april 2016

Updated at 6:10 p.m. EST on June 14

The Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting turned chaotic in Phoenix this week over a resolution that condemned white supremacy and the alt-right. On Tuesday, leaders initially declined to consider the proposal submitted by a prominent black pastor in Texas, Dwight McKissic, and only changed course after a significant backlash. On Wednesday afternoon, the body passed a revised statement against the alt-right. But the drama over the resolution revealed deep tension lines within a denomination that was explicitly founded to support slavery.

A few weeks before the meeting was slated to start, McKissic published his draft resolution on a popular Southern Baptist blog called SBC Voices. The language was strong and pointed.

A federal judge ruled in favor of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe on Wednesday, handing the tribe its first legal victory in its year-long battle against the Dakota Access pipeline.

James Boasberg, who sits on D.C. district court, said that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed to perform an adequate study of the pipeline’s environmental consequences when it first approved its construction. In a 91-page decision, the judge cited the Corps’ study of “the impacts of an oil spill on fishing rights, hunting rights, or environmental justice” as particularly deficient, and he ordered it to prepare a new report on its risks.

The court did not, however, order the pipeline to be shut off until a new environmental study is completed—a common remedy when a federal permit is found lacking. Instead, Boasberg asked attorneys to appear before him again and make a new set of arguments about whether the pipeline should operate.

Step back from the daily headlines of the Trump administration.

After almost 6 months under President Trump and the 115th Congress, the United States is in a strange position: Republicans enjoy a decisive partisan advantage, controlling the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.

Yet GOP officials have no mandate to govern. (And neither, of course, do Democrats.) The country is adrift as a result, even amid significant challenges that confront it at home and abroad. And it is likely to stay adrift through the 2018 midterms, when voters can next send a clear signal about their preferred course.

Until then, Trump’s allies will remain frustrated by the stiff opposition their champion faces. Some cast that opposition as illegitimate, given that Trump won the 2016 election. They insist that allegations about collusion with Russia and entrenched opposition from the bureaucracy are unfairly stymieing the White House.

When Evan McMullin arrived at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., one afternoon in early April, he sensed right away that he was in enemy territory. After more than a decade in the CIA, he knows how to case a room, and the heightened security outside the building that day suggested to him the presence of someone from Donald Trump’s administration—a White House official, perhaps, or a member of the first family. As he passed through the lobby, a gaggle of Republican staffer types glared at him. By the time he joined me at a table in the hotel’s restaurant, where he noticed the conservative radio host and Trump enthusiast Laura Ingraham seated nearby, he appeared exhausted. He ordered a virgin mojito—something to help the teetotaling Mormon take the edge off—and sighed.

By firing James Comey, President Trump has now provoked the criminal investigation he insisted didn’t exist when he fired him. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly investigating whether Trump tried to obstruct justice by firing the former FBI director last month, placing the Trump administration in a legally perilous situation less than six months into office.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Mueller has quietly reached out to multiple top intelligence officials to set up interviews as part of his sprawling probe into both Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. That includes examining any wrongdoing by Americans that accompanied it, as well as any efforts to obstruct or curtail the federal investigation itself.

Once upon a time, diesel fuel was going to be the future. It was seen as more efficient, on a mileage-per-gallon basis, than other fossil fuels, and for that reason was also thought to be less polluting. About two decades ago, acting on those beliefs, policy makers in Europe—where high energy prices already made mileage a more-pressing issue than in the U.S.—made a number of rules that incentivized the growth of diesel over gasoline for use in passenger cars, moving past its traditional role in trucking and construction.  

These policies were remarkably successful at meeting their goals, and diesel-powered cars soon accounted for half of the cars sold on the continent. Car companies poured resources into developing diesel-related technology. But the result of this success has been not greener, friendlier, cheaper motoring, but the creation of toxic clouds over major European cities. At the end of 2016, Paris was choked by its worst episode of smog in more than a decade, lasting longer than two weeks, according to the city’s pollution-watching agency Airparif, and prompting the city to enact emergency measures that included restricting car use. It was not the first time. During a March 2015 pollution event, Paris was briefly the most polluted city in the world, surpassing famously smoggy Beijing. London shared in the ignominy when it too beat out Beijing for the first time in January of this year.  

The summer job is considered a rite of passage for the American Teenager. It is a time when tossing newspaper bundles and bussing restaurant tables acts as a rehearsal for weightier adult responsibilities, like bundling investments and bussing dinner-party plates. But in the last few decades, the summer job has been disappearing. In the summer of 1978, 60 percent of teens were working or looking for work. Last summer, just 35 percent were.

Why did American teens stop trying to get summer jobs? One typical answer is: They’re just kids, and kids are getting lazier.

One can rule out that hypothesis pretty quickly. The number of teens in the workforce has collapsed since 2000, as the graph below shows. But the share of NEETs—young people who are “Neither in Education, Employment, or Training”—has been extraordinarily steady. In fact, it has not budged more than 0.1 percentage point since the late 1990s. Just 7 percent of American teens are NEETs, which is lower than France and about the same as the mean of all advanced economies in the OECD. The supposed laziness of American teenagers is unchanging and, literally, average.

Last Friday, at 10:30 a.m., ob-gyn Rebekah McCurdy was seeing patients in her office when she got the call. Hello, said the voice on the line. It’s us. We’re thinking of doing a C-section, and we’re ready to put her under anesthesia. Weird, thought McCurdy. She wasn’t covering deliveries that morning, and in any case, she didn’t have any C-sections scheduled. “Who is this?” she said.

“It’s the zoo,” said the voice. “It’s for Kira.”

McCurdy dropped everything and ran to her car. A few hours later, she was delivering a baby gorilla into the world.

Philadelphia Zoo has a long history of raising great apes: In 1928, it became the first American zoo to successfully breed both chimpanzees and orangutans. In 2009, when it restarted its breeding program in a newly built primate house, vets contacted Stuart Weiner, a director at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and a specialist in high-risk obstetrics. They wanted someone on standby in case any of the pregnancies became complicated.

A buried line in a new Facebook report about chatbots’ conversations with one another offers a remarkable glimpse at the future of language.

In the report, researchers at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab describe using machine learning to train their “dialog agents” to negotiate. (And it turns out bots are actually quite good at dealmaking.) At one point, the researchers write, they had to tweak one of their models because otherwise the bot-to-bot conversation “led to divergence from human language as the agents developed their own language for negotiating.” They had to use what’s called a fixed supervised model instead.

In other words, the model that allowed two bots to have a conversation—and use machine learning to constantly iterate strategies for that conversation along the way—led to those bots communicating in their own non-human language. If this doesn’t fill you with a sense of wonder and awe about the future of machines and humanity then, I don’t know, go watch Blade Runner or something.

When Jeremy Bentham created the Panopticon, his prison of constant surveillance, in the late 18th century, he envisioned his design to be a building: circular in shape, layered like an especially unsavory cake, a structure that ensured that, at any moment, inmates could be observed—and could be, as well, observers. Bentham named his design after Panoptes, the Greek giant who had 100 eyes.

He might as well, though, it seems clear in retrospect, have named the thing after Twitter. Or Facebook. Or, for that matter, Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Americans, at least, in this omni-mediated age, have achieved the kind of self-surveillance that Bentham could only have imagined. With the help of our communications technologies, we are constantly aware of each other, and, as a perhaps inevitable result, constantly policing each other: the words we use. The tone we adopt when using them. The clothes we wear. And then, also, the decisions we make about our careers, about the way we spend our leisure time, about our diets, about our children. “She did what?” “She’s really let herself go.” “She works too hard.” “She doesn’t even work.” “I saw her feed that poor kid a Cheeto.”