—for example, Godspeed You! Black Emperor—as an interest in your profile, and then clicked on the link that generated, you would see everyone who had listed that as a favorite band. Any book or movie or artist suddenly had a visible network of people attached to it. “It struck me as a very efficient way to find communities of common interest around these pretty quickly, and this was a novel and very useful feature,” John Norvell, an anthropologist who was teaching at Harvard that year, wrote in an email.
And if you think about how Instagram hashtags work now, it’s not too far off from that very early vision. Courses showed the power that layering Facebook on top of existing real-life groups of people could have. And the other feature showed an enduring truth about social media: Liking certain cultural products and hobbies put you in a particular social grouping, according to the machine, if nothing else.
Norvell ended up thinking a lot about TheFacebook that year, as he’d just developed a new course called “Life Online,” which he taught for the first time the very semester TheFacebook launched. He lurked on the site and watched his students take to it.
“Facebook seemed to take over so fast,” Norvell said. “Expressions like ‘a relationship isn’t official until it’s Facebook official’ started to be heard right away.”
Heather Horn, now an editor at The New Republic, was an incoming freshman in the fall of 2004. Many of her classmates had signed up over the summer, so they never experienced a day on campus without Facebook. “Pretty continually through the next four years, I had people berate me that my three-year, rock-solid relationship wasn’t listed on Facebook,” Horn told me. “I remember my roommate’s boyfriend thought I must not be serious about my boyfriend, if he wasn’t listed on Facebook. I remember thinking that was just bananas.”
[Read: When you fall in love, this is what Facebook sees]
Of course, then as now, the romantic possibilities of TheFacebook were not limited to merely listing or checking a relationship status. Most people’s stories about the early service revolve around what Wright called “the flirtation machine.” People were thirsty, and here was the perfect blue oasis. “Facebook seemed like someone had taken the high-school game of deciphering people’s mental statuses and crush pursuits from AOL instant-messaging statuses and said, ‘How do we make this bigger and more all-encompassing?’” Horn said.
How exactly to approach someone on Facebook, though, was not entirely settled. Katie Zacarian was a senior who would go on to work at Facebook. She remembered a roommate calling her in to look at her computer screen. A fellow student had sent a message to her that said something like “Hey, you’re cute. Would you like to meet up?” But who was this guy? Nobody knew him. “We pored over his profile to [try] to figure out who he was and where she could have possibly collided with him on campus,” Zacarian, now an environmental-conservation technologist, said. “Being asked out by someone you’d never met nor ever seen in person was completely new to us ... In February 2004, it was hard for us to believe that a photo and a few things you wrote about yourself would prompt a guy to ask you out and, at first, seemed sort of weird.” (In the end, the roommate and messenger had a single, awkward date.)
Though cruising classmates was an embarrassingly common pursuit, TheFacebook wasn’t all dating. Norvell, one of the few faculty members with a profile in the early months, observed all kinds of interesting behavior from the students in and outside his classes.
“I remember that people took Facebook features like ‘liking’ and the various components of the profile back then to do creative and funny things with them, tons of inside jokes and multiple layers of irony,” Norvell recalled. “My own students wrote whole papers on what a ‘like’ could mean. I think all that took the Facebook developers by surprise, and they struggled to keep up with it. They expected much more literal uses.”
In other words, the culture of TheFacebook exploded in technicolor.
Thirteen days (13!) after launch, the future New Yorker editor Amelia Lester began a Crimson column about TheFacebook, joking, “For the uninitiated—all three of you ...” She then went on to detail a remarkably complete critique that could be applied to Instagram 2019 as well as TheFacebook 2004: “Just about every profile is a carefully constructed artifice, a kind of pixelated Platonic ideal of our messy, all-too organic real-life selves who don’t have perfect hair and don’t spend their weekends snuggling up with the latest Garcia Marquez.”
In a sense, everybody became Harry Lewis, the central node in the network. Facebook induced new behaviors along with the new pressures on the self. People became addicted, thirsted for the most friends possible, registered wry criticisms about the meaning of “friending,” and conscientiously objected to joining.
And if it’s hard to peg real three-dimensional people as one thing or another, TheFacebook not only made this possible, it practically required it. “Online social networks prove endlessly fascinating as long as I continue to subconsciously sort everyone I know into neat little categories,” Lester wrote.
But if the downsides of this new thing were obvious to the critical eye, what made people keep coming back and back and back? Lester had a theory there, too. “There are plenty of other primal instincts evident at work here: an element of wanting to belong, a dash of vanity and more than a little voyeurism probably go a long way in explaining most addictions (mine included),” she wrote. “But most of all it’s about performing—striking a pose, as Madonna might put it, and letting the world know why we’re important individuals. In short, it’s what Harvard students do best. And that’s why, wildly misleading photos aside, it would be difficult if not near-impossible to go cold turkey in the face of thefacebook.com.”
As Lester’s column implies, within weeks, Facebook’s first users had—like water rushing down a hill—come to occupy every position that it was possible to have on TheFacebook. So many of the behaviors that have come to dominate social media were visible right then, in miniature. Weeks in, Goodin noted, there were already “the ironic users,” who gave funny answers to the profile prompts and listed themselves as married to friends or roommates.
Almost everyone I talked with had a hard time remembering how the world was before this all happened. In particular, there is so much information about real people online now. Back then, information that linked a real physical person with their digital manifestations was sparse.
“That was really the first time that people ever made an account with their real name on it,” Cheever says. Before TheFacebook, “pretty much everything was like ‘Username: mds416.’ It was considered unsafe to use your real name. Cybervillains would come to your house and kidnap you.”
But TheFacebook borrowed some of the intimacy of the college environment to make this fairly radical step away from privacy feel safe. So people at Harvard, and then elsewhere, started giving more and more of themselves to the web.
[Read: Social apps are now a commodity]
“We were so open. For a while, anybody who ever went to Harvard could see whatever I posted,” said Natalie Bruss, a partner at the venture firm Fifth Wall, who was also in Zuckerberg’s class.
And so it went from school to school, establishing a new norm of how to be on the internet that was firmly enmeshed with how to be in college. An early marketing innovation, according to Marks, was that the company’s founders created demand at a school before launching there. “It meant people were dying to be on Facebook, so it launched with this high density, and that brought all this engagement early on,” she said.
A launch of TheFacebook created a frenzy. Who had time to think about the theoretical relationship between one’s online persona and the offline self? Later, there would be the real-names policy and Cambridge Analytica and the creeping understanding that we have all given the most sophisticated advertising mechanisms in the history of the world all the information they need to sell us things. Kids would get smart and switch back to usernames and private, ephemeral messaging platforms. A new, savvier generation is creating new norms. That’s good, but that’s not the same thing as returning to the world I took for granted until February of my senior year.
To watch these dynamics play out on ever-larger scales has been disorienting. The world should not be this perfectly fractal. And normally, it is too huge to comprehend: the millions of ways to live and talk and eat, the forgotten corners, deserts, farmers, bayou dwellers, towers in Singapore, welders in Accra, vaqueros, fly-fishing guides, hole-punch manufacturers, rare-earth-mineral-mining children, chocolatiers, shamans, and painters. But with Facebook, my dorm became coextensive with the world. This whole jumble of 2 billion people share something now, this thing called Facebook. There is almost nowhere on Earth that you can definitively say: There is no Facebook here and Facebook has changed nothing. Even the uncontacted indigenous people of the Amazon have gone viral.
I have wondered through the years whether another group of people could have accomplished this so quickly and so thoroughly. Was Mark Zuckerberg the only person who would have made this particular mark in the world?
And should I have seen it in him? When I was passing him on the way to a late-night bagel or some popcorn chicken, should he have glowed, predestined, charmed?
He really was just a guy. Cheever, a serious ultimate-Frisbee player, tells a funny story about Zuckerberg. He had met a great ultimate-Frisbee player, Mark Zuckerman, whom he wanted on the team, but at a tournament, Mark Zuckerberg signed up to play too. It was a windy day, and as Zuckerberg warmed up with a teammate, a gust of wind sent a Frisbee crashing into his nose. Bleeding, the poor freshman had to be driven to the hospital.
“So for two years of my life, anytime someone said ‘Mark Zuckerberg,’ I thought, Do you mean bizarro Mark Zuckerman? He was a joke character,” he said. “Then all of a sudden, here he is appearing in my Crimson newspaper.”
And that’s probably the best way to explain how watching Facebook take over the world feels to me. One minute, people are sending jokes about pokes and making detailed Friendster comparisons. The next, the thing has become central to all information flow and geopolitics.
“I often think about, you know, obviously Mark didn’t know it was gonna go this way. I still have his business card, from when his title was ‘I’m CEO, Bitch,’” said Goodin, the first woman on Facebook. “What’s weird is that it seemed like this kind of fun thing, and all of a sudden it’s a utility and it’s warped into something else that is not that great because of the way it has transformed social interaction.”
If it feels like a discontinuity, however, one thing has been constant from February 4, 2004, to today: Nothing in the world is better at getting people to put their selves on the internet. And there’s nothing more interesting than other people.
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.
Tell us: What was your childhood P.E. experience like?
Here’s how readers responded.
A handful of readers explained how gym class creates a culture where bullying thrives:
Twelve years old, entering high school, physically underdeveloped and socially challenged, I was a prime candidate for bullying. Our high school allowed upper-class students to choose where they spent their time during free periods. One of the options included the gym. There was a group of older students who spent their study time in the bleachers during my gym classes. To this day (I’m now 77), I remember their taunts and jeers as I participated in the exercises. They had a nickname for me, one I can’t say even after all these years, so real is the pain when I recall it, not because it was forbidden language, but because of the mocking way in which they used it.
A painful experience, yes, but suffering that was mitigated by my very wise eighth-grade teacher. He had taken me aside one day to tell me that my brain had developed faster than my body but in the long run that was an advantage, and that my body would catch up to my brain someday. That short piece of mentoring stayed with me through high school, enabling me to use my intelligence to attract friends and thwart enemies, succeeding where I could and minimizing those areas where success was beyond my reach.
Anne Hayes
Derby, Conn.
P.E. brings back memories of everything awkward about school and adolescence. Being picked almost last. Communal showering. Not being able to wear glasses because they might break, so therefore not being able to see, so therefore not being any good. As a girl in the ’70s, not learning how to play soccer, but having to memorize the size of the field; same for basketball and baseball. Don’t even get me started on dodgeball. The game where the kids who were already being picked on daily got battered, and it was sanctioned by the teachers.
The P.E. I was exposed to was not evil, just sad.
Marjorie Colletta
Alexandria, Va.
As an artistic, bookwormy type of kid, P.E. was my idea of a nightmare. Especially since at my school, the girls had to wear these hideous, shapeless, green polyester one-piece sacks that snapped on over each shoulder. The mean girls would chase after the nerdy girls (me) and yank at the snaps, making the top of the sack fall down while we were out on the field near where the boys were (in their non-sack-like T-shirts and shorts). And don’t get me started on how our gym teacher, whose whistle-adorned neck resembled that of a pit bull, used to look at me in utter derision when I klutzed my way through whatever activity we had that day. P.E. made me hate exercise even more than I did to begin with!
Pamela J. Kincheloe
Rochester, N.Y.
Girls’ P.E. in middle school was great. I learned to play volleyball. But I was the only Jewish player on the team and the Christian girls didn’t socialize with me. Sadly, they didn’t invite me to eat lunch with them. I’ve never forgotten that experience.
Donna Myrow
Palm Springs, Calif.
One reader recently rediscovered her P.E. report card:
I recently came across my third-grade report card, from 1967. My P.E. teacher had commented that “Katrina ... is not especially athletically inclined. She will try anything once but lacks initiative in athletic competition.”
(Courtesy of Katrina Weinig)Fortunately, I don’t think my parents ever showed me that report card so I never internalized its negative message! As it turned out, sports have been a major part of my life, on both the amateur and professional level. I’m turning 60 this year and, while I no longer compete, I still backpack, ski, scuba dive, cycle, swim, and ride horses, among other things. These sports have kept me healthy in mind and body, allowed me to share incredible experiences with family and friends, and brought me great joy.
Takeaway lesson for P.E. teachers: Encourage kids to find sports they can be passionate about. Competitive team sports aren’t for everyone, but with a little guidance and positive reinforcement, almost all people can find a sport they’ll enjoy and succeed at.
Katrina Weinig
Washington, D.C.
Forget gym class; for some readers, the locker room alone was anxiety-inducing:
I was in high school in Los Angeles in the 1960s, when gym class every day was mandatory and no one thought of questioning it. What was also mandatory was that everyone showers after gym class, and to ensure compliance, the gym teachers—all women—would stand at the entrance to the shower room checking off our names as we left. If they suspected that a girl had simply pretended to take a shower, they would pull her towel away to see if she had water drops on her naked body (many girls learned to splash a few drops on themselves so they could pass the test, as most of us preferred to shower at home). This felt not only tyrannical, but intrusive and embarrassing—and if you didn’t have enough showers on the teachers’ dreaded lists at the end of the semester, you got an “Unsatisfactory” in behavior on your report card.
Claudia Plimpton
Amherst, Mass.
In my seventh-grade gym class—in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1959—we girls had to line up each day in military fashion so the teacher could look down the collar of our droopy, one-piece gym suits to make sure we were wearing either a bra or an undershirt. If found wanting, we were called out, in all senses of the word.
Julia McGregor
Minneapolis, Minn.
I was in a public middle school (which was then called “junior high”) in the late 1960s in Louisville, Kentucky. We girls had to wear a horrible royal blue one-piece outfit with sort-of-bloomer legs and snaps up the front. I was small and thin and very physically inept. I shrank into the background as much as possible, but in team play that was impossible. The very, very worst memory, though, is that after class, we had to strip and take a big group shower. For girls going through puberty, it was the ultimate humiliation.
Caren Nichter
Martin, Tenn.
Other readers found ways to avoid participating altogether:
Being a music, drama, and English devotee, I found P.E. a horrible and jarring way to spend an academic period. It was the only subject I ever failed, due to my boyfriend’s trunk, which was my escape route to skip, skip, skip that harrowing high-school subject. Today I am a certified yoga teacher and yoga therapist and love to swim and hike, but would always choose to read a book before engaging in physical activity.
Susan Borofsky
Düsseldorf, Germany
I don’t blame it on the gym teachers or the classes. But I thought it was cool to always complain about my period. I took pride in doing as little as I could without getting in trouble.
Joan Chandler
Chicago, Ill.
What was gym class like to a nerdy, depressed adolescent? Torture. I loathed games, was an unpopular pick for teams, and dreaded gym class. Fortunately, Mrs. Pratt, our ancient gym teacher, had a policy of excusing girls with menstrual cramps from participation—with a “note” from a parent. I always had a “note.” I had cramps three days a week, every week, throughout junior high school.
Diana Dubrawsky
Silver Spring, Md.
In high school in Queens, New York, I menstruated with “horrible” cramps at least four times a month to avoid P.E. and the dreaded “gym suit.”
Yvette Sedlewicz
Garland, Texas
I hated it. Constant harassment. Team sports are evil. I finally stopped going. Got into trouble because of it. Did not care.
William Milne
Barrie, Ontario, Canada
Because it was 55 years ago, I have forgotten why we did this, but my best friend and I decided to protest P.E. We refused to put on P.E. uniforms one high-school semester. At the time, our school was giving number grades in every subject and the P.E. teacher gave us a 70—for merely sitting on the gym bleachers, I suppose. Those low grades in P.E. ruined our overall four-year grade averages. That protest cost us the valedictorian and salutatorian honors our senior year and it was a graduating class of 31 students. Since then, I think very carefully about what and how I protest.
Helen Albanese
Oakton, Va.
One reader found a way to customize P.E. to fit her needs:
Oh, how I hated P.E.! I hated my body, was terribly self-conscious in those awful gym shorts, and was terrified of being the weakest link in the team chain. Every week, weather allowing, my high-school P.E. class went for a 45-minute run through the woods around the school. My mother had recently been trying to get fit and was spending her mornings speed-walking through the neighborhood. I read an article in one of her fitness magazines about how a fast walking tempo was as good for you as going for a run. The next day I took the magazine to school, screwed up my courage, and confronted my gym teacher. He was a towering, gruff man and I was an overly sensitive, poetry-reading, theater-department geek. I stated my argument—“Scientific research shows that a brisk walk is as beneficial as a jog, therefore I plan to walk the jogging route at a fast pace instead of running.” I showed him the magazine article, said I had my mother’s blessing, and waited, shaking in fear, for the backlash. However, I was met with approval. My plan was allowed! I was the only one allowed to speed-walk, cementing my reputation as the weird one who did everything her own way. But the respect I had for my gym teacher grew and, I would like to think, his for me. I still grumbled while I fell behind in burpees, but I was pleased as punch speed-walking through the woods.
Amy McGriff
Delft, Netherlands
Many readers had positive experiences—one even discovered a lifelong love for distance running:
I enjoyed my childhood P.E. classes. They were a welcome break from the rest of the day and a fun way to release steam.
Mohammed Siddiqui
Doha, Qatar
I don’t remember much of what we did in gym class, but I do remember having lots of outdoor playtime regardless of the weather. If it rained, we still went out. If there was snow and cold, we bundled up. We played a lot of dodgeball and kickball and there were always jump ropes (double Dutch) going and we practiced shooting baskets from the basketball free-throw line. And here’s the best: We were taught dances of all sorts. I remember square dancing, but in particular I remember we learned the minuet. Of all things, the minuet? It was so not an East Chicago thing. Go figure.
Jan Clifford
South Pasadena, Calif.
I started kindergarten in 1974 in Northwest Florida, in the deepest of the Deep South. Two P.E. teachers team-taught in my elementary school, one male and one female, and I probably remember them better than most of my other teachers through all of K–12. They were very kind and made P.E. fun. They started a running program where we started out running a half mile each day and then built up to a mile. Some students chose to walk the distance, but I chose to run and discovered a lifelong love for distance running. I ran competitively in cross-country and track through junior high, high school, and college, which I attribute to my wonderful elementary-school P.E. teachers. I even got a small college scholarship after I was among the top-ranked Florida high-school women in the mile, two-mile, and 5K.
Yes, we played the much maligned game of dodgeball, but we also participated in a creative variety of games ranging from disco dancing to group activities with a silk parachute to my very favorite, field day with popcorn and snow cones afterward for 15 cents. Many of the activities were group-oriented rather than competitive, and they built community at the same time as they promoted physical activity. I also loved rainy-day P.E., with such classics as Heads Up, Seven Up, an indoor game played at tables which involved putting your head down, having one of the kids choose someone while everyone’s eyes were closed, and then trying to guess who was “it.”
I realize that not everyone has such idyllic memories of P.E. However, as someone who has struggled with depression as an adult, I think that P.E. and running together acted as a natural antidepressant that stabilized my mental health without my even realizing it. I probably would have had to start taking medication at a much younger age had it not been for developing a love for exercise early in life.
Karen Kruse Thomas
Baltimore, Md.
For me, P.E. was a godsend. I was a good student in school (straight A’s), and I owe it to some good teachers and to ... P.E.! We had class twice a day in grade school, plus during our long lunch breaks. All afternoon and morning, looked forward to getting out to play softball, football, dodgeball, rassle with the other guys, whatever. It enabled me to sit for the rest of the school day without too much agony.
Robert Sarracino
St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada
Finally, one reader had a recommendation for how to fix P.E.:
Students would be better off by starting each school day with 20 minutes of simple teacher-demonstrated calisthenics!
Michelle Miller
Toronto, Canada
“Ben Mezrich clearly aspires to be the Jackie Collins of Silicon Valley.”
It was the summer of 2009, and I had just published my book The Accidental Billionaires, about the founding of Facebook—which Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher would soon adapt into the Oscar-winning film The Social Network. I was on my book tour, bouncing from cable-news outlet to cable-news outlet, and at nearly every stop, Mark Zuckerberg’s refutation was waiting for me, passed along by his company’s spokesman, Elliot Schrage. I believed—and still believe—that what I had written was a fair and true telling of Facebook’s origins in a college dorm room, an almost Shakespearean drama involving socially awkward friends who had launched a revolution. Zuckerberg disagreed; at the time, his main concern seemed to be that I had implied that he’d founded Facebook to meet girls. A secondary concern seemed to be with the subtitle of my book—A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal. When news of The Accidental Billionaires leaked onto the internet before publication, along with that subtitle, the word that seemed to rile up the biggest number of panicked missives from Facebook’s PR team was that kicker: Betrayal.
Who, the PR flacks kept asking, was betrayed?
A decade later, having watching Facebook grow into the multibillion-dollar, multibillion-user behemoth we know today, buffeted by scandals ranging from accusations of misuse of personal data to the Facebook platform being appropriated for election meddling, that question feels even more important. The answer gets right to the heart of what Facebook has become.
[Read: The thrilling Facebook creation myth]
Facebook’s origin story, as portrayed by my book and the movie, is well known. Late one night after a date gone bad, Zuckerberg made a website, FaceMash, which allowed his fellow Harvard students to compare female classmates based on photos he pulled from various dorm registries. When the prank site reached the attention of the Harvard administration, Zuckerberg was nearly kicked out of school for “breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy.” Though he managed to avoid any substantial punishment, he was written up in The Harvard Crimson, where he caught the attention of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the 6-foot-5-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers who couldn’t have been more perfect foils if they’d actually been invented whole-cloth out of Aaron Sorkin’s fevered imagination.
The twins were building their own social website, HarvardConnection, which later morphed into ConnectU, and were in the market for a coder. They reached out to Zuckerberg, who readily agreed to work for them. It was around that time that Zuckerberg went to his friend and classmate Eduardo Saverin and pitched him on an idea to create a new website, a place where people could connect, putting up their own profiles—a site that wouldn’t get him nearly kicked out of school. He asked Saverin to fund the endeavor; Saverin offered up $1,000, the most prescient investment in the history of the world, in exchange for the title of CFO and 30 percent of the company.
Weeks later, in February of 2004, after stalling Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss with a series of emails claiming he was too busy with classwork to finish their coding, Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com, which rapidly grew into a phenomenon. Zuckerberg ended up in California, where he met up with Sean Parker—and Eduardo Saverin, too, quickly found himself cut out of the story, his name erased from the Facebook masthead, his shares in the company diluted away.
[Read: Sean Parker’s lasting influence on Facebook explained]
The first few months of Facebook’s existence already offered plenty of candidates for the tail end of my subtitle. But the personal, dorm-room story was only one component of a much larger drama, still being played out on a global scale.
From the very beginning, Facebook wasn’t supposed to be just another social network—it was supposed to be a social revolution. Zuckerberg had never cared about making money with the site; in high school, he’d turned down a lucrative offer for software he’d developed, instead giving it away for free. As much as Saverin had pushed for Zuckerberg to figure out ways to monetize Facebook, Zuckerberg had never made that a priority. Instead, Facebook was supposed to be something “cool,” something that changed the world by changing how we interacted with one another. Facebook wasn’t some site you visited—it was a place where you lived. By sharing yourself among intersecting circles of friends, family, and colleagues, you became connected to an ever-growing village. The more you shared, the more connections could be made. Consequently, the less you protected your data, the better Facebook functioned, and the more powerful the revolution.
Yes, Zuckerberg created Facebook to help socially awkward kids like himself meet girls—but he was also intent on growing an online village designed to break down the barriers between people by changing our conceptions of privacy. Zuckerberg believed that the world was a better place the more we shared, whether we liked it or not. Although he’s seemed genuinely surprised at the privacy scandals that have hit Facebook over the years, nothing he’s done to break down our privacy walls has been unintentional. Privacy is antithetical to the engine that makes Facebook work. Privacy limits connection, whether it’s a connection with friends and family over a photo you put on your profile or a connection to a company trying to sell you something that you, according to your personal data, obviously want. This is the experience that Facebook was always meant to offer. The data you put on Facebook was never supposed to be private.
And this leads back to my subtitle, and to the concept of betrayal. From the very beginning, Zuckerberg has shown a pattern of deflecting and discarding things and people that don’t conform to his worldview or his ambition. In the same way that Zuckerberg discarded people like the Winklevoss twins and Eduardo Saverin in his quest to launch his revolution, he’s endeavored to shake off our fears about attacks on privacy and mishandled data. When we discover that our private information isn’t actually private, we feel betrayed.
And that’s why I believe I was right about Mark Zuckerberg—and why every one of us knows a little bit what it feels like to be a Winklevoss.
A man walks to an old farmhouse, his hands grazing stalks of grass, in a primal American image: something out of an Andrew Wyeth painting, or Days of Heaven. He’s greeted by his grandpa, whom he hasn’t seen in a long time. Inside the house sits a beautiful car. Is this real life? No, it is the hallucination of an office worker with a cashew blocking his airway. A colleague Heimlichs him back to reality, and he appears bummed to discover that he is not, in fact, dead.
This was Audi’s way of announcing that it would electrify its cars by 2025, part of a Super Bowl ad class that not-so-gently warned the viewer that consumer products would shape not only their life, but also their death. The commercial-break culture war of the past few years—brands image-washing themselves with gender-role reversals, multiculti montages, and Kendall Jenner wandering into a protest—seemed somewhat on pause, perhaps with the blowback to Gillette’s masculinity lecture too fresh. What instead emerged was a lurid, almost putrid sensibility, culminating in the eerie resurrection of Andy Warhol smearing ketchup on a soggy hamburger bun. Chunky milk, murderous nuts, flying reptiles barbecuing a barbecue: The end will be nasty, and it will not be in your control.
“IT’S WORSE THAN IT WAS YESTERDAY” read a fake newspaper headline in the home-security gizmo SimpliSafe’s Super Bowl spot, an explicit work of fearmongering that also featured an Amazon Echo–type device that malevolently spied on users. Amazon, meanwhile, advertised itself with an oddly chipper affirmation of the nightmares people have about its AI-adjacent products. The company infiltrated private spaces, as per Forest Whitaker’s Alexa-enabled toothbrush. It took command of a user’s credit card when Harrison Ford’s dog, wearing an Echo collar, stocked up on kibble. It hijacked civilization at a supervillain scale, with an Alexa-rigged space station taking down the country’s power grids. The point was that Amazon would never actually allow these things. But also, definitely, that it could.
The sense of mutating capitalism—of products gaining sentience then running amok with horrifying results—also defined one of Sunday’s more effective WTF moments. Bud Light has branded itself with a medieval shtick for years now, but on Sunday night a campy joust of beverage-affiliated warriors turned gruesome, with the reenactment of a Game of Thrones scene in which a hero had his eyes gouged out. Then a dragon swooped in and roasted Bud Light’s royal court, and the Thrones theme song started to play. Twist: This was an ad both for beer and for HBO’s biggest hit show. Another wall between discrete cultural-commercial kingdoms has fallen, and not even the stupidest mascots are safe from the ensuing chaos.
Bud Knight will be back, though, as no one—fictional or otherwise—dies in ad land. Hence Martin Luther King Jr. returned to the Super Bowl in arguably an even dicier context than the much-loathed Dodge spot from last year. The NFL has been buffeted by fans and celebs swearing it off in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, who accused team owners of blacklisting him for his anti-racism protests. The league, on Sunday, tried to strike back with an ad-like montage of King’s words preceding the coin toss, which was overseen by King’s daughter Bernice King, U.S. Representative John Lewis, and former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young.
“Humanity is turning the tide and our efforts must include bridge builders, strategic negotiators and ambassadors,” Bernice King tweeted on Sunday, an implicit response to critics on Kaepernick’s side. Social-justice leaders can and obviously do disagree tactically about when to build bridges and when to refuse to participate with alleged oppressors. But MLK’s words were being used, more than anything, for football’s own PR efforts against dissenters. They were, in effect, being weaponized against supporters of his own cause.
But the spookiest haunting, still, was by Andy Warhol’s ghost. The late artist’s spiel about the universality of Coca-Cola—“A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking”—provided the seed for a decidedly un-Warholian bit of doggerel used to hawk that drink. Warhol himself made an appearance, too, in a Burger King commercial that showed him sitting at a table and eating a Whopper on camera, at length. A pioneer of the postmodern blurring between art and ads, Warhol is an apt figure for such treatment, but also an ominous one. Count off another vertebrae engulfed by the snake eating its own tail.
The Warhol footage came from the Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth’s 1982 documentary, 66 Scenes From America, and the original clip—of Warhol unwrapping the burger, eating it, sitting in uncomfortable silence, and then saying his name—made the kind of gnomic statement on consumerism that Warhol specialized in. Burger King rebroadcast it undoctored, save for, in both the 45-second TV spot and the nearly five-minute internet version, a flash of text: #EatLikeAndy. It also tried to mascot-ify him by handing out “mystery boxes” containing white-bob wigs before the game. Said the brand’s marketing materials: “You’ll know exactly what to do with everything that’s inside the box, and you’ll have your own 15 minutes of fame, or should we say, flame.”
The Warhol ad did make for one of the most arresting spots of the night, with silence and mystery cutting against the game’s loudness. And it’d certainly be hard to argue impropriety in a fast-food chain decontextualizing and commodifying a pop-art adman who famously admired Madison Avenue’s talents for … decontextualization and commodification. “Warhol’s great advance was collapsing any distinction between commercial and noncommercial modes of experience,” Stephen Metcalf wrote recently in The Atlantic, elsewhere citing his quote “Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art.”
Even so, a line is being crossed. Warhol said that the ad-swaddled surfaces of modern life were canvases; now a corporation has taken not only his art but also his own likeness in the act of art making, and represented it as an ad. If he is the prime target for such treatment, there is no reason to think he’d be the only one. In an almost visceral way, the morbid mood of Sunday’s ads hinted at an expansion of Warhol’s 15-minutes-of-fame principle past the truism it’s already become. One day we will each leave this Earth, but our image no longer will. If gods or accomplishments or loved ones do not ensure immortality, at least the corporations might, as there’s no buyer that can’t also become a seller.
Michael Apa remembers the first time a patient told him she wanted her teeth fixed because she didn’t like the way they looked in selfies. It was 2015, and Apa’s patient was Huda Kattan, who had good reason to care about her smile: Kattan has leveraged her popular beauty blog and millions of Instagram followers to build a global cosmetics brand, Huda Beauty. In the process, her path to success has been dotted with thousands of close-up images and videos of her own face.
To perfect her teeth, Kattan opted for porcelain veneers, which have exploded in popularity in the past 10 years. Apa, an aesthetic dentist with a quarter-million Instagram followers of his own, documented her procedure on his YouTube channel. Although veneers have been used less glamorously for decades to help non-famous people with serious size or shape problems in some of their teeth, they can also be used to perfect someone’s already-nice smile beyond the capabilities of traditional orthodontia. Veneers start at about $1,000 a tooth, and for top-tier aesthetic dentists such as Apa, they can easily hit $3,000 to $4,000 apiece.
For years, using veneers to perfect already-good teeth was mostly confined to the professionally attractive and fabulously wealthy. They started to gain wide favor among traditional celebrities in the late 1990s and might have stayed confined to those rarefied circles were it not for Instagram. The platform’s cabal of mostly young, mostly female, mostly preternaturally attractive power users, often referred to as “influencers,” are under immense pressure to meet the same beauty standards as their traditionally famous—and often far wealthier—Hollywood counterparts. Now Apa hears the desire to look better in selfies all the time, from people with all kinds of jobs. “Every cosmetic procedure has just gone crazy in popularity since Instagram became a thing,” he says.
[Read: Who would spend $17 on toothpaste?]
These influencers have a different, more intimate relationship with their fans than the celebrities of the past, which has helped Instagram collapse any remaining gap between the things actors and models do to their bodies and what young consumers will aspire to (and spend money on) for their own bodies. As a result, influencers have begun to normalize a whole host of cosmetic enhancements, including veneers, for a generation of young consumers.
Dental veneers date back as far as 1928, when the pioneering aesthetic dentist Charles Pincus was asked by Hollywood studio execs to perfect the look of an actor’s teeth. That version of the procedure was temporary, and actors could pop off their perfect smiles at the end of the day. Now veneers are more permanent. Thin porcelain covers are glued to the fronts of teeth that have been sanded down to accommodate the addition, and they last at least 10 years on average. They’re in a tier of cosmetic procedures common among influencers, alongside things such as lip injections and Fraxel laser treatments: more invasive and longer-lasting than a good makeup application, but not as extreme or expensive as plastic surgery.
“[Influencers] have to perform traditional beauty,” says Brooke Erin Duffy, a communications professor at Cornell University. “If they don’t do enough and aren’t looking great, they’re going to get called out.” At the same time, there’s a risk of doing too much and looking too fake, which can turn fans against them, Duffy says. That puts Instagram stars in a bind that the veneers tier of procedure can ease: Audiences want to feel like they’re following someone authentic, but also someone who’s authentically prettier, richer, and happier than anyone they know in real life.
“Part of this is a push to stick with aesthetics that are safe and which do well, metrics-wise,” says Emily Hund, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania who studies Instagram influencers. For many women whose accounts focus on fashion, beauty, or lifestyle, that includes adhering to basic norms of feminine grooming: flowing hair, even skin, a small waist, manicured nails, plump lips, and a straight, white smile. According to Hund, achieving those features drives positive engagement and helps accounts gain followers, which in turn better situates an influencer to make sponsorship deals and earn an income.
Often the easiest way for these influencers to generate money is to sell the tools of their own aesthetic achievement back to their followers, giving fans a way to replicate the look they admire. Kattan, for instance, started a beauty company that’s now worth a billion dollars by selling her own line of false eyelashes to her followers. But usually this strategy means partnering with a third party to endorse a product or service, which the influencer then receives for free, often in addition to payment for posts. That dynamic has helped a lot of influencers end up with a new set of pearly whites, free of charge.
“It’s almost hard to find an influencer without veneers now,” Apa says. When he expanded his New York City practice to include an office in Dubai in 2014, inviting the region’s Instagram stars in to get their teeth done was the primary way he built a new client base, he says: “It just completely changed the landscape of how I thought of attracting business and patients.” Apa notes that now up to 90 percent of his business in both offices comes from people who know about him from Instagram, and influencers and traditional celebrities alike seek him out. (The actress Chloë Sevigny and the reality-TV star Kyle Richards both recently appeared on his account.)
On Instagram, anything beloved by celebrities quickly finds a huge audience of normal users, hungry to experience the lifestyles of the rich and famous. “It’s mind-blowing how much influence social media has on people,” says Anabella Oquendo Parilli, a dentist and the director of New York University’s aesthetic-dentistry program for international students. While most people can afford a new lipstick or an occasional new pair of shoes, selling $10,000 worth of new teeth is something else. But social media is an environment where users expect to get a more intimate view of a person’s life, which sets the stage for influencers to recommend more than just clothing or makeup to their followers.
To meet that expectation, beauty and lifestyle influencers have created a class of Instagram-famous medical professionals such as the plastic surgeon Dr. Miami or the dermatologist Simon Ourian, who now have millions of followers in their own right. Being their patient has become a widely understood luxury good, like a designer handbag for your corporeal form, and it’s increasingly common to see cosmetic procedures advertised in the same ways as more traditional high-end status accessories on social media. A pair of Christian Louboutin shoes and a set of plumped-up lips cost about the same, and for a lot of young social-media users, they feel like similar consumer decisions.
Taking a medical procedure and recasting it as a marketable consumer good isn’t a simple process, but it’s one for which Instagram’s structure and culture work almost perfectly. It’s where you see what your friends had for brunch, one tap away from an internet celebrity showing off her new teeth. People’s ability to process those things separately just hasn’t caught up to the technology we now have at our disposal. “We use the framework we’d use for our friends and neighbors” when evaluating posts from influencers, says Duffy. “We have this expectation that social media gives us a glimpse into the ‘real’ person behind the scenes.”
[Read: When a sponsored Facebook post doesn’t pay off]
Social-media users now also live in an environment where they have far more opportunities to judge their own appearance than previous generations did. “You really get to see yourself age over however long you’ve had one of these phones,” says Apa. That creates pressure on regular users to perform to the same standards as the famous and wealthy. Those standards are aesthetic, but they’re also socioeconomic: It costs a lot of money to be that pretty. Instagram rewards people who perform beyond their economic lot in life, which spurs a whole host of purchases and can push people to less experienced, less expensive practitioners. Oquendo Parilli and Apa believe comparison photos on social media paint a vivid picture of what’s possible, but they warn that most depict work performed on someone who had good teeth to begin with. “A lot of people can take okay teeth and make them look white,” Apa says. “When there’s real complications, it becomes much more evolved and complicated, and requires much more experience.”
On the vast, unmediated plane of the internet, influencers do serve an important function that a lot of users find valuable. They’re a moderating force, filtering all the available products, services, and experiences that regular people don’t have the time to investigate fully. If you can find a couple of Instagram stars who share your personal style, they can help you redecorate your bedroom or pick a new winter coat.
But as consumers become more comfortable with Instagram as a place to shop, its ability to sell things spreads into more and more areas of life. The faux intimacy of influencer relationships and Instagram’s quick, seamless shopping infrastructure make the platform an effective advertising backdrop for all kinds of things, says Hund. “If you’re following an influencer and they tag their makeup artist or dermatologist, you can instantly click over to that person’s profile and maybe get an appointment,” she says. The combination of forces can be irresistible, even if you’re fully aware of how they all work. I may like my teeth just how they are, but I did look at them a little more closely in my bathroom mirror last night.
In December, Kate Julian asked why young people are having so little sex.
Julian devotes extensive space in her article to the ways in which [apps like Tinder] fail to bring people together, even for casual intimacy … But then she notes in a parenthetical that the impact has been very different in the gay and lesbian community. There, the apps have been much more successful, and active dating is much more common. “This disparity raises the possibility that the sex recession may be a mostly heterosexual phenomenon,” she says.
That’s a very important aside … It suggests … that men and women increasingly just do not know how to relate to each other in intimate situations. The feminists may well be right that it’s straight men who have more adapting to do, but if the evidence is to be believed both straight men and straight women are suffering from the situation they’re in and both have a powerful incentive to find a way out.
Noah Millman
Excerpt from a post on TheWeek.com
American women’s cultural and political power has grown exponentially over the last 30 years, and it’s likely that people are having less sex for the same reason they’re delaying marriage and children: It’s what women want …
I’m not sure that the current sexual “decline”—which is actually quite slight—is something to worry about. In fact, a lot of the concern seems to be part of a broader backlash against women’s rising autonomy.
Jessica Valenti
Excerpt from a post on Medium.com
Studies show young people are having less sex than previous generations. I knew I was ahead of my time.
— Conan O'Brien (@ConanOBrien)November 17, 2018
Julian is extending the economic sense of a recession, a period of temporary economic decline marked by a reduction in trade and industry … Let’s hope, then, we don’t see a Sex Depression.
John Kelly
Excerpt from a post on oxforddictionaries.com
Julian writes, “If people skip a crucial phase of development, one educator warned—a stage that includes not only flirting and kissing but dealing with heartbreak and disappointment—might they be unprepared for the challenges of adult life?” I read that and thought, Okay, so basically everyone’s a gay kid now. It used to be just the gay kids who made it to young adulthood without ever having dated or flirted or fucked or gotten broken up with. We watched our straight peers and siblings—with the encouragement of parents, educators, and the culture—date, go steady, hook up, lose their virginities … and learn to deal with heartbreak and disappointment. And for the most part, we gay kids didn’t get to do any of that. And still don’t, in places or in families where it’s not safe for young gay kids to be out. That’s why high-school-like drama tends to characterize the dating lives of a lot of young gays and lesbians. Because as young adults, we have to make all the same mistakes and learn all the same lessons that straight kids did back in high school and middle school.
Dan Savage
Transcript from Savage Lovecast
The bird-and-bee cover illustration for the December issue is charming, but I found it perplexing that the magazine chose to use a European robin (Erithacus rubecula) to represent the Platonic form of a bird rather than a North American species, considering the story that follows is primarily about U.S. trends. Why not the American robin (Turdus migratorius), a familiar bird whose understated beauty becomes apparent upon closer inspection? If you’re looking for a colorful, compact species like the European robin, why not the eastern bluebird (Sialia sialis), the state bird of Missouri and New York, or the American goldfinch (Spinus tristis), honored by Iowa, New Jersey, and Washington? The subtle orange splash found on the European robin’s breast has an approximate match in females of the Baltimore oriole (Icterus galbula), named after a city not far from The Atlantic’s headquarters.
Conor Gearin
Quincy, Mass.
Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. In December, Joan C. Williams explored why white liberals play into his trap.
I appreciated this article, especially as I’ve learned that having conversations with working-class whites about economic issues often reveals that we share a lot of similar progressive views. But I’d also urge that this doesn’t need to be zero-sum. Concentrating on economic issues does not mean turning your back on issues of gender, race, environmentalism, etc. Economic inequality, gender imbalances, structural racism, and environmental devastation are not isolated issues—the same economic system that disenfranchises women and people of color is also pushing our planet to the brink of catastrophe. Democrats should be telling narratives about the interrelatedness of the issues that face our country and our world.
Andrew L. Guthrie
Portland, Ore.
I am a working-class black person and have always voted for Democratic candidates. However, I have come to conclusions similar to Joan C. Williams’s. The Democrats are far too invested in identity politics as a way to political victory and have abandoned millions of whites who supported them in the past.
Deonne Fulton Cooper
Kingstree, S.C.
Williams contends that “Democrats have banked a lot on the prospect that their voters’ anger can outmatch the anger of the voters who propelled Trump to office.” Implicitly, Williams seems to believe that the Democrats have focused their messaging entirely or primarily on anti-Trump and race-related ideas. This is quantifiably false. In the midterm elections, Democrats and outside Democratic groups spent more than half of all advertising dollars on health-care-related messages alone. Anti-Trump messaging was common, but messages rooted in economic populism dominated across all media markets. Williams specifically mentions “open borders” and taking the bait on immigration. But again, Democrats spent more advertising dollars on education, the budget, and taxes than on immigration. Clearly, Democrats do not “take the bait” on immigration to the degree that Williams thinks they do.
Davis Larkin
Chicago, Ill.
There is one very good reason Democrats cannot concentrate on the economy: Nothing can be done about the economy, so one might as well focus on other things.
Our free-market system, when left to itself, cannot help but produce tremendous economic inequality. Only government intervention can possibly correct this, and the American ethos of individualism anathematizes such regulation as “socialist.” Thus, so long as politicians are beholden to their corporate sponsors, they might continue making vague and vote-getting promises, but they will not do anything to improve the situation.
Besides, polls show that most voters are not particularly interested in the economy, but are more concerned (especially Trump voters) with threats to their status.
Stephen E. Silver
Santa Fe, N.M.
I’m a woman, 35, working-class, nonreligious, and I gladly voted for Obama in 2008. That was the last time I voted for a president, and my own lack of participation bothers me. But I don’t know what to do about it.
If I’d voted in 2016, it would have been for Trump, in large measure to vote against Hillary Clinton. And this article is dead-on accurate about everything I know to be true about the election and the frustration felt by middle America. For me, that frustration is mostly directed at my peers-of-a-different-class who arrogantly mock my very real questions, label me ignorant, and team up to hurl insults in my direction. I seem to trigger an angry response from these people, and I don’t understand why.
Here’s an example: An acquaintance posted a meme to Facebook a few days ago. It read, “While Trump had you focused on the migrant caravan, here’s what you missed at home,” then proceeded to list murders and almost-murders that had happened over a couple of weeks in America. I don’t understand how those things are related, or why anyone would be able to learn about one or the other but not both. I asked what the point of the meme was. Within minutes I was called a racist, idiotic Trump supporter—no joke. Four people belittled me, but zero gave an answer that wasn’t a rewording of the meme itself. Why is it easier to call me racist and dumb than it is to answer the question?
It’s therapeutic to see someone finally “getting it.”
Jodie L. Shokraifard
Greenville, Texas
For the third time in a century, Peter Beinart wrote in December, leftists are driving the Democratic Party’s agenda. Will they succeed in making America more equitable, or overplay their hand?
Peter Beinart’s article draws a parallel between today’s leftist energy and that of the progressive movements of the 1930s and ’60s. Beinart points out that the ambitious agendas of these movements were possible to achieve only with coordinated pressure applied by activists on the far left, including the occasional threat of disorder. He cautions that the newly energized left should be careful to convince the American people of its cause lest it face an electoral backlash like the ones faced by previous movements.
Perhaps caution is the wrong lesson to learn from history here. Many of the crowning achievements of the New Deal (such as Social Security) are still integral to society today. Similarly, the Voting Rights Act (albeit with some gutting by conservative Supreme Courts) and the Civil Rights Act endure. Even more recently, the Affordable Care Act has become part of the fabric of modern American society, and something that Republicans have had trouble finding the political will to dismantle (despite having controlled all three branches of government).
Truly useful progressive legislation can endure momentary electoral backlash by right-wing reactionaries; the newly energized left should focus on a new Voting Rights Act for the 21st century, radical reform of the criminal-justice system, federal jobs guarantees (or better yet, a universal basic income), and access to health care for all American citizens.
Ilya Nepomnyashchiy
Mountain View, Calif.
Employee emails contain valuable insights into company morale, Frank Partnoy wrote in September. Text analytics has other applications, too, he showed: According to recent research, a company’s stock price can decline significantly in the months after the company subtly changes descriptions of certain risks—which algorithms may spot more easily than people do.
I am compelled to respond to Frank Partnoy’s article, purportedly on the use of automated textual analysis to uncover corporate malfeasance. Mr. Partnoy cites only two examples: Enron and my company, NetApp. He concludes that a change to one risk factor in NetApp’s 2011 annual report subtly predicted deep trouble ahead: “Embedded in that small edit was an early warning. Six months after the 2011 report appeared, news broke that the Syrian government had purchased NetApp equipment through an Italian reseller and used that equipment to spy on its citizens.”
As our public filings show, we disclosed the Syria allegation explicitly and promptly, and we fully cooperated with the government. What’s more, the Department of Commerce determined that NetApp had not violated U.S. export laws, a fact that was not noted in the article.
The boring, but accurate, truth is that I made the risk-factor update shortly after I joined the company as general counsel in late 2010, to be explicit that our business model (like many IT-equipment providers) was largely channel-driven. When I made this small change, we were not aware of any Syria allegations, which first surfaced in November 2011, many months after the six-word edit on which your accusation of foul play is premised.
Matthew Fawcett
General Counsel, NetApp
Sunnyvale, Calif.
Frank Partnoy responds:
I thank Matthew Fawcett for his clarification, which makes NetApp an even more interesting example than was previously known. After I read his explanation, I contacted Lauren Cohen, the Harvard Business School professor who originally referenced NetApp as an example of the association between subtle changes in disclosure and later stock-price declines. Cohen told me that his results, published in a paper he co-authored called “Lazy Prices,” have now been replicated by numerous other researchers, stock exchanges, and private analytics firms. As this paper shows, a change in how a firm describes its risk factors tends to be associated with a significant subsequent stock-price drop—in NetApp’s case, the decline was 20 percent. One surprising aspect of text analytics is that it reveals information even the writer of the text might not know.
BarometerThe most-read magazine stories from 2018 on TheAtlantic.com
1. The Birth of a New American Aristocracy
Matthew Stewart (June)
2. The Sex Recession
Kate Julian (December)
3. The Last Temptation
Michael Gerson (April)
4. The Dangers of Distracted Parenting
Erika Christakis (July/August)
5. American Hustler
Franklin Foer (March)
6. A Warning From Europe
Anne Applebaum (October)
7. What Really Killed the Dinosaurs
Bianca Bosker (September)
8. How the Enlightenment Ends
Henry A. Kissinger (June)
9. Boycott the GOP
Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes (March)
10. The Nancy Pelosi Problem
Peter Beinart (April)
Princeton is academically rigorous, but too exclusive and hierarchical. MIT has brilliant students, but it’s socially unpleasant. The University of Pennsylvania is altogether too career-minded.
These are some of the opinions that researchers heard when they asked 56 Harvard and Stanford students—most of them still in school, some of them recent graduates—which colleges they applied to and how they decided which one to attend.
The researchers, Amy Binder, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, and Andrea Abel, a graduate student there, published their analysis of the students’ sometimes barbed evaluations—recorded in interviews conducted five years ago—in the journal Sociology of Education late last year. Binder and Abel’s focus was on “how students construct a status hierarchy among elite campuses” and what this process has to do with establishing their own (perceived) position at the top of said hierarchy.
[Read: Elite college admissions are broken]
In general, the Harvard and Stanford students spoke highly of their own institutions, enthusing about their prestige and the broad assortment of opportunities they provided. One interviewee, a junior at Harvard, said she was won over when, during an admissions interview, she was advised, “You have to go to Harvard because a lot of these other schools are just not going to expand your experience enough.” Another Harvard student was pleased that she could dive into both biomedicine and Arabic without feeling like she was compromising the quality of her education in either subject.
Stanford students were proud, too, especially of their school’s (reputed) laid-back atmosphere. One alum called it “very creative and a little bit hipster.” Another marveled at “certain quirky things,” such as the fact that “[at] graduation they have neon, they’re wearing bikinis. At graduation!” On both campuses, students tended to believe that their schools’ sterling reputations were deserved.
A lot of the praise that students had for their schools, though, came implicitly, in the form of criticizing other campuses. The University of Pennsylvania—and, in particular, its business school, Wharton—was mentioned regularly as an example of what Harvard and Stanford proudly claimed not to be. Penn, in the view of these students, was too preprofessional. “I think people who pursue just a[n undergraduate] business degree, it’s like a signaling effect saying, ‘I don’t value learning for learning’s sake; I value education as a means to an end,’” said one recent Harvard graduate.
Other schools were looked down upon for other reasons—some for being too social, others for not being social enough. Some Harvard and Stanford students said they wouldn’t have fit in as well at Princeton (“It’s stiff”; “Everybody drinks too much”) or the University of Chicago (“Within five minutes, someone was trying to talk to me about Kant and, sort of, philosophy”). Meanwhile, there were plenty of well-regarded schools—such as Johns Hopkins and public universities like the University of California system and the University of Michigan—that none of the surveyed students brought up in conversation.
The colleges that these students had strong opinions about do have their own distinct cultures, but in the big picture, they are not so different. Binder notes that this pool of schools are all “incredibly selective,” “spend a lot of resources per pupil,” and have “very small” and “largely affluent student bod[ies]” who come from across the U.S. and the world. “In terms of how good the education is that students receive, they are basically the same on an objective scale,” she wrote to me in an email.
These interviews do not capture how all students at highly selective colleges generalize about students at similar schools, let alone how all students at just Harvard and Stanford do so. Still, Binder and Abel note that the 56 students’ beliefs were “highly convergent” and more or less consistent across gender, race, and socioeconomic background.
Binder and Abel have a theory for why many of these “elites-in-the-making” engage in such micro-comparisons (and, often, outright stereotyping): “By critiquing other campuses,” they write, “these students subtly elevate their own status and position.” If Princeton is regarded as too stiff, then Stanford is implied to be easygoing by comparison—and thus more deserving of renown.
The impulse to engage in such status elevation speaks to a broader anxiety that many of these students have about attending highly selective and competitive schools. “It’s about having worked all their young lives to get into an outlandishly selective university, knowing at some level that having made the 5 percent [admissions] cut is a matter of luck, but also being told that they got there through their own merit, and using every means at their disposal to bolster their confidence about themselves and the future,” Binder says.
As Binder and Abel suggest, these students may worry that many attendees of other colleges are as capable as they are, so emphasizing differences between schools can help validate them in self-identifying as uniquely brilliant and therefore deserving of the best education and jobs. Further, it’s also possible that these students—having for years devoted themselves fully to the project of becoming standout college applicants—feel the need to justify their past efforts.
The act of comparing may also be a sort of defense mechanism—an assertion on the part of these students that they are not what they fear, deep down, they may be. For instance, one Harvard alum who knocked Wharton for being too preprofessional was himself on the finance-career track that so many Whartonites pursue. When the researchers asked him why preprofessionalism was a relevant differentiator, given his own professional trajectory, he said, “You made a conscious decision to go to a[n undergraduate] business school, whereas I made a decision to get a liberal arts education that was less tailored and more open-ended.”
Binder and Abel also brought up the comments of a Harvard junior with a distaste for campuses that were too careerist. “This negative assessment of career focus was particularly striking since [she], herself, had participated in one of the student-run finance clubs throughout her years at Harvard, was on a path to take an investment banking job directly out of college, and planned to apply to an elite business school two years later and then return to Wall Street with her MBA in hand,” write Binder and Abel. Their research points to an uncomfortable truth about many highly ranked, highly selective schools: They aren’t as different from one another as some of their attendees would prefer to think.
Heading into Super Bowl Sunday, the NFL probably believed that it had Donald Trump exactly where it wanted him. Which is to say, it had him quiet. But the NFL discovered that no amount of bootlicking will control the president’s mouth.
The president had mostly ceased his fiery, public rebukes of the NFL and its handling of Colin Kaepernick’s protest. Trump’s broadsides were theatrical and effective, and showcased his political muscle. Nothing usually frightens the NFL, but the president had successfully punked the most powerful sports league in America into silencing player protests, while simultaneously exacting long-awaited vengeance on the NFL for subverting his numerous attempts to become a franchise owner.
You might think the NFL’s strategic behind-the-scenes groveling and appeals to the president’s ego would have bought the league even more leeway with Trump, but on Sunday, Trump couldn’t resist throwing a jab at the league on its holy day.
During his pre–Super Bowl sit down with CBS’s Face the Nation interviewer Margaret Brennan, Trump said he would never encourage his son Barron to play the sport, because it is “dangerous.” If the NFL is going to sell out to Trump, it should have at least checked the fine print to make sure the president wouldn’t remind millions of viewers about the NFL’s link to head injuries and CTE.
[Read: Trump’s divisive and relentless politicization of the NFL]
“The helmets have gotten far better but it hasn’t solved the problem,” Trump said. “So, you know, I hate to say it, because I love to watch football. I think the NFL is a great product, but I really think that as far as my son—well, I’ve heard NFL players saying they wouldn’t let their sons play football. So it’s not totally unique, but I would have a hard time with it.”
This is quite a reversal for Trump, who had a different opinion of the NFL back in 2016, probably because it suited his political interests and played to his tough-guy persona. After a woman fainted at one of his campaign events in Lakeland, Florida, and later returned, Trump said, “That woman was out cold, and now she’s coming back. See, we don’t go by these new, and very much softer, NFL rules. Concussions—‘Uh oh, got a little ding on the head? No, no, you can’t play for the rest of the season.’ Our people are tough.”
“Football has become soft like our country has become soft,” Trump declared at another 2016 rally. “The outcome of games has been changed by what used to be phenomenal, phenomenal stuff. Now these are rough guys, these are rough guys. These guys—what they’re doing is incredible, but I looked at it and I watched yesterday in particular. So many flags, right? So many flags.”
But that was then. In the intervening two years, the league has squandered its credibility and dignity just to keep the president from throwing temper tantrums about the sport. And now, on Super Bowl Sunday, Trump points out the dangers of playing football.
There are countless examples of how Trump’s loyalty runs only in one direction. The revolving door at the White House is perfect proof of that. Appeasing Trump’s ego doesn’t seem to be a sound long-term strategy, because Trump seizes on opportunities to gain political capital, paying no mind to collateral damage.
[Conor Friedersdorf: How NFL players can avoid playing into Trump’s hands]
Trump has gotten everything he’s wanted out of this tenuous truce with the NFL. The Los Angeles Times reported that the NFL ingratiated itself with Trump after the New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft reached out to the president, a longtime friend, for assistance in forcing Canada to stop airing American Super Bowl ads so that broadcasters could sell ads for the Canadian market, maximizing the league’s revenues. Just how important the matter was or how much the NFL actually needed Trump’s help are open questions, but when Trump renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada, he was able to fix the NFL’s problem. Naturally, Trump couldn’t wait to brag about coming to the NFL’s rescue, puffing up his image as a master negotiator.
“I did them a big favor in negotiating the USMCA [United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement], which is basically the replacement to NAFTA, which is one of the worst trade deals ever made,” Trump told CBS. “And I said to Canada, ‘Look, we have a great American company known as the NFL,’ and they were being hurt and treated unfairly—the NFL—by Canada for a long time. And I said to Prime Minister [Justin] Trudeau, who was very nice about it and really understood it, ‘I hope you can settle the difference immediately and fast.’ And they did. So I did the NFL a big favor, as a great American company, and they appreciated it. And Roger Goodell—this is a dispute that has gone on for years. Roger Goodell called me and he thanked me.”
The NFL has gotten Trump to play nice for now, but that does nothing to erase the perception that the NFL willingly torpedoed Kaepernick’s career because it was frightened of Trump, nor has it quieted the interest or support for Kaepernick, who remained a dominant story line during Super Bowl week.
Goodell faced a new round of questions at his annual pre–Super Bowl press conference about why Kaepernick remains unsigned by a NFL team. The NFL commissioner insisted that Kaepernick would be in the league if a team thought he could help them win. Given the number of quarterbacks in the NFL who have had opportunities to play despite being less accomplished and talented than Kaepernick, that line is hard to buy.
Kaepernick’s supporters, including Cardi B, LeBron James, and the director Ava DuVernay, used Super Bowl week to prod the NFL about its treatment of Kaepernick. The hashtag #ImWithKap was trending as massive coverage of the Super Bowl began. The former quarterback posted photos on social media of James, John Carlos, Harry Belafonte, Angela Davis, Steph Curry, and Kevin Durant wearing his apparel. The NFL may have temporarily silenced the president, but Kaepernick’s message and influence are proving to have staying power.
[Read: Colin Kaepernick’s shadow still looms over the NFL]
After Cardi B and Rihanna both cited Kaepernick in turning down the chance to perform at the NFL’s halftime show, the NFL made the unusual move of canceling the customary press conference for Maroon 5. Maybe the band didn’t want to answer questions about why they had chosen to perform at halftime when other superstars had passed on the opportunity. Considering that the halftime performance by Maroon 5 and the secondary performers Travis Scott and Big Boi was universally regarded as lackluster, those artists have to be wondering if the extra scrutiny was even worth it.
With news that ratings for this year’s Super Bowl hit a 10-year low—something that should be attributed to the game being the lowest-scoring Super Bowl ever, moderate national interest in the Rams, the lingering bad taste from the huge blown call in the NFC Championship Game, and Patriots fatigue—Kaepernick’s supporters can view their online campaign as an indication that they made a dent in the NFL machine.
But this is why it never made sense for the NFL to yield to Trump. The narrative that NFL ratings were down because of the player protests and Trump urging his supporters to stay away from the league was always overblown.
The reason league ratings rebounded this season isn’t because Trump stopped blasting the NFL, or because players stopped kneeling. It’s because the matchups in marquee time slots got better. The Dallas Cowboys, who played in two of the top-five most viewed regular-season games, won the NFC East and went to the playoffs. The Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes exploded into stardom. The nearly 12,000 points scored by NFL teams this season were the second most in league history, and the 73 games that were decided by three points or fewer were a league record.
The issues the NFL experienced prior to this season—injuries and lackluster games—were always cyclical and temporary. They weren’t worth the league permanently sacrificing its decency.
LOS ANGELES—As a new immigrant to the United States, Li Zhong Huang knew there was only one place he wanted to live: the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, where he could be surrounded by language, food, and people from his home province of Guangdong. In 2001, he found an apartment with a shared bathroom and kitchen for $390 and moved in, relishing the sunny weather and ample transportation options of his new neighborhood.
A decade after he arrived, though, the neighborhood started changing. Construction started on two new luxury apartment condos. One, Blossom Plaza, now offers two-bedroom apartments with amenities such as a pool, a shuffleboard court, and a fitness center for $2,600 a month. The other, Jia Apartments, features a pool, a spa, and black granite countertops, with two bedrooms starting at $2,500.
At first, Huang liked these developments. The new complexes were clean and attractive, replacing buildings that were old and run-down. But then, two years ago, his landlord said he needed to renovate the apartment; after Huang and his wife left for a few weeks and stayed with friends, the landlord raised the rent to $1,600 and changed the locks, Huang told me through a translator. The change happened so quickly that Huang and his wife lived on the street outside their old apartment building for a few days, trying to get back in to collect their belongings.
For centuries, Chinatowns were neglected by outside investors. When legislation reduced the rights of Chinese residents in America, they moved into close-knit communities for protection and stayed there for years as redlining and other restrictions made it hard to move elsewhere. Investment followed wealthy white families to the suburbs, but Chinese families were prevented from coming along.
But now, as Baby Boomers and Millennials move back into center cities, Chinatowns are some cities’ hottest neighborhoods. Sale prices in Boston’s Chinatown were among the fastest-growing in the city in 2017, increasing by $285,000; one of New York City’s biggest condo projects is a $1.4 billion, 815-unit tower in Chinatown that features a 75-foot swimming pool, an “adult tree house,” and an outdoor tea pavilion. According to an analysis by the website Zumper, rents for a one bedroom in the “historic cultural” neighborhood of Los Angeles, which includes Chinatown, were $2,350 in June 2017—among the highest in Los Angeles, more than listings in popular neighborhoods such as West Hollywood and Silver Lake. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, prices are increasing faster in the zip codes that include Chinatown than in other downtown neighborhoods.
As investors set their sights on Chinatowns across America, longtime residents are being displaced. “Once you have more luxury units, that starts demographic change, whether it’s Harlem or Chinatown—those signs for luxury housing are the beginning of the end,” Andrew Leong, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, told me. A 2013 study completed by Leong and other scholars for the Asian American Legal Defense Fund found that from 1990 to 2010, Asians went from a majority to a minority of the residents of Chinatowns in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. D.C.’s Chinatown is down to about 300 Chinese residents, from the 3,000 who lived there at its peak.
Blossom Plaza apartments in Los Angeles’s Chinatown (Alana Semuels / The Atlantic)Representatives from Chinatown Community for Equitable Development, a volunteer nonprofit in Los Angeles’s Chinatown that organizes residents (and which introduced me to Huang), told me they’re working with tenants in 10 buildings in Chinatown to fight rent increases and proposed evictions. Katie Wang, one of CCED’s volunteers, told me, “A lot more tenants are talking about landlords harassing them, rent increases, and buildings being bought and sold.”
Some of this displacement is happening because of a lack of strong rent-control laws: Massachusetts voters passed an initiative prohibiting rent control in 1994; Pennsylvania has no state statute governing rent control. But even in places with rent control, Chinese residents don’t feel empowered to speak up when their rights are violated, often because they don’t feel like they truly belong in the larger community, said Jan Lin, a professor of sociology at Occidental College who has studied Chinatowns in Los Angeles and New York. Los Angeles law regulates the amount by which landlords can increase the rent in buildings constructed before 1978, but often residents don’t know their rights or are too intimidated to push back because of their immigration status, said CCED’s Wang.
Still, some of the displacement problems are systemic: market-based economies have largely not figured out how to attract investment to low-income communities without displacing many of the people who have long lived there.
This displacement can be devastating for people who have lived in a neighborhood for decades, who know its bus routes, and who depend on their neighbors for company and help. CCED volunteers brought me to 651 Broadway, a single-room-occupancy building in the middle of Chinatown, where the rent is about $300 a month. Dozens of elderly Chinese people live there, in tiny rooms with a dingy shared kitchen and a communal bathroom where mold grows on the ceiling.
But the people I talked to said they didn’t want to leave; the shabby apartments were located in a neighborhood where they could speak in their own language, buy their own native food, and see their friends. Jun Ha Yu spoke to me from his tiny room. He knows Chinatown intimately: It’s where he goes to the bank and visits the Social Security office, where he can interact with friends and shop owners despite his limited English, where he can buy the type of food he likes to cook. He can easily access downtown Los Angeles and public transit, which is especially useful since he doesn’t drive. If Yu had to move to another neighborhood in car-centric Los Angeles, he’d lose all that.
Jun Ha Yu in his room in Los Angeles’s Chinatown (Alana Semuels / The Atlantic)Chinatowns can help ease the transition for first-generation immigrants, Leong told me, regardless of whether they live in the area. They also serve as hubs for people who want to preserve a common culture. Frances Huynh, another CCED volunteer, told me that she remembers taking the bus to Chinatown as a child from her home in the San Gabriel Valley to eat familiar food and see family and friends.
The developments in Chinatowns may appear to preserve some of this culture, but the new restaurants and apartments are sometimes so expensive that they are no longer accessible to the people who created the community in the first place. In Los Angeles, for instance, the Blossom Plaza apartment complex has red lanterns hanging in the courtyard, which allows Brookfield Properties, which owns the building, to advertise “the look you want in a Chinatown LA apartment.” But even the Blossom Plaza apartments that are set aside as “affordable” may be too expensive for current Chinatown residents; a studio for one person is targeted at people with an income of $20,350, while the median household income in Chinatown is $19,500. Residents of 651 Broadway told me that some of the stores they had depended on are getting pushed out, including two low-cost grocery stores. Instead, there are boba tea shops, art galleries, a wine bar, and a much-heralded new Asian fusion restaurant that features a $144 steak. The neighborhoods may still look like Chinatowns, Leong said, but are really just “Disneyfied” versions of the neighborhoods they once were.
That this displacement is happening in progressive cities such as Los Angeles, Boston, and Philadelphia, where elected officials have long spoken of the need to preserve affordable housing, shows how hard it can be to construct laws that reduce displacement or maintain affordable housing once gentrification begins.
Los Angeles also lets developers build complexes that are taller than a zoning code allows, and thus fit more apartments, if they include a certain number of affordable units in those developments. In 2016, Los Angeles voters approved Measure JJJ, which allows developers to increase residential density by building higher structures if they provide affordable units; the measure also encouraged the city to give incentives for building more affordable housing near transit. But those affordable units are, like Blossom Plaza, often too expensive for current Chinatown residents. “We have folks who are making under $30,000 and are too poor for affordable housing,” Sissy Trinh, the executive director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance, which works with Chinatown residents in Los Angeles, told me.
[Read: Taking over the family business in Chinatown]
In Boston, housing set aside as affordable is also often too expensive for longtime Chinatown residents, according to Karen Chen, the executive director of the Chinese Progressive Association, an advocacy group. Affordable housing is targeted at people making 80 to 100 percent of the area’s median income, but that income is calculated by using average incomes for Boston and the surrounding suburbs, making the level much higher than the average income in Chinatown.
Still, Boston has slowed development in Chinatown amid pushback from the Chinese community. In 1993, for example, the New England Medical Center was granted permission to build a parking garage in Chinatown, demolishing a building where the local community had a day-care center, after-school program, and ESL classes. But a coalition of residents and local business owners pushed back, led by the Chinese Progressive Association. Residents showed up at planning meetings and at city hall, and forced a referendum on the garage, which was defeated 1,692 to 42. The offices of the Chinese Progressive Association are currently located on Parcel C, where the garage was planned—the current building hosts nonprofits on the lower levels and condos on the top.
Since then, the Chinese Progressive Association has been able to use the coalition it formed in 1993 to draw attention to other developments it says would disrupt the community. It supported the Community Preservation Act, which adds a small property tax in Massachusetts in order to fund affordable housing, and organized residents on behalf of a short-term rental ordinance better regulating Airbnb in Boston. Many units in Chinatown were being used for Airbnbs, which meant they were taken off the rental market. The group is currently trying to connect existing residents to potential investments in the community, working with an environmental-justice organization to bring renewable energy to Chinatown.
Fighting to preserve Chinatown in Boston is an endless battle, Chen told me. Recently some row houses that historically held Chinese families were made into condos. And some low-income families that received subsidies for their housing had to move when their subsidies expired. (Developers received below-market-rate loans in return for setting aside units as affordable for a certain period of time, or offering subsidies over that time.) It can be more difficult to protect communities in the United States because the right to private land ownership was such an integral part of the country’s founding, according to Chen. “It’s such a prevalent thing in the U.S., to overemphasize property rights over community rights,” she said.
Boston’s Chinatown has been able to preserve some existing housing because of the strength of community involvement, Chen said. But “it’s difficult to organize in a community where it is so dispersed,” Leong, the professor, told me. Most of the CCED organizers I talked to in Los Angeles lived in the San Gabriel Valley and took a 45-minute bus ride into Chinatown.
Without local-community involvement, Chinatowns are at risk of becoming historical remnants. The people who lived in these neighborhoods when they were undesirable are having to leave. This creates even greater problems than a cultural hub being displaced. It means even more people join the ranks of the dispossessed in major cities across America, with nowhere to go and no one to help them figure out what’s next.
During the buildup to Super Bowl 53, the football world was in a retrospective mood. The nature of the New England Patriots’ nearly two-decade run since the arrival of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady in 2000 meant there were the basic totals to tally. With his ninth Super Bowl appearance, Brady eclipsed the number of times any other franchise had made it to the championship game, and with another victory, he’d become the only quarterback to win six titles. But the Patriots’ players seemed also to sense—or invent—a pattern of doubt outside their locker room. A shirt sold by the wide receiver Julian Edelman during the playoff run featured a defiant-looking version of the New England logo emblazoned with the phrase “Bet Against Us.” Before the team jet left Foxborough for Atlanta, Brady led fans in chanting, “We’re still here!”
The skeptics were hard to identify, exactly; the Patriots were two-and-a-half-point favorites over the Los Angeles Rams. What few there may have been were proved wrong as New England won, 13–3. In retrospect, that drumming up of detractors seems like an attempt to fill a narrative vacuum—one that Sunday’s game exposed in full. The Patriots have spent the better part of the 21st century as the most successful franchise in pro football, with a quarterback and a coach uniquely suited to adapting to a sport in flux. Over four low-scoring and inevitable-feeling quarters, the Super Bowl simply confirmed them as such.
For the most part, the game was a slog; reading the statistics is almost as interesting as it was watching the events unfold. The only scoring in the first half came on a field goal from New England’s Stephen Gostkowski, and the Rams’ first eight possessions ended in punts. Until the fourth quarter, things kept to a pattern. Los Angeles got the ball and promptly gave it up; New England got the ball, held on to it marginally longer and advanced it marginally farther, and then sent it back L.A.’s way.
With just under 10 minutes left and the score tied at 3—“It’s the first Super Bowl ever without a touchdown through three quarters,” CBS’s Jim Nantz had noted earlier, doing his best to render the tedium historic—Brady slipped into his now-familiar mode. He floated a short pass to the tight end Rob Gronkowski, who rumbled for 18 yards, then fired the ball to Edelman in the middle of the field for 13 more. On a second down on the Rams’ 31-yard line, with the first palpable momentum of the evening behind him, Brady arced a deep throw to a tightly covered Gronkowski, who hauled it in at the two. A touchdown quickly ensued, then an interception of the Rams quarterback Jared Goff, then a clock-bleeding New England drive that ended in a field goal to put things out of reach. “It wasn’t pretty,” Edelman, the Super Bowl MVP, said afterward, “but we’ll take an ugly win over a pretty loss any day.”
[Read: Rob Gronkowski and the cost of greatness]
It is tempting, after any championship, to draw ironclad conclusions, to isolate some title-worthy trait of the winning team. This is doubly true in the NFL, where success fosters unabashed mimicry. The Rams’ turnaround under the 33-year-old Sean McVay, who in two seasons built a 4–12 team into the Super Bowl runner-up, has inspired the hiring of a slew of young, offensive-minded head coaches over the past month. Former Belichick lieutenants have long dotted the coaching ranks, as rival organizations look to co-opt the “Patriot way.”
This championship, though, reaffirmed that New England’s success is not reducible to any one style of play or strategic principle. Sunday’s was the lowest-scoring title game in NFL history, coming two years after the biggest championship comeback ever. The Patriots have featured stalwart defenses and borderline unrealistic offenses; they have favored the run and the pass. Sometimes these shifts have happened from season to season, sometimes from week to week. The team that scored touchdowns on five of its first six possessions in a divisional-round rout of the Los Angeles Chargers was entirely dissimilar, in everything but the final outcome, to the one that played in the Super Bowl.
Beyond the hoarding of Lombardi trophies, the most frustrating aspect of the Patriots’ dominance, for the rest of the NFL, may be that it offers little by way of a blueprint. The discernible constant is also the element that can’t be replicated; the Patriots still have arguably the greatest coach and quarterback in NFL history. If other teams’ successes tend to reflect some certain advantage—a high-octane aerial attack or imposing defensive front—Belichick and Brady have a gift for adjustment. On Sunday night, Belichick engineered a defense that had graded out in the middle of the pack throughout the season to stop the second-highest-scoring team in football. Brady, after three quarters spent similarly stymied, spotted his opportunity and led the crucial drives.
In some ways, the analyst’s challenge mirrors that of the Patriots’ opponents. How do you say something insightful about a team that resists any particular insight, whose only pattern is change, whose genius resides in its impossibility to pin down? In the closing moments, after the late field goal had pushed New England’s lead out of reach, the CBS analyst Tony Romo tried for a summary. He had garnered plaudits in recent weeks for his spot-on play predictions, but here he could be accurate only in a more abstract way. “They’ve been here; they’ve been in so many close games. They just”—Romo paused, searching for the phrase—“know how to do it.”
In 2015, scientists discovered a pig in China that would set off a frantic, worldwide search. The pig carried bacteria resistant to colistin, a drug used to cure infections when almost all other drugs have failed. Colistin is an old antibiotic with sometimes severe side effects in humans. Chinese doctors didn’t even prescribe it for human patients; instead, farmers were relying on literal tons of it, used in low doses, as a growth promoter in pigs.
Bacteria are constantly crossing continents in people, animals, and food, though. In England, where colistin is reserved for patients in rare and dire circumstances, public-health officials worried. Could colistin-resistant bacteria also be lurking in that country?
The answer was hidden somewhere in Public Health England’s archives. The agency routinely collects and sequences bacteria on food and humans, and it just needed to search those sequences for the DNA segment that confers bacterial resistance to colistin. In theory, this shouldn’t have been much harder than a Google search. To a computer, a DNA sequence looks like a very long word, which just happens to be made up of only four letters: A, T, C, and G.
[Read: Big pharma would like your DNA]
Yet, the search took 256 computers working together for an entire weekend, says Zamin Iqbal, a computational genomicist at the European Bioinformatics Institute who collaborates with Public Health England. The researchers there did find colistin resistance among their 24,000 samples, and eventually, countries all over the world found it, too.
Why did this process take so long? The computers at Public Health England had to open up and search the sequencing files of 24,000 genomes one by one. If Google had to search every page on the internet for the word pie every time you search for pie, that search would also take forever. Instead, Google is constantly indexing pages. If a blog post is written about pie, Google files that post under the pie entry in its index. So when someone comes along looking for pie recipes, it just has to serve up the pages under the pie entry. That’s part of the reason a Google search takes less than a second.
So Iqbal decided to build a Google of sorts for bacterial and viral genomes. He and his colleagues downloaded all available genomes—nearly 500,000 at the time—from a public database called the European Nucleotide Archive. The 170,000-gigabyte data set took six whole weeks to download. Then, the team indexed the data. The resulting tool is called BIGSI, for BItsliced Genomic Signature Index.
Searching for colistin resistance through nearly 500,000 sequences now takes just a few seconds.
[Read: 300 million letters of DNA are missing from the human genome]
Suppose a patient has an unusual brain infection, says Jennifer Gardy, a genomic epidemiologist who until recently was at the University of British Columbia and who was not involved with the project. Suppose it’s a pathogen that the doctor doesn’t recognize. Before BIGSI, the pathogen’s particular sequence might have been hiding in one of those 500,000 genomes. But a mountain of data is only as good as your ability to search it. “We can now go back and look through all of the DNA, through all of the other experiments that had done sequencing. Loads and loads of DNA,” Gardy says. For the first time, it’s possible to easily answer a question as simple as: “Have we seen this thing before?”
Since Iqbal and his colleagues started sharing their project—making a demo version of BIGSI available online, posting a non-peer-reviewed paper on the website bioRxiv, giving talks—they’ve been hearing from researchers who’ve started to use it. After Andrew Page, a bioinformatics researcher now at the Quadram Institute, learned about the tool, he walked back to his office and fired it up. Page was interested in a particular plasmid, a round loop of DNA, that helps make typhoid-fever bacteria drug resistant. These plasmids seemed to have popped up out of the blue in Pakistan.
“Within two seconds, I got a list of 20 other samples where they were seen,” Page says. The plasmid wasn’t just in other typhoid bacteria. It was in soil bacteria, animal bacteria, E. coli—painting a much more complex picture of how resistance plasmids emerge and get swapped between different bacterial species.
Iqbal’s paper is just getting published today in Nature Biotechnology, after making its way through the sometimes slow process of peer review. But published papers have already cited the bioRxiv preprint, and another scientist wrote a program to more easily search mutations of a gene in BIGSI. Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University, says that BIGSI is a fantastic idea, although the tool is only as good as the data that go in. “The genomes we choose to sequence are very biased,” she says—often toward serious clinical infections, from patients in research-intensive hospitals, in big urban centers.
The team is updating BIGSI with new data that have been made public since Iqbal made the first version, and the total number of sequences available at one quick click will be up to 1.2 million. As sequencing becomes more common, the number of publicly available bacterial and viral genomes has doubled. At the rate this work is going, within a few years multiple millions of searchable pathogen genomes will be available—a library of DNA and disease, spread the world over.
Perhaps it’s because as a child she practiced her penmanship by logging the favors owed to and from her powerful politician father in a record book so they’d never get lost. Perhaps it’s because she gave birth to five children in six years. Perhaps it’s because she first ran for public office at age 47, when her youngest kid was a senior in high school and she knew herself, and her mind, and what she had to offer. Perhaps it’s because she never gives up.
Whatever the reasons, Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi has clearly not only reemerged as what she already was more than a decade ago—the highest-ranking woman in the history of the republic, as speaker of the House—but as the single Washington leader best able to frustrate, sidestep, stymie, outfox, infuriate, and when it suits her purposes, simply ignore Donald Trump.
“Mr. President, please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory,” she coolly told Trump in December, when he condescended to suggest that she might not be in a position to “talk right now” in an Oval Office negotiation over a looming government shutdown, because her election as speaker was still unsettled. Can anyone now remember that such a time ever happened?
[Read: Congresswoman, interrupted]
“She’ll cut your head off and you won’t even know you’re bleeding,” her filmmaker daughter Alexandra told CNN last month, describing her mother’s negotiating style. “That’s all you need to know about her. No one ever won betting against Nancy Pelosi. She’s persevered.”
No kidding.
That analysis could just as easily apply to her deft handling of the restive young Democrats, who just two months ago were grumbling that her day had passed and were all but openly wondering how they might block her from becoming speaker again. Now she’s the unquestioned heroine of the anti-Trump left, on par with the iconic Ruth Bader Ginsburg and rapidly climbing to the level of Eleanor Roosevelt, if not Joan of Arc.
Pelosi’s own public response to her reversal of fortune has been understated, but sly. Greeting the packed audience at her weekly news conference last Thursday, she simply said, “Wow, full house. Winning is good. Good morning.”
[Read: Pelosi won, Trump lost]
Pelosi co-opted the crop of insurgent Democratic freshmen who might have threatened her rule in part by pledging to serve only four years as speaker, but also by listening to their concerns and hearing them out, and addressing them. She has a healthy sense of her own status, but doesn’t let her ego get in the way of the task at hand.
“She knows how to count votes better than anybody,” says former Representative Tom Downey of New York, who grew close to her after she first came to Congress from San Francisco in a special election in 1987, two years before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born. “She’s perfectly politically centered to lead the new dynamic members of Congress, because she was once one of them. She gave her first speech on AIDS when she got to the Congress. She’s really absolutely the perfect person for this moment.”
Not coincidentally, her face-offs with Trump have solidified and consolidated her power over her own caucus. “That meeting inside the Oval Office where the president said he would own the shutdown elected her speaker that day,” Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, told me in the middle of the recent shutdown. “She was going to get there anyways, but even if you go out and see the coat she wore, it sold out the next day … She won it because she stood up to him.” McCarthy added bluntly, “She wants to break him.”
[Read: Why the new Democratic majority could work better than the last]
So far, she’s doing a pretty good job of it. The writer Aaron Sorkin once called the White House the “single greatest home-court advantage in the modern world,” and it’s tough to make a president look weak on his own turf, but Pelosi managed to do so. Indeed, the speaker tends to deal with Trump as if brushing a piece of lint off her shoulder.
“It goes to show you,” she reportedly told a closed-door meeting of Democrats after her December confrontation in the Oval Office. “You get into a tinkle contest with a skunk, you get tinkle all over you.” The Washington Post reported that she added, “It’s like a manhood thing for him. As if manhood could ever be associated with him.” Still later, she mocked Trump’s ever-shifting definition of his proposed border wall, telling USA Today, “He’s already backed off the cement—now he’s down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something.”
Pelosi has a singular ability to get under Trump’s skin, and it shows. “I think Nancy Pelosi should be ashamed of herself, because she’s hurting a lot of people,” Trump said at the White House on Friday as bipartisan negotiations over border security dragged on. By contrast, Pelosi uses the president’s most inflammatory statements as a mere foil to talk about whatever she wants to talk about.
“You don’t take the bait,” says Drew Hammill, one of her deputy chiefs of staff. In last fall’s midterms, for example, when Trump suddenly threatened to revoke birthright citizenship, Pelosi declined to be distracted, releasing a statement underlining the issue that polling showed was playing best for Democratic candidates all around the country. “President Trump’s new claim that he can unilaterally end the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship shows Republicans’ spiraling desperation to distract from their assault on Medicare, Medicaid and people with pre-existing conditions,” she said.
“We didn’t react to his taunting of her in his rallies,” Hammill adds. “What’s the point?”
Pelosi’s strategy is bearing fruit. The latest Quinnipiac University poll shows that voters trust her over Trump, by a margin of 49 to 42 percent, with women trusting her even more: 54 to 37 percent. (Men trust Trump more.) Voters back a border-security measure that would not include a wall by nearly 2 to 1, 61 to 33 percent. (Republicans oppose the idea of no wall, but all other demographic groups, by race, age, and gender, support it.) And voters overall trust congressional Democrats more than Trump on the issue of border security, by 50 to 41 percent.
Friends say Pelosi’s priorities are clear and unshakable, and contribute to her equanimity in dealing with Trump’s provocations.
Susan Brophy, a Bill Clinton White House congressional liaison in the late 1990s, remembers traveling on a European trip with Pelosi when Brophy was dating Gerald McGowan, a widowed telecommunications lawyer with seven children. “At one point we were just talking,” Brophy recalls, “and I said, ‘I don’t know … he’s got so many kids. It just really makes me nervous. It’s so much responsibility, and I really like my job. What do you think?’ And she said, ‘Are you kidding me? I would give all of this up tomorrow for my family.’” (Brophy soon married McGowan, who became Clinton’s ambassador to Portugal, and herself went on to a post–White House career as a prominent lobbyist at the Glover Park Group.)
Republicans might caricature Pelosi as a San Francisco liberal—she moved there after she married her husband, Paul—but her DNA is deep in Baltimore’s Little Italy, where her father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., was the longtime mayor. Little Nancy and her five brothers took turns manning the desk in the family’s corner row house, where they handled constituent service requests. As a child, Nancy was once offered a toy elephant by a Republican poll worker, but recoiled. Decades later, in the run-up to the 1984 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan went to Baltimore for what was supposed to be some kind of civic event that instead turned into a GOP campaign stop. The White House asked whether former Mayor D’Alesandro would appear with the president; he would not. Instead, the D’Alesandros skipped town, and Nancy’s mother, Annunciata, plastered Mondale for President signs in every window in all three stories of the family home.
“She holds some grudges, as you have to in politics,” Tom Downey says, “but she’s not consumed with it, and it’s not a big part of her plan. Trump’s a silly man, and she knows it. He’s not going to be a problem for her.”
The burgundy pantsuit that Pelosi wore when she was sworn in as speaker the first time in 2007 is already in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Curators had better be on the lookout for the iconic item of apparel or personal effects that could symbolize her second tour. She’s already well on her way to earning the honor.
Editor’s Note: Every Monday, Lori Gottlieb answers questions from readers about their problems, big and small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Dear Therapist,
We recently moved to a new country and my daughter quickly made some friends who make me uncomfortable. Specifically, there is one boy who used spectacularly sexually explicit language with her in a text, which I find degrading and demeaning.
I found this out because after my daughter came home late from an outing with friends for her birthday, I used that as an excuse to go through her phone, as I’d suspected that there was something off about this boy. To complicate matters, he’s the son of a colleague.
What do you think I should do?
Anonymous
Dear Anonymous,
This is a great opportunity to open the lines of communication between you and your daughter around sexuality and relationships. I say “open the lines of communication” because whatever you discuss now will be just one of many conversations to come, and also because these conversations, if they’re to be helpful to her at all, will be not a monologue but a reciprocal and ongoing dialogue.
Understandably, you have strong feelings about what this boy wrote, and you may see this as a chance to share those feelings with her. But before you do so, consider the dynamic that sets up: her voice, and her feelings, get lost. Instead, I urge you to use this more as a chance to hear how she feels about what’s going on with this boy. I know this takes a lot of restraint, but if you come from a place of curiosity, not only will you learn something you may not have known about your daughter and her inner life, but she’ll be more apt to trust you and feel comfortable coming to you when the stakes are even higher.
In listening to her, you may find that the teenage years present a period when not only are the children experiencing great change, but their parents often have an adjustment to make as well: They need to come to the realization that their kids may not see the world the way their parents do. For instance, what you find degrading, your daughter may find exciting. And if she does, you’ll want to be curious about that—why does she find it exciting? In other words, you want to be careful not to shame her or convince her that your way of seeing something is the only way, or the “right” one.
In this conversation, your honesty with her will serve as a model for her honesty with you. When you bring this up, you might say something like, “I know you may be upset by what I’m about to say, but I’ve had an uncomfortable feeling about some of your new friends, so I looked through your phone. I know I should have brought this up with you instead, and I could be wrong about all of this, but I did see [name of boy’s] text, and I’m curious about how you feel about it.”
Expect her to be mortified and also angry that you went through her phone. Most likely, though, a part of her will be relieved that you brought it up. Many teens wonder how to navigate this new sexual terrain, and their friends are just as confused, so knowing that there’s a calm, trusted adult they can talk to helps them feel safe (even if they pretend otherwise).
As you discuss this, you may also want to understand more about her relationship with this boy. Is he a friend or is more going on between them? Is his interest reciprocated? If she has a crush on him, you can find out what she likes about him. Do they have interests in common? Values? Or is he merely cute or cool? Does she feel pressured by him to delve into territory she’s not ready for or interested in? What does she think motivated him to send that kind of text?
Remember, your job is mostly to listen. If you do want to share your thoughts after you’ve heard her out, you can tell her—again, without judgment—how his text felt to you, which might be a springboard for more discussions around relationships, online behavior, intimacy, expectations, social pressure, the short- and long-term consequences of what people send online, and good decision-making. Ask your daughter what she wants from her relationship with this boy, and how she wants to respond to texts like this. All of these questions will help her step back and really think about what’s happening and what feels good or not so good to her, so she can establish a framework for how she wants to be treated.
You may also want to set some reasonable rules around online behavior in your family by laying out what are acceptable uses of the phone and what happens to your daughter’s phone privileges if those rules are breached. Some parents use apps that let them monitor their kids’ online activity, but many kids find ways around them (using their friends’ phones, for instance). Other parents make it clear to their child that a condition of having a phone is that the parents get to check it periodically. The point is to set the stage for open communication and to have clear expectations going forward.
As for the boy himself, unless he’s breaking the law—at least in the United States, sexting is a crime for minors, including forwarding someone else’s sext to a friend, and your daughter should be made aware of this, if she isn’t already—I’m not sure it matters that the boy is a colleague’s son. If this does escalate to sexting, you may at that point want to let his parents know what their son is sending—again, without judging them or him, but simply parent to parent, knowing that all kids make mistakes and that his parents probably don’t know that this is happening.
The good news is that your discovery will give you a way to begin these important conversations with your daughter, creating a safe place for her to go if needed, and imparting the message that she’s in charge of how she responds to sexual interest, both wanted and unwanted, and that she has the ability to choose her own actions wisely.
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.
Em novembro, quando se colocou diante de um batalhão de jornalistas para uma entrevista coletiva, o ainda juiz Sergio Moro – que havia então acabado de aceitar ser ministro de Jair Bolsonaro – deixou claro: “Ele [Bolsonaro] dá a última palavra. Sou uma pessoa disposta a ouvir e eventualmente mudar meus posicionamentos. Tenho bem presente que há uma relação de subordinação.”
Foi difícil não lembrar daquelas palavras hoje, quando o Ministério da Justiça e Segurança Pública, comandado por Moro, colocou no ar um documento curiosamente intitulado “Memórias de Curitiba“ que o ex-juiz apresentara havia instantes a governadores como um “projeto de lei anticrime”.
Moro, que chegou a ser visto como uma garantia de moderação do governo Bolsonaro, aparentemente não conseguiu – ou sequer achou necessário – se opor ao radicalismo de extrema direita do presidente. Seu “projeto anticrime” saiu às feições do que deseja o ex-militar e cria condições para que tenhamos uma polícia (ainda) mais violenta e impune.
Para começar, o texto elaborado pelo ex-juiz mexe no artigo 23 do Código Penal, que trata das exclusões de ilicitude – isto é, as condições em que uma pessoa não é punida mesmo cometendo um crime.
O artigo frisa que eventuais excessos na legítima defesa serão punidos. É aí que entra a caneta de Moro, que quer acrescentar o seguinte parágrafo: “O juiz poderá reduzir a pena até a metade ou deixar de aplicá-la se o excesso decorrer de escusável medo, surpresa ou violenta emoção”.
Na prática, todo esse palavrório aumenta as chances de qualquer pessoa – inclusive, obviamente, policiais – escapar de punição ao reagir com violência desmedida a crimes. Trata-se de um desejo antigo e conhecido de Bolsonaro.
Outros pontos do pacote legislativo do ex-juiz vão no mesmo caminho. Moro deseja que passe a ser tratado como caso de legítima defesa o “[d]o agente policial ou de segurança pública que, em conflito armado ou em risco iminente de conflito armado, previne injusta e iminente agressão a direito seu ou de outrem.”
Por fim, o projeto de Moro altera o Código de Processo Penal para vedar a prisão de quem comete ato criminoso numa situação de exclusão de ilicitude. Novamente, a regra também valeria para policiais.
‘Como definir o que é ‘escusável medo, surpresa ou violenta emoção’?’Numa entrevista coletiva que concedeu nesta segunda-feira, em Brasília, logo após a reunião com os governadores, Moro tentou afastar a ideia de que esteja distribuindo licenças para policiais matarem suspeitos. “Não existe nenhuma licença para matar. Quem afirma isso está equivocado, não leu o projeto”, afirmou.
O sociólogo Pedro Bodê, coordenador do Centro de Estudos em Segurança Pública e Direitos Humanos da Universidade Federal do Paraná, leu o trecho do projeto que mexe na exclusão de ilicitude a meu pedido. E se disse estarrecido com o que viu.
“Como definir o que é ‘escusável medo, surpresa ou violenta emoção’? É muito subjetivo. É claro que um policial sob fogo de fuzil está em uma situação extremamente desvantajosa. Mas também é claro que isso será invocado a toda hora quando houver denúncias de excessos. A defesa dos policiais da Vila 29 de Março, por exemplo, poderia alegar que eles estavam sob violenta emoção por causa da morte do colega e agiram em função dela, por exemplo”, ele criticou.
“É como se [o projeto de lei] oferecesse uma compensação para as péssimas condições de trabalho do policial, alterando a legislação para criar condições de que o agente possa ter uma atitude mais violenta, letal. E já falamos de uma das polícias mais letais do mundo”, lembrou Bodê.
Logo após o anúncio das medidas de Moro, a Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil montou um grupo de trabalho para estudar o projeto de lei, que será coordenado pelo advogado criminalista Juliano Breda, que já se confrontou com o ex-juiz em processos da operação Lava Jato.
‘A interferência policial é bem-sucedida quando ninguém morre’.O grupo ainda dá os primeiros passos de um trabalho previsto para terminar em 30 dias. Mas um integrante, que pediu para ficar anônimo para não atropelar os colegas, me disse que, da forma como foi redigido, o projeto de Moro é um convite ao aumento da letalidade policial e uma promessa de impunidade para casos de abuso de poder.
“O texto contém propostas que a OAB já considerou inconstitucionais”, disse Breda, citando o cumprimento de penas após condenação em segunda instância e a instalação de escutas para monitorar conversas entre detentos e seus advogados. “E também sugere que haverá aumento no encarceramento em massa. O Supremo Tribunal Federal já disse considerar que nosso sistema carcerário vive um estado de coisas inconstitucional, com violações aos direitos humanos e individuais dos cidadãos presos.”
O grupo de trabalho deverá produzir um documento com o qual a OAB espera pautar o debate público a respeito do projeto.
Na sua primeira entrevista coletiva em novembro, o ainda juiz Sergio Moro disse não ver o bangue-bangue como forma bem sucedida de combate ao crime – ao contrário do que acredita seu chefe. “O confronto tem de ser evitado. A interferência policial é bem-sucedida quando ninguém morre, quando o criminoso vai preso e policial volta para casa seguro. Temos estatísticas terríveis de assassinatos de policiais absolutamente intoleráveis. O confronto até pode acontecer, mas é sempre indesejável.”
Perguntei, à assessoria de Moro, o que mudou de lá para cá na visão dele a respeito do assunto. E, também, como e a quem caberá definir o que é “escusável medo, surpresa ou violenta emoção”. Se vierem, as respostas serão acrescidas a este texto.
The post Sergio Moro, o ‘moderado’ de Bolsonaro, quer mudanças que aumentam a violência policial appeared first on The Intercept.
Millions of gig economy workers around the world now earn a living on so-called crowd worker websites — work that falls under the umbrella of crowdsourcing, or dividing up tasks into minuscule portions to spread over a large number of people. The sites pay as little as $1 an hour for individuals to perform short, repetitive tasks, such as identifying images seen in pictures and churning out product reviews.
Some of these crowd workers were unknowingly helping to build out the Pentagon’s battlefield drone capability.
The work was done as part of a Defense Department initiative called Project Maven. Last year, The Intercept reported that the Pentagon had quietly tapped Google as part of the project to develop an artificial intelligence program to help Air Force analysts swiftly sort the thousands of hours of drone video and choose targets on the battlefield.
Outsourced crowd workers were tasked with providing the initial image data labeling — correctly identifying parts of an image — that allowed Google’s artificial intelligence program to tell buildings, images, trees, and other objects apart.The artificial intelligence program, however, must learn to be able to distinguish between objects on the videos — and in order for the program to learn, someone must teach it. Enter the outsourced crowd workers, who were tasked with providing the initial image data labeling — correctly identifying parts of an image — that allowed Google’s artificial intelligence program to tell buildings, images, trees, and other objects apart. The role of the crowd workers has garnered little attention.
Emails obtained by The Intercept show that shortly after Google inked the deal with the military, the tech giant began working to label a set of satellite images captured by a technology known as wide-area motion imagery. In October 2017, Google sent a company called CrowdFlower — which subsequently changed its name to Figure Eight — the raw images with instructions on data labeling. The data labeling project started showing results quickly over the following month, as engineers developed better guidelines for the crowd workers to teach the artificial intelligence to identify the objects.
Project Maven, with the help of the crowd workers, was designed to allow Pentagon officials to engage in “near-real time analysis” and to “click on a building and see everything associated with it,” including people and vehicles, according to leaked documents obtained by The Intercept.
Asked if crowd workers have continued to contribute to Project Maven, a spokesperson for Google referred our questions to Figure Eight, which did not respond to The Intercept’s inquiry.
Illustration: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
Since 2007, Figure Eight has hosted one of the largest digital platforms that allows individuals to sign up to perform micro-tasks, such as data annotation. The “human-in-the-loop” service is marketed as a cost-effective way for companies to fine-tune large data sets to make algorithms more accurate. Other firms in the industry include Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Upwork, and Clickworker.
Will Pleskow, an account executive at Figure Eight, confirmed his company’s role on the Project Maven initiative during a September 2018 interview with The Intercept at the AI Summit, a trade show for machine-learning companies. Pleskow said the workers performing the data labeling, known as “contributors,” did not know that they were working for Google or for the military, which is not an unusual arrangement.
“Our customers have the option of showing who they are. Most of the time, it’s kept anonymous,” said Pleskow. He added that his firm provides similar image labeling tasks to improve the quality of technology for autonomous vehicles, such as driverless cars.
Several Figure Eight workers told The Intercept that it is not out of the ordinary for workers to be left in the dark about how their assembly-line style of data entry is used.
“Contributors to the Figure Eight platform are not given who the data will benefit,” said one former crowd worker, who used an online username when The Intercept reached out over social media. “Usually, they are given a reason for why they are doing a task, like, ‘Draw boxes around a certain product to help machines recognize it,’ but they are not given the company that receives the data.”
Another former crowd worker said that Figure Eight only provided the identity of the end-user client in a handful of scenarios, typically when the platform was used to conduct academic studies.
“Workers absolutely should have the right to know what they are working on, and especially when moral or politically controversial activities are involved.”The rise of the gig economy has presented a myriad of challenges for organized labor. Most gig economy firms, including virtually all crowd-worker platforms, classify their workers as contractors, which means that they do not qualify for benefits, minimum wage, or overtime.
The distributed network allows for a global workforce. Figure Eight has a large user base in countries such as Venezuela, Indonesia, and Russia, as well as the United States. The far-flung employee base and individualized tasks on an opaque platform provide few opportunities for questioning corporate decisions.
Pleskow said in the September 2018 interview that he was unaware of any discontent or ethical concerns from Figure Eight workers after the revelation of the Project Maven initiative last year.
At Google, however, an open rebellion broke out over the project. Several employees quit Google in protest, while others openly challenged the Silicon Valley giant’s leadership, claiming that the company had abandoned its “Don’t Be Evil” ethos. Employees demanded that the company swear off future “warfare technology” projects. Executives were later caught misleading workers, erroneously stating that the contract was merely worth $9 million, while internal documents revealed that Google expected Project Maven to ramp up to a $250 million contract.
Following the protest, Google executives announced that they would not renew work on Project Maven after the initial phase of the contract ran its course — though they did not promise to eschew military work in the future.
Other tech giants are reportedly interested in engaging the military as it continues to deploy artificial intelligence technology. Much larger machine-learning projects may require vastly new engagement from gig economy workers, who may unknowingly engage in the work.
“Workers absolutely should have the right to know what they are working on, and especially when moral or politically controversial activities are involved,” said Juliet Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College, in an email to The Intercept. “It’s a basic dimension of democracy, which should not stop at either the factory or the platform ‘door.’ For too long, the country has tolerated erosion of basic civil rights in the workplace, as corporations assume ever-more control over their workforces. It’s time to win them back.”
The post Google Hired Gig Economy Workers to Improve Artificial Intelligence in Controversial Drone-Targeting Project appeared first on The Intercept.
The federal agency managed by Neomi Rao, the nominee to replace Brett Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, has been stalling a critical employer guidance on workplace sexual harassment for over a year.
Rao, who is the director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is already reported to be on the Trump administration’s shortlist for a future Supreme Court position, should one open up, and faces senators in confirmation hearings on Tuesday.
OIRA is a division of the Office of Management and Budget, which evaluates regulations from across the federal government. In November 2017, just a month after the Harvey Weinstein revelations kicked off the #MeToo movement, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an independent agency, delivered the new harassment guidelines to OIRA. The federal government hasn’t updated its workplace guidance, which helps set human resources policy across the country, since the 1990s. A January 2017 proposed draft, issued just before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, was the product of a bipartisan task force and subject to months of public comment. But it has fallen into a black hole under Rao.
Recently, writings of Rao’s while at Yale University have been unearthed. “A good way to avoid a potential date rape is to stay reasonably sober,” Rao wrote in 1994. “And if she drinks to the point where she can no longer choose, well, getting to that point was part of her choice. … Implying that a drunk woman has no control of her actions, but that a drunk man does strips women of all moral responsibility.”
The cache of writings included an essay from 1994 in which she stated, “Trendy political movements have only recently added sexuality to the standard checklist of traits requiring tolerance.” Rao added: “No one knows whether sexuality is a biological phenomenon or a social construct. The truth may lie somewhere in the middle.” In a separate piece, she chided “homosexuals” for wanting “to redefine marriage and parenthood.”
Now, as OIRA administrator, Rao’s office has sat on the most important federal response to the #MeToo movement, which would clarify to workers and employers what the EEOC considers workplace sexual harassment. “I absolutely think it’s relevant to considering her record when it comes to civil rights,” said Maya Raghu, director of Workplace Equality and senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center.
Debra Katz, the sexual harassment lawyer who represented Christine Blasey Ford in her allegations against Kavanaugh last year, told Bloomberg Law last June, “In a moment where we have a huge cultural and societal reckoning, this administration is showing it’s not going to take a leadership role in preventing sexual harassment.”
In a statement to The Intercept, EEOC spokesperson Kimberly Smith-Brown described a “normal course” of back and forth on the content of rules and regulations with OIRA. “At this point, the ball is back in our hands here at the EEOC, and we’re evaluating it internally,” Smith-Brown said.
But experts in the regulatory process claim that the situation is unusual. As an independent agency, the EEOC is not required to send guidance to OIRA for review; the agency submitted it voluntarily. The normal timeline for guidance review is 90 days; the EEOC guidance is at 15 months and counting. And the guidance does not appear on any list of documents under review at OIRA, making it impossible for stakeholders and the public to track its status.
“You can’t find it on the website,” said Amit Narang, a regulatory policy advocate at Public Citizen. “They are using OIRA to keep this stuck.”
The Trump administration, as part of its deregulatory agenda, has waged a kind of war on agency guidance, which attempt to clarify or interpret statutes for regulated entities without having the force of law. Rao herself has said that the administration wants to limit agency guidance documents, saying that it relies on a “thinner constitutionality” standard, and “if there’s a guidance document that imposes significant costs — it’s economically significant, or otherwise significant from a policy perspective — we should be taking a look at that.”
The EEOC has not updated its sexual harassment guidance for employers since the 1990s. According to a 2016 task force report co-chaired by Democratic commissioner Chai Feldblum and Republican Victoria Lipnic, nearly one-third of the 90,000 charges received by the EEOC in fiscal year 2015 involved allegations of workplace harassment. Charges have spiked since then, as the #MeToo movement has only widened awareness of the realities of sexual misconduct in the workplace. The agency unanimously approved the guidance on a bipartisan basis when sending it to OIRA.
Feldblum’s proposed re-nomination to the commission was seen at one point as a major stumbling block in getting the guidance approved. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, put a hold on the nomination of Feldblum, who is openly gay, for another term, blocking two Republican nominees for EEOC in the process. Feldblum eventually chose to exit the EEOC at the end of 2018, leaving the agency with only two of five commissioners, not enough for a quorum.
Even with the political dispute out of the way, the guidance has been stalled at OIRA under Rao’s leadership.
The guidance accomplishes what conservatives often regard as an important function: providing clarity to businesses. Consolidating several earlier guidance documents under a single legal analysis, the EEOC lays out what types of harassing workplace conduct it would consider as violating federal equal employment opportunity and anti-discrimination statutes. “An updated guidance would be important for employers, so they know what the law is,” said Raghu, of the National Women’s Law Center. “It’s especially important for small businesses, many of whom don’t have HR directors or legal counsel to interpret the law for them.”
While not legally binding, EEOC defines in the guidance when it believes an employer is specifically liable, how it can limit liability through prevention and prompt corrective action, and what protected classes are covered.
The latter appears to be the sticking point with the administration. The guidance included gender identity and sexual orientation as covered under the interpretation of sex-based harassment. This has been EEOC policy since at least 2012, but it diverts sharply from the Justice Department’s views throughout the Trump presidency.
In October 2017, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions prohibited transgender people from protections against workplace discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the same statute EEOC cites in its guidance. Sessions’s Justice Department even filed legal briefs asking an appeals court and then the Supreme Court to reaffirm this interpretation of Title VII, in a case involving the EEOC.
Justice Department spokesperson Andrew Hudson referred questions about the updated guidance to the Office of Management and Budget, which did not respond to The Intercept’s queries. Hudson did note that the Justice Department and the EEOC recently signed a memorandum of understanding to work together on addressing workplace harassment within state and local governments. The MOU elided the sexual orientation issue.
Sessions is no longer attorney general, but the influence of social conservatives within the Trump administration remains strong. The Supreme Court recently allowed the administration to temporarily ban transgender service members from the military.
Rao’s inflammatory college writings have put her under the microscope for bias against LGBTQ Americans and a cavalier attitude toward sexual assault, which critics believe she will carry into her judgeship. People for the American Way is rallying opposition to Rao’s confirmation, saying in a petition that “Neomi Rao’s bigoted views have no place on the federal bench.”
More broadly, as OIRA administrator, Rao has been known as the “deregulation queen,” proudly blocking any number of regulatory measures. Questions of administrative law generally go to the D.C. Circuit, where Rao would sit if she were confirmed. “There are a whole host of rules that she has blocked that have a significant negative impact on a lot of people, especially vulnerable people,” said Raghu. Rao’s confirmation hearing is scheduled for February 5.
The post Neomi Rao, Nominee to Replace Brett Kavanaugh, Heads Agency That’s Been Stalling Sexual Harassment Guidance appeared first on The Intercept.
Ana Maria Archila, the Queens woman who famously confronted Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake in a Capitol Hill elevator, will be Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s State of the Union guest on Tuesday.
Archila, a longtime community organizer and co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy Action, was one of two women who shared their stories of sexual assault for the first time with the senator in an emotional encounter during the debate over Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. With a CNN camera broadcasting live right behind the women, Archila and Maria Gallagher blocked the doors of an elevator and pressed Flake to justify his support for Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault as a teenager.
In a surprising pivot shortly after the encounter, Flake said he would not support Kavanaugh’s confirmation without an additional FBI investigation into the allegations. He, of course, ultimately joined Republicans in putting Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. But for a moment, the impassioned confrontation appeared to have played a role in his decision to delay the nomination.
Archila, a constituent of Ocasio-Cortez’s, will now return to the Capitol as an invited guest.
“I just feel particularly moved that in her first participation in the State of the Union, she is inviting me to join and inviting that moment of the elevator, my confrontation with the men who do not understand the life of women and the lives of people who are not in power, that she’s inviting that into the imagination of people again,” Archila told The Intercept.
She would not have confronted Flake “had it not been for the courage that I watched, the courage of the people that had been protesting for weeks, the courage of women who were telling their stories” in congressional offices, to their families, and on social media. “I would not have ever told my story otherwise — I hadn’t in 30 years,” she reflected.
Members of Congress each bring a guest to the State of the Union address, and many choose to bring one who represents an issue or policy stance they prioritize. Ocasio-Cortez dropped a hint about her guest on Saturday, posting a picture of an enamel pin that reads “Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History” that she had picked up at a local shop.
Y’all aren’t ready for NY-14’s #StateOfTheUnion guest!
Here’s a hint: I just picked up this gift for them at our very own Lockwood Shop in Jackson Heights ? pic.twitter.com/wSv23WmJ9k
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 2, 2019
Archila said she feels so much gratitude for Ocasio-Cortez and what she represents: “This idea that we all deserve a country where we can live with dignity, that we have so much wealth that is accumulated in such few hands, and she is determined to bring that demand to Congress and to give voice to a demand that I think is very widely shared.”
An immigrant herself, Archila has spent the past two decades working on behalf of immigrant rights in Queens and said she feels a deep connection to Ocasio-Cortez because of their shared commitment to building “grassroots power with people who are excluded from our democracy.”
“I cherish this privilege that I have as a citizen to vote, but I have never felt so proud of voting for someone as when I voted for Alexandria,” she added. “It was really a powerful experience to feel like I was voting for someone I 100 percent believed in. And this was, you know, in June of last year when we were fighting Trump’s separation of children at the border. So I voted for Alexandria in the morning and then took a train to D.C. and the next day organized the largest demonstration, the largest civil disobedience that has been done inside the halls of Congress, when 700 women got arrested in the Hart Senate building.”
The post Ana Maria Archila, Who Confronted Sen. Jeff Flake, Will Be Ocasio-Cortez’s SOTU Guest appeared first on The Intercept.
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