Conan O'Brien's Empathetic Trip to Mexico

U.S. State Department — Win McNamee / Getty

The State of Trump's State Department

Julia Ioffe

Anxiety and listless days as a foreign-policy bureaucracy confronts the possibility of radical change

The flags in the lobby of the State Department stood bathed in sunlight and silence on a recent afternoon. “It’s normally so busy here,” marveled a State Department staffer as we stood watching the emptiness. “People are usually coming in for meetings, there’s lots of people, and now it’s so quiet.” The action at Foggy Bottom has instead moved to the State Department cafeteria where, in the absence of work, people linger over countless coffees with colleagues. (“The cafeteria is so crowded all day,” a mid-level State Department officer said, adding that it was a very unusual sight. “No one’s doing anything.”) As the staffer and I walked among the tables and chairs, people with badges chatted over coffee; one was reading his Kindle.

Jeff Sessions's Unforced Error

Adam Serwer

The attorney general’s testimony about communications with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign has landed him in hot water.

The Washington Post’s report that Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke twice with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak during the 2016 presidential campaign, has made an exchange between Minnesota Democratic Senator Al Franken and Sessions during the his confirmation hearing the focus of questions about whether Sessions misled Congress.

On January 10, in response to a question from Franken, Sessions said that he had no communications with the Russian government. Here is the exchange:

FRANKEN: OK. CNN has just published a story and I'm telling you this about a news story that's just been published. I'm not expecting you to know whether or not it's true or not. But CNN just published a story alleging that the intelligence community provided documents to the president-elect last week that included information that quote, "Russian operatives claimed to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump." These documents also allegedly say quote, "There was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump's surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government."

Now, again, I'm telling you this as it's coming out, so you know. But if it's true, it's obviously extremely serious and if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?

SESSIONS: Senator Franken, I'm not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn't have––did not have communications with the Russians, and I'm unable to comment on it.

How to Build an Autocracy

David Frum

The preconditions are present in the U.S. today. Here’s the playbook Donald Trump could use to set the country down a path toward illiberalism.

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It’s 2021, and President Donald Trump will shortly be sworn in for his second term. The 45th president has visibly aged over the past four years. He rests heavily on his daughter Ivanka’s arm during his infrequent public appearances.

Fortunately for him, he did not need to campaign hard for reelection. His has been a popular presidency: Big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits have worked their familiar expansive magic. Wages have grown strongly in the Trump years, especially for men without a college degree, even if rising inflation is beginning to bite into the gains. The president’s supporters credit his restrictive immigration policies and his TrumpWorks infrastructure program.

The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids

Erika Christakis

Today’s young children are working more, but they’re learning less.

Step into an American preschool classroom today and you are likely to be bombarded with what we educators call a print-rich environment, every surface festooned with alphabet charts, bar graphs, word walls, instructional posters, classroom rules, calendars, schedules, and motivational platitudes—few of which a 4-year-old can “decode,” the contemporary word for what used to be known as reading.

Because so few adults can remember the pertinent details of their own preschool or kindergarten years, it can be hard to appreciate just how much the early-education landscape has been transformed over the past two decades. The changes are not restricted to the confusing pastiche on classroom walls. Pedagogy and curricula have changed too, most recently in response to the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s kindergarten guidelines. Much greater portions of the day are now spent on what’s called “seat work” (a term that probably doesn’t need any exposition) and a form of tightly scripted teaching known as direct instruction, formerly used mainly in the older grades, in which a teacher carefully controls the content and pacing of what a child is supposed to learn.

Why Do the Big Stories Keep Breaking at Night?

Adrienne LaFrance

Even in the internet age, the rhythms of print publications drive the news cycle.

It’s usually around 8 p.m. when the push notifications start rolling in. On Wednesday night, The New York Times kicked things off at 7:56 p.m. with a major story about how Obama administration officials had scrambled to preserve intelligence on Russia in the days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

An hour later, the next big story dropped. This time, from The Washington Post, with a bombshell revelation that Jeff Sessions did not disclose at least two encounters he had last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, despite having told lawmakers that “I did not have communications with the Russians” in his recent confirmation hearings to become the United States attorney general.

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.

Conan O’Brien’s Empathetic Trip to Mexico

David Sims

The late-night host emphasized America’s common interests with its southern neighbor in his latest international special.

Since the election of Donald Trump, late-night talk-show hosts have all leaned into political humor. Stephen Colbert has seen a ratings bump as he’s shifted back to covering the news in full force. Jimmy Fallon has made a stronger effort to go for the jugular with his sketches. Seth Meyers’s “Closer Look” at the news has made him a worthy heir to Jon Stewart. Conan O’Brien, a host who’s been in the late-night business longer than his peers, has always been more of an old-fashioned showman, one who presents his point of view through broad, empathetic sketches instead of direct rants to camera. Wednesday’s broadcast, “Conan Without Borders,” was the perfect encapsulation of his style.

Since joining TBS in 2010 with Conan, O’Brien has hosted several special episodes from around the world, visiting South Korea, Cuba, Germany, and Armenia, as well as various cities around America. But his trip to Mexico felt far more loaded than his other specials, which have generally played it safe and focused on having O’Brien enjoy some of the local customs of wherever he is exploring. Thursday’s episode focused on Conan’s compassion for the people he met in Mexico City, and it continually brought up their anger, despair, and confusion at the anti-immigrant rhetoric that pervaded the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Betsy DeVos's Misunderstood Alma Mater

Emily DeRuy

Calvin College is no fundamentalist Christian school.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.—It would be easy enough to drive past Calvin College without giving Betsy DeVos’s alma mater a second thought. Six miles southeast of downtown, the school is a sprawling cluster of nondescript buildings and winding pathways in a quiet suburb. But to bypass Calvin would be to ignore an institution whose approach to education offers clues about how the recently appointed U.S. education secretary might pursue her new job, and about the tug religious institutions feel between maintaining tradition and remaining relevant in a rapidly diversifying world.

DeVos is now Calvin’s most famous alum, and in recent weeks, the school has been painted in some circles both online and in conversation as a conservative, insular institution that helped spawn a controversial presidential-cabinet member intent on using public dollars to further religious education. But that is a grossly simplified narrative, and one that obscures the nuances and very real tensions at the school.

The Geography of Medical Debt

Olga Khazan

The prevalence of unpaid medical bills varies widely by state, but it affects the South disproportionately.

Nearly one in four American adults under the age of 65 has medical debt, according to the results of a new study by the Urban Institute, and southerners are hit hardest by past-due doctors’ bills.

The study authors, Michael Karpman and Kyle J. Caswell, found that eight of the ten states with the highest rates of past-due medical debt were in the South: Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Georgia. The rate was lowest in Hawaii, at 6 percent of adults, and the highest was Mississippi, at 37 percent. Nationwide, African-Americans and people aged 25 to 34 were most likely to have past-due doctors’ bills.

Share of Adults Ages 18 to 64 Reporting Past-Due Medical Debt

Why California Is Environmentalists' Trump Card

Ronald Brownstein

Unique authority granted to the golden state allows it to have a profound impact on emissions regulations.

With Scott Pruitt, a close ally of the oil and gas industry, now confirmed as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, environmentalists are bracing for a broad assault on former President Obama’s green legacy, particularly his efforts to reduce the carbon emissions linked to global climate change.

In most of those fights, the only viable recourse for environmentalists is to contest Pruitt in court. (They can’t expect much help from the Republican Congress.) But on the critical issue of requiring auto manufacturers to improve fuel efficiency, green forces have another line of defense: unique authority that Congress granted to California under the Clean Air Act decades ago. Across the many confrontations looming between President Trump and Democratic-leaning local governments on issues from immigration to health care, the impending struggle between the EPA and California over fuel economy may be the one where Democrats most clearly hold a trump card.