The Clickbait Presidency

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous

Gabrielle Glaser

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

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

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

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

Middlebury Reckons With a Protest Gone Wrong

Conor Friedersdorf

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

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

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

A Violent Attack on Free Speech at Middlebury

Peter Beinart

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

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

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

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

The Clickbait Presidency

Derek Thompson

The Donald Trump conspiracy-theory feedback loop is only going to get worse.

President Donald Trump’s accusation on Twitter that Barack Obama ordered a wiretap on his residence has been denied by the former president, rebutted by the FBI director, and criticized by Republican lawmakers. But it’s hardly surprising that Trump’s presidency has been mired in groundless conspiracy theories, since that’s exactly how this whole thing got started.

Even before he was a Republican presidential candidate, Trump’s modern political career kicked off with unfounded, and repeatedly disproved, rumors about Barack Obama's birth certificate. It continued when he became president-elect, as Trump fixated on the size of his inauguration crowd, arguing against all evidence that it was larger than the record crowd that showed up in 2008 to see President Obama sworn in. Now, as president, he has claimed that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote only because of several million illegal voters, none of whom the White House has been able to identify.

Where Saturday Night Live Loses Its Political Power

David Sims

The show feels less urgent whenever it presents members of the Trump administration as brainless simpletons.

It’s perfectly understandable why Saturday Night Live avoided going to either of its two biggest stars for the political cold open of its last episode. The performances of Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump and Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer have helped bring the show back into the zeitgeist after several years of struggling for relevance. But neither is part of the main cast, and it’s easy to have too much of a good thing: McCarthy’s work as Spicer was a barnstorming success the first time, but there’s a good chance the returns would diminish quickly if that sketch were just recycled again and again.

But the most recent episode showed how much ground SNL still needs to make up outside of its special guest stars if it wants to remain a fixture in the conversation. The creator Lorne Michaels’s eye for stunt casting has always been sharp, and Baldwin and McCarthy’s work had a pronounced edge that the show’s 2016 election material had lacked. But the rest of SNL’s political satire, such as Saturday’s cold open that framed Attorney General Jeff Sessions as Forrest Gump, often leans on presenting the Trump administration as cheerfully unaware or low on brainpower. It’s a more toothless approach that’s far easier for viewers of all political viewpoints to dismiss, and it’s a well the show keeps coming back to whenever Baldwin’s far nastier take on Trump is unavailable.

Will 'Denounce-and-Preserve' Beat 'Repeal-and-Replace'?

David Frum

Rolling back Obamacare will require full Republican support in the Senate. Rand Paul—and others—could defect using a familiar political play.

Watch Rand Paul to understand why Obamacare repeal is in so much trouble.

Paul faces a more agonizing dilemma than almost any other Republican senator. A libertarian ideologue and Tea Party stalwart, Paul has spoken vociferously about the imperative of repeal for years.

Yet Paul also represents a state that has done well out of the Affordable Care Act. Four hundred and forty thousand Kentuckians have gained coverage under the ACA; Kentucky’s uninsured rate tumbled from 20 percent in 2013 to 7.5 percent in 2015.

Even more strikingly, it is Kentucky’s Appalachian Southeast that has seen the biggest gains from the ACA. And it so happens that southeastern Kentucky voted more staunchly for Paul’s 2016 reelection than did any other section of the state.

The Trump Administration's Dramatic Narrowing of Its Travel Ban

Matt Ford

A new executive order issued on Monday tightens the scope of the controversial policy, excluding those who already hold valid visas.

President Trump replaced his controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries with a scaled-back version on Monday, narrowing its scope to block only new applicants for visas and removing Iraq from its coverage. The scaled-back ban represents a considerable defeat for the president, whose original executive order was met with protests and a stern rebuke from the federal judiciary.

The new order, which goes into effect one minute after midnight on March 16, prohibits entry into the United States for citizens of six countries—Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—for 90 days for those who do not already hold a valid visa. New visas will not be issued and expired visas will not be renewed for citizens from the six countries during the 90-day period.

Chance the Politician

Spencer Kornhaber

The rapper is spending his good will—and $1 million in ticket sales—on Chicago Public Schools.

On Friday, Chance the Rapper sounded frustrated. After meeting with Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner to talk about Chicago Public Schools’ funding crisis, he told reporters he had received only “vague” answers about the issue. He also leveled some complaints against the reporters themselves. "I want y'all to do your jobs," he said outside Chicago’s James R. Thompson Center. "The international and national publications out there—Complex, Billboard, people that post about me walking down the street and shit—if you guys could give a comprehensive history on how we ended up here."

Publications like Complex and Billboard post about Chance walking down the street and doing other things because he is one of the hottest names in music, the subject those publications largely exist to cover. But Chance wants to use the power of pop stardom to bring attention to a decidedly unglamorous municipal struggle: the fact that Chicago Public Schools is freezing $46 million of its budget after Rauner’s veto of $215 million in spending for the district. It isn’t the first time a celeb has tried to leverage their platform for a cause, but Chance’s move comes at a striking moment in his career arc, takes up a specific—and urgent—issue, and plays skillfully on a national moment in which politics and pop culture seem particularly entangled.

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

Uri Friedman

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

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

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

The Hidden Link Between Autism and Addiction

Maia Szalavitz

It’s believed that people on the spectrum don’t get hooked on alcohol or other drugs. New evidence suggests they do.

Shane Stoner’s addiction began in 2008. He lost a factory job, his parents divorced, his father died—and then a relative introduced him to heroin. “I felt like heroin gave me confidence,” Stoner says. “I could get out of bed in the morning and do the day. No matter what happened, it made me feel like it was going to be all right.” It erased his constant anxiety.

Stoner, now 44, eventually entered detox in 2013 after he was arrested for stealing copper from an abandoned house. It was obvious at that point that he was addicted to heroin. But it would take several more years for him to get the diagnosis that truly helped him understand himself: autism.