Attention to the Unseen

Francis Wilkinson writes: President Donald Trump may ultimately be a unifying force on one of the most divisive issues in U.S. politics: immigration. That’s not Trump’s intent, of course. Having launched his presidential campaign in 2015 with a demagogic assault on immigrants, Trump has been a reliable fount of calumny ever since. His policies, from brutalizing children at the border — a 7-year-old girl died in U.S. custody last week — to terminating Temporary Protected Status for refugees, appear designed…

Read More Read More

Julian E. Zelizer writes: The federal government released a devastating report last week documenting the immense economic and human cost that the U.S. will incur as a result of climate change. It warns that the damage to roads alone will add up to $21 billion by the end of the century. In certain parts of the Midwest, farms will produce 75 percent less corn than today, while ocean acidification could result in $230 billion in financial losses. More people will…

Read More Read More

Bari Weiss writes: Paris. Toulouse. Malmo. Copenhagen. Brussels. Berlin. For most people, they are lovely cities where you might happily take a holiday. But for the world’s Jews, they are something else, too. They are place names of hate. Paris for us doesn’t mean just baguettes and Brie but also this year’s murder of a Holocaust survivor in her apartment in the 11th arrondissement and the 2015 siege of a kosher supermarket during which four people were killed. Toulouse is…

Read More Read More

Bryan Mealer reports from the migrant caravan: María Cáceres’s son Javier, who is 15, has Down’s syndrome. He’s a tall, chunky kid, with short dark hair, a missing front tooth, and eyes that are permanently crossed. María tells me how they fled San Pedro Sula after gang members constantly harassed her family for bribes and “taxes”. When they couldn’t pay, some men burned down their house, then murdered her two brothers. María had just finished burying them when – on…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: A little girl from Honduras stares into the camera, her young features contorted in anguish. She’s barefoot, dusty, and clad only in a diaper and T-shirt. And she’s just had to run from clouds of choking tear gas fired across the border by U.S. agents. A second photograph, which also circulated widely and rapidly on social media, shows an equally anguished woman frantically trying to drag the same child and a second toddler away from the…

Read More Read More

60 Minutes reports: This past week, a federal judge struck down the president’s latest immigration order. It’s been a chaotic two years on the border as the administration imposed barriers with little consideration of their legality or consequences. The 2017 ban on travelers from Muslim countries was so abrupt it surprised the officers who had to enforce it. Before the midterm elections, President Trump ordered thousands of troops to Texas to stop what he called “an assault” by a caravan…

Read More Read More

Sabrina Tavernise reports: As the country catches its breath after one of the most acrimonious midterm elections in years, it would be easy to conclude that all of America is hopelessly divided — a land where two angry tribes are at each other’s throats and everybody thinks about politics all the time. But the reality is far less extreme. A deep new study of the American electorate, “Hidden Tribes,” concludes that two out of three Americans are far more practical…

Read More Read More

The Atlantic reports: Cecil and David Rosenthal were buried in matching caskets made of wood, each adorned with a single Jewish star. The brothers, 59 and 54, were two of the 11 Jews killed in Pittsburgh on Saturday, remembered by all as irrepressibly friendly synagogue regulars. But they were also vulnerable in a different way than the other victims of the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue: The brothers lived with profound intellectual impairment; Cecil, for example, could neither read…

Read More Read More