The Atlantic

Après Comey le déluge.

Since the director of the FBI on Friday announced the discovery of new emails potentially pertinent to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server, the presidential campaign has been shaken up. First, came the round of recriminations, as Clinton and her allies, career prosecutors, and even some Republicans assailed James Comey for the disclosure.

Now, with about a week left, there’s a new spree of investigative reports related to the election. Two, related to potential interference by Russia in American elections, are now in dispute. A third, alleging ties between Russian intelligence and Donald Trump, is still fresh. The fourth (and perhaps most solid) concerns his tax returns.

One of the double-edged aspects of being a writer is that you can become known in all kinds of unlikely circles. That was what I was thinking when I pulled a large envelope out of my mailbox. The return address was Germany; the cover letter (in German) announced that I was the recipient of Compact magazine, and more oddly, requested that I should send an email confirming receipt.

The magazine itself, also in German, was about politics. A superficial look might suggest it was the anti-American manifesto of some fringe left-wing German group (“Heil Hillary! Candidate of US Fascism” reads one headline), but closer inspection revealed it came from the other end of the ideological spectrum.

A glance at a political profile of Jürgen Elsässer, Compact’s purported editor, discloses that he had been an extreme leftist who opposed German reunification and worked for Neues Deutschland, once the official newspaper of the East German Socialist Unity Party, the client Communist Party ruling East Germany in the interests of the USSR. Yet at some point in the 2000s, he migrated to the far right, and is now aligned with the new anti-immigrant party, Alternative für Deutschland. The prestigious newspaper die Zeit flat out calls Elsässer a Kremlin propagandist.

Why is PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel backing Donald Trump for president? After listening to Thiel explain his position at the National Press Club on Monday, one might conclude that it has much to do with the eccentric billionaire’s dark obsession with bubbles.

Immigration bubbles, housing bubbles, dotcom bubbles, stock bubbles, trade bubbles, war bubbles—Thiel hates them all, considers them downright “catastrophic.” As such, he is frustrated by the foolish compulsion of Americans (especially Baby Boomers) to again and again “buy into” the rosy promise of bubbles. “Whenever there is a hard problem, people want to believe in an easy solution,” he lamented. They “deny reality,” and soon another bubble begins to “inflate.”

Late one summer night in 1949, the British archeologist Jacquetta Hawkes went out into her small back garden in north London, and lay down. She sensed the bedrock covered by its thin layer of soil, and felt the hard ground pressing her flesh against her bones. Shimmering through the leaves and out beyond the black lines of her neighbors’ chimney pots were the stars, beacons “whose light left them long before there were eyes on this planet to receive it,” as she put it in A Land (1951), her classic book of imaginative nature writing.

What does it take to unite former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, liberal columnist Paul Krugman, and pitchfork-wielding former Tea Party Representative Joe Walsh?

In today’s polarized times, it should be practically impossible—but FBI Director James Comey has managed to pull it off. On Friday, Comey sent a letter to the Republican chairs of committees relevant to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, saying that the FBI had discovered new, pertinent emails.

Comey’s short note—just three paragraphs, with little other information about the number of emails, their source, or when they might be reviewed—shook the presidential race. Coming with several polls showing a slightly tighter race, it suddenly looked like the Clinton campaign might be falling apart at the seams, and that Trump had a renewed chance.

Updated at 3:45 p.m.

Our Facebook timelines erupted early Monday morning with a specific kind of post: Seemingly half of our friends had apparently traveled to the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota and used Facebook to “check in.”

Except they weren’t really there. They had used Facebook’s check-in feature to lend support to the ongoing protests. According to one of the viral posts that called on Facebook users to check in at the reservation, the flood of check-ins is intended to “overwhelm and confuse” police agencies. The post alleged that the Morton County Sheriff’s Department had been using check-ins to identify and “target” protesters.

“This is concrete action that can protect people putting their bodies and well-beings on the line that we can do without leaving our homes,” read the call to action.

It started with a bull named Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief, who had a whopping 16,000 daughters. And 500,000 granddaughters and more than 2 million great-granddaughters. Today, in fact, his genes account for 14 percent of all DNA in Holstein cows, the most popular breed in the dairy industry.

Chief—let’s call him Chief for brevity’s sake—was so popular because his daughters were fantastic milk producers. He had great genes for milk. But, geneticists now know, he also had a single copy of a deadly mutation that spread undetected through the Holstein cow population. The mutation caused some unborn calves to die in the womb. According to a recent estimate, this single mutation ended up causing more than 500,000 spontaneous abortions and costing the dairy industry $420 million in losses.

Uber, Lyft, and other ride-sharing services were supposed to be a more egalitarian transportation option than a traditional cab service. There’s a mountain of data that shows how difficult and dangerous something as simple as finding a cab ride home can be, particularly for women and black people. Ride-hailing apps were expected to help fix that.

But a new study finds some of the problems persist. The economists Yanbo Ge and Don MacKenzie, of the University of Washington, along with Christopher R. Knittel of MIT and Stephen Zoepf of Stanford, came up with an experiment to test how well these popular apps were serving groups that had been marginalized by the taxi industry. They sent research assistants out as riders in two cities, Seattle and Boston, to hail nearly 1,500 rides using Uber, Lyft, and another service called Flywheel. The riders took screenshots of the apps to chronicle their experience, recording their estimated wait times, whether a driver accepted them, and where and when they were picked up and dropped off. Through these trials the economists were able to gather data on how the three services differed in their treatment of gender and race. At the end of the trials, the economists found “significant evidence of racial discrimination,” meaning that black riders faced longer wait times and more frequent cancellations than white riders.

Legal weed has an enemy in Boston: the Roman Catholic Church. On Friday, the Boston Archdiocese gave $850,000 to oppose Question 4, a ballot initiative that would create a system for regulating legal, recreational marijuana in Massachusetts. The Church’s donation increased the opposition effort’s funding by roughly 40 percent—only Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas billionaire who gave $1,000,000 to the opposition in early October, has cut a bigger check. The Knights of Columbus, another Catholic organization, has also given $150,000 to fight the initiative.

The donation is surprising, both for its politics and its size. Advocates of legal weed often frame their cause as a social-justice issue, pointing to the harms of the U.S. drug war and the way low-level drug arrests disproportionately affect men of color. On many other issues, these progressive activists would likely find themselves aligned with Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who leads Boston’s archdiocese. During his 13 years in the city, O’Malley has redirected many of the Church’s resources toward caring for the poor. He has led the development of policies around sex-abuse for the Church, and is part of Pope Francis’s inner circle; in 2013, the pontiff appointed him to a small council of advisers tasked with reforming Church governance.

Last week, a massive chain of hacked computers simultaneously dropped what they were doing and blasted terabytes of junk data to a set of key servers, temporarily shutting down access to popular sites in the eastern U.S. and beyond. Unlike previous attacks, many of these compromised computers weren’t sitting on someone’s desk, or tucked away in a laptop case—they were instead the cheap processors soldered into web-connected devices, from security cameras to video recorders. A DVR could have helped bring down Twitter.

Great, I thought as I read the coverage last week. My DVR helped bring down Twitter. (Probably not, at least this time—the targeted products were older than what you’d find in most American homes, and less protected.) But the internet is huge! There are around a couple billion public IPv4 addresses out there; any one of those might have a server, a desktop computer, or a toaster plugged in at the other end. Even if the manufacturer of my gadget gave it a dumb and easily guessed password, wouldn’t it be safe in this sea of anonymity? How would the hackers find me?