Jason Chaffetz's Abrupt Exit

Why Was Bill O'Reilly Really Fired?

Megan Garber

The host’s ouster serves as an object lesson about what happens when morality and money come to a head.

Here are some of the things Bill O’Reilly has done, allegedly, to the women he has worked with throughout his two decades at the Fox News Channel:

approaching an African American woman whose desk was near his, referring to her as “hot chocolate,” and grunting like a “wild boar”
offering multiple unwanted sexual advances and lewd comments to a woman producer on his show, phoning her “when it sounded as if he was masturbating” and describing “various sexual fantasies”
suggesting that she “buy a vibrator,” “engage in phone sex or a threesome with him,” and listen to “the details of his alleged sexual encounters with a cabana masseuse, airline stewardesses, and Thai sex-show workers”
threatening to make any woman who dared to complain about his behavior “pay so dearly that she’ll wish she’d never been born”

How Late-Night Comedy Fueled the Rise of Trump

Caitlin Flanagan

Sneering hosts have alienated conservatives and made liberals smug.

A month after the election, Trevor Noah, the host of The Daily Show, published an op‑ed in The New York Times that sought to position himself and his show as instruments of healing in a broken land. It was called “Let’s Not Be Divided, Divided People Are Easier to Rule,” and it zapped around progressives’ inboxes and Facebook feeds like a digital balm of Gilead. It was a reminder that we were not, in those fevered early weeks, being our best selves: “Instead of speaking in measured tones about what unites us, we are screaming at each other about what divides us.” How true that was, and—one might churlishly observe—what a sea change from Noah’s tone during the campaign, when he berated the Republican candidate for tweeting with “those fat little tiny fingers of yours” and for trying to think with “that stupid head,” and when he advised the candidate that “maybe you should look in the mirror, asshole.”

Mexico’s Revenge

Franklin Foer

By antagonizing the U.S.’s neighbor to the south, Donald Trump has made the classic bully’s error: He has underestimated his victim.

When Donald Trump first made sport of thumping Mexico—when he accused America’s neighbor of exporting rapists and “bad hombres,” when he deemed the country such a threat that it should be contained by a wall and so clueless that it could be suckered into paying for its own encasement—its president responded with strange equilibrium. Enrique Peña Nieto treated the humiliation like a meteorological disturbance. Relations with the United States would soon return to normal, if only he grinned his way through the painful episode.

In August, Peña Nieto invited Trump to Mexico City, based on the then-contrarian notion that Trump might actually become president. Instead of branding Trump a toxic threat to Mexico’s well-being, he lavished the Republican nominee with legitimacy. Peña Nieto paid a severe, perhaps mortal, reputational cost for his magnanimity. Before the meeting, former President Vicente Fox had warned Peña Nieto that if he went soft on Trump, history would remember him as a “traitor.” In the months following the meeting, his approval rating plummeted, falling as low as 12 percent in one poll—which put his popularity on par with Trump’s own popularity among Mexicans. The political lesson was clear enough: No Mexican leader could abide Trump’s imprecations and hope to thrive. Since then, the Mexican political elite has begun to ponder retaliatory measures that would reassert the country’s dignity, and perhaps even cause the Trump administration to reverse its hostile course. With a presidential election in just over a year—and Peña Nieto prevented by term limits from running again—vehement responses to Trump are considered an electoral necessity. Memos outlining policies that could wound the United States have begun flying around Mexico City. These show that Trump has committed the bully’s error of underestimating the target of his gibes. As it turns out, Mexico could hurt the United States very badly.

How America’s Coastal Cities Left the Heartland Behind

Brian S. Feldman

St. Louis and other Midwestern hubs prospered for much of the 20th century. Then lawmakers in Washington quietly changed the rules of the economy.

The people of St. Louis weren’t really surprised when, on January 12, the National Football League announced its decision to let E. Stanley Kroenke, the owner of the St. Louis Rams, move his team to Los Angeles. Kroenke had long signaled his intentions, and L.A.’s media market beckoned as the nation’s second largest. Moving the team meant more revenue for the league, and therefore more money in owners’ pockets. And that, as serious football fans know, is the point.

The NFL isn’t a charity. It’s a legally sanctioned cartel that strictly limits the number of franchises in order to maximize the value of each. St. Louis simply was losing another round in the NFL’s long-running game of profit-maximizing musical chairs. Indeed, the city originally had lured the Rams from Los Angeles in 1995 after losing a bidding war that sent the previous hometown football team, the St. Louis Cardinals, to Phoenix in 1988.

Jason Chaffetz's Abrupt Exit

McKay Coppins

The House Oversight chairman announced on Wednesday that he won’t seek another term in Congress, surprising even close political allies.

Representative Jason Chaffetz shocked politicos from Utah to Washington Wednesday with a surprise announcement that he would not seek reelection next year.

The Utah congressman, who serves as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is a high-profile figure in the GOP—a media-savvy lawmaker viewed by many party leaders as a rising star. But he has also been a target of fierce grassroots opposition in recent months, as critics accuse him of allowing partisan hypocrisy to hinder his role as a designated Trump watchdog. Earlier this year, he made national headlines when he was booed off stage by angry constituents at a town hall in his district, and since then activists have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to various efforts to unseat him.

The USS <i>Carl Vinson</i> in the South China Sea on April 8 — U.S. Navy via Reuters

How Did the Trump Administration Lose an Aircraft Carrier?

David A. Graham

The White House said the USS Carl Vinson was headed for North Korea as it sailed the opposite direction—the latest example of a communications failure inside the executive branch.

A certain amount of unpredictability is a virtue in foreign policy. When one’s adversaries—and perhaps one’s allies—don’t know precisely what a country will do, it gives that country a little extra power in the relationship. Like all virtues, it turns into a vice when used in excess. Donald Trump, Fred Kaplan recently argued, offers an extreme test of Richard Nixon’s “madman theory,” the Vietnam-era approach of letting enemies think Nixon might really be insane and do anything.

As my colleague Kathy Gilsinan wrote last week, the hazards of this approach are on display in the latest American standoff with North Korea—a contest between two leaders who delight in bellicose rhetoric and erratic action. “When two leaders each habitually bluster and exaggerate, there’s a higher likelihood of making a catastrophic mistake based on a bad guess,” she wrote, including the threat of nuclear war. Even for those who espouse unpredictability, the presumption is that at least the putative madman has some sense what’s going on, even if no one else does. The point is the appearance of unpredictability, not true chaos.

A glass etching of a brain — Alastair Grant / AP

How Poverty Changes the Brain

Tara García Mathewson

The early results out of a Boston nonprofit are positive.

You saw the pictures in science class—a profile view of the human brain, sectioned by function. The piece at the very front, right behind where a forehead would be if the brain were actually in someone’s head, is the pre-frontal cortex. It handles problem-solving, goal-setting, and task execution. And it works with the limbic system, which is connected and sits closer to the center of the brain. The limbic system processes emotions and triggers emotional responses, in part because of its storage of long-term memory.

When a person lives in poverty, a growing body of research suggests the limbic system is constantly sending fear and stress messages to the prefrontal cortex, which overloads its ability to solve problems, set goals, and complete tasks in the most efficient ways.

Alec Baldwin Gets Under Trump’s Skin

Chris Jones

Comedy and tragedy in an age of political chaos

点击这里阅读中文版本 | Read this article in Chinese.

Alec Baldwin collapses onto his dressing-room couch at Saturday Night Live like a man participating too enthusiastically in a trust fall. He is 58 years old. He has three children under 4. He has been dividing what’s left of his time between filming a movie with Emilio Estevez in Cincinnati and answering the call from NBC whenever it comes, which, because of his now-signature portrayal of Donald Trump, has been many weeks this season. His appearances gather eyes like car accidents; some clips have been watched on YouTube more than 20 million times. Those legions of viewers have formed a kind of makeshift resistance, a community of the gaslit, together feeling a little less crazy for knowing that at least Alec Baldwin can see what they are seeing. Turning the president into a running joke might prove the most consequential work of his career. It’s at least been the most consuming.

Words Which by Their Very Utterance Inflict Injury

Conor Friedersdorf

College students urging the punishment of speech that “wounds” risk silencing the causes they support.

College students seeking to suppress or punish speech in their communities are the latest iteration of a longer tradition in American life than many of their critics acknowledge. That’s true even narrowing our backward gaze to Supreme Court cases from the last century.

During World War II, for instance, the case of Chaplinsky vs. State of New Hampshire considered whether the municipality of Rochester had, by arresting Walter Chaplinsky, a Jehovah’s Witness, for his speech, violated his rights. On the day in question, Chaplinsky was distributing literature on the street when a crowd became inflamed at his message and complained to the city marshal, James Bowering. At first, Bowering advised the crowd that Chaplinsky was acting within his rights; later, after another altercation, he warned that his literature was creating a disturbance.

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: We're Headed for Oligarchy

Rebecca J. Rosen

Robert Solow on powerful families’ threat to democratic institutions.

In a recent interview at the Economic Policy Institute, Nobel Prize-Winning economist and MIT professor Robert Solow riffed on the political effects of increasing inequality and concentration of wealth at the very top. "If that kind of concentration of wealth continues, then we get to be more and more an oligarchical country, a country that's run from the top," he said.

Solow's sentiments echo a point he made earlier this week in his review of Thomas Piketty's book in The New Republic. (Solow, it should be noted, is not the only Nobel Prize-winning economist to use the o-word in discussing Piketty's work.) Having examined and explained the trends Piketty identifies, Solow turns his attention to the possible measures that could be taken to ameliorate the inequality, and rejigger the system to favor merit over inheritance. Piketty, Solow says, favors an annual, global progressive tax on wealth, such that the benefits of a growing economy could be more widely felt.