The Atlantic: The 5 Trump Amendments to the Constitution

 The surprising aspect of this conclusion is not that the Constitution can be informally amended. That has been the usual way of making revisions. In 1803, the Supreme Court granted itself the power to review laws and overturn them. In 1824, the states tied the electoral vote to the popular vote. Neither of those changes was inscribed on parchment or envisioned by the Founders, but today we can’t imagine our constitutional system without them.

Presidents have been the authors of many informal amendments. George Washington set enduring precedents such as the two-term limit on presidential service (a norm so embedded that after Franklin D. Roosevelt broke it, it was written into the formal Constitution). Andrew Jackson reimagined the president as the direct representative of the people. Abraham Lincoln ruled out secession. [...]

The impeachment mechanism was intended to be a check on presidential misbehavior; instead, post-Trump, it is now more like a partisan permission slip, allowing presidents to do as they please provided they keep their party in line. In other words, from now on, presidents should assume that the way to hold on to power is to stay not on the right side of the law but on the right side of their party. To put it mildly, that is not what the Founders intended. [...]

The president has his own superpower: unconstrained, unlimited authority to pardon and commute federal crimes. In recent years, presidents, fearing political blowback if a pardoned criminal were to commit another crime, have become more and more parsimonious in their use of pardons to correct even blatant injustices. That’s a loss for the justice system. Some presidents made fishy-looking pardons, but underuse of pardons became a much bigger problem than their overuse.

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The Atlantic: The Unlikeliest Pandemic Success Story

 “People say the COVID disaster in America has been about a denial of science. But what we couldn’t agree on is the social compact we would need to make painful choices together in unity, for the collective good,” Bitton added. “I don’t know whether, right now in the U.S., we can have easy or effective conversations about a common good. But we need to start.” [...]

That mattered when the coronavirus began spreading early last year. At the time, Bhutan looked like a ripe target. It had only 337 physicians for a population of around 760,000—less than half the World Health Organization’s recommended ratio of doctors to people—and only one of these physicians had advanced training in critical care. It had barely 3,000 health workers, and one PCR machine to test viral samples. It was on the United Nations’ list of least developed countries, with a per capita GDP of $3,412. And while its northern frontier with China had been closed for decades, it shared a porous 435-mile border with India, which now has the world’s second-highest number of recorded cases and fourth-highest number of reported deaths. [...]

Bhutan then went further. At the end of March, health officials extended the mandatory quarantine from 14 to 21 days—a full week longer than what the WHO was (and still is) recommending. The rationale: A 14-day quarantine leaves about an 11 percent chance that, after being released, a person could still be incubating the infection and eventually become contagious. Bhutan’s extensive testing regimen for people in quarantine, Wangmo added at a press conference, was “a gold standard.” [...]

Fourth, draw on existing strengths. When Bhutan added five more PCR machines to its testing stock, up from just one, it needed people to collect samples from the field and operate the devices. So it shifted technicians from livestock-health and food-safety programs, and trained university students. When it became clear that one ICU physician was not enough, it instructed other doctors and nurses in clinical management of respiratory infections and WHO protocols. “This is the lesson from Bhutan,” Rui Paulo de Jesus, its WHO country representative, told me. “Utilize the resources you have.”

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The Atlantic: Moral Perfection Can Wait

 Over the past six years, he has compiled an admirable policy record, but this has been overshadowed by a number of political and ethical scandals. Trudeau got into an entirely unnecessary turf battle with his own attorney general over a criminal prosecution involving corruption at a major Canadian company. (The prime minister was found to have broken conflict-of-interest rules, his second violation of ethics laws.) During the 2019 election, photos of Trudeau in blackface surfaced. His Liberal Party lost seats in Parliament and the popular vote. It still managed to hold on to power, but not by much. The outcome this time around could be worse. Whether the Liberal Party hangs on to government comes down to whether progressives rally around Trudeau, abandon him for less flashy alternatives on the left, or, disenchanted, stay home entirely. [...]

These questions are not abstract; they carry serious consequences. If the other side wins, then all our cherished progressive policies go out the window. At the same time, we cannot be completely amoral, the way, for example, many supporters of Donald Trump are—evangelical voters and country-club Republicans alike who looked past Trump’s financial and moral shortcomings because he promised to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices or cut taxes for the wealthy. A line has to be drawn somewhere. Progressives must demand integrity from our leaders—especially on issues such as diversity, respect for women, and corruption. [...]

One common occurrence on the left is the search for infallibility in our politicians. We want ideological purity and an unimpeachable record clear of misdeeds. In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Barack Obama warned progressives about “circular firing squads,” in which people who agreed on most issues took morbid pleasure in pummeling one another. This is perhaps the greatest failing of the modern left: We seek moral perfection in a world of politics where compromise is the cost of doing business. Run afoul of progressive dogma or say the wrong thing, and one is liable to get canceled.

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The Atlantic: India Is What Happens When Rich People Do Nothing

 Laying the blame for India’s coronavirus disaster—hundreds of thousands of new cases and thousands of deaths each day, both of which are certainly a huge underestimate—at Modi’s feet would be easy. Certainly, much can be attributed to his government: After the virus landed on India’s shores, he imposed a brutal shutdown—one that largely hurt the poorest and most vulnerable—without consulting the nation’s top scientists, yet did not use the time to build up the country’s health-care infrastructure; his administration offered little in the way of support for those who lost their job or income as a result of restrictions; and rather than taking advantage of low case counts in prior months, his government offered an air of triumphalism, allowing enormous Hindu religious festivals and crowded sporting competitions to go ahead. Modi’s ruling Hindu-nationalist party has been accused of hoarding lifesaving drugs, and has held mass election rallies cum super-spreader events that would make Donald Trump blush. (This is to say nothing of how the authorities have used the pandemic to invoke a draconian colonial-era law to restrict freedoms, while Modi’s government has at various points blamed minority groups for outbreaks, arrested questioning journalists, and, most recently, demanded that social-media platforms including Facebook and Twitter delete posts critical of the authorities, ostensibly as part of the fight against the virus.) [...]

India’s economic liberalization in the ’90s brought with it a rapid expansion of the private health-care industry, a shift that ultimately created a system of medical apartheid: World-class private hospitals catered to wealthy Indians and medical tourists from abroad; state-run facilities were for the poor. Those with money were able to purchase the best available care (or, in the case of the absolute richest, flee to safety in private jets), while elsewhere the country’s health-care infrastructure was held together with duct tape. The Indians who bought their way to a healthier life did not, or chose not to, see the widening gulf. Today, they are clutching their pearls as their loved ones fail to get ambulances, doctors, medicine, and oxygen. [...]

Many things went wrong then, and many people were responsible: Safety systems that could have slowed down or partially contained the leak were all out of operation at the time of the accident; gauges measuring temperature and pressure in various parts of the plant, including the crucial gas-storage tanks, were so notoriously unreliable that workers ignored early signs of trouble; the cooling unit—necessary to keep chemicals at low temperatures—had been shut off; the flare tower, designed to burn off methyl isocyanate escaping from the gas scrubber, required new piping.What has happened since is perhaps more instructive. Indians have by and large forgotten the tragedy. The people of Bhopal have been left to deal with its fallout. Richer Indians have never had to visit the city, so they have ignored it. Yet their apathy signals a choice, a decision to look the other way as their fellow Indians suffer.

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The Atlantic: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

 In the past few decades, Americans have broadened their image of what constitutes a legitimate romantic relationship: Courthouses now issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Americans are getting married later in life than ever before, and more and more young adults are opting to share a home rather than a marriage license with a partner. Despite these transformations, what hasn’t shifted much is the expectation that a monogamous romantic relationship is the planet around which all other relationships should orbit.

By placing a friendship at the center of their lives, people such as West and Tillotson unsettle this norm. Friends of their kind sweep into territory typically reserved for romantic partners: They live in houses they purchased together, raise each other’s children, use joint credit cards, and hold medical and legal powers of attorney for each other. These friendships have many of the trappings of romantic relationships, minus the sex. [...]

Beliefs about sexual behavior also played a role. The historian Richard Godbeer notes that Americans at the time did not assume—as they do now—that “people who are in love with one another must want to have sex.” Many scholars argue that the now-familiar categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, which consider sexual attraction to be part of a person’s identity, didn’t exist before the turn of the 20th century. While sexual acts between people of the same gender were condemned, passion and affection between people of the same gender were not. The author E. Anthony Rotundo argues that, in some ways, attitudes about love and sex, left men “freer to express their feelings than they would have been in the 20th century.” Men’s liberty to be physically demonstrative surfaces in photos of friends and in their writings. Describing one apparently ordinary night with his dear friend, the young engineer James Blake wrote, “We retired early and in each others arms,” and fell “peacefully to sleep.” [...]

John Carroll, who met his platonic partner, Joe Rivera, at a gay bar, describes this type of romantic relationship as “one-stop shopping.” People expect to pile emotional support, sexual satisfaction, shared hobbies, intellectual stimulation, and harmonious co-parenting all into the same cart. Carroll, 52, thinks this is an impossible ask; experts share his concern. “When we channel all our intimate needs into one person,” the psychotherapist Esther Perel writes, “we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.” Such totalizing expectations for romantic relationships leave us with no shock absorber if a partner falls short in even one area. These expectations also stifle our imagination for how other people might fill essential roles such as cohabitant, caregiver, or confidant.

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The Atlantic: Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters

 The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. “My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith,” he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year. It’s a message his campaign will seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to confirm Amy Coney Barrett—a devout, conservative Catholic—to the Supreme Court. [...]

It helped that Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle. The former campaign adviser recalled showing his boss a YouTube video of the Israeli televangelist Benny Hinn performing “faith healings,” while Trump laughed at the spectacle and muttered, “Man, that’s some racket.” On another occasion, the adviser told me, Trump expressed awe at Joel Osteen’s media empire—particularly the viewership of his televised sermons. [...]

The Faustian nature of the religious right’s bargain with Trump has not always been quite so apparent to rank-and-file believers. According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelicals are more than twice as likely as the average American to say that the president is a religious man. Some conservative pastors have described him as a “baby Christian,” and insist that he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his savior. [...]

In fact, according to two senior Utah Republicans with knowledge of the situation, Don Jr. has been so savvy in courting Latter-day Saints—expressing interest in the Church’s history, reading from the Book of Mormon—that he’s left some influential Republicans in the state with the impression that he may want to convert. (A spokesman for Don Jr. did not respond to a request for comment.)

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The Atlantic: Do Americans Understand How Badly They’re Doing?

The numbers are not ambiguous. From a peak of 7,581 new cases across the country on March 31, and with a death toll now just below 30,000—at one point the world’s fourth highest—there were just 526 new cases on June 13, the day we masked ourselves and took the train back to Paris. The caseload continues to be small and manageable. [...]

That insult succinctly conveys the crux of the problem. American leadership has politicized the pandemic instead of trying to fight it. I see no preparedness, no coordinated top-down leadership of the sort we’ve enjoyed in Europe. I see only empty posturing, the sad spectacle of the president refusing to wear a mask, just to own the libs. What an astonishing self-inflicted wound. [...]

America is my home, and I have not emigrated. I have always found the truest expression of my situation in James Baldwin’s label of “transatlantic commuter.” I have lived in France off and on since the early 2000s, and it has been instructive over the decades to glimpse America’s stature reflected back to me through the eyes of a quasi-foreigner. If the country sparked fear and intense resentment under George W. Bush and mild resentment mixed with vicarious pride under Barack Obama, what it provokes under Trump has been something entirely new: pity and indifference. We are the pariah state now, but do we even see it?

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The Atlantic: Despise Bolton, but Read His Book Anyway

And Bolton doesn’t have many friends outside the White House, either. He seems to be doing his best to present himself as a principled whistleblower going head-to-head with a White House trampling his rights. But his welcome within anti-Trump circles has been decidedly frosty. Democratic Representative Mike Quigley, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee, suggested to Politico that anyone who wants to see what Bolton has to say should borrow his book from the library, rather than give the former national security adviser any money. Clicking on any of #JohnBolton’s recent tweets, meanwhile, reveals a cascade of replies calling him a coward and accusing him of selling out his country for book profits. [...]

The best answer is to treat the book—and its author—bloodlessly, as a source of information that needs to be evaluated with due consideration for the source but without an instinct to either valorize or condemn. Bolton has a story to tell. It is very likely a story worth hearing. To absorb it implies no heroism or redemption for the man. It is not an embrace. It is possible to hear his story while maintaining one’s disdain for his behavior. The relationship is transactional. [...]

And what does Bolton get in this transaction? We actually don’t know. Maybe he’s motivated by the money. Maybe he just wants to tell his story. Maybe he craves the attention. (This is a guy, after all, who tried to create a hashtag out of his own name.) That’s really his business. He’s getting something, or he presumably wouldn’t have written the book. The point is that hearing his story need not mean validating or vindicating him.

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The Atlantic: A Solution to the Confederate-Monument Problem

Once they are down, must they go straight to the smelter? Certain charmless totalitarian ideologues have enjoyed obliterating evidence of their predecessors—think of Wahhabi grave-leveling, the denuding of churches by Protestant zealots, the erasure of enemies of Stalin. Not wanting to be like Stalin is good. Certain hemming-and-hawing, bien-pensant types have proposed that we “put them in a museum.” The problem is that museums are also sometimes sites of veneration, and in a museum Lee could retain his dignity, unless he is perhaps used as a coat rack, or put on a mechanically rocking pedestal so children can ride him if they insert a quarter (U.S. currency only, please). [...]

Or, if Virginia must honor its heritage with museum treatment, it could emulate another eerie European site—this one untainted by genocidal associations. In Copenhagen, Denmark, one of my favorite landmarks is a bronze statue, Agnete and the Merman, which is installed permanently at the bottom of one of the city’s canals. Passersby can see it under the surface if they stop to look, but most of the time no one is looking at all—and because it is submerged, it remains present but locked away in another world. The water is usually clear. [...]

Ridding ourselves of history is a fantasy—in this case a fantasy of absolution, as if any place could be washed free of its sins by a single act of iconoclasm. But history can be managed in more and less graceful ways. Either of these would create a public space without consecrating one—and make the statues’ final home redolent of history without stinking of it.

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The Atlantic: America Has No President

It is not that Trump has been silent. Far from it: His Twitter feed has been a supercharged version of its normal self. Trump has attacked Joe Biden, slurred reporters, insulted leaders on the front lines of protests, and claimed federal authority he doesn’t have. This is the sort of behavior we’d call unhinged from any other president, but the word has lost any power through its endless, justified invocation throughout his tenure. In any case, the tweeting suggests a president flailing around for a message that sticks and for a sense of control.

What has been missing is any sort of behavior traditionally associated with the presidency. Trump initially condemned George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer, but since then there have been no statements intended to quell anger, bridge divisions, or heal wounds. There have been no public appearances, either; Trump traveled all the way to Florida to watch a SpaceX rocket launch on Saturday, but hasn’t managed to travel in front of cameras for a formal statement. [...]

“He should just stop talking. This is like Charlottesville all over again,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said on CNN last night, referring to Trump’s disastrous comments after a violent white-nationalist march in Virginia in 2017. “He speaks and he makes it worse. There are times when you should just be quiet, and I wish that he would just be quiet.” [...]

Nothing in Trump’s statement to the Times touches the demonstrations or shows even a rudimentary understanding of what has inspired them. The paper reports that “aides repeatedly have tried to explain to him that the protests were not only about him, but about broader, systemic issues related to race.” Unsurprisingly, Trump, who has a long history of racist behavior and comments, has not warmed to that explanation. Instead, he has gravitated toward conspiracy theories. Yesterday, he tweeted that he would designate antifa—a familiar rhetorical target—as a terrorist organization, even though he has no federal authority to do so. He also blamed outside agitators for unrest, a claim debunked by his own allies at National Review. It seems true that there are some violent protesters trying to stir up trouble, but they are plainly neither the starting point nor the majority of the marchers.

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The Atlantic: It’s Slowly Dawning on Trump That He’s Losin

There’s ample polling to back that up. RealClearPolitics’s average has the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, up 6.3 percent on Trump. Polling averages in each of the potentially decisive states show Biden up, too, save North Carolina—and even there, the most recent polls show Biden ahead by 5 percent. A survey of Texans released yesterday even has Biden up by a point in the Lone Star State. [...]

Privately, however, Trump is not so sanguine. Late yesterday, a trio of stories arrived reporting on turmoil inside the president’s reelection campaign. It’s a throwback to the news-dump Fridays of the early Trump administration—or to the fractious leaks that characterized Trump’s 2016 campaign. CNN reported that Trump screamed at his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, last Friday over his sliding poll numbers, even threatening to sue him. (How serious the threat was, CNN notes, is unclear, and Trump issues empty lawsuit threats as reflexively as many people check their phone.)[...]

That upset may help to explain Trump’s fury now. The president is still fighting the last war, trying to rerun the 2016 campaign in a new environment. Trump clearly has never really moved on from the previous race, tweeting about it as recently as this morning. No campaign rally is complete without a lengthy soliloquy on the 2016 race, and Trump never stopped holding campaign rallies, even in the first months of his term in office. As recently as this January, a (misleading) map of the 2016 election results has been spotted on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. He also continues to claim that the election was a landslide, rather than a loss in the popular vote—which he sometimes explains away with bogus claims of fraud. [...]

Trump may yet win the election. There’s a lot of time between now and November, and the pandemic and volatile economy make it hard to even envision the territory on which the battle will be fought. But at the moment, Trump is losing and he doesn’t understand why. Because the president continues to fixate on the previous election, and interpret it in questionable fashion, he is desperate to keep talking, oblivious to the self-inflicted damage his press conferences create. He has killed the daily briefings, for now, and in name, but continues to speak with reporters and the public in other forums. It scratches his itch for public attention a little, but it can’t replace the big rallies that he seems to believe are the salvation for his campaign. In 2016, Trump’s inability to keep his mouth shut turned out to be just crazy enough to work. He hasn’t grasped that in 2020, it’s the problem, rather than the solution.

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The Atlantic: The Callousness of India’s COVID-19 Response

Yet even as India was gripped by demonstrations and violence, the coronavirus was making inroads into society here. The country reported its first case on January 30, but authorities steadfastly insisted that cases were one-offs and no local transmission was taking place. In recent weeks, though, India has seen exponential growth in the number of cases. Today, we are three days into a three-week nationwide lockdown, a heavy restriction on a nation of 1.3 billion people that Modi and his government have insisted will help defeat the virus.

The government is offering little in the way of a safety net. Only after the lockdown came into force, and amid growing outrage, did the finance minister finally announce an aid package. Yet its $22 billion value is a pitiful amount compared with what governments elsewhere have provided: Whereas governments in Britain, Spain, and Germany have offered stimulus plans of up to 20 percent of GDP, India’s amounts to less than 1 percent of its GDP. It provides no help for day laborers or other workers in similar unorganized sectors. It contains no measures for migrant workers. The actual amounts of support—five kilograms of rice or wheat, and one kilogram of legumes, per person for the next three months, coupled with cash transfers, in some cases of 500 rupees, or $7, a month—have infuriated voters. Here in Goa, a lawyer has petitioned the high court to direct the state government to provide essential goods to the people, especially those who are living below the poverty line. [...]

There is, unfortunately, good reason to believe that all of this will not be enough. For one, India is still not testing enough people, having conducted the fewest number of tests of any country with confirmed cases of the coronavirus, at just 10.5 per million residents (South Korea, by contrast, has conducted more than 6,000 tests per million residents). That private laboratories are allowed to charge $60 per test—remember, just $7 a month has been offered as income support for some residents—means significant barriers to confirmation and treatment remain in place. (The government argues that because of the size of the population, widespread testing is not feasible.) The authorities are also not meticulously contact tracing, people are fleeing isolation centers, and measures such as self-quarantines and social distancing are impractical in a country where much of the population lives in dense clusters in overcrowded megacities. Whereas the WHO recommends a ratio of one doctor for every 1,000 patients, India has one government doctor for every 10,000, according to the 2019 National Health Profile. A 2016 Reuters report noted that India needed more than 50,000 critical-care specialists, but has just 8,350. In short, the country’s health-care system is in no position to cope with an avalanche of patients with a contagious respiratory infection in the manner that China and Italy have been doing—India’s continued inability to deal with the epidemic of tuberculosis speaks to that struggle.

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The Atlantic: Ukraine’s Quiet Depopulation Crisis

Ukraine nevertheless stands apart. It is still a nation at war, yet in a survey last year, 55 percent of residents named mass emigration as the greatest threat to their country—the UN estimates that Ukraine could lose nearly a fifth of its population by 2050. And whereas politicians in Eastern Europe typically invoke demographic decline as a justification for conservative policies such as restricting abortion rights and providing financial bonuses for large families, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to reverse brain drain by improving his country’s economy and rule of law. In December, he announced a program to draw young Ukrainians back from abroad with promises of preferential loans to start their own businesses upon their return. [...]

Why young Ukrainians leave places like this is no mystery. The country is Europe’s second-poorest, beset by corruption and low living standards, and it shares a border with the European Union. Furthermore, a war with Russia-backed separatists still wages in the east, and has displaced 2 million people, many internally. (Ukraine’s depopulation problem is also tied to high mortality rates: According to Ella Libanova, the director of the Ptoukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies at the National Academy of Sciences, 30 percent of 20-year-old Ukrainian men won’t make it to their 60th birthday, thanks in large part to alcohol abuse and road accidents.)

So Ukraine’s limited ability to stem emigration is not entirely an issue of political will. Rather, it is a consequence of the country’s place in the global economy: as a reservoir of migrant labor. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, the majority of first-time EU residence permits were given to Ukrainians, the lion’s share of whom moved to neighboring Poland. Remittances from overseas made up more than 11 percent of Ukraine’s GDP. That Ukrainians are heading to Poland and elsewhere in Central Europe also highlights the absurdity of these countries’ negative rhetoric toward prospective immigrants: “One of the paradoxes of [Central European] anti-migrant rhetoric toward the south … is that it’s only possible because those countries have benefited heavily from migration from the east,” Alexander Clarkson, a European-studies lecturer at King’s College London, told me.

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The Atlantic: The Great Toilet-Paper Panic

It started with an unsubstantiated rumor. “You can laugh now,” said Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in 1973, “but there is an acute shortage of toilet paper.” There wasn’t— but it didn’t matter. The broadcast sent America into a mass panic. Millions of shoppers swarmed into grocery stores to begin hoarding toilet paper. The Scott Paper Company insisted that the shortage was being artificially induced, and urged people to stop panic-buying the product. Nevertheless, for four months, toilet paper—absent from the selves—was bartered, traded, and even sold on the black market. Out of nowhere, a shortage was born.

"The Great Toilet Paper Scare" was directed by Brian Gersten (https://www.briangersten.org). It is part of The Atlantic Selects, an online showcase of short documentaries from independent filmmakers, curated by The Atlantic.

The Atlantic: Coronavirus Could Break Iranian Society

Zeynep Tufekci has written about the advantages and disadvantages of authoritarianism in dealing with a disaster like this. China can lock down a city, quarantining tens of millions at a time, and it can marshal its top experts, allowing them to wage a campaign against the disease with the absolute authority of a caesar. But it can’t avail itself of the benefits of public trust, including transparent and honest accounts of the disease and its toll. In Iran, it appears that the government has all the disadvantages of an unfree society, and none of the compensating advantages. Watch this incredible video, at once comic and horrifying, of a top Iranian health official, Iraj Harirchi, assuring the public that the situation is being addressed, while sweating and coughing on colleagues and his audience because he has contracted the coronavirus: [...]

At some point, incompetence and evil become indistinguishable. I feel like we have passed this point several times in the past few years, and Iran’s leadership in particular keeps passing it over and over, like a Formula 1 car doing laps. Last month’s accidental downing of a civilian airliner exposed one form of fatal incompetence, followed by an abortive effort to cover it up. Iranians are understandably primed to wonder whether this disaster is similar, a tragedy of malign incompetence that is expanding beyond the government’s ability to contain. [...]

But any amount of waiting can be stressful, even in a place much more competently run than Iran. Earlier this month, I visited Hong Kong. Everyone wore masks. In public, no one crowded into my personal space on buses or in narrow pedestrian alleys. Shopkeepers came outside every quarter hour or so to wipe down the doorknobs and door buzzers of their shops, in case the last customer had left a viral particle. The burden of containing the coronavirus felt collective, and heavy. Hong Kong has a strong sense of identity and group responsibility, which has up until now kept it sane. I could take just a few days of it. Only in the middle of the night, when I knew I would encounter no one up close, did I feel comfortable—and not like some kind of norm-violating monster—walking around with my face exposed to the air.

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The Atlantic: ‘Pure Poison’ for a Scholarly Career

All we know for certain, through forensic testing, is that the manuscript likely dates to the 15th century, when books were still mostly handmade and rare. But its provenance and meaning are uncertain, making it virtually impossible to corroborate any claims about its contents against other historical materials. So why are so many scholars and scientists driven to solve the puzzle?

For many, it’s the ultimate opportunity to prove their analytical skills in their given field. For others, it’s a chance to test promising new digital technologies and artificial-intelligence advances. And for some, it’s simply the thrill of the hunt. [...]

“Everyone wants to be the one to prove it, to crack it, to prove your own abilities, to prove you’re smarter,” says Davis, the medieval scholar. One problem, she adds, especially with a complex medieval manuscript, is that researchers are specialists. “Hardly anyone out there understands all the different components” of the manuscript, she points out, referring not just to the illustrations but to things like the binding, the inks, and the handwriting. “It’s going to take a whole interdisciplinary team.” [...]

In the end, the manuscript may simply be an unsolvable mystery. Robert Richards, a historian of science at the University of Chicago, uses the codex to teach the concept of scientific paradigms, where a scientific theory comes to shape a field of research so strongly that scientists can’t always explain or identify anomalies outside of the theory.

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The Atlantic: The 53-State Solution

Two of the past three presidents received fewer votes than their opponent. In 2017, most legislation passed by the Senate was supported by senators representing only a minority of the population. And after the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, all five of the conservative Supreme Court justices—a majority of the Court—have been appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, supported by a group of senators who received fewer votes than the opposing senators, or both. [...]

None of these arrangements are necessarily partisan, and for much of the nation’s history, they did not consistently favor either political party. But today, the system is in tension with the bedrock principle of democracy: majority rule. Due to an advantageous distribution of voters in the right states, the Republican Party has repeatedly been able to control the federal government despite a lack of popular support. In 2016, for example, Republicans failed to win a majority of votes cast for the House, Senate, or the presidency, yet nonetheless secured control of all three. [...]

A better solution to the problem of minority rule would address it directly. Democrats—if and when they regain control of Congress—should add new states whose congressional representatives would likely be Democrats. In areas that are not currently states, like Washington, D.C., or territories like Puerto Rico, this could be done with a simple congressional majority. But Democrats should also consider breaking up populous Democratic states and “un-gerrymandering” the Senate. Perhaps there could be a North and South California, or an East and West Massachusetts. A new state of Long Island, an area that is geographically larger than Rhode Island, would be more populous than most of the presently existing states. [...]

However, small and large states are now divided politically in a way they haven’t usually been. As Matthew Yglesias notes, one important factor is race. Nonwhite voters represent a growing share of the country, but they are unevenly distributed, often clustered in large states. Another factor is higher education. White voters are more divided on lines of educational attainment, and smaller states are more likely to have a less educated population than larger states. As these sorts of demographic divides have come to coincide with the rural-urban divide, one party—the Republicans—has benefited tremendously, and is now the favorite for the majority of states, but not the majority of people.

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The Atlantic: Will Britain Rejoin the EU?

This observation, made somewhat in jest, contains a number of truths. The first, most obviously, is that Brexit has happened—it is no longer a proposition but a living, breathing project. Fundamentally, now that Britain has left the EU, those seeking to lead the country must offer more than opposition to Brexit, but a program that seeks to make it work. This leads to the second truth, which is largely unacknowledged but no less real: The very fact of Brexit has turned many erstwhile pro-Remain members of Parliament into de facto Brexiteers—the more they succeed, the more they are able to help grow the economy, the more they improve conditions for ordinary people, the more they make their opponents’ case that Brexit was worth it. Only in Britons’ collective failure do the old remainers win, and actively seeking national failure is not a vote winner. [...]

With Brexit, if Johnson follows through with his plan to return what he has called “full legal autonomy” to Britain, he will suddenly have the power to create new dividing lines in a raft of new areas, from immigration and trade policy to fishing rights and agricultural subsidies, as well as those that were already in the government’s control, like prison sentencing, taxes, and public spending. As with all policy changes, there will be winners and losers: Domestic producers, for example, are forecast to benefit, while consumers are not; fishing communities might prosper, but at the cost, according to the EU’s negotiating mandate, of the wider British economy, which will have to pay a higher price when selling goods and services to the continent. The benefactors of these decisions might win big and have a vested interest in maintaining the new status quo, while the losers might barely notice at first, only paying the price over time. Such is the alchemy of politics that votes can be won by hitting large numbers of people a little bit for the great benefit of just a few. [...]

The reality of the political cycle also means that any push to rejoin is likely to be some years away. The Conservative government has a commanding majority that will be hard for the opposition to overturn by 2024, the scheduled date of the next election. There is every chance that Johnson will be prime minister until close to 2030. Conventional wisdom suggests that for Labour to even stand a chance of winning, its next leader will have to seek votes from those who abandoned the party in 2019—many of whom voted for Brexit. Would they really vote for a party offering to reopen the question? Would any Labour leader really hang their leadership on this peg?

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The Atlantic: Russia’s Twin Nostalgias

Long before Stalin’s rule, the Russian elite would relax here, valuing the distance from Moscow both geographically (it is about 1,000 miles away) and culturally (it lies a short distance from what is now Georgia, and across the water from Turkey). Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s widow, Anna, moved to Sochi to escape violence in St. Petersburg surrounding the Bolshevik revolution, buying a piece of land on the outskirts of the city where she built a house and planted a garden, calling her little retreat “Joy.” (Dostoyevskaya lost that home soon after she moved in, when a soldier attacked her as part of the Bolshevik campaign against property owners, saying the house now belonged to the working classes, and forcing her to flee once again. Along with the personal cost to her, she also lost a part of her husband’s archive—handwritten copies of The Brothers Karamazov are still missing as a result.)

After coming to power, Stalin in 1926 ordered his commissars to plant botanical gardens here. Hoping to curry favor with the leader, each one—among them Kliment Voroshilov, Genrikh Yagoda, and Sergo Ordzhonikidze—also built and ornately decorated hotels in their name. These structures included enormous neoclassical columns, pompous arches, grandiose fountains, and statues of naked Greek gods next to busts of Soviet heroes. In less than a decade, a dozen such palaces emerged, each one next to the other, along Sochi’s hills, offering healing mineral water, spas, and baths. [...]

After that, the city cultivated a reputation as a vacation destination for workers across the U.S.S.R.—thanks to state-provided packages that included stays at health resorts and various healing programs. Miners, engineers, or factory workers as far away as the northern reaches of Siberia knew that after a year of hard work, they would be able to take a month-long break here. Millions living in grim industrial cities dreamed of warm Sochi nights, where the tropical air added to the sense of excitement. Here, residents of closed and secretive towns could even see foreign tourists visiting from Eastern Europe, or African countries allied with Moscow, all together on open dance floors. For locals, Sochi was a beloved place, its quiet and romantic embankment populated by old people playing chess, the city’s pace relaxing and peaceful.

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The Atlantic: The Crisis of American Christianity, Viewed From Great Britain

In England, people are a bit embarrassed about the word. But I’ve taken the view that the word evangelical is far too good a word to let the crazy guys have it all to themselves, just like I think the word Catholic is far too good a word for the Romans to keep it all to themselves. And while we’re at it, the word liberal is too good a word for the skeptics to have it all for themselves. It stands for freedom of thought and exploration.

Everything gets bundled up together, whether it’s abortion or gun rights or homosexuality or whatever. All issues are seen as either you’re on that side, and it’s the whole package, or you’re on this side, and it’s the whole package. [...]

In the early Church, one of the great attractions of Christianity was actually a sexual ethic. It is a world where more or less anything goes, where women and children are exploited, and where slaves are exploited often in hideous and horrible ways. In the Greco-Roman world, if you’d already had one daughter, and then you had another, the regular thing was either to sell her into slavery or literally to leave her out for the wolves.

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