An Optics Problem For McCain

The Obama Doctrine

Jeffrey Goldberg

The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world.

Friday, August 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void—began with a thundering speech given on Obama’s behalf by his secretary of state, John Kerry, in Washington, D.C. The subject of Kerry’s uncharacteristically Churchillian remarks, delivered in the Treaty Room at the State Department, was the gassing of civilians by the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

Welcome to Parent College

Olga Khazan

Can parenting classes help end America’s disgraceful child-abuse epidemic?

The woman was young and thin, with shiny long hair and a European accent. Sitting in a parenting class at the San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center last fall, she described what she had done to her son recently.

The scene would be familiar to many parents: She picked up her 6-year-old after school. The boy wanted to keep playing, so he started crying and yelling and pretending to hit her. She took him home and began preparing a snack. He went to the bathroom and, afterward, demanded his mom pull up his pants for him. She told him to do it himself. He refused and wandered about the house, trousers around his ankles.

“I reminded him about two times,” she recalled to her parenting classmates. “‘Please pull up your pants.’”

Quit Your Job

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

A midlife career shift can be good for cognition, well-being, and even longevity.

Perhaps you are one of the lucky ones. Perhaps you have reached your 40s, 50s, or 60s blissfully happy in your job. You are engaged, fulfilled, and challenged. Your work draws on your natural talents and passions. If so, feel free to skip this article.

The rest of us, however, may be experiencing, if not a mid-career crisis, at least mid-career ennui. According to Gallup pollsters, only one-third of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers are engaged by their work. Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management and well-being, says about half of Boomer and Gen X employees fall in a second category that Gallup characterizes as “not engaged.” As Harter puts it, “They show up; they get their paycheck and do the minimum required.” And one out of five belongs in the category Gallup calls “actively disengaged,” which Harter describes as “a pretty desperate state.” This situation exacts a toll on more than just productivity: Gallup has found that, compared with engaged employees, actively disengaged workers of all ages are far likelier to report stress and physical pain. They have higher cortisol levels and blood pressure, and they are nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression or to call in sick.

The Left Wing's Trump

Michelle Cottle

He’s an obnoxious millionaire New Yorker, a populist with a sketchy business, and party leaders hate him. Also: Alan Grayson is a Democrat.

Name this 2016 candidate:

He’s a loud, crass New York native who delights in political name-calling.
He is filthy rich but peddling a very raw form of anti-establishment populism.
His business ethics are seriously sketchy.
He has questioned Ted Cruz’s eligibility for the presidency based on Cruz’s Canadian birth.
He has a colorful marital history.
The more obnoxious and controversial he becomes, the more his supporters love him.
He’s considered so toxic by his own party that its leaders are actively working to tank his candidacy, even though he is currently ahead in the polls.
He has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president.

Did I lose anyone with that last bit? I am, of course, talking about Alan Grayson, the saucy liberal firebrand—or unhinged, ethically questionable demagogue, depending on your perspective—currently representing Florida’s 9th congressional district and running to replace Marco Rubio as the state’s junior senator. The latest Public Policy Polling survey out of Florida, released last week, has Grayson up 11 points over the Democratic establishment’s preferred candidate, Representative Patrick Murphy. This is unwelcome news for a party that’s casting a hopeful eye on the Sunshine State as it works to claw back its Senate majority from Republicans. Because, in a cycle where many—many—Republicans are in a white-hot panic over the prospect of Donald Trump becoming the ochre-tinted face of their party, Grayson stands as a not-so-gentle reminder that Democrats have their loudmouthed embarrassments as well.

America Needs ‘Y’all’

Vann R. Newkirk II

English has no standard second-person plural word, and it’s time for that to change.

How y’all doing?

A greeting as Southern as a bowl of grits, it rolls off the tongue in a single open-mouth utterance. Sweeter than honey and often saturated with hidden meaning, it can open up a dialogue with a roomful of strangers with ease.

Part of that ease hinges on the incredible versatility of the phrase’s most important word. “Y’all,” that strange regional and ethnic conjunction, offers a simplicity to speech that can’t be found elsewhere. It is a magnificently elegant linguistic creation.

There are no distinct second-person plural pronouns in modern standard English. “Ye” once served that purpose; a good look at the King James version of the Bible can give a sense of the usage. “Ye are the light of the world,” Jesus told a crowd in Galilee. But nowadays, “ye” and some other fun Middle English pronouns have fallen by the wayside, except at Medieval Times and in fantasy novels. Even “thou,” the etymological and more formal big brother of “you,” fell off the linguistic map around the 17th century.

Barack Obama’s Revolution in Foreign Policy

Niall Ferguson

When you think you’re the smartest person in the room, it’s tempting to make up your own grand strategy.

It is a criticism I have heard from more than one person who has worked with President Obama: that he regards himself as the smartest person in the room—any room. Jeffrey Goldberg’s fascinating article reveals that this is a considerable understatement. The president seems to think he is the smartest person in the world, perhaps ever.

Power corrupts in subtle ways. It appears to have made Obama arrogant. As described in Goldberg’s story, he is impatient to the point of rudeness with members of his own administration. His response to Secretary of State John Kerry when he hands him a paper on Syria is: “Oh, another proposal?” “Samantha, enough,” he snaps at the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “I’ve already read your book.” We learn, too, that he “secretly disdains … the Washington foreign-policy establishment.”

The LGBT Politics of Christian Colleges

David R. Wheeler

At many evangelical universities, you can be gay—as long as you don’t “act” it.

In the past, many conservative Christian colleges condemned both same-sex attraction and same-sex intimacy. But now that gay marriage is legalized, and as the country undergoes broad cultural shifts, that’s changing. Some of these same schools are now attempting to separate sexual identity from sexual behavior in their policies and campus customs. However awkwardly, they’re trying to welcome gay students while preserving rules against same-sex “behavior.”

Depending on the theological and political climate of the school, colleges have different ways of dealing with this new reality. A few have fully opened their communities to LGBT students and faculty, lifting all restrictions against same-sex dating or same-sex marriage. This fall, two conservative Christian colleges, Eastern Mennonite University and Goshen College, added sexual orientation to their nondiscrimination policies. Ultimately, this move forced both of them to withdraw from the nation’s most prominent membership organization of evangelical universities.

The Walking Dead: Live From the Kill Floor

Lenika Cruz and David Sims

Two kidnapped members of Rick’s crew learned about their abductors—who they are, what they want, and how far they’re willing to go.

Every week for the sixth season of AMC’s post-apocalyptic drama The Walking Dead, Lenika Cruz and David Sims will discuss the latest threat—human, zombie, or otherwise—to the show’s increasingly hardened band of survivors.

Here Is When Each Generation Begins and Ends, According to Facts

Philip Bump

We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

After the Times ran a column giving employers tips on how to deal with Millennials (for example, they need regular naps) (I didn't read the article; that's from my experience), Slate's Amanda Hess pointed out that the examples the Times used to demonstrate their points weren't actually Millennials. Some of the people quoted in the article were as old as 37, which was considered elderly only 5,000 short years ago.

The age of employees of The Wire, the humble website you are currently reading, varies widely, meaning that we too have in the past wondered where the boundaries for the various generations were drawn. Is a 37-year-old who gets text-message condolences from her friends a Millennial by virtue of her behavior? Or is she some other generation, because she was born super long ago? (Sorry, 37-year-old Rebecca Soffer who is a friend of a friend of mine and who I met once! You're not actually that old!) Since The Wire is committed to Broadening Human Understanding™, I decided to find out where generational boundaries are drawn.

What Would Breaking Up the Banks Even Look Like?

David Shirreff

The phrase “break up the banks” is often tossed around as though it’s some sort of abstraction. Here’s a sensible approach to how it could work in practice.

When regulators from around the world—including the U.S. and the E.U.—determined in 2008 that the banking system was terribly under-regulated, they all suggested a similar fix: Separate the departments involved in investment banking from those that deal with more run-of-the-mill insured deposit-taking. But recently there has been some back-sliding on such separation, and finance is still dominated by giant banks that mix the two.

Yet separation makes a lot of sense. Why should to two such wildly different activities as investment banking and retail banking be bundled together in the same institution? It’s obvious what JPMorgan gains: a nice piece of ballast to offset embarrassing, high-stakes trading mishaps. But what about consumers? How does an ordinary person benefit from putting her deposit into a complex global bank? I have asked that question to experts for more than a decade and have yet to hear a satisfying answer.