The Creative Process of a Paralyzed Screenwriter

Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s

Olga Khazan

A new study finds that people today who eat and exercise the same amount as people 20 years ago are still fatter.

There’s a meme aimed at Millennial catharsis called “Old Economy Steve.” It’s a series of pictures of a late-70s teenager, who presumably is now a middle-aged man, that mocks some of the messages Millennials say they hear from older generations—and shows why they’re deeply janky. Old Economy Steve graduates and gets a job right away. Old Economy Steve “worked his way through college” because tuition was $400. And so forth.

We can now add another one to that list: Old Economy Steve ate at McDonald’s almost every day, and he still somehow had a 32-inch waist.

A study published recently in the journal Obesity Research & Clinical Practice found that it’s harder for adults today to maintain the same weight as those 20 to 30 years ago did, even at the same levels of food intake and exercise.

The Coddling of the American Mind

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

The Slave-State Origins of Modern Gun Rights

Saul Cornell and Eric M. Ruben

The idea that citizens have an unfettered constitutional right to carry weapons in public originates in the antebellum South, and its culture of violence and honor.

Gun-rights advocates have waged a relentless battle to gut what remains of America’s lax and inadequate gun regulations. In the name of the Second Amendment, they are challenging the constitutionality of state and municipal “may issue” regulations that restrict the right to carry weapons in public to persons who can show a compelling need to be armed. A few courts are starting to take these challenges seriously. But what the advocates do not acknowledge—and some courts seem not to understand—is that their arguments are grounded in precedent unique to the violent world of the slaveholding South.

Claims that “may issue” regulations are unconstitutional have been rejected by most federal appellate courts—that is, until last year, when a court in California broke ranks and struck down San Diego’s public-carry regulation. This year, a court did the same with the District of Columbia’s rewritten handgun ordinance. Both decisions face further review from appellate courts, and perhaps also by the Supreme Court. If the justices buy this expansive view of the Second Amendment, laws in states such as New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Hawaii with the strictest public carry regulations—and some of the lowest rates of gun homicide—will be voided as unconstitutional.

What's the Matter, Whole Foods?

Adam Chandler

The upscale grocery store chain is laying off 1,500 employees as competition mounts and consumers demand lower prices.

Earlier this week, Whole Foods announced it would lay off 1,500 employees as the upscale grocery chain aims to save money and lower its prices. On the same day as the announcement, Whole Foods co-CEO Walter Robb told the crowd at a Fortune conference the entire food industry is in the midst of a “tectonic shift” as organic food goes mainstream.

That’s a pretty breezy explanation from the co-head of a company whose shares have fallen about 38 percent this year. It’s true that Whole Foods’s storied growth has been undercut by all the grocers muscling in on the company’s turf. As Helaine Olen noted in Slate:

Once an upstart, Whole Foods is now so successful that it’s spawned its own competitors. A decade ago, organic and other food like gluten-free items were considered specialty products. Whole Foods could charge high prices, because many of their customers were choosing between Whole Foods and … Whole Foods. Now Walmart carries the organic Wild Oats line of food.

Why Did Pope Francis Meet With Kim Davis?

Emma Green

The Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk spoke with the pontiff during his visit to D.C., her lawyers and the Vatican have confirmed.

The pope has left the United States, but details are still coming out about his trip. Here’s a big one: Last Thursday afternoon, during his time in Washington, D.C., he met with Kim Davis, the Rowan County clerk who has refused to perform same-sex marriages, her lawyers say.

“She left at 1:15 exactly, and she was at the Vatican [embassy] a hour and a half or so, maybe up to two hours, waiting, and that also included the meeting,” said Mat Staver, her attorney at the firm Liberty Counsel, said. Davis and her husband, Joe, met with the pope for “under 15 minutes,” Staver said. “The pope came out and greeted her, held out his hand, ask Kim to pray for him, and she clasped his hands with her hands, and asked the pope to pray for her.”

Mike Blake / Damir Sagolj / Reuters / alessandro0770 / Shutterstock / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?

Graham Allison

In 12 of 16 past cases in which a rising power has confronted a ruling power, the result has been bloodshed.

When Barack Obama meets this week with Xi Jinping during the Chinese president’s first state visit to America, one item probably won’t be on their agenda: the possibility that the United States and China could find themselves at war in the next decade. In policy circles, this appears as unlikely as it would be unwise.

And yet 100 years on, World War I offers a sobering reminder of man’s capacity for folly. When we say that war is “inconceivable,” is this a statement about what is possible in the world—or only about what our limited minds can conceive? In 1914, few could imagine slaughter on a scale that demanded a new category: world war. When war ended four years later, Europe lay in ruins: the kaiser gone, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, the Russian tsar overthrown by the Bolsheviks, France bled for a generation, and England shorn of its youth and treasure. A millennium in which Europe had been the political center of the world came to a crashing halt.

The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Ta-Nehisi Coates

American politicians are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system that’s left the U.S. with the largest incarcerated population in the world. But they've failed to reckon with history. Fifty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family” tragically helped create this system, it's time to reclaim his original intent.

By his own lights, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador, senator, sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a broken home and a pathological family. He was born in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised mostly in New York City. When Moynihan was 10 years old, his father, John, left the family, plunging it into poverty. Moynihan’s mother, Margaret, remarried, had another child, divorced, moved to Indiana to stay with relatives, then returned to New York, where she worked as a nurse. Moynihan’s childhood—a tangle of poverty, remarriage, relocation, and single motherhood—contrasted starkly with the idyllic American family life he would later extol.

When Schools Overlook Introverts

Michael Godsey

As the focus on group work and collaboration increases, classrooms are neglecting the needs of students who work better in quiet settings.

When Susan Cain published Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking nearly four years ago, it was immediately met with acclaim. The book criticizes schools and other key institutions for primarily accommodating extroverts and such individuals’ “need for lots of stimulation.” Much to introverts’ relief, it also seeks to raise awareness about the personality type, particularly among those who’ve struggled to understand it.

It seems that such efforts have, for the most part, struggled to effect much change in the educational world. The way in which certain instructional trends—education buzzwords like “collaborative learning” and “project-based learning” and “flipped classrooms”—are applied often neglect the needs of introverts. In fact, these trends could mean that classroom environments that embrace extroverted behavior—through dynamic and social learning activities—are being promoted now more than ever. These can be appealing qualities in the classroom, of course, but overemphasizing them can undermine the learning of students who are inward-thinking and easily drained by constant interactions with others.

How Tasteless Suburbs Become Beloved Urban Neighborhoods

Daniel Hertz

The same bungalows that some now see as charming appeared tacky to the people who watched them get built up.

All around the country, people in communities of many ages—from colonial Boston to postwar Minneapolis—tell similar, virtuous narratives about how their neighborhoods were built. These narratives, in turn, set powerful assumptions about what an affordable, friendly neighborhood can and should look like. Recently, a columnist in Seattle Magazine laid out his version of the story as he argued that housing just isn't what it used to be. “In a rapidly growing city where the haves have more and the have-nots are being squeezed out, the bungalows offer a lesson we ought to relearn,” he wrote, adding that those early 20th century bungalows “reflect a lack of materialism, housing built not for profit, but for living in.” He wanted his city “to find a way to get back to those values.”

The Very Sudden Arrival of Hurricane Joaquin

Adam Chandler

Just a few days ago, the East Coast was in for some rain. Now, there may be a serious storm.

Although science may be capable of proving humanity’s disdain for Mondays, this past Monday wasn’t so bad. The world found out there is water on Mars. Many of us had just enjoyed a supermoon-cum-lunar eclipse. And, just two days ago, the heavy rain predicted to hit the East Coast was not attached to a hurricane.

And now, there’s Hurricane Joaquin, which by some accounts, may make landfall by the weekend and is already eliciting comparisons to previous disasters:

Sandy? #Joaquin pic.twitter.com/DvPUyd2PUp
— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) September 30, 2015

Heavy Joaquin-related precipitation is already expected with the potential for over a foot of rain in the Bahamas. While meteorologists still aren’t certain if the hurricane will hit land, some are predicting that downpours from other weather systems, very strong winds, and some flooding will happen regardless of weather Joaquin reaches the United States. Others yet are warning that the storm could strengthen as it reaches warmer water.