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As a kid, I saw the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. As a future primatologist, I was mesmerized. Years later I discovered an anecdote about its filming: At lunchtime, the people playing chimps and those playing gorillas ate in separate groups. It’s been said, “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.” In reality, there’s lots more of the former. And it can be vastly consequential when people are divided into Us and Them, ingroup and outgroup, “the people” (i.e., our kind) and the Others. The core of Us/Them-ing is

Earlier this year, reporter Lee Stranahan was in the White House press room when another journalist asked him which outlet he worked for. “Breitbart News,” Stranahan answered, recalling the exchange in a recent phone conversation. The other journalist laughed, thinking this had to be a joke. Breitbart, after all, was largely known, whether justly or not, as a hothouse where the alt-right tended to its most outlandish, paranoid creations: Clinton conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant fearmongering, garden-variety misogyny. One of its story tags was “black crime.” The tag is no longer used, yet it

In a new book, University of North Carolina-Charlotte anthropologist Jonathan Marks says that racism in science is alive and well. This stands in sharp contrast to creationist thinking, Marks says, which is, like racism, decidedly evident in our society but most certainly not welcome in science. In Is Science Racist?, Marks writes: "If you espouse creationist ideas in science, you are branded as an ideologue, as a close-minded pseudo-scientist who is unable to adopt a modern perspective, and who consequently has no place in the community of scholars. But if you espouse racist ideas in science,

Unfulfilling Forty-one years before Maureen O’Connor dove into Pornhub’s user data for this issue’s cover story, Molly Haskell found herself in her local movie theater on 86th Street, two seats away from a man who was enthusiastically masturbating. Onscreen was an X-rated movie titled Inserts, which had made its way into conventional distribution channels. We’ve all read stories about the gradual mainstreaming of porn, but the early 1970s were really when it first happened: The explicit films Deep Throat and I Am Curious (Yellow) had survived legal challenges to their exhibition, and the old d

1 “A competent woman losing a job to an incompetent man is not an anomalous Election Day surprise; it is Tuesday in America,” Rebecca Traister wrote in the first major profile of Hillary Clinton since her defeat (“Citizen Clinton,” May 29–June 11). Unsurprisingly, the profile elicited an outpouring of reactions (as Alex Shephard at the New Republic wrote, it “stirred the hornets’ nest that appears to follow Clinton wherever she goes”), including a fair bit of vitriol from the lock-her-up crowd. Commenter PolsciProfessor55 responded to this, writing, “I think one of the main reasons for the nas

The world’s workers seem to be in a bad spot: A recent study found that each new industrial robot displaces six employees. Automation is on the rise in fields from radiology to volleyball coaching (page 50 of this special Jobs Issue). Workers in poorer manufacturing-reliant nations are especially vulnerable, it’s said, because their jobs could soon be done by robots. Yuval Noah Harari, author of the new book Homo Deus, speculates in a recent Bloomberg View column about the rise of a huge, embittered “useless class” living on the dole. But if work is being automated out of existence, how do yo

The meeting was apparently jovial—though we have to take the Russians’ word for it. On May 10, Donald Trump received Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak, Moscow’s ambassador to the United States, in the Oval Office. But the American president barred the White House press corps from the meeting. Footage released by the official Russian news agency, Tass, showed the three men joking and laughing, and according to leaked accounts of the meeting, Trump bragged that he had “just fired the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was crazy, a real nut job.” The reason? “

Not that long ago, Maria Nalubega, 16, suspected she was pregnant. The teen from Mbuya-Kinawataka, a slum in Uganda, had not been using contraception with her boyfriend of two years. She feared what her neighbors might think if they saw her buying condoms at the local shop. She was terrified to ask for advice from her single mother, who expected to her to abstain from sex until marriage. And she simply thought she was too young to become pregnant. In Uganda — where I also grew up — Nalubega's circumstances are not unusual. It's hard for young people to get information about sex and pregnancy.

Updated at 1 p.m. ET North Korea has released American college student Otto Warmbier, who is on his way back to the U.S. and won't be forced to serve a 15-year prison term, according to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Warmbier is in a coma, his father tells NPR. News of the University of Virginia student's medical condition came on the heels of his release. Fred Warmbier tells NPR's Emily Kopp that he's been told his son has been in a coma since sometime after his sentencing in March of 2016. Fred and Cindy Warmbier tell the AP that Otto Warmbier is now on a Medivac flight. "We want the worl

Out shopping for cleaning supplies at the local Target in a Seattle suburb last February, 55-year-old married mom Mary Kay Letourneau made small talk about the weather with Tanya Becker, an acquaintance whose children attended the same school as two of Letourneau’s daughters. “She was really well put together,” recalls Becker, 41. “She had a big smile, she seemed like she was very happy. Everything about her screamed ‘soccer mom.’ She was just so normal.” But little has ever been normal about Letourneau’s tumultuous life. The former elementary school teacher at Shorewood Elementary School in

On what was to be her wedding day, Stephanie Villarosa ate chocolate-flavored rice porridge out of a Styrofoam cup. Under normal circumstances—rings exchanged, fidelity promised, bride kissed—she and her family would have been feasting on lechón, or roasted suckling pig, a delicacy in her fiancé’s hometown of Iligan City on the island of Mindanao. Instead, Villarosa was huddled on an institutional plastic chair about 24 miles south of Iligan, inside Marawi City’s provincial government building, where she was finally safe after hiding in a house for 11 days. Outside, sniper fire crackled over

Paul M. Barrett and Robert Langreth, with James Paton David Hernandez, a 44-year-old restaurant worker and Type 1 diabetic, didn’t have insurance from 2011 through 2014 and often couldn’t afford insulin—a workhorse drug whose list price has risen more than 270 percent over the past decade. As a result of his skimping on dosages, Hernandez in 2011 suffered permanent blindness in his left eye, and three years later he experienced kidney failure. He’s since received a lifesaving kidney transplant covered by Medicare and has drug coverage under a New Jersey program for the disabled. But Hernandez

In February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Environmental Protection Agency to review the Obama administration’s Waters of the United States, or WOTUS, rule. The regulation, which was created in 2015 but was put on hold by a court later that year, aims to expand the federal government’s ability to apply anti-pollution statutes to a variety of bodies of water. This week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would be acting on the president’s order and rolling back the regulation. When he first called upon the EPA to review WOTUS, Trump cited its

In the new abnormal that defines the Donald Trump era, FBI officials sit around debating whether they should tell the president of the United States whether he’s part of an investigation into Russian subversion. Think about that. The story arc of the June 8 hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee may have been as simple to understand as the courtroom climax of any Law and Order episode: Who are you going to believe, the witness or the defendant? And make no mistake: Donald Trump was the off-stage defendant on Capitol Hill, while star witness James Comey all but pronounced the president

More than 190 Democrats in Congress have joined together to sue President Trump on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. They say Trump is violating the U.S. Constitution by profiting from business deals involving foreign governments — and doing so without congressional consent. And they want the court to make it stop. Trump has "repeatedly and flagrantly violated" the Constitution's Emoluments Clause, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told reporters on a conference call. The clause says that "without the Consent of the Congress," the president can't accept benefits "of any kind

In the future, when a couple wants to reproduce, “they will not make a baby in a bed or in the backseat or a car, or under a ‘Keep Off the Grass’ sign,” says Henry Greely, the director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford Law School. Instead, they will go to a clinic. Using stem cells from the couple’s skin or other non-reproductive organs, scientists will be able to make eggs and sperm, which will be combined into embryos. “Each of those embryos will have its own gene sequence,” Greely says. “The parents will be asked: ‘What do you want to know about these embryos?’ And they’

If you had to put a price on your life, what cash amount do you think it would be? What about $100,000? That was the amount, last June, that a group of kidnappers in Atlanta demanded in exchange for a woman’s life. Not high enough? Well, in a statistical sense, certain government agencies value a human life significantly more. In 2010, for example, both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration put a price on human life: $9.1 million (in proposing stricter air pollution regulations) and $7.9 million (in proposing new cigarette warning labels), respectively. On it

By 1997, the South Koreans were pretty cocky, and for good reason. For 30 years, the East Asian country had been one of history’s economic marvels, transforming itself from a poor, war-torn wasteland into a rich industrial powerhouse. The economy wasn’t perfect: Korea’s big companies were prone to amassing too much debt and investing it in outlandish projects. But the Koreans had shrugged off such problems again and again. The future seemed secure. It wasn’t. On July 2, 1997—almost exactly 20 years ago—authorities in Thailand relinquished their control over the national currency, the baht. Wi

Sunday was “trivialize violence against the media” day for President Trump. Thursday was “fly to Warsaw and champion Western values day.” As presidential speeches go, Trump’s address in Warsaw was fair. Ish. If you forget who is speaking and what that person has been saying and doing since Inauguration Day—since the opening of his campaign in 2015—and really through his career. But if you remember those things, the speech jolted you to attention again and again. “We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.” This must be an example of what the grammaria

Updated for clarification at 12:15 p.m. ET Last month, Democratic Senator Ed Markey delivered what seemed like an explosive bit of news during an interview with CNN: A grand jury had been impaneled in New York, he said, to investigate the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. The only problem: It wasn’t true. The precise origins of the rumor are difficult to pin down, but it had been ricocheting around social media for days before Markey’s interview. The story had no reliable sourcing, and not a single credible news outlet touched it—but it had been fervently championed by The Palmer

Mikhail Ogorodnikov hadn’t been planning to speak at the rally until someone handed him a megaphone. It was a cold day in March in the Russian city of Vladimir, with dirty snow still stiff on the ground, and many in the crowd in front of Ogorodnikov were roughly his age, 16. As he gathered his thoughts, a strange fact occurred to him: the man they were rallying against, Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been in power longer than most of them had been alive. “For the past 17 years, this man has been robbing the country I love,” he shouted into the bullhorn. “He doesn’t want this country to

Biologist Eric Verdin considers aging a disease. His research group famously discovered several enzymes, including sirtuins, that play an important role in how our mitochondria—the powerhouses of our cells—age. His studies in mice have shown that the stress caused by calorie restriction activates sirtuins, increasing mitochondrial activity and slowing aging. In other words, in the lab, calorie restriction in mice allows them to live longer. His work has inspired many mitochondrial hacks—diets, supplements, and episodic fasting plans—but there is not yet evidence that these findings translate t

In the beginning, it was almost possible to believe Donald Trump had a coherent worldview. There were those, like Walter Russell Mead in Foreign Affairs, who argued that the president had a purposeful, Andrew Jackson-inspired “America First” policy. Alliances and treaties, especially trade deals, would be measured according to a narrow definition of national interest rather than long-term global stability. This was a simplistic, nearsighted strategy, but at least it made some political sense. It was what his constituency wanted. The primacy of domestic electoral considerations has certainly be

Updated | By the time Michael Flynn was fired as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser in February, he had made a lot of bad decisions. One was taking money from the Russians (and failing to disclose it); another was taking money under the table from the Turks. But an overlooked line in his financial disclosure form, which he was forced to amend to detail those foreign payments, reveals he was also involved in one of the most audacious—and some say harebrained—schemes in recent memory: a plan to build scores of U.S. nuclear power plants in the Middle East. As a safety measure. In

THIS SPRING, as President Trump fired FBI director James Comey; as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, came under scrutiny for his secret conversations with Russians, including a bank executive close to Vladimir Putin; as The Wall Street Journal reported on the same bank’s murky connection to a foreign Trump development; as the commander-in-chief used his private club at Mar-a-Lago to host the Chinese president, to the delight of its dues-paying members (while also ordering a missile strike on Syria); as the House sought documents from Trump’s favored lender, Deutsche Bank, and the Treasury Departm

At the bar of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, you can order a crystal spoonful of Hungarian wine for $140. Cocktails run from $23 for a gin and tonic to $100 for a vodka concoction with raw oysters and caviar. There’s a seafood pyramid called “the Trump Tower” that costs $120, or you can hit BLT Prime, a restaurant where the $59 salt-aged Kansas City strip steak comes with a long-shot chance of seeing the President sitting nearby. It’s the only restaurant in town where he has dined. If the urge to shop strikes, there’s a Brioni boutique in one corner that offers the same Italian s

Three years ago, the Islamic State overran large swaths of Iraq and Syria, and soon declared a caliphate that straddled the border between the two countries. Today, the group's physical caliphate is declining — and the group is preparing its base of fighters for a future under siege. One of the ways it is doing that is through its musical propaganda. In the most austere interpretations of Islam, musical instruments are prohibited. But the a cappella hymn, nasheed in Arabic, is permissible. The Islamic State has used nasheeds to spread its message since its founding, disseminating battle hymns

Watching the national controversy over the White House and Russia unfold, I’m reminded of Karl Marx’s oft-quoted observation: “History repeats itself: first as tragedy, second as farce.” I was a close witness to the national tragedy that was Richard Nixon’s self-inflicted downfall as president, and I’ve recently contemplated whether a repeat of his “Saturday Night Massacre” may already be in the offing. Given how that incident doomed one president, Trump would do well to resist repeating his predecessor’s mistakes—and avoid his presidency’s descent into a quasi-Watergate parody. The massacre b

AT THE CLOSE OF the last century, the New York City Police Department switched from full-metal-jacket bullets to hollow points. It was a move meant to spare lives—in theory, anyway: The old bullets had a tendency to pass through their targets and endanger bystanders, while hollow points expand after impact, inflicting greater damage to internal organs but also increasing the likelihood that the bullet will slow to a halt inside the body. And so, on February 2, 2012, when Officer Richard Haste shot 18-year-old Ramarley Graham—who was unarmed, standing in his own bathroom—the hollow-point bullet

Results in epidemiology often are equivocal, and money can cloud science (see: tobacco companies vs. cancer researchers). Clear-cut cases are rare. Yet just such a case showed up one day in 1984 in the office of Harris Pastides, a recently appointed associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A graduate student named James Stewart, who was working his way through school as a health and safety officer at Digital Equipment Corp., told Pastides there had been a number of miscarriages at the company’s semiconductor plant in nearby Hudson, Mass. Women, especi