Category: You Should See This

Since the election, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, who has served as the city clerk of Madison, Wisconsin, for fifteen years, has struggled with the decision of whether to stay in her job. “I’ve had to figure out if the stress of doing this work is worth trying to make voting accessible for all eligible voters in my community, or if I should be pursuing a career where I’m not receiving any death threats,” she told me

According to a theory of social psychology called the “weapons effect,” the mere sight of a gun inspires aggression. In 1967, the psychologists Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage wrote, “In essence, the gun helps pull the trigger.” Their methodology had flaws, but later studies verified their premise. In one U.K. study, people were more inclined to assault a police officer who was visibly armed with a Taser. Brad Bushman, an Ohio State researcher who served on President Barack Obama’s committee on gun violence, told me, “We’ve found that it really doesn’t matter if a good guy or a bad guy is carrying the gun—it creates the bias to interpret things in a hostile way.” Citizens who openly carry firearms “think that they are making the situation safer, but they are making it much more dangerous.”

Though Smith sets a chapter in Manhattan, where he visits the site of a slave-auction block, and a chapter in West Africa, his book is mostly about the American South, during a period when the South’s political identity has begun to change. The South is still a conservative place, but election analysts no longer need a special regional element to explain its voting behavior: Democrats do better in states, like Virginia and Georgia, that have large numbers of Black and college-educated white voters, and worse in places that don’t. The outrage of conservative state legislatures over social-studies curricula involves concession that school boards from Texas to North Carolina have embraced a progressive view of history and current events. The most significant Confederate monuments—those on Richmond’s Monument Avenue and Stone Mountain, near Atlanta—are either being removed or might soon be. “The whole ideology of the Lost Cause is in deep trouble,” David Blight, the eminent Yale historian of the Civil War and its aftermath, told me earlier this week. “The fact that Monument Avenue is being taken apart is something that no one in my field truly thought they would ever see.” Even more striking to him are the deep discussions under way about reimagining Stone Mountain, with its ninety-foot-high carvings of Confederate leaders. Blight said, “In my field, we’ve had conference after conference and talk after talk about the Confederate monuments and everyone always says, ‘Well, Stone Mountain, they’ll never be able to take that down.’ ” But now they might. For generations, conservative Southern politicians had openly defended the Confederate cause. Blight said, “Republicans just don’t go there.”

“The crucial feature of these fossil bankruptcies — where fossil companies are using bankruptcy to get out of environmental obligations — is that a company can’t pay all of its debts,” said Joshua Macey, a University of Chicago law professor specializing in environmental law and bankruptcy. “The only way to solve this is to insist that, before bankruptcy, the firm is either doing cleanup contemporaneously or has a guarantee that there will be sufficient assets to do cleanup.”

“I don’t mind that they come on Memorial Day and put Confederate flags on Confederate graves. That’s okay,” she said. “But as far as I’m concerned, you don’t need a Confederate flag on—” She stumbled over a series of sentences I couldn’t follow. Then she collected herself and took a deep breath. “If you’re just talking about history, it’s great, but these folks are like, ‘The South shall rise again.’ It’s very bothersome.”

Aides who worked under Pompeo said the exchange regarding the raid typified a leadership style that included brusque treatment of personnel and an intense focus on partisan politics that sometimes hampered the day-to-day business of the State Department. In interviews, dozens of other department employees alleged that Pompeo’s chaotic tenure, and that of his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, left deep institutional and cultural scars that continue to impede American diplomatic efforts around the world.

Acquiescing to the terms set by the industry, Harnett argued—“disruption,” “sharing economy,” “platform,” “innovation,” even “startup”—also helped “pave the way for a handful of companies that represent a tiny fraction of the economy to have an outsized impact on law, mainstream corporate practices, and the way we think about work.” By aligning with consumers, rather than software engineers or gig workers, the coverage also elided the question of whether companies like TaskRabbit and Uber were ultimately in the business of technology as such.

“What’s happened is that people are now sorting themselves into churches that align more with their political ideology than their theology,” he said. “They want the sermons they hear on Sundays to align with what they hear on cable news all week.”

It was September 1999. At 26, Sarah had spent almost her entire life as a member of the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a paramilitary religious cult headquartered in the New Mexico desert. Founded by Sarah’s parents in the early 1980s, the group operated under the leadership of Sarah’s mother, who believed herself to be God’s oracle. According to her prophetic vision, “true Spirit-led Christianity is war.” The group’s several dozen members wore fatigues. During worship meetings, they battled Satan by slashing the air with invisible, demon-slaying swords. Everyone had a military rank. Sarah’s mother was the General. The youngest children were privates.

Import requirements, shipping container logistics—the FBI had seen it all, hammered out over a series of texts dating back to October on the Anom encrypted phone network. Federal agents hadn’t cracked Anom’s cryptography, or paid off an informant directly involved in the canny deal. They had, along with the Australian police, spent the past three years running the whole system.