HIV/Aids: China reports 14% surge in new cases

The vast majority of new cases were transmitted through sex. not blood transfusion as in the past.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2QfQsiQ

Egypt sentences activist for 'spreading fake news'

Amal Fathy has publicly criticised the government over the extent of sexual harassment in Egypt.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2xMrMYB

Danish police free manhunt suspects in death threat case

Two men in a Swedish car were detained over fears an attack was about to take place, police say.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2DFcV7J

Turkey's Erdogan opens mosque in German city of Cologne

Turkey's president ends a tense state visit by opening one of Europe's largest mosques in Cologne.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2zFeYok

Lindsay Lohan under fire for 'bizarre' Instagram video

Lindsay Lohan has been criticised online after posting a video showing an altercation with a homeless family.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2DHrBDr

Jefferson Airplane's Marty Balin dies aged 76

He was the co-founder and vocalist-guitarist of the 1960s psychedelic rock group in San Francisco.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2xMQGHA

Trump on Kim Jong-un: 'We fell in love'

The US president told a rally that the North Korean leader had sent him "beautiful" letters.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2DRZy4j

Special words that don't exist in English (yet)

Some languages have words and phrases that English speakers never knew they needed.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2y3GHg7

Protesters throw paint at police in Barcelona

Several people were injured as those for and against Catalan independence clashed in the city.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2xLHIdp

Why are Hong Kong domestic workers practising their dance moves?

Why a domestic worker in Hong Kong takes part in beauty contests

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2Qi4gt4

What will the FBI inquiry into Kavanaugh actually do?

The probe was ordered by a Senate committee after a Republican changed his mind about the nomination.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2DHjJSi

Rudolf Nureyev: How the dance legend continues to inspire

The Russian ballet legend became a star in 1961 but a new film shows how his skill and legacy live on.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2xM3PAJ

Brazil indigenous group bets on 'golden fruit'

A rare variety of cocoa growing on its land is a ray of hope for an indigenous community in Brazil.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2DHZ7JL

Why Hollywood writer Ubah Mohamed hated her name

Ubah Mohamed used aliases to get work before breaking into Hollywood.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2OYNOxS

India airports: Has PM Modi built more than others?

The Indian prime minister says he's built more airports than previous governments - has he?

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2xUBrMX

Racism and stereotypes in colonial India’s 'Instagram’

A recent exhibition of postcards from colonial India explores how Indians were portrayed.

from BBC News - World https://ift.tt/2NQHegk

Elon Musk’s Fait Accompli

Two days after the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Elon Musk for securities fraud related to misleading Tweets about Tesla, Musk and Tesla have reached an agreement with the SEC. The settlement allows Musk to stay on as CEO, but requires him to relinquish the role of Chairman of the Board, and not to seek that post again for three years. In addition, Musk must pay $20 million in fines and agree to comply with corporate communication processes. Tesla has also agreed to pay $20 million fines and to appoint two new outside members to the board. Musk and Tesla agreed to the terms without admitting or denying wrongdoing. The settlement still must be approved by the court.

Tesla’s stock cratered during Friday trading, dropping almost 14 percent after news of the lawsuit broke after hours Thursday. That impact almost certainly pressed Musk and Tesla to pursue the settlement quickly. It also underscored the street’s confusion that Musk rejected a prior settlement offer, which had been the impetus for the SEC to file suit. According to reports, the SEC’s earlier settlement offer had also required Musk to give up the chairman’s seat, albeit for only two years instead of three.

The settlement represents a substantial compromise on the SEC’s part. Their lawsuit had asked for Musk to step down as CEO, and it sought to bar him from serving as officer or director of a public company. Musk is the public face of Tesla, so the company (and its stock) would surely suffer had this outcome been realized. And even if the matter were litigated, some experts have guessed that as much as 30 percent of Tesla’s value is contingent on Musk being its CEO.

[Further reading: The car that killed glamour]

The outcome will probably save Tesla, in the short term anyway. But it speaks volumes about its CEO’s station, and how much it’s fallen. Yesterday, after the SEC lawsuit was filed, I said that Elon Musk is his own worst enemy. And not just because of the ill-advised tweets about a hypothetical leveraged buyout of Telsa. Musk’s troubles at Tesla started because his previous business successes, though substantial in financial terms, hadn’t brought him experience running and managing a public company, let alone one that had to design, manufacture, and distribute consumer goods at scale. He couldn’t control labor and production issues at his factories, sometimes casting his own management failures as treason on the part of his workers. Then he lashed out at the short sellers who took that news, partly accessible because Tesla had to make public filings, as reason to bet against the company. Musk’s war on the media, carried out in public in sometimes embarrassing ways, only produced more problems.

The negotiation with the SEC only further cements Musk’s status as self-saboteur. According to Reuters, Musk wouldn’t agree to the prior settlement offer because “he wouldn’t be truthful to himself,” and “wouldn’t have been able to live with” a compromise.

But when Musk called the SEC’s bluff, they acted quickly and decisively, filing a lawsuit with a far more serious set of demands than either settlement offered, among them the ouster of Musk as CEO. When you call someone’s bluff, and you’re right, then you look shrewd indeed. But that was not the case here. The SEC brought the hammer down immediately, revealing the strength of its hand. The market spoke too, punishing Musk and Tesla for their foolhardiness. Settlement notwithstanding, nobody looks good here, except maybe the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The settlement is likely sufficient to stabilize the stock price, which sits at about $264 per share, more than $100 less than its value when Musk tweeted about taking the company private last month. Eventually, given changes to the company’s fundamentals, it might rise to the levels when Musk promised a marijuana-laced target of $420 per share. And the Tesla board probably won’t seek to remove Musk, because despite it all the company depends on him as a figurehead.

[Further reading: Elon Musk is his own worst enemy]

That was enough in 2010, when Tesla went public, but now the vultures are circling. Mercedes, Ford, Volkswagen, and other manufacturers are aggressively pursuing electric vehicles, drafting behind the lead that Musk and Tesla piloted. No ordinary person knows who the CEO of Ford or VW is, but they probably don’t care, either. The proof is in the pudding: Whether the cars ship and sell, and how quickly.

It feels like the end of an era for Elon Musk as indefatigable inventor-industrialist, no matter how Tesla or SpaceX or any of his other ventures perform. Musk’s reputation was predicated on cunning and audacity: His willingness to try things that had failed before, and to press hard on them until they succeeded. Electric cars. Reusable rockets. But many of them haven’t yet succeeded, not really. Tesla is a proof of concept for an industry, and risks being overtaken. SpaceX has made a technological promise about space commerce and travel, but it remains an overblown government and commercial contractor. The Boring Company has ambition for a new kind of urban transit, and claims to have deals to realize it, but enormous uncertainty still faces it.

Now that Elon Musk has shown, with this SEC debacle, that he is not just a visionary but also a fool, it’s possible that the walls will continue crumbling around him. It almost feels like Musk himself has realized it, too. Yesterday evening, after the markets had closed and after what must have been an awful day of panicked negotiation with the SEC and his board, Musk posted a tweet that read, “And remember…,” accompanied by a photo of the Tesla roadster he had launched into space in February.

Once deployed from the Falcoln Heavy rocket, the Tesla was gently set into orbit between Earth and Mars, where it orbits the sun like any other celestial body. When he launched it, Musk announced that he expected the car to endure in space for hundreds of millions of years.

And remember … pic.twitter.com/UaDUv4OlZf

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 28, 2018

Yesterday’s tweet betrays desperation rather than swagger. It’s as if Musk was saying, No matter what happens, part of my legacy is out there for good, cemented into the interstellar backdrop. And he’s right. But at the same time, that Tesla floating up there in the cosmos is also just space junk, a relic from a man who flew, Icarus-like, full of giddy confidence, too close to the sun.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2Op99mQ

Jeff Flake Explains Himself

Jeff Flake barely slept the night before he upended the battle for the Supreme Court.   

The Arizona senator had spent days agonizing over what to do with the explosive allegation that Judge Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted a young woman when he was in high school. For hours on Thursday, Flake—a key Republican swing vote—listened intently to raw testimony from the accuser and the accused, searching for something like certainty. But when it was over, he felt he was no closer to knowing for sure what happened in that suburban-Maryland bedroom 35 years ago.

The next morning, Flake’s office announced that, given the lack of corroborating evidence, the senator was prepared to move forward with Kavanaugh’s confirmation—but in private, he remained conflicted. “I was just unsettled,” he told me.

A few hours later, Flake shocked Washington with a dramatic last-minute call to delay the confirmation so that the FBI could spend a week investigating the accusation against Kavanaugh. The move was greeted with scorn from the right and plaudits from the left. But when Flake called me Friday, just before midnight, he was quick to emphasize that this was not an act of ideology.

Ever since I first interviewed him early last year for a profile, Flake has struck me as a politician preoccupied with unfashionable ideas. As a pro-immigration free trader and an outspoken critic of the president, he is generally out of step with the GOP of Donald Trump. And as he nears retirement, he prefers to talk about things like process, and decorum, and safeguarding democratic institutions. This is what he’s fixated on in the fight over Kavanaugh—and it’s why his approach is unlikely to please many partisans on either side of the aisle.  

In an interview Friday night, Flake told me about why he changed his mind on the Kavanaugh vote, what it was like to be confronted by sexual-assault survivors on Capitol Hill, and what he hopes to learn from the FBI investigation in the coming week.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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McKay Coppins: As of Friday morning, you were planning to vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. By the afternoon, you were calling for an FBI investigation before you could support his confirmation. What happened in those few hours that changed your mind?

Jeff Flake: I don’t know if there was any one thing, but I was just unsettled. You know, when I got back to the committee, I saw the food fight again between the parties—the Democrats saying they’re going to walk out, the Republicans blaming everything on the Democrats.

And then there was [Democratic Senator] Chris Coons making an impassioned plea for a one-week extension to have an FBI investigation. And you know, if it was anybody else I wouldn’t have taken it as seriously. But I know Chris. We’ve traveled together a lot. We’ve sat down with Robert Mugabe. We’ve been chased by elephants, literally, in Mozambique. We trust each other. And I thought, if we could actually get something like what he was asking for—an investigation limited in time, limited in scope—we could maybe bring a little unity.

We can’t just have the committee acting like this. The majority and minority parties and their staffs just don’t work well together. There’s no trust. In the investigation, they can’t issue subpoenas like they should. It’s just falling apart.

Coppins: So, you were motivated mainly by preserving institutional credibility?

Flake: Two institutions, really. One, the Supreme Court is the lone institution where most Americans still have some faith. And then the U.S. Senate as an institution—we’re coming apart at the seams. There’s no currency, no market for reaching across the aisle. It just makes it so difficult.

Just these last couple of days—the hearing itself, the aftermath of the hearing, watching pundits talk about it on cable TV, seeing the protesters outside, encountering them in the hall. I told Chris, “Our country’s coming apart on this—and it can’t.” And he felt the same.

Coppins: Heading into Friday, what factors were you weighing as you decided how to vote?

Flake: It was a sleepless night. I was getting calls and emails for days from friends and acquaintances saying, “Here’s my story, here’s why I was emboldened to come out.” Dr. Ford’s testimony struck a chord, it really did, with a lot of women.

Coppins: What was it like hearing from some of those women?

Flake: I didn’t expect it. I mean, we’re getting women writing into the office. People we don’t know. Other offices, I’m told, are having the same experience.

Coppins: The footage of sexual-assault survivors confronting you in the elevator Friday has been widely viewed. What was going through your mind when they were talking to you?

Flake: Obviously, it’s an uncomfortable situation. But it was—you know, you feel for them. It was poignant.

I mean, keep in mind, their agenda may be different than mine. I think some of their concern was how Kavanaugh would rule on the court. They may have been there prior to the allegations against him because of his position on some issues. But it certainly struck a chord.

Coppins: Some conservatives say delaying the vote will just give Kavanaugh’s opponents more time to engage in bad-faith efforts to derail his confirmation. What do you say to that?

Flake: I’m sure that will happen. There are already people saying, “Oh, a week’s not enough.” We tried to limit the time duration for the investigation, and limit the scope to the current allegations. But no doubt some will try to use it, and its time, for more accusations to come forward.

Coppins: As of now, are you planning to vote to confirm Kavanaugh unless the FBI finds something in the next week that changes your mind?

Flake: Yes. I’m a conservative. He’s a conservative. I plan to support him unless they turn up something—and they might.

Coppins: What do you want to know from the FBI? Are there any specific questions lingering in your mind, or witnesses you’re eager to hear from?

Flake: Well, obviously, Mark Judge. That’s the one that sticks out because he was mentioned so much by Dr. Ford, and he might be able to shed some light on her recollection of time and events.

Coppins: Your colleague, Ted Cruz, predicted that Mark Judge will just plead the Fifth if he’s asked about the allegations—would that change the calculus for you?

Flake: You know, all we can do is ask. We’ve got to try.

Coppins: There were reports that President George W. Bush called to lobby you to support Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Is that true?

Flake: Oh yes. I’ve spoken to him a few times in the past few weeks.

Coppins: What did he say?

Flake: He obviously worked closely with Brett, so he’s a big fan. And he’s called me and a number of my colleagues.

Coppins: You talked earlier about the crisis of authority facing American institutions. Do you worry that confirming Kavanaugh with these allegations hanging over him will do some damage to the long-term credibility of the Supreme Court?

Flake: Obviously. I’ve felt that this delay is as much to help him as us. My hope is that some Democrats will say,“Hey, we may not change our vote, but this process was worthy of the institution, and we feel satisfied.” That means something. The country needs to hear that.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2Qkmcna

The World Adjusts to Donald J. Trump

NEW YORK—The giggles that greeted Donald Trump’s boasts at the United Nations about his accomplishments were widely interpreted in the United States as mockery on the part of world leaders who knew better. But from my perch in the hall that day, this wasn’t so clear. The laughter also seemed to spring from familiarity. One way to translate the snickering that grew as Trump claimed he’d gotten more done than any president in history, and punctuated the hyperbole with a signature “so true,” was as a collective, knowing nod from the assembled dignitaries. There he goes again, they appeared to be saying. Classic Donald.

If 2017 was the year Trump stormed the United Nations, extolling national sovereignty and threatening to “totally destroy” a UN member state before the bewildered international body, 2018 was the year the United Nations adapted to the changing climate that Trump’s deeply disruptive conduct of foreign affairs has produced. The American president at this year’s annual General Assembly wasn’t a revelation. He wasn’t a laughingstock. He was, instead, a force to be reckoned with one way or another.

Some world leaders backed down and agreed to play by Trump’s rules. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, fresh off celebrating the virtues of multinational free-trade agreements during a speech to the General Assembly, agreed on the sidelines of the UN gathering to a major concession: entering into negotiations on a bilateral trade agreement with the United States in order to prevent Trump from slapping tariffs on Japanese auto exports and to potentially lift the steel and aluminum duties Trump has already imposed on his nation. At a press conference after the announcement, Trump crowed that Japan was increasing its purchases of American military equipment and liquefied natural gas to rectify the trade deficit between the two countries. A Japanese trade official was less exultant. Noting that Abe had repeatedly tried without success to persuade the U.S. president to rejoin the trans-Pacific trade pact that Trump withdrew from immediately after taking office, he described bilateral trade talks as “a better arrangement than nothing.”

[Donald Trump’s UN press conference gave a tour of his worldview.]

Other leaders demonstrated that they’d learned how to play to Trump’s predilections while still largely getting their way. As part of his effort to coax a reluctant United States and North Korea toward an agreement on peace and denuclearization, South Korean President Moon Jae In stroked Trump’s ego, telling his American counterpart during a meeting in New York that “you are, indeed, the only person who can solve this problem,” which “no one has been able to solve in the decades past.” Then he went on Trump’s favorite television network, Fox News, and amplified the message, noting that none of the diplomatic progress with North Korea so far would have been possible without Trump’s bold decision to become the first American president to meet with North Korea’s leader. Trump took note. At his press conference on Wednesday—during which he warned against the kind of devastating war on the Korean peninsula he once threatened, rhapsodized about Kim Jong Un’s “beautiful letters,” and stated that he had “all the time in the world” to strike a deal with North Korea, all of which must have been to Moon’s delight—Trump urged every reporter to watch the South Korean president’s interview with Fox. “What he said about me last night was an unbelievable thing,” Trump marveled.

But while Moon seemed intent on bringing Trump along on his campaign to transform the Korean peninsula, in other cases the nations represented in New York this week appeared reconciled to moving forward without the United States—even as many held out hope that America, with or without Trump at its helm, would soon see the error of its ways and once again provide the ballast to multilateralism that it alone can offer.

On Wednesday, for example, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres presided over an event on the organization’s new non-binding Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration, which has been approved by every UN member state except the United States and Hungary, led by the populist-nationalist Viktor Orban. (The previous day, with Guterres sitting behind him, Trump had condemned the Compact as an infringement on American sovereignty. The leader of a self-styled nation of immigrants had argued that the “only long-term solution to the migration crisis” is to make the countries that migrants are leaving “great again.”) Lamenting the “xenophobia, intolerance, and racism” that “unregulated, unmanaged migration” has spawned, Guterres applauded the 191 nations still supporting the initiative. The Compact “recognizes that while every sovereign state has the prerogative to govern its borders, our interdependent world demands solutions that are anchored in cooperation and our pursuit of the common good,” he said.

[Trump issues a scathing rejection of “globalism.”]

In a joint statement on Monday and in remarks at a UN Security Council session chaired by Trump on Wednesday, Britain, France, Germany, China, and Russia all reaffirmed their support for the Iran nuclear deal despite America’s withdrawal from the agreement last spring. They also agreed to establish a financial vehicle in the European Union in an attempt to keep trade with Iran flowing as the United States reimposes sanctions on the Iranians. While the Trump administration is trying to isolate Iran, it is actually the United States that finds itself alone because of its unilateral exit from the nuclear pact, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani argued at a news conference.

Across town, at an event with top Canadian officials at the Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke wistfully—and in the past tense—of the post-World War II period when there was “clear American leadership in the world” and “we all got used to calling the American president the leader of the free world.” At a moment when Canada and the United States are at loggerheads over renegotiating NAFTA, Trade Minister Jim Carr talked euphemistically about “diversify[ing] our trade” through agreements with the European Union and Asian and Latin American nations. (Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for his part, revealed the strategy he has come to adopt to avoid a blowup with Trump: Be firm—imposing equivalent countertariffs to Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, for example—but don’t “escalate or respond in kind” to maintain “a constructive relationship with the president.”)

Among the most notable adjustments to the Trump era at the United Nations was an escalating struggle over the soul of the international system. Speaking to the UN General Assembly shortly after Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron directly countered the American president’s vision of self-interested, fiercely independent states collaborating only if and when their interests overlap—and the specific policies on trade, climate, Iran, and other issues that derive from it. Rejecting both the “survival-of-the-fittest approach” to international affairs and the notion that today’s global tumult is an “interlude in history before things return to normal,” Macron advocated for a “new world balance” involving multiple powers that seek new ways to remedy the inequities of globalization.

[The victims of climate change are already here.]

“Never forget that the genocides that led to your being here today were fueled by the language we are growing accustomed to, because they were fueled by the demagoguery we applaud, because we are currently seeing ... international law and all forms of cooperation crumbling, as if it were business as usual—out of fear, out of complicity, because it looks good,” Macron declared.

On Thursday, another young leader, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, made a similar but less Trump-centric case during her first appearance at the UN General Assembly. Her country’s isolated position “at the bottom of the South Pacific” had not made it insular, she said—in fact just the opposite. And climate change was a prime example of what she called governments’ obligations “to their people and each other.” Ardern noted that “there is a grinding reality in hearing someone from a Pacific island talk about where the sea was when they were a child, and potential loss of their entire village as an adult. Our action in the wake of this global challenge remains optional. But the impact of inaction does not. Nations like Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, or Kiribati—small countries who’ve contributed the least to global climate change—are and will suffer the full force of a warming planet. If my Pacific neighbors do not have the option of opting out of the effects of climate change, why should we be able to opt out of taking action to stop it?”

“In the face of isolationism, protectionism, racism,” Ardern continued, “the simple concept of looking outwardly and beyond ourselves, of kindness and collectivism, might just be as good a starting point as any.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2Olobdz

America Is Finally Listening to Women. It’s Sparking a National Crisis.

“The only consensus,” declared the Washington Post about Thursday’s Judiciary Committee hearings, “was that the Senate — and the nation — had hit a new low.” In the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last added that, “It’s impossible to look at the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings and not see America as a nation in decline.” A lot of respectable people believe that. It’s the kind of sentiment you hear from nonpartisan journalists and anti-Trump conservatives, the people who represent the supposedly thoughtful center in today’s Washington.

But it’s nonsense. Claiming that Thursday’s hearings reflect “a new low” and “a nation in decline” implies that, in some previous era of American history, the Senate Judiciary Committee would have treated Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford more fairly than they did this week. In fact, for the vast majority of American history, Blasey Ford would have received no hearing at all. The Senate Judiciary Committee would not have bothered to inquire into her allegations of sexual assault because it would not have pretended that sexual assault was disqualifying for a seat on the Supreme Court.

By 1991, things had progressed enough that the Judiciary Committee was willing to publicly interview Anita Hill. But at that hearing, conducted by a Judiciary Committee that included no women, Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter told Hill that, “You testified this morning that the most embarrassing question involved — this is not too bad — women’s large breasts. That is a word we use all the time.”

Thursday’s hearings do not reflect a Senate in decline. They reflect a Senate in crisis. That’s entirely different. The Kavanaugh hearings have thrown the Senate into crisis because women are now powerful enough to disrupt the amicable, male-dominated consensus that in previous eras silenced them altogether. But they are not yet powerful enough to get justice. That’s not just true in the Senate. That’s true in the nation as a whole.

The increase in partisan polarization, likewise, does not reflect a nation in decline. It reflects a nation in crisis because one political party is no longer totally dominated by white men—leading the other political party to more nakedly defend the privileges of white men. When women and people of color were less represented in either party, and white male privileges were thus less threatened, both found it easier to be civil. This isn’t a new story. American politics grew more tranquil after Reconstruction, once both parties agreed that southern blacks should not be permitted to vote.

Reasonable people can question the way Senate Democrats handled Ford’s allegations when she first came forward. But the notion—which is attractive to people in the respectable center—that there was some calm, polite, collegial way to arbitrate her charges is a myth. They could have been buried calmly and politely. But they could not have been arbitrated calmly and politely because Ford’s charges are dangerous. They’re dangerous to conservative hopes of achieving a majority on the Supreme Court and they’re dangerous to the many powerful men whose careers would be ruined were they accountable for their abuse of women. Kavanaugh and the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee know that. And they have learned from President Trump that when women or people of color endanger your status, it doesn’t work to play nice.

On Friday, two women who say they are survivors of sexual assault confronted Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator. Their actions constituted a violation of Senate norms; they weren’t civil at all. But the episode didn’t reflect an institution or a nation in decline. It reflected an institution and a nation in crisis—the kind of crisis that always comes when people long denied justice challenge the well-mannered consensus on which that injustice rests.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2OkRexP

The Family Weekly: When Parents Enable Teenage Binge Drinking

This Week in Family

After the release of the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s high-school calendars, Americans were introduced to a time-honored East Coast teen tradition: Beach Week. This rite of passage beloved by mostly suburban upper-middle-class high-schoolers involves a lot of debauchery—namely, raging parties, binge drinking, and (often drunken) sex—says the Atlantic staff writer Ashley Fetters. Graduates of these schools remember that adults often turned a blind eye to what they were really up to during Beach Week.

Fetters also investigated another beloved tradition: the often maligned “dad joke.” These jokes tend to inspire such strong reactions because of their particular kind of wordplay, and that dad jokes are undergoing a renaissance says a lot about the state of modern fatherhood.

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Other Highlights

Americans have a reputation for divorcing often, but in fact, the divorce rate has been on the decline for decades, and in the past 10 years, it has fallen by 18 percent. Yet, as the Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker reported this week, the reason for this drop-off isn't that the institution of marriage has necessarily gotten stronger—it’s that the type of person who's most likely to marry has changed. Those with college degrees now account for more a greater percentage of marriages than in decades past, and they tend to produces more-stable unions.

Although buying luxury goods might make shoppers feel good, a recent study found that these purchases actually can repel potential friends. Researchers found that even though people who purchased these high-status objects thought that they would attract new friends, the effect is the opposite, writes Joe Pinsker. In fact, people with more basic versions of items like cars or watches were rated as more socially appealing than their flashier peers.

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Dear Therapist

Every Monday, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions about life’s trials and tribulations, big or small, in The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” column.

This week, a reader says that two of the most important people in their life—a best friend and their wife—hate each other. The fact that the reader’s wife refuses to spend time with the friend (admittedly, an “inadvertent asshole”) is straining the friendship with a person they love “like a brother.”

Lori’s advice: Open the lines of dialogue with both your wife and friend.

A better option would be to talk to your wife about why this friendship is so important to you despite your friend’s obvious shortcomings. … Let her know that even so, you understand why she doesn’t like him. Then ask her what she’d hope you would do if she had a close friend or family member who was the “inadvertent asshole.” Would she want you to go out with this person occasionally because they’re important to her? How would she feel if you acknowledged that this person can be difficult and still refused to see them? Or would she hope instead that you’d find a way to tolerate and make the best of occasional plans with the person she loves because you love her and don’t want to put her in an untenable position?

Send Lori your questions at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.

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from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2NRe68w

Robert Venturi Made Architecture Less Rigid, Yet More Clubby

Robert Venturi, the Philadelphia architect and writer who died earlier this month at 93, had a gift for maxims and other wryly efficient turns of phrase, many of which appeared in his 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. The most famous of these was “less is a bore”—a cheeky response to “less is more,” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s summary of modern architecture’s obsession with economy and rigor, with flat roofs and facades scrubbed of decoration.

But it’s a different phrase from the Venturi lexicon that best sums up his complicated legacy: the “both-and.” Early in Complexity and Contradiction, he writes, “I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning… I prefer the ‘both-and’ to ‘either-or,’ black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white.”

By “both-and,” Venturi meant an architecture that could pursue multiple, even seemingly opposed, strategies at the same time, that could be playful and deeply ambitious or historically minded but also new. The goal, he argued, was not a simple glassed-in box of a modern building—a streamlined form that hid all the messiness of getting architecture built—but one that welcomed ambiguity and embraced what he called “the difficult whole.” Venturi wanted, as he put it, to awaken architects from “prim dreams of pure order.”

The idea of the “both-and” suggested a new pluralism, and maybe a new tolerance, in architecture. But the phrase turned out to have its limits. To the extent that Venturi was making an argument in favor of a kind of big-tent populism in architecture, it was a space for new styles instead of new voices, new forms rather than new people. In fact, tucked inside Complexity and Contradiction is an argument for a renewed insularity in the profession, a position that continues to influence the architectural academy and hamstring its efforts to engage a broad public. Even as Venturi ushered in a freer, less doctrinaire architectural culture, he helped pave the way for a white, male and clubby profession to close ranks against the outside world, and grow clubbier still.

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All the energizing extremes inherent in the idea of the “both-and” live comfortably in the small house that made Venturi’s early reputation. Designed for his mother for a site in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, it was completed in 1964, when Venturi was 39. The architect began with the platonic image of a house as drawn by any first grader: gabled roof, chimney pointing skyward. Then he began to tweak and subvert those familiar shapes, cutting a deep notch in the gable and then hiding the front door behind a simple square opening punched through the facade.

These gestures knock the whole composition thrillingly off-balance, suggesting the ironic directions architecture would take as it moved in the 1970s toward postmodernism. In other ways—especially its interior, a mere 2,000 square feet packed with architectural allusion and meaningful detail—the design known as Mother’s House is all-American in the most familiar and most searching senses of that term. As I wrote in the Los Angeles Times after seeing it a couple of years ago, “Benjamin Franklin, the Shakers, Gertrude Stein and Andy Warhol are all squeezed in there together.”

By the time he was finishing the house and his first book, Venturi had fallen in love with a young architect and planner named Denise Scott Brown. Scott Brown, born in South Africa in 1931, met Venturi in 1960, when both were on the architecture faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first husband had died in a car accident the year before. Before long they were teaching together, then writing and designing buildings.

Just how much Scott Brown contributed to Complexity and Contradiction or the design of Mother’s House remains a subject of debate. Certainly by the time their book with Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, was published in 1972, they were collaborators in every way. Yet when the jury for the Pritzker Prize, the most important award in architecture, convened in 1991, they made the decision (mildly controversial then, infamous now) to honor Venturi alone.

In what turned out to be the most consequential moment of his career and perhaps the bitterest of hers, there was no “both-and.” And thus was Venturi, whom the Yale historian Vincent Scully had praised for the subtlety of his “anti-heroic” stance, elevated by the Pritzker jury to the status of hero, of solitary genius, after all.

Scott Brown was only the most visible casualty of Venturi’s heroism.

As Venturi was writing Complexity and Contradiction, many architects of his generation were growing frustrated with the way leading corporate firms were tilting the goals of modern architecture away from their progressive, even radical political origins in the European Bauhaus and toward a crasser profit motive. They worried that architects were losing their autonomy to a partnership with Wall Street and the larger marketplace.

These younger architects responded by insisting that the profession should answer only to itself and its own circumscribed goals: how a building is built, what it looks like, the conversation it carries on with important landmarks of the past. (Architecture about architecture. And for architects.) Venturi included an argument in support of this point of view in Complexity and Contradiction. It is the only part of the book that seems truly dated.

“The architect’s ever diminishing power and his growing ineffectualness in shaping the whole environment can perhaps be reversed, ironically, by narrowing his concerns and concentrating on his own job,” he wrote. “Perhaps then relationships and power will take care of themselves.”

One (unintended) consequence of this “narrowing” was that architecture as a profession failed to grow with and reflect the culture. Architects did indeed “take care of themselves,” and that mostly meant people who looked like Robert Venturi.

In certain ways, Complexity and Contradiction was part of the larger wave of cultural upheaval that reordered America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet architecture today still looks and feels a lot like 1966. By one recent measure, just 18 percent of licensed architects in the United States are women and 2 percent African American.

Is it unreasonable to expect Venturi to have used Complexity and Contradiction to fight not just theoretical battles but social ones as well? Probably. But the idea that architecture was about to face a political reckoning—that it suffered by walling itself off from those larger questions—was already in the air.

In 1968, the civil rights leader Whitney Young, Jr., gave the keynote address at the national convention of the American Institute of Architects, taking the profession to task for both its whiteness and its timidity.

“One need only take a casual look at this audience to see that we have a long way to go in this field of integration of the architects,” Young told the group. “You are not a profession that has distinguished itself by your social and civic contributions to the cause of civil rights, and I am sure this has not come to you as any shock. You are most distinguished by your thunderous silence.”

He then told a story about talking to an African American man who had just finished studying architecture at Yale; Young had asked him for advice about what to tell the AIA. The young man encouraged Young to challenge the architects “to become more relevant. He did want you to begin to speak out as a profession. He did want in his own classroom to see more Negroes. He wanted to see more Negro teachers. He wanted while his classwork was going on for you somehow as educators to get involved in the community around you.”

Young went on to remind the architects, in simple but devastating terms, “You are part of this society.”

That they needed reminding in 1968 was a sign of how many architects agreed with Venturi that narrowing the profession’s focus made sense. That many in the profession still need reminding today is the more troubling fact, and a sign that making sense of his influence can be a tricky business. Even as he aimed to upend architectural theory, Venturi, in his provocative debut, offered a sly but ultimately very effective defense of the status quo.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2N93QDx

Britain’s Labour Party Could’ve Had a Good Summer—If It Could Have Stopped Fighting With Itself

LIVERPOOL—It’s been a long, turbulent summer for British Prime Minister Theresa May. Heck, it’s been a long year. From her ill-fated decision to call for a general election last summer (one that, rather than adding to her ruling Conservatives’ majority, lost it completely) to the party infighting, Brexit battles, and cabinet resignations that have followed since, May has spent much of the past year and a half lurching from one seemingly impossible crisis to the next. Throughout, she has proven herself profoundly weak, yet surprisingly stable.

It’s an opportunity, perhaps, for a united and organized opposition to step up. But Britain doesn’t have such an opposition. What it has is the Labour Party.

At its annual party conference this week in Liverpool, the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, betrayed little hint of the party’s internal divisions. “Where the Tories have divided and ruled, we will unite and govern,” Corbyn said. “We represent the new common sense of our time, and we are ready to deliver on it.”

But Corbyn’s largely well-received speech capped off a summer of divisiveness and acrimony within the party that’s every bit as severe as the Conservatives’ problems: disagreements over Brexit and whether the party should support a second referendum, splits over its handling of anti-Semitism allegations, and growing divides between Corbyn’s grassroots loyalists and his staunchest critics that some fear threaten to tear the party in two.

For one thing, of course, there’s Brexit. Since Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the Labour Party has maintained a position of what has been called “constructive ambiguity” on the issue, opting to promote itself as the party that could deliver a “better” Brexit than the current government, but without offering specifics. The drawbacks of this were clear in Liverpool, where Brexit supporters and opponents clashed over whether to essentially call for a second referendum. The debate spilled outside the venue, where some demonstrators held signs asking Brexit: Is it worth it?, while others responded with signs saying Yes it’s worth it.

[Further reading: The populist’s guide to scandal, Jeremy Corbyn edition]

But that wasn’t the most divisive issue. Though they didn’t figure as prominently in any formal sense, the allegations of anti-Semitism that dogged the party and its leader throughout the summer inevitably lurked under the surface. Corbyn, who has personally ignited scandal himself, most recently with revelations that he once criticized British “Zionists” for having no sense of English irony, touched on the issue only briefly in his conference speech. He pledged to “eradicate anti-Semitism both within our party and the wider society,” but did not address his own comments—which, for conference attendees such as Alex Richardson, a member of the Jewish Labour Movement, wasn’t enough. “He hasn’t shown contrition,” Richardson told me. But Jo Bird, a recently elected Labour representative and a member of the Jewish Voice for Labour, told me it’s not a priority for her voters. “We knocked on over 2,000 doors in that campaign just four weeks ago and nobody raised the issue of anti-Semitism or bullying,” she said. They were more concerned with economic issues.

[Ben Judah: British Jews find their voice.]

But perhaps the greatest division was invisible in Liverpool—one centered not on what was said and who was there, but on who was absent. Whether because of the anti-Semitism allegations or the populist direction in which Corbyn is steering the party, some regular conference attendees opted to sit this one out—or even leave the party altogether. Sam Stopp, a former Labour representative in London, told me that this was the first Labour conference he was missing since 2011—a decision he made after he formally left the party in April.

“Being in a political party is a bit like a marriage, and it would take an awful lot for you to walk out on it. It would have to get to the point of irreconcilable differences, and that was the point I got to,” he said. One problem was the party’s poor handling of its anti-Semitism allegations; the other was the rise of the left within the party. “The centrists are basically irrelevant now—it’s not their party,” Stopp said, adding, “Those who feel that they’re clinging onto their Labour membership by a thread have not spent a load of money going to Labour conference … The people who have turned up are the Jeremy Corbyn ultras.”

David Clark, a special adviser to former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook under former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, also decided to sit out the conference this year for some of the same reasons. The party split, he said, is much deeper than the popular framing of the “Corbynistas” versus the “Blairites,” and includes people from the center or center-left like himself. He said the party has found ways to sideline Corbyn’s critics, including through recent efforts to make it easier to remove sitting Labour lawmakers between elections. “The message it sends to people who are not Corbyn loyalists is that they’re not welcome in the Labour Party and that they shouldn’t be represented,” Clark said. “You can’t possibly win on that basis. You really can’t.”

To hear Corbyn’s supporters tell it, though, he has won—and could go on to win even more. Under his leadership, the party’s membership swelled by upwards of 35,000 people in the days following the 2017 general election, putting Labour’s overall membership at more than 550,000—more than four times that of the ruling Conservatives. This uptick hasn’t stopped in the wake of the party’s summer of scandal, either. An estimated 470 people resigned from Labour in March in response to the anti-Semitism scandal; more than 1,000 people joined.

But that doesn’t mean members like Clark will stick around. “I debate with myself constantly whether there is any point in staying, and up until this moment I’ve decided I should stay,” he said. “But nothing is certain.” His individual calculation is emblematic of the party’s ongoing problems managing the split between the grassroots and the “establishment” members of the party. As Anand Menon, the director of U.K. in a Changing Europe, told me of the conference: “They’ve avoided an outright fight, but it doesn’t mean they’re united.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2xKmqwS

Kavanaugh Could Carry on Trump’s Agenda for Decades

For Brett Kavanaugh, Thursday’s hearing was an audition. Appearing after Christine Blasey Ford, it originally seemed the judge might find his Supreme Court nomination seriously threatened. Ford had proven a sympathetic and credible witness in detailing allegations that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school, and managed in a plainly hostile cross-examination to solidify her account and put to bed a number of conspiracy theories about her. For the Judiciary Committee and the very few swing voters in the Senate, it would have been difficult to establish a more credible and more sympathetic denial: to match Ford fact for fact, and to outflank calls for a more thorough investigation of the claims.

But, Kavanaugh’s audience was not those swing voters or even the people who might be moved by the testimony of a woman facing her alleged abuser. It seemed the one person that the would-be ninth justice was ultimately speaking to was the person who nominated him to the Supreme Court in the first place, President Donald Trump. The figure on display Thursday—an indignant, self-pitying, deeply partisan son of privilege—provided a clear view of what binds the judge to Trump, and what may still secure him a spot on the nation’s highest court. Kavanaugh’s performance also augurs what the Court might look like if he joins its ranks.

On Thursday, Kavanaugh did not show any of the stately, sphinx-like judicial restraint typical of Supreme Court nominees in such hearings, or that he’d shown in his staid, evasive answers during public hearings before the Senate Judiciary in early September. This time around, he was an avatar of rage, scolding the very senators he will need to confirm him. “This confirmation process has become a national disgrace,” he said. “The Constitution gives the Senate an important role in the confirmation process, but you have replaced advice and consent with search and destroy. Since my nomination in July, there’s been a frenzy on the left to come up with something, anything to block my confirmation.”

Kavanaugh then specifically attacked Democratic partisans, characterizing his hearing as part of a reaction to the presidency of Donald Trump, and associating it with “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.” He scowled, and yelled, and wept. He scolded senators for how they did their own jobs. His primary mode was defiance, summed up in one sentence: “You may defeat me in the final vote, but you’ll never get me to quit.”

In their own minds, everyone envisions their public moments of indignation to be righteous, soaring eruptions of well-planned and thorough vindication, worthy of the climax moment in a biopic. Reality often falls short, as did Kavanaugh’s. While his affected stentorian family-man rage did seem to elicit emotional responses from other stentorian family men in the room, his outbursts and sniping against Democratic lawmakers did not provide vindication, and indeed opened him up to new lines of attack.

Whereas wise counsel would’ve probably instructed Kavanaugh to bend a bit and contextualize a clear pattern of binge drinking and hard partying corroborated by his calendar, written evidence, and statements from both friends and accusers, he chose to play the oak tree, unyielding in his assertion that he drank legally—a claim that appears to be clearly false—and never blacked out, or drank so much that he couldn’t remember something from the night before. Any casual observance of prep-school or Yale drinking culture would provide reason to doubt that claim. He also said that what seem to be clear sexual innuendos written in his yearbook about a female classmate were not, and evaded questions probing what they meant.

Taken separately, these small seeming lies, untruths, and omissions unnecessarily damage the credibility of Kavanaugh’s account. Taken together, though, they are essential to Kavanaugh’s audition strategy. Instead of admitting to any of the fallibility of conduct or fuzziness of memory common to mere mortals, in Kavanaugh’s recollection he is an adamantine Boy Scout, an athletic polymath who drank “too much” but who was never truly affected by too much alcohol, who despite hanging with a group of knuckleheads never disrespected women, who can remember the exact details of his entire life with the aid of a meticulous calendar. In all, what Kavanaugh’s testimony requires is not just a repudiation of allegations against him as a partisan plot, but an acceptance of him as incorruptible and virtuous, against existing evidence and common sense.

It’s clear why that strategy would appeal to one President Trump. According to the Washington Post, “Trump had privately told aides and confidants that he was disappointed in Kavanaugh’s Fox News interview, which he’d viewed as lackluster and weak, and was eager to see his nominee mount a forceful and indignant defense of himself.” Kavanaugh delivered on the indignation and more, immediately moving the White House from despair after Ford’s testimony to optimism and high praise. It appears that Kavanaugh’s demeanor was the main reason for Trump’s confidence in his nominee. According to that report, the thrilled president told associates: “This is why I nominated him!”

This does appear to be why Trump nominated Kavanaugh. Not because of Kavanaugh’s long history as a relatively run-of-the-mill member of the mainstream conservative legal elite since assisting Ken Starr with investigating Bill Clinton, and not even necessarily because of the nominee’s leanings on Roe v. Wade or presidential power, but because of a deeper kinship. It’s too fitting that a political fight involving multiple sexual assault allegations is where Kavanaugh would prove his true fealty to Trump. All that’s really missing from the transcript of his remarks is a well-placed interjection of “witch hunt!” into his defense.

Friday afternoon, the Judiciary Committee asked the Trump administration to instruct the FBI to conduct a supplemental, week-long background investigation into “current, credible allegations” of sexual assault that have been leveled against Kavanaugh by Ford and two other women. The committee’s move came after retiring Arizona Republican Jeff Flake reached a “gentleman’s agreement” with Democrat Chris Coons of Delaware, and said he wouldn’t vote for Kavanaugh’s nomination without further FBI review. Later Friday, Trump directed the FBI to proceed.  

The odds that such a review will change how the handful of moderate Republicans and more conservative Democrats will vote on Kavanaugh are unknown, and depend on just what the FBI finds. Assuming Kavanaugh is confirmed, a Trumpist justice will change the dynamic of the Court beyond the numerical split between conservative and liberal judges. All justices are partisan, but his open attacks on “the left” constitute a naked political bias that might have previously been disqualifying for a potential justice. If confirmed, that bias is essentially enshrined. It always seemed unlikely that Kavanaugh would rule against major Republican priorities; but now it seems more likely that he will make all of his decisions through the prism of a lockstep long-term Republican strategy—or Trumpian strategy, should the two ever conflict. The independence of the high court from the other two branches has always been greater in theory than it has in practice, but along with the consolidation of power across branches that Trumpism appears to entail, Kavanaugh’s confirmation will likely see the Court grow closer to the executive.

Trump already has one pick in the Supreme Court, and Justice Neil Gorsuch has been an ultra-conservative bomb-thrower in his brief time as a justice. But as the long-awaited GOP white whale of a truly conservative fifth seat, Kavanaugh’s confirmation process ensures that if he secures that spot, the Court will operate and be perceived differently by the public, as well. Along with Gorsuch and Justice Clarence Thomas—who stared down sexual-assault allegations from Anita Hill at his own confirmation hearing—Kavanaugh would create an ultra-conservative insurgency that could pull Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts further right and further in alignment with Trump in major voting-rights decisions, in other civil-rights issues, and in matters to do with the Russia probe, including possibly whether a sitting president can be indicted. And if cases challenging Roe v. Wade do come to the court and put the old precedent in danger, the optics will be thus: Two justices who faced high-profile allegations of sexual assault with indignation and scorn would be making critical decisions on women’s sexual and reproductive rights. Those optics are material in this case; they represent power, and demarcate the limits of both the political and personal agency of the groups most likely to oppose Trumpism.

If Kavanaugh is confirmed, even if Trump doesn’t sign another bill for the rest of his presidency, his will be one of the more important terms of any who’ve held the office. Not only will he have secured a conservative dream of a reliably red court, he will have done so in a way that makes its particular shade of red one more to Trump’s liking. This should, in turn, accelerate the process of reunifying and rebuilding the GOP in his image. It’s unclear as of yet if the Senate will vote to confirm Kavanaugh, but every decision is made in the crucible of now with the weight of future decades bearing down.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2NP28fD

The Secret to Brett Kavanaugh's Specific Appeal

If you are one of Brett Kavanaugh’s detractors, the accusations against him demonstrate an underlying contempt for women. His attempts to portray himself as a studious, innocent youth make it worse, adding dishonesty to the list of objectionable characteristics. When he testified before the Senate on Thursday, he seemed like an entitled frat-boy infuriated by the possibility of not getting his way. To see him as suitable for the Supreme Court seems unfathomable.

But it is of course quite fathomable: On Friday, the Judiciary Committee voted to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Senate floor, albeit with the understanding that an FBI investigation would take place.  As the accusations came out, President Trump and the GOP leadership doubled down in support of their nominee. Trump called him “a wonderful man, and a man who has the potential to be one of our greatest Supreme Court Justices ever.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell denounced the alleged survivors of serious sexual assault, saying “[the]shameful, shameful smear campaign has hit a new low.” The real victim, he claimed, is Kavanaugh, suffering “the weaponization of unsubstantiated smears.”

[Further reading: Jeff Flake’s deal with Democrats puts Kavanaugh’s nomination in limbo  ]

Ideology partly explains the differing reactions. But there are other highly qualified justices. Backing Kavanaugh means alienating a lot of women voters—why the resolute support for someone so tainted?

What is hard to see, unless you see the world through the lens of a certain type of powerful man—like Trump, like McConnell—is that the picture that has emerged about Kavanaugh’s past, far from marking him as unfit, signals that he is trustworthy. It shows that Kavanaugh is there for the guys. Most of all, he knows how the world works: Ordinary rules are for ordinary people. They do not apply to the entitled elite—and he will fight to keep it that way.

One key to understanding Kavanaugh’s specific appeal is that unlike, say, Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby, he stands accused of having assaulted his victims as part of a group.

As lawyer and civil rights advocate Nancy Erica Smith has noted, “sexual assault does not usually take place in public.” Yet none of Kavanaugh’s accusers claim that he attacked them alone. His best friend was there, or a group of drunken buddies. Christine Blasey Ford wrote: “Kavanaugh was on top of me while laughing with [Mark] Judge, who periodically jumped onto Kavanaugh. They both laughed as Kavanaugh tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state.”   Deborah Ramirez recalled that Kavanaugh pulled down his pants and stuck his penis in her face during a drinking game, while their Yale classmates laughed and taunted her. Julie Swetnick’s sworn affidavit says she saw Kavanaugh and others attempt to “cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang raped’ in a side room or bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys.”

A striking thing about these stories is that they are variations on a theme: Sexual assault as social performance.

We may never know what happened in those Washington, D.C. house parties or Yale dorm rooms. But there are some things we do know that seem to substantiate the accusers’ portrait of Kavanaugh. For one, there’s a yearbook entry—a carefully fashioned self-portrait. Kavanaugh’s contains bragging innuendo about sex and prodigious drinking. He lists one of his activities as “Renate Alumnius,” publicly insinuating a sexual history with a girl from a nearby private school. Like the alleged physical assaults, this reputational assault was performed with a group, a club of football players who also named Renate in their yearbook entries and captioned a group photo of themselves as the “Renate Alumni.”

Choosing to describe yourself as a “Renate Alumnius,” or with phrases such as “100 Kegs or Bust” and “Beach Week Ralph Club— Biggest Contributor,” or thrusting yourself on unwilling women to the amusement of your jeering friends, are all ways to signal, to the intended audience, that you are part of the team, a member of the club—and a trustworthy keeper of its secrets.

Secret-keeping is a theme Kavanaugh returns to repeatedly.

His 2014 speech to the Yale Law School Federalist Society featured tales of drunken exploits from his law school days, including a bus trip he organized that ended with a night of bar-hopping in Boston and “group chugs from a keg” on the bus. He noted: “Fortunately for all of us, we had a motto, what happens on the bus stays on the bus. Tonight, you can modify that to what happens at the Fed Soc after-party stays at the Fed Soc after-party.” In an address a year later at Catholic University Columbia School of Law, he mentioned that three alumni of that school were “really, really good friends” of his from high school. Then he added: “Fortunately, we’ve had a good saying that we’ve held firm to this day, as the dean was reminding me before the talk, which is ‘What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.’ That’s been a good thing for all of us I think.”

[Further reading: The pernicious double standard around Kavanaugh’s drinking]

Secrets and group loyalty go hand in hand. If you know that I did something wrong or illegal, but I don’t have anything similar on you, that’s a recipe for blackmail, not trust. But when the knowledge is mutual—when we’ve done something illicit together—the dynamic is radically different. Mutual misbehavior builds trusting bonds, partners in crime.

In his book “Codes of the Underworld,” Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta stated it clearly: “Groups whose members have transgressions to hide from public view and whose members share knowledge of these transgression with each other will enjoy a comparative advantage in their ability to support their internal cohesion.”

A lot of alleged transgressions are coming out to the light of day this week. But keep in mind that they very nearly did not. Kavanaugh has been prominent for decades, drafting the Starr Report, serving as George W. Bush’s Staff Secretary, and confirmed after extended hearings to the U.S. Court of Appeals. He and his friends, and others like them in similar circles, seem to have managed a remarkable balancing act, discreetly flaunting their misbehavior, loudly enough so that others know that bad things had been done, but with enough plausible deniability that no one gets into trouble.

Being an excellent keeper of one’s own group’s secrets does not mean one will keep others’ dirty laundry safely hidden—quite the opposite.  It was Kavanaugh, when working for Ken Starr, who argued for uncovering and including the most graphic sexual details about President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. Keep the secrets of the in-group; raid and reveal those of the out-group.

[Further reading: A rare gentleman’s agreement in the Senate]

Kavanaugh, up for an ostensibly non-partisan position, has hinted that Trump is part of his in-group these days. In his formal response to Trump upon being nominated for the Supreme Court seat, he said: “I’ve witnessed firsthand your appreciation for the vital role of the American judiciary. No President has ever consulted more widely, or talked with more people from more backgrounds, to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination.” Saying this to a president who has chosen his nominees from a short list vetted by conservative groups demonstrates loyalty—and the secret-keeper’s skill at saying the right thing to maintain a proper facade.

The stories now circulating about Kavanaugh indicate, beyond skill at covert transgression, an aptitude for ensuring that a double standard would apply to him. Of course underage drinking is against the law.  Of course it is wrong to assault women. (Kavanaugh categorically denies having assaulted women, but shrugs his shoulders at the voluminous evidence of underage drinking.) People—ordinary people—get into trouble for doing those things. But people like Kavanaugh—who are immune to repercussions by dint of money, connections, personal charisma, or the ability to instill fear—don’t. Doing those things, and importantly, doing them publicly, sends a powerful signal about one’s invulnerability and prerogative.

This is, I believe, the greatest appeal that Kavanaugh holds for the Republicans: The rules that apply to others do not apply to them. One of the most vivid illustrations of this maxim is the recent history of the very position for which he is nominated.  When President Obama tapped Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court, McConnell decreed that such appointments could not be made in an election year. Now, with Trump in the White House, and a Republican majority Senate, McConnell proclaims that not only may a Justice be nominated and approved, but the confirmation process must be completed with the greatest haste possible. “We’re going to plow right through it.” It is their world, and they make the rules.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2DGirHa

Are Immigrants a Drain on Government Resources?

Last weekend, the Department of Homeland Security released a draft rule change designed to make immigrating to the United States harder and the immigrant experience more fraught, impoverished, and perilous. The proposal would deny green cards to people who use popular government anti-poverty programs—ones for which they legally qualified—including food stamps, Medicaid, prescription-drug subsidies, and housing vouchers.

The rule change is an expansion of existing law, which already bars many non-citizens from accessing public aid and seeks to ensure immigrant families are self-supporting. “Those seeking to immigrate to the United States must show they can support themselves financially,” DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a press release. The rule would “promote immigrant self-sufficiency and protect finite resources by ensuring that they are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers.”

Yet immigrants are not a sap on “finite” resources. In the longer term, immigrants contribute more to the government’s coffers than they receive in social spending. Moreover, these programs are not just welfare or a hand out, but also an investment, helping ensure that families are healthy, educated, and able to work and support themselves over the course of generations.

The rule change—long in the works, and long opposed by anti-poverty nonprofits, legal-aid groups, immigration advocates, social-justice organizations, and many others—is a technical one. The 447-page proposal would make caseworkers consider the legal use of public benefits as a “heavily weighed negative factor” in considering whether to grant an immigrant entry to, or the right to remain in, the country. It would affect 400,000 people a year, the administration estimates, among them prospective and current legal immigrants.

Immigration experts anticipate that the maneuver would make it harder for low-income families to come to the United States and would scare immigrants away from the safety net—with profound repercussions for their health and well-being, and a profoundly disparate impact on communities of color. Among those who would likely avoid seeking government aid, they said, would be the millions of mixed-status families, with both citizen and non-citizen members, already here.

The proposal’s mathematics are brutal and zero-sum, implying that a dollar spent helping an immigrant is a dollar not spent helping a native-born American and that immigrants are a drain on public resources. This is not at all the way that the numbers add up. For one, because the government runs deficits nearly every year, your average American is a drain on Uncle Sam, not just your average immigrant. The American people do not provide a net fiscal benefit to the government, regardless of their citizenship or legal status.

Further, the government’s resources are not “finite.” Immigrants do not come and steal things away from native-born Americans. Immigrant families pay taxes. They work. They start businesses. They spend money in their communities. They join native-born families in being economically productive, both paying money to the government and receiving benefits from the government.

Do they receive more than they take—that is, are they a net drain? Again, the answer is no. Lower-income immigrant families might receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. But that mathematical equilibrium is temporary, and an artifact of the way the tax-and-transfer system is structured to help lower-income families and to support families with kids. As one Federal Reserve summary of the research puts it: “If immigrants are assigned the marginal cost of public goods, then the long-run fiscal impact is positive and the short-run effect is negative but very small (less negative than that of natives).” Given some time in the country, these families pay in, in other words. One estimate puts the net present value of each immigrant to the government at $259,000. The Trump administration would prefer a smaller country, a smaller economy, and a more perilous long-term fiscal picture, evidently.

Plus, disinvesting in families—particularly families with young children—might save the government a few safety-net dollars, but at the cost of hurting those families’ health and long-run earning potential. “The proposal at its core says that work and family don’t matter; wealth and income are what matters,” said Olivia Golden, the executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy, in a call with reporters. “It targets documented working parents playing by the rules, who are looking to health, nutrition, and housing supports for their families and we know from decades of research that children's well-being—their health, their economic security, their schooling and learning—depends on their parents and on their family’s stability of income, housing, and nutrition security.”

Indeed, the policy would likely discourage pregnant women from seeking prenatal care. It will spook families with young kids away from health programs that would provide them with immunizations. It would discourage families from getting help to ensure their kids eat enough high-quality food. It would increase poverty rates among families with non-native members. The result? More missed days of school, fewer kids making it through high school, lower college-graduation rates, depressed lifetime earnings, more emergency-room visits, more heart disease, more deprivation.

It would also, of course, result in more poverty now. Yesenia Chavez of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health describes the proposal as “life-threatening,” something that would make it “impossible for people of color and immigrants to be in this country and live with dignity.” She added in a statement: “Federal assistance programs like Medicaid or [food stamps] are critical for immigrant families, and a change in policy would force immigrant families of all immigration status to forgo access to their basic needs, like health care, food, and housing, in order to keep their families together.”

The math is off, as well as cruel. In some way, the government itself admits it. “DHS has determined that the proposed rule may decrease disposable income and increase the poverty of certain families and children, including U.S. citizen children,” the draft rule reads. “For the reasons stated elsewhere in this preamble, however, DHS has determined that the benefits of the action justify the financial impact on the family.” Only in some blinkered, zero-sum sense. Depriving immigrant families of health care, healthy food, insurance, and antipoverty supports does not just hurt them. In the long term, it hurts everyone.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2NMkiih

How iRacing Is Democratizing Motorsports

It’s 1 o’clock on a weekday afternoon, and I’m sitting in a race car, idling in the pits at Virginia International Raceway. Typically, this 3.27-mile, 17-turn circuit serves as a proving ground for some of the world’s best drivers. But today, it’s my personal patch, and I’m about as far away from becoming Lewis Hamilton as the Formula One god’s native England is from this southern outcropping of the Commonwealth.

The day’s weather—sunny and just shy of 80 degrees—couldn’t be more perfect for a hot-lapping session, and after a few revs of the engine I drop it into first gear, peel out of my stall, and hurtle down the pit lane off-ramp, trying all the while to be mindful of the 45-mph speed limit. As soon as the nose of my car crosses the main road, I floor it down a mini straight into the first turn as if I know what I’m doing. But I don’t. I’ve never driven here, or even watched a vastly more qualified pilot do as much on TV. So it figures that as soon as I jerk the steering wheel to take on the long right-hander ahead (a.k.a. “The Horseshoe”), my rear wheels let out a banshee squeal as they lose touch with the tarmac and send me spiraling many revolutions off course onto the surrounding grass in a haze of dust and smoke.

Rightly, I should be catching my breath, checking my underwear, and keeping an eye out for the safety car after a scare like that. And perhaps I would be if I were actually inside the car I just crashed. But I’m not. I’m at home, safe and sound, playing iRacing—the gearhead’s answer to Fortnite and the preferred training tool of a not-insignificant number of the drivers gunning for IndyCar, NASCAR, and Formula One championships this fall. More simulator than video game, iRacing gives anyone the chance to drive a pretend race car and take on comers from all over. Getting started takes little more than a newish Windows-based computer (or Xbox), a compatible steering wheel and pedal set (which set me back $200), a high-speed-internet connection, and a credit card. iRacing is free to download, but to start driving you’ll need a membership—and those generally start around $13 a month.

It was only a matter of time before I signed on. Growing up, I was the kid who could not be separated from his Tomy Turnin’ Turbo Dashboard, who set aside a sizable chunk of his modest weekly allowance to feed an addiction to OutRun—the Sega Genesis arcade game that’s kind of like a big boy’s Turbo Dashboard. It had a steering wheel and shifter, but it also had pedals for the gas and brake. And unlike the games of Speed Racer make-believe I played from the driver’s seat of many a parked car, mashing those pedals produced a corollary response. It was glorious.

No one was in a bigger hurry to get his driver’s license than I was. And when that moment finally came, the sense of accomplishment that followed dwarfed anything I’d felt crossing the stage at my high-school commencement. I can still remember the first time my dad warily tossed me the keys to his Volvo wagon and released me into traffic alone. I drove that rig through the streets of Chicago like I stole it.

After a while, however, you get tired of paying speeding tickets. (Or, rather, your mom gets tired … ) You concede that you’re not the next Willy T. Ribbs. You mellow. You develop a deeper appreciation for walking, especially after having lived in the pedestrian-friendly confines of New York City. You buy a Prius. You come to see driving as a hassle, and racing as something better left to highly skilled professionals. And the more you visit with those pros during your seasonal patrols of the auto-racing beat, frankly, the less you feel the need for speed. Watching them do their thing on the weekends is enough of a thrill.

Or it was until I picked up iRacing. To be perfectly blunt, it’s becoming a bit of an obsession. I’ve barely done more than two aggregate hours of computer-based racing, and already I’ve shifted my steering-wheel and pedal setup over from my home-office desktop to my slightly more powerful home-theater PC. I’m Google-tracking the prices for RAM upgrades. I’m seriously thinking about dumping my well-worn desk chair for a snazzy new racing-style bucket seat. And every last one of these childlike urges draws a contemptuous shake of the head from my better half.

I can’t help myself. iRacing’s got its hooks into me. Honestly, more than a few times while writing this story, I caught myself drifting over to iRacing’s online store to ogle the expansive collection of dirt racers, NASCARs, and monocoque machines on offer. Never mind that I’m nowhere close to taming the beginner’s car I have now—a Skip Barber Formula 2000. Even more embarrassing: I’ve driven this 1,250-pound, 135-mph demon around a track before in real life. In my defense, that was three years ago, and I had two IndyCar drivers and a coterie of Barber school instructors coaching me. And yet: I struggled with the car’s well-deep seating position. I fumbled with the clutch. (It was my first time operating a manual transmission.) I couldn’t anticipate turns, because I couldn’t commit the circuit to memory. And for all my squinting, I still couldn’t see the racing line, the straightest and quickest pathway through the track.

iRacing not only brought all those handicaps surging back to the fore, it presented new issues with my pedals (which too often slide across the floor when I hit the brakes) and my steering wheel (which I’ve hopelessly secured to my desk’s sliding keyboard tray). In the virtual world, though, I can be the bad carpenter who curses his tools. I can also consider bigger, better tools: the Aston Martin GTE, a Formula One machine. I’d be a fool not to when none of these virtual cars retails for more than $12. Roughly the same amount of money buys simulator access to racetracks like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (home of the Indy 500) and the Nürburgring (possibly the world’s deadliest race course). On the one hand, it’s easy to imagine my incremental splurging adding up quickly. On the other, iRacing, for all its “freemium” pricing tactics and tempting hardware upgrades that can easily soar into five figures, is still fundamentally cheaper than physically going racing. (A track day entry can cost around $200, but even then you might still have to bring your own car and, in some cases, a racing license.)

[Read Hampton Stevens on the short and brutal life of a NASCAR engine. ]

What’s more, iRacing is eerily close to the genuine article. It’s faithful to the rules of the racetrack and to the laws of physics. It uses laser scanning to reproduce racetracks, and trades on relationships with manufacturers and pro-racing teams in replicating vehicle dynamics, iRacing’s executive vice president, Steve Myers, tells me. A shocking degree of these subtleties can be felt through the force-feedback steering wheel, which damn near snapped off my hands at the elbow during that crash in Virginia.

Given that commitment to realism, it’s no wonder that the iRacing community is so robust, with more than 74,000 active account holders, many of them bona fide veterans, according to Myers. The illustrious list of ringers runs the gamut from the Formula One legend Rubens Barrichello to NASCAR’s Dale Earnhardt Jr., and they don’t play with kid gloves. Earlier this year, the NASCAR bad boy Tony Stewart had Reddit buzzing after he cussed out two bickering competitors during an iRace. The moment was yet more evidence of how close the average motorsports aficionado can get to his or her racing heroes through the simulator. But those stars can’t simply run amok: Scott Speed, a former NASCAR and Formula One racer who consults with iRacing program designers and engineers, saw his digital license temporarily revoked after video surfaced of him purposefully attempting to crash into other players mid-race. “This is not real life,” he protested to The Drive, “it’s a game.”

Actually, iRacing’s more like the nexus between motorsports fantasy and reality. The pros use it to practice and for reconnaissance, a valued resource given the limits on access to prerace testing and to NASA-grade dynamic simulators. And the experience only figures to get more immersive as virtual-reality technologies become ubiquitous at home. “If you go on Twitter and do a search of iRacing,” Myers tells me, “especially on road-course weekends in NASCAR, you’re gonna see dozens of drivers using our product to practice on tracks that they might not know well or they want to get better at.”

Meanwhile, the iRacers are giving the pros a run for their money. Barrichello and Earnhardt—respectively, two of the best road-course and oval-track racers ever—don’t even rank among the top 20 in their disciplines in the iRacing ratings, which are modeled after the Elo system. Further up those rankings is William Byron. A self-professed racing addict by age 6, Byron began his driving career on the iRacing platform and quickly emerged as one of the most accomplished racers in the history of the sim, winning one out of every three races he entered over the course of the next nine years. It was enough to compel his father, a Charlotte-based financier with no family ties to motorsports, to look into offline-racing options for his boy. To say that Byron’s knack translated would be an understatement. Last year, as a 19-year-old rookie, he won NASCAR’s Xfinity Series, the triple-A level of stock-car racing. This year, he’s driving Jeff Gordon’s old Cup car.

Byron and Ty Majeski, iRacing’s top-rated oval racer and a development driver for the powerhouse Roush Fenway Racing team, have become the poster boys for a generation of online racers with crossover ambitions. “iRacing has definitely been great for the sport,” says Jack Irving, the senior executive who oversees Toyota’s driver-development farm system, which identifies and grows young talent. “If you love racing, then you want to race all the time. And the only way to do that is home simulation. So iRacing, to me, it’s not necessarily the next frontier. I think it’s already here.”

The distance between fantasy and reality will only get shorter as iRacing works with motorsports’ terrestrial stakeholders to create opportunities for gamers to drive proper race cars. Within that is an e-sports element that’s presented as seriously as the real thing; the production values for these streaming broadcasts—with their play-by-play announcers, “onboard” interviews, and slick graphic overlays—are as impressive as anything you’ll find on ESPN or Fox Sports. Myers says iRacing streaming broadcasts for this year have already crested 1 million impressions in just the NASCAR PEAK Antifreeze iRacing world championships, an event that pits iRacing’s 40 best stock-car racers in a mad dash for $17,000 in cash and prizes. It’s likely only a matter of time before tens of thousands of people are scrutinizing these broadcasts from the grandstands of actual racetracks as the gamers trade paint pixels, in much the same way that World of Warcraft packs its completists into stadiums and arenas.

After my virtual reckless-driving accident in Virginia, I retreated to a local coffee shop to watch an endurance iRace in Le Mans, France, and fooled a few curious patrons into believing there was an actual race taking place. It speaks to the simulator’s drawing power. Worth noting: Casual race fans aren’t the only ones watching. Industry decision makers like Irving tune in to scout fresh talent. It’s all the motivation I need to get back behind the virtual wheel and try again. And if I fail to get any closer to Lewis Hamilton in the process? That’s fine. I’ll settle for at least being able to say that I had fun, that I turned a corner.

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