The New Yorker: Has Anything Changed for Female Politicians?

When news reaches Missoula that Rankin has won the general election by a plurality of 7,567 votes, reporters and photographers crowd the front lawn of her house in town, curious to bring back news of the “lady from Montana”— specifically what she looks like, what she’s wearing. (From across the country, her colleague Carrie Chapman Catt, the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, questions Rankin’s credentials; the first woman in office should be an “intellectual”—certainly not a Westerner without a law degree.) Rankin morphs in the press from small and slight with “locks of fire” to “tall and slender, with frank hazel eyes, sandy hair, and energetic mouth.” She gets several marriage proposals by mail; a toothpaste company offers her five thousand dollars for a photograph of her teeth. It is reported that she can “dance like a boarding school girl” and that she makes her own hats. “I am glad glad glad even to Pollyannaism,” one newspaperwoman writes, “that Jeannette is not ‘freakish’ or ‘mannish’ or ‘standoffish’ or ‘shrewish’ or of any type likely to antagonize the company of gentlemen whose realm has hitherto been uninvaded by petticoats.” [...]

Rankin enters the House on April 2, 1917, in an extraordinary session called by President Wilson to debate war with Germany. The question is not how Rankin will vote but how a woman will vote. (Catt and many of the leaders of the national suffrage movement have urged her to vote for war; anything less, they assure her, will irrevocably set back the cause.) The men stand and applaud as she enters the House, dressed in blue and carrying a bouquet of flowers. She later remembers that, as she walks in, she’s a little worried, unclear where she should sit: at thirty-six and unmarried, she does not want to be accused of flirting. [...]

Twenty-two years later, at the age of sixty, the Candidate tries again for Congress and wins. She has spent the intervening years working for peace and disarmament organizations and travelling the world. She returns to the House in 1941 and achieves instant notoriety and a swift end to her political career when she casts the sole vote against going to war with Japan.

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The New Yorker‎: Twenty-five Years After the Failed Soviet Coup

The space in front of the White House where Desnitsky and others stood was promptly named the Square of Free Russia. The “defenders of the White House” and their sympathizers joyfully celebrated their victory, but their euphoric mood, along with the sense of moral clarity and righteousness, proved to be short-lived. Just a few years after the failed coup, less than ten per cent of Russians chose to see those events as a democratic revolution that put an end to Communist Party rule. That perception has not changed. According to a Levada Center poll, taken in August of this year, only eight per cent share this view. Thirty-five per cent say that it was just another episode in the struggle for power among the top leadership, while thirty per cent think that it was a tragedy that had deleterious effects on the state and the people. Today almost half of Russians say that they don’t know or don’t remember what happened in August of 1991. The Square of Free Russia is now a square only in name: the public is barred from the space around the White House, now the seat of the Russian Cabinet, by a tall iron fence.

The failed coup accelerated the secessionist movements in other constituent republics, first and foremost in the Baltics, but also in Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova. In a referendum in December, 1991, the people of Ukraine voted overwhelmingly for independence. By the end of the year, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Under the leadership of Yeltsin, who had just smashed the seventy-year-old Communist regime, the new Russia faced the task of building a democratic system, a market economy, and a Russian statehood to replace the Soviet one. The collapse of the Soviet Union may not have been regarded as a tragic event at the time, but, for Russians, seeing the country’s territory shrink and its might diminish was hardly a reason for rejoicing. The fact that the U.S.S.R. fell apart was unexpected and confusing. Those who rose to defend freedom in August, 1991, wanted to get rid of the Communist regime, not to destroy the Soviet Union. To people in Eastern European countries and many in the Baltic states, the Soviet Union may have been a foreign occupier and its collapse a liberation, but to Russians it was still their country, and the sense of liberation was missing. “Free from whom?” was a question that had no answer. [...]

It was only after those protests, and especially after annexing Crimea, that Putin turned to the language of ideas. Today he speaks constantly about state nationalism and Russia’s greatness, and he enjoys the approval of more than eighty per cent of Russians. The fact that, twenty-five years ago, a people’s movement changed the course of history is something that he would rather erase from national memory. He rejects the idea that those events marked a historical divide. In 2012, he said, “In order to revive national consciousness, we need to link historical eras and get back to understanding the simple truth that Russia did not begin in 1917, or even in 1991, but rather that we have a common, continuous history spanning over a thousand years, and we must rely on it to find inner strength and purpose in our national development.”

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The New Yorker‎: The Very Strange Writings of Putin's New Chief of Staff

Back in 2012, Vayno published an article in a Russian academic journal, and in the past few days hundreds if not thousands of Russians have struggled to deduce meaning from its twenty-nine pages. The article is called “The Capitalization of the Future”; the pages that follow do little to shed light on the meaning of the title or, really, much else. The text seems to propose a new term for the time-space continuum. The term is “protocol.” Vayno’s first job in Putin’s administration, between 2002 and 2007, happens to have been in the protocol service. One suspects that this was where he got one of the ideas for this article, expressed in a complicated table called “A Model Protocol for Shaping the Time-Space Relationship.” The table, which resembles a maze, contains a number of dead ends and a few circular paths that proceed from “Concept of the World” through “Thought and Expectations” to “The Future.” (“Knowledge” and “Uncertainty” appear to be optional.) The article also contains a dense description of a device called the Nooscope, which Vayno has apparently patented. The Nooscope, which “consists of a network of space scanners,” scopes out the noosphere. Or, as the article puts it, “The nooscope’s sensor network gives clear readings of co-occurrences in time and space, beginning with latest-generation bank cards and ending with smartest.” [...]

Though fewer than a hundred and forty pages, the book appears to offer nothing less than a recipe for global domination. Written as a theory of everything, the book covers all of history and all of human nature, which makes it difficult to summarize. The basic idea, though, seems to be absolute triumph through the use of tactics from sambo—Soviet martial arts—in everything, especially in economics. That is, if one assumes that there is a basic idea in the book. The text spans centuries of history and leaps across disciplines. This, for example, is how the book analyzes the Russian Army’s battle against Napoleon, in 1812: “If you are at Point A and you need to strike at Point B, then you will be forced to make a one-two strike, from A to B by way of Zero. That is too long a strike. But if you place yourself at Point Zero, then your strike will be short and merciless.” Sambo happens to be the sport in which the young Putin excelled before he took up judo and excelled in that. The sambo principle that Vayno seems to like is striking when the opponent least expects it. [...]

Why, then, does Putin need to reshuffle his men at all, and why does his doing so unfailingly attract attention? As with more and more aspects of contemporary Russia, the best explanation was offered more than half a century ago by Hannah Arendt, when she defined the true role of Stalin’s party purges: they were “an instrument of permanent instability.” The state of permanent instability, in turn, was the ultimate instrument of control, which sapped the energies and attention of all. The best way to insure being able to strike when it is least expected is to scramble all expectations. Perhaps that’s why Vayno’s “Protocol” turns the time-space continuum into a maze. Then again, maybe that’s what the nooscope is for.

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The New Yorker‎: Wall Street's Reluctant Embrace of Clinton

Despite their fundamental disagreements, one perspective both Trump and Clinton seemed to share was that banks and bankers are not to be trusted and that banks should possibly even be broken up. In the past few days, however, Trump has made one of his trademark sharp turns, suggesting ahead of his speech today that he might institute a moratorium on new financial regulation. He also announced a list of economic advisers on Friday—thirteen men, heavily populated with billionaire business figures, such as the hedge-fund manager John Paulson and Stephen Feinberg, of Cerberus Capital, and many of whom are Trump political donors, according to Politico. The list suggests that he won’t be seeking the policy expertise of academic economists and, combined with the ban on regulation, might be seen as an effort to inch back into the good graces of Wall Street. [...]

It used to be that the Republican Party was the party of Wall Street, or at least of a certain urban-professional, socially moderate, economically conservative banker type. Republicans could be relied on to offer policy ideas that the financial sector loved: free trade, tax cuts, and loosened regulation were the predictable trifecta, with a little budget austerity sprinkled in. The alignment between wealthy political donors from major banks and corporate executive suites and candidates like Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for President in 2012, made logical sense, as predictable as the sun setting in the West. [...]

The tilt in Clinton’s favor among financial-industry types may have less to do with their love of her than with a rejection of what Trump represents: instability. As Warren put it in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek last week, “Nuclear war is bad for business.” Wall Street’s backing of Clinton is therefore less a vow of support than an attempt to stave off catastrophe.

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The New Yorker: What Happened to the Ice Bucket Challenge?

All these critiques had the same underlying theme: the faddishness of the challenge undermined its value. This makes intuitive sense, but is it true? Actually, no. Silly though the Ice Bucket Challenge may seem now, it had far-reaching effects. It raised a reported two hundred and twenty million dollars worldwide for A.L.S. organizations; in just eight weeks, the American A.L.S. Association received thirteen times as much in contributions as what it had in the whole of the preceding year. Public awareness rose: the challenge was the fifth most popular Google search for all of 2014. Brian Fredrick, the vice-president for communications and development at the A.L.S. Association, told me, “The challenge suddenly made a lot of people who probably didn’t even know who Lou Gehrig was aware of the disease. It really changed the face of A.L.S. forever.” [...]

If the success of the challenge had come at the expense of other charities, ambivalence might be justified. But there’s almost no evidence that this was the case. According to Giving U.S.A., individual donations in the U.S. rose almost six per cent in 2014, which doesn’t suggest any cannibalization effect. Indeed, it’s likely that the very nature of the challenge, which belongs to a category known to anthropologists as “extreme ritual,” made people more openhanded. Dimitris Xygalatas, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut who has studied the effects of such rituals, ran a fascinating experiment with people who were undergoing kavadi—a Hindu ritual that commonly involves piercing the skin with sharp objects and then making a long procession while carrying heavy objects. Xygalatas found that people who did kavadi, and even people who just joined in the procession, donated more to charity than people in a control group. And those who gave the most painful descriptions of the experience donated the most. As a result, Xygalatas has suggested that the Ice Bucket Challenge, far from stealing from other charities, almost certainly increased the total size of the pie.

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The New Yorker‎: Atatürk versus Erdogan: Turkey's Long Struggle

Throughout his tenure as Prime Minister and now as President, Erdoğan has distanced himself from Atatürk. He views himself as the father of a new Turkish identity, one aligned more closely with its Ottoman past, its Islamic heritage. He has taken the country in a more religious direction, similar to a place it was in before the 1997 coup. Just before that coup, a poll conducted by the World Values Survey found that ninety-five per cent of Turks trusted their military. A Pew poll taken last year in the run-up to national elections found that only fifty-two per cent of Turks gave the military a positive rating. With support for the military less dominant now and with Erdoğan’s support still solid among much of the population, the coup has faltered. Citizens have taken to the streets in protest. Opposition parties have also chosen to stand in solidarity with the government. The Peoples’ Democratic Party, or H.D.P., which mainly represents the country’s Kurdish minority, sent out a mailer against the coup: “The only solution is democratic politics!”

Framed portraits of Atatürk still line Cevdet Paşa Caddesi, the main thoroughfare along the Bosphorus, in Istanbul. It seems unlikely that the Statue of the Republic with him at its center will be removed from Taksim Square anytime soon. Atatürk’s legacy and longevity seem to extend without question. He was the one who advised, “He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth, and the teachings of science.”

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The New Yorker‎: Elizabeth II, the Brexit Queen

“Retaining the ability to stay calm and collected can at times be hard,” she conceded, at the opening of Scotland’s Parliament, on Saturday. “One hallmark of leadership in such a fast-moving world is allowing sufficient room for quiet thinking and contemplation, which can enable deeper, cooler consideration of how challenges and opportunities can best be addressed.”

For Elizabeth, the Brexit vote marks an almost Shakespearean turn. In the nineteen-twenties, when she was born, the British Empire was the largest in history. It covered almost a quarter of the earth’s land mass; it held sway over more than four hundred and fifty million people, about a fifth of the world’s population. It was “the empire on which the sun never set.” In the past year, her reign, now the longest in British history, has twice been fêted with imperial pomp and horsey parades—last fall, for setting the longevity record, and, this spring, as she reached the age of ninety. Even Washington celebrated. At the British Embassy, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer last month led the toasts at a lawn party honoring the Queen’s birthday. Big names from the White House and Congress also attended. [...]

The monarchy itself is not in jeopardy. The Queen will hang on to her palaces, diamond-encrusted tiaras, royal carriages, and footmen, not to mention billions in assets, vast tracts of prime land, and royal privilege. Barring a political reversal on Brexit, however, her dynastic heirs could inherit little more than the realms of England and Wales. By today’s numbers, Little Britain would represent less than one per cent of the world’s population—and cover a mere fifty-six thousand square miles, smaller than the state of Florida. Forget where the sun sets; it would cover less than a time zone. [...]

“Change,” she added, “has become a constant. Managing it has become an expanding discipline. The way we embrace it defines our future.” For now, she’s the only other constant in Britain.

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The New Yorker‎: Who Are Donald Trump's Supporters?

It’s considered an indication of authenticity that he doesn’t generally speak from a teleprompter but just wings it. (In fact, he brings to the podium a few pages of handwritten bullet points, to which he periodically refers as he, mostly, wings it.) He wings it because winging it serves his purpose. He is not trying to persuade, detail, or prove: he is trying to thrill, agitate, be liked, be loved, here and now. He is trying to make energy. (At one point in his San Jose speech, he endearingly fumbles with a sheaf of “statistics,” reads a few, fondly but slightingly mentions the loyal, hapless statistician who compiled them, then seems unable to go on, afraid he might be boring us.) [...]

Yes, true: there are approximately seven million more Americans in poverty now than when Obama was elected. On the other hand, the economy under Obama has gained about seven times as many jobs as it did under Bush; even given the financial meltdown, the unemployment rate has dropped to just below the historical average. But, yes: the poverty rate is up by 1.6 percentage points since 2008. Then again the number of Americans in poverty fell by nearly 1.2 million between 2012 and 2013. However, true: the proportion of people who depend on welfare for the majority of their income has increased (although it was also increasing under Bush). And under Obama unemployment has dropped, G.D.P. growth has been “robust,” and there have been close to seventy straight months of job growth. But, O.K.: there has indeed been a “skyrocketing” in the number of Americans needing some form of means-tested federal aid, although Obama’s initiatives kept some six million people out of poverty in 2009, including more than two million children. [...]

The Trump supporters I spoke with were friendly, generous with their time, flattered to be asked their opinion, willing to give it, even when they knew I was a liberal writer likely to throw them under the bus. They loved their country, seemed genuinely panicked at its perceived demise, felt urgently that we were, right now, in the process of losing something precious. They were, generally, in favor of order and had a propensity toward the broadly normative, a certain squareness. They leaned toward skepticism (they’d believe it when they saw it, “it” being anything feelings-based, gauzy, liberal, or European; i.e., “socialist”). Some (far from all) had been touched by financial hardship—a layoff was common in many stories—and (paradoxically, given their feelings about socialism) felt that, while in that vulnerable state, they’d been let down by their government. They were anti-regulation, pro small business, pro Second Amendment, suspicious of people on welfare, sensitive (in a “Don’t tread on me” way) about any infringement whatsoever on their freedom. Alert to charges of racism, they would pre-counter these by pointing out that they had friends of all colors. They were adamantly for law enforcement and veterans’ rights, in a manner that presupposed that the rest of us were adamantly against these things. It seemed self-evident to them that a businessman could and should lead the country. “You run your family like a business, don’t you?” I was asked more than once, although, of course, I don’t, and none of us do. [...]

American Presidential campaigns are not about ideas; they are about the selection of a hero to embody the prevailing national ethos. “Only a hero,” Mailer wrote, “can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation; a hero embodies the fantasy and so allows each private mind the liberty to consider its fantasy and find a way to grow. Each mind can become more conscious of its desire and waste less strength in hiding from itself.” What fantasy is Trump giving his supporters the liberty to consider? What secret have they been hiding from themselves?

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The New Yorker: How to Steal an Election

Early American Presidential elections were not popular elections, not only because the vote was mainly restricted to white male property owners but also because delegates to the Electoral College were elected by state legislatures. The legislative caucus worked only as long as voters didn’t mind that they had virtually no role in electing the President, a situation that lasted for a while since, after all, most people living in the United States at the time were used to having a king. But a new generation of Americans objected to this arrangement, dubbing it “King Caucus.” “Under what authority did these men pretend to dictate their nominations?” one citizen asked in 1803. “Do we send members of Congress to cabal once every four years for president?” New states entering the union held conventions to draft state constitutions, in which they adopted more democratic arrangements. This put pressure on old states to revise their own constitutions. By 1824, eighteen out of twenty-four states were holding popular elections for delegates to the Electoral College. Between 1824 and 1828, the electorate grew from fewer than four hundred thousand people to 1.1 million. Men who had attended the constitutional convention in 1787 shook their gray-haired heads and warned that Americans had crowned a new monarch: “King Numbers.” [...]

Populism is very often a very clever swindle. But since 1831, with only one exception—the Whigs in 1836—every major party has nominated its Presidential candidate at a Convention. [...]

The rise of the primary was a triumph for Progressive reformers, who believed that primaries would make elections more accountable to the will of the people. That didn’t quite come to pass. Instead, primaries became part of the Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement of newer members of the electorate. Frederick Douglass addressed Republicans at a Convention in Cincinnati in 1876, asking, “The question now is, Do you mean to make good to us the promises in your constitution?” Sarah Spencer, of the National Woman Suffrage Association, was less well received at that Convention, which marked the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. “In this bright new century, let me ask you to win to your side the women of the United States,” Spencer said. She was hissed. In 1880, Blanche K. Bruce—a former slave, a delegate from Mississippi, and a U.S. senator—served as an honorary vice-president of the Republican Convention, and wielded the gavel.

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The New Yorker‎: On Brexit, the 2016 Euro Championship, and Trump

The parallels with the Trump campaign could not be more obvious. Trump praised Brexit as a resounding revolt against “rule by the global élite.” White working-class voters, ignored or disdained by the richer, better-educated political class, seem to have decided that, since Europe was doing very little for them, they had nothing to lose by leaving it. (Nor did love letters from Julie Delpy, arguments by Nobel laureates, threats by George Soros, or pleas by David Beckham and Bob Geldof make any difference.) You can imagine a similar conclusion if American voters were asked to decide what Washington was doing for them, and whether to revert to states’ rights on everything. And how eerie that, just as in current American political life, it was President Obama—brought in by Prime Minister David Cameron to tell the British that they would be at the back of the line if they left the E.U.—who became the bogeyman in the British war of the populists against the élites. In a Fox News-style turn, the economists and politicians were written off by Michael Gove, one of the leading Brexiteers, as “experts,” of whom “the British people are sick.” [...]

Of course, both the Brexit campaign and the Trump movement have tended to coalesce around the threat of immigration. In both cases, there are two streams of anxiety. One is economic: poorer, hungrier, more eager workers from nearby countries (Mexico; or Poland, Slovakia, Spain) are taking jobs that somehow “belong” to native populations (even if those native people seem disinclined to do them) and are swallowing up much-needed public resources, like education and health care. The second anxiety is cultural and religious—which is to say, fear of Islam. Would the Brexiteers have achieved their small majority without the migrants from Syria, and Angela Merkel’s hospitality toward them? It’s doubtful. Farage’s right-wing ukip produced a scandalous poster, with the words “BREAKING POINT: The EU has failed us all.” It showed a photograph, from 2015, of a massive, snaking crowd of Syrian migrants, mostly young men, at the Slovenian border. The implication was raucously clear, just as it is when Trump regularly inflates the number of Syrian immigrants admitted by the Obama Administration: they are swamping us.

At the same time, leaders of the Brexit campaign seem to want Britain to remain part of a common market, if not part of an overweening political bureaucracy. This makes sense, since most of them are members of the Conservative Party, people committed (as was Margaret Thatcher, who campaigned for British entry into the European Common Market, in 1975) to free enterprise. But wouldn’t a single market entail the more or less free movement of labor—the Briton who goes off to work in Paris, the Greek who comes to teach in Bristol? Asked this very question on TV, a day after the momentous vote, Daniel Hannan, a Conservative member of the European Parliament and leading pro-Brexit campaigner, conceded as much. He was, he said, in favor of the free movement of labor, but keen to reduce unemployed European citizens’ automatic right to free British services. We could be like Norway, he said, a country that never joined the E.U. When an exasperated interviewer suggested that this vision was completely at odds with the dark threats of his campaign, and its promise to “control” immigration to Britain, he replied that leaving the E.U. was never likely to have had a drastic effect on immigration levels. And notice the entirely expected conclusion of such a Norwegian-style compromise: the “acceptable” immigrant, such as the French banker who arrives in London with a generous contract in hand, gets to stay, while the eager but unemployed Pole, just looking for work in a richer country like the U.K., gets screwed. And the Syrian refugee, unaffected by Brexit, comes anyway.

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The New Yorker‎: Casual Sex: Everyone Is Doing It

Up to eighty per cent of college students report engaging in sexual acts outside committed relationships—a figure that is usually cast as the result of increasingly lax social mores, a proliferation of alcohol-fuelled parties, and a potentially violent frat culture. Critics see the high rates of casual sex as an “epidemic” of sorts that is taking over society as a whole. Hookup culture, we hear, is demeaning women and wreaking havoc on our ability to establish stable, fulfilling relationships. [...]

The Casual Sex Project was born of Vrangalova’s frustration with this and other prevalent narratives about casual sex. “One thing that was bothering me is the lack of diversity in discussions of casual sex,” Vrangalova told me in the café. “It’s always portrayed as something college students do. And it’s almost always seen in a negative light, as something that harms women.” [...]

This last theory relates to another of Vrangalova’s findings—one that, she confesses, came as a surprise when she first encountered it. Not all of the casual-sex experiences recorded on the site were positive, even among what is surely a heavily biased sample. Women and younger participants are especially likely to report feelings of shame. (“I was on top of him at one point and he can’t have forced me to so I must have consented . . . I’m not sure,” an eighteen-year-old writes, reporting that the hookup was unsatisfying, and describing feeling “stressed, anxious, guilt and disgust” the day after.) There is an entire thread tagged “no orgasm,” which includes other occasionally disturbing and emotional tales. “My view has gotten a lot more balanced over time,” Vrangalova said. “I come from a very sex-positive perspective, surrounded by people who really benefitted from sexual exploration and experiences, for the most part. By studying it, I’ve learned to see both sides of the coin.”

Part of the negativity, to be sure, does originate in legitimate causes: casual sex increases the risk of pregnancy, disease, and, more often than in a committed relationship, physical coercion. But many negative casual-sex experiences come instead from a sense of social convention. “We’ve seen that both genders felt they were discriminated against because of sex,” Vrangalova told me. Men often feel judged by other men if they don’t have casual sex, and social expectations can detract from the experiences they do have, while women feel judged for engaging in casual experiences, rendering those they pursue less pleasurable.

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The New Yorker‎: Forget Congress—The Gun Business Faces a Judge

But, on Monday, as the Senate vanished into the bog of gun politics, the most serious legal challenge to American gun violence was unfolding not in Washington but in a state court in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Parents of Sandy Hook victims, and one survivor, have brought a novel lawsuit against Remington Arms, which manufactured the AR-15-style Bushmaster rifle used in the attack, that could pry open the inner workings of the gun company, much as lawsuits against tobacco companies exposed their knowledge of the risks of cancer and their efforts to market to children. Unlike the plaintiffs in previous lawsuits against gun companies, the parents are not seeking to prove that the gun had an unsafe design or was distributed in ways that lead to illegal black-market sales; they accuse Remington of “unfair trade practices” for placing advertisements that marketed it to civilians as “the ultimate combat weapons system.” In effect, they are accusing Remington of lying to customers. [...]

One of the biggest things at stake is discovery: If the case goes forward, will plaintiffs, and the press, be allowed to see internal documents about how Remington marketed its weapons using the Internet and video games? Bellis has ordered discovery to begin, but Remington lawyers have said that they will seek to bar files from public view. Bellis has until mid-October to decide what will happen to the case.

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The New Yorker: Battleground America (Apr 23, 2012)

The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. (The second highest is Yemen, where the rate is nevertheless only half that of the U.S.) No civilian population is more powerfully armed. Most Americans do not, however, own guns, because three-quarters of people with guns own two or more. According to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Policy Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, the prevalence of gun ownership has declined steadily in the past few decades. In 1973, there were guns in roughly one in two households in the United States; in 2010, one in three. In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; in 2010, that figure had dropped to one in five. [...]

The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 by two men, a lawyer and a former reporter from the New York Times. For most of its history, the N.R.A. was chiefly a sporting and hunting association. To the extent that the N.R.A. had a political arm, it opposed some gun-control measures and supported many others, lobbying for new state laws in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, which introduced waiting periods for handgun buyers and required permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon. It also supported the 1934 National Firearms Act—the first major federal gun-control legislation—and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which together created a licensing system for dealers and prohibitively taxed the private ownership of automatic weapons (“machine guns”). The constitutionality of the 1934 act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, in U.S. v. Miller, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.” Furthermore, Jackson said, the language of the amendment makes clear that the right “is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.” The Court agreed, unanimously. In 1957, when the N.R.A. moved into new headquarters, its motto, at the building’s entrance, read, “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.” It didn’t say anything about freedom, or self-defense, or rights.

The modern gun debate began with a shooting. In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald bought a bolt-action rifle—an Italian military-surplus weapon—for nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents by ordering it from an ad that he found in American Rifleman. Five days after Oswald assassinated President Kennedy, Thomas Dodd, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, introduced legislation restricting mail-order sales of shotguns and rifles. The N.R.A.’s executive vice-president, Franklin L. Orth, testified before Congress, “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”

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The New Yorker: Nice Museum. Where’s the Art?

The reasons for a museum to grow are many. Contemporary artworks—especially installations and performances—demand more varied spaces than those available in older museums. Also, it’s easier to obtain funding for a shimmering new structure than for an unglamorous renovation. Attracting art donations requires space—billionaire X must know that his Warhols, Bacons, and Hirsts will be out there for all to see. Finally, the hushed museum halls of yore evoke an era when the artists were mostly Western white men and the patrons were often the unscrupulously rich. (Some of this hasn’t changed.) The goal now is to welcome the widest possible audience for learning, socializing, and entertainment. That means event spaces, concert halls, film theatres, gathering places, and plenty of shopping. Among the most intriguing expansions is that of Tate Modern, whose towering addition on the Thames opens June 17th. Its ambition could hardly be loftier: to redefine the museum for the twenty-first century. [...]

During a recent press briefing, Tate Modern’s director, Frances Morris, spoke of the institution’s shift “from being a museum that people come to and look at, spend time in, to a museum that opens its doors to collaboration, conversation, and participation.” This is already evident in a floor plan of the extension: a majority of the ten new levels won’t contain art at all. There’s a panoramic viewing floor at the top, a level for the restaurant, another for learning and events, and one for the bar and shop, leaving the art to three floors, in addition to repurposed oil tanks in the basement for performances and installations.

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The New Yorker: The Forgotten Lessons of the American Eugenics Movement

Soon, the United States, along with Germany, was at the forefront of the movement to improve the human species through breeding. Scientific American ran articles on the subject, and the American Museum of Natural History hosted conferences. Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and many other prominent citizens were outspoken supporters. Eugenics was taught in schools, celebrated in exhibits at the World’s Fair, and even preached from pulpits. [...]

Forced or coercive sterilizations never entirely went away either. In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that at least a hundred and forty-eight female prisoners in California were sterilized without proper permission between 2006 and 2010. Last year, a district attorney in Nashville was fired for including sterilization requirements in plea deals. [...]

Despite these contemporary remnants of America’s involvement in eugenics, and despite the fact that the movement shaped national policy and held sway in the upper reaches of society for many years, this chapter of American history is surprisingly absent from the common conception of the country’s past. It’s not that it has been ignored by historians or journalists. [...] Yet it seems that the collective forgetfulness is not a matter of some well of information remaining untapped but of our inability or unwillingness to soak up what is drawn out of it.

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The New Yorker‎: Transgender Rights and the End of the New South

Earlier that day, McCrory’s office had filed its own federal lawsuit, which attempted to protect the state from federal anti-discrimination action against H.B. 2. “North Carolina does not treat transgender employees differently,” according to the lawsuit. “All state employees are required to use the bathroom and changing facilities assigned to persons of their same biological sex, regardless of gender identity, or transgendered status.” Such bland assertions of neutrality have an infamous place in the law. Before the Supreme Court established a right to same-sex marriage, in 2015, North Carolina forbade gay and straight alike to wed members of the same sex. Before the Court invalidated laws against racial intermarriage, in 1967’s Loving v. Virginia, the state forbade both black and white people to marry someone of the other race. All these laws were defended on the grounds that they treated everyone alike. So, for that matter, were the original Jim Crow segregation laws. In 1896, upholding separate-but-equal accommodations, the Supreme Court held that, if “the enforced separation of the races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” this was “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction on it.” [...]

Trump’s version of the Republican Party, at least as he has expressed it in the primaries, liquidates both sides of McCrory’s strategy. On the cultural front, it turns away from personal and religious morality to stir up an us-versus-them energy with nationalist xenophobia. Economically, it replaces a blandly relentless laissez-faire program with aggrieved attacks on incompetent élites—sometimes in the name of tax cuts, sometimes in support of trade protectionism, universal health care, and rebuilding crumbling infrastructure. Trump’s primary campaign and Barack Obama’s Administration, in very different ways, have left Pat McCrory’s Republicanism with hardly any place to stand.

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