Fraud Alert Regarding The Atlantic

Portrait of a Party on the Verge of Coming Apart

Molly Ball

With the Iowa caucuses just two weeks away, can Republicans reconcile themselves to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz? Or will the GOP break into pieces?

CHARLESTON, South Carolina—For a certain type of Republican, the fantasy world where Donald Trump is not winning the GOP primary is a very nice place to live.

Beth Hansen, the campaign manager for John Kasich, is this type of Republican. Hansen is speaking to a crowd that’s gathered in a smokehouse bar in this city’s elegant, cobblestoned downtown, describing vividly a world where Kasich, the unvarnished, moderate governor of Ohio, is actually poised to win. This is not, to put it mildly, a world most political observers can currently envision.

“Our surge in New Hampshire is less than four weeks away!” Hansen says, to scattered applause from the group of several dozen clean-cut people in bow ties and long wool coats. “I feel really good about our ground game,” she adds. “We don’t rely on the public polls.”

What ISIS Really Wants

Graeme Wood

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

All Hollowed Out

Victor Tan Chen

The lonely poverty of America’s white working class

For the last several months, social scientists have been debating the striking findings of a study by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.* Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily improving life expectancy. While critics have challenged the magnitude and timing of the rise in middle-age deaths (particularly for men), they and the study’s authors alike seem to agree on some basic points: Problems of mental health and addiction have taken a terrible toll on whites in America—though seemingly not in other wealthy nations—and the least educated among them have fared the worst.

The Religious Right's Donald Trump Dilemma

Molly Ball

The Republican candidate’s speech at Liberty University divides evangelical leaders, revealing a split in the so-called values vote.

There were many unbelievable moments over the course of Donald Trump’s speech on Monday at Liberty University, the evangelical college founded by the late Jerry Falwell.

There was his citation of the Bible: “Two Corinthians 3-17, that's the whole ball game. … Is that the one? Is that the one you like? I think that's the one you like.”

There was the part where he ranked his favorite books, calling The Art of the Deal “a deep, deep second to the Bible. The Bible is the best. The Bible blows it away.”

There was his pledge to win the war on Christmas: “If I'm president, you're going to see ‘Merry Christmas’ in department stores, believe me.”

And there was a delightful new twist on his oft-repeated claim that Americans will be overwhelmed with winning: “If I'm president, you'll say, ‘Please, Mr. President, we're winning too much. I can't stand it. Can't we have a loss?’ And I’ll say, ‘No, we're going to keep winning.’”

The Divorce-Proof Marriage

Olga Khazan

Your income, how long you dated, and how many people attend your wedding affect the odds you'll stay together.

A diamond is forever, but an expensive engagement ring means the marriage might not last that long. According to a new study, spending between $2,000 and $4,000 on an engagement ring is significantly associated with an increase in the risk of divorce.

The data scientist Randal Olson recently visualized some of the findings from a paper by Andrew Francis and Hugo Mialon, two researchers at Emory University who studied 3,000 married couples in the U.S. to determine the factors that predicted divorce. They analyzed income, religious attendance, how important attractiveness was to each partner, wedding attendance, and other metrics to determine the aspects associated with eventual marital dissolution.

The Selective Outrage of the Anglican Church

Jonathan Merritt

The global communion suspended its Episcopal branch for accepting same-sex marriage—yet has failed to address dubious behavior of its leaders elsewhere.

For the worldwide Anglican Communion, the world’s largest Protestant denomination, sexuality has become a line in the sand.

The Episcopal Church, Anglicanism’s American branch, was suspended on Thursday for three years for its willingness to consecrate same-sex marriages. But the punishment is not expected to dissuade Episcopalian leaders. As Jim Naughton, a communications consultant for the Episcopal Church said, “We can accept these actions with grace and humility but the Episcopal Church is not going back. We can’t repent what is not sin.”

But the denomination’s decision should not be interpreted as a theologically orthodox parent lovingly disciplining its rebellious child. Beneath the Anglican Communion’s actions against the Episcopal Church lies selective outrage, with the Episcopal Church being punished for its attempt to interpret doctrine, while unambiguous sins of other leaders have gone unaddressed.

ADHD Is Different for Women

Maria Yagoda

The standard conception of the disorder is based on studies of "hyperactive young white boys." For females, it comes on later, and has different symptoms.

When you live in total squalor—cookies in your pants drawer, pants in your cookies drawer, and nickels, dresses, old New Yorkers, and apple seeds in your bed—it’s hard to know where to look when you lose your keys. The other day, after two weeks of fruitless searching, I found my keys in the refrigerator on top of the roasted garlic hummus. I can’t say I was surprised. I was surprised when my psychiatrist diagnosed me with ADHD two years ago, when I was a junior at Yale.

In editorials and in waiting rooms, concerns of too-liberal diagnoses and over-medication dominate our discussions of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. The New York Times recently reported, with great alarm, the findings of a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study: 11 percent of school-age children have received an ADHD diagnosis, a 16 percent increase since 2007. And rising diagnoses mean rising treatments—drugs like Adderall and Ritalin are more accessible than ever, whether prescribed by a physician or purchased in a library. The consequences of misuse and abuse of these drugs are dangerous, sometimes fatal.

The Blood Harvest

Alexis C. Madrigal

Each year, half a million horseshoe crabs are captured and bled alive to create an unparalleled biomedical technology.

The thing about the blood that everyone notices first: It's blue, baby blue.

The marvelous thing about horseshoe crab blood, though, isn't the color. It's a chemical found only in the amoebocytes of its blood cells that can detect mere traces of bacterial presence and trap them in inescapable clots.

To take advantage of this biological idiosyncrasy, pharmaceutical companies burst the cells that contain the chemical, called coagulogen. Then, they can use the coagulogen to detect contamination in any solution that might come into contact with blood. If there are dangerous bacterial endotoxins in the liquid—even at a concentration of one part per trillion—the horseshoe crab blood extract will go to work, turning the solution into what scientist Fred Bang, who co-discovered the substance, called a "gel."

When Emotional Intelligence Goes Wrong

Andrew Giambrone

People skills can be dangerous.

“People skills” are almost always assumed to be a good thing. Search employment ads and you will find them listed as a qualification for a startling array of jobs, including Applebee’s host, weight-loss specialist, CEO, shoe salesperson, and (no joke) animal-care coordinator. The notion that people smarts might help you succeed got a boost a quarter century ago, when the phrase emotional intelligence, or EI, entered the mainstream. Coined in a 1990 study [1], the term was popularized by Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book [2]. Since then, scores of researchers have shown how being in touch with feelings—both your own and other people’s—gives you an edge: compared with people who have average EI, those with high EI do better at work [3], have fewer health problems [4], and report greater life satisfaction [5].

What Tinder and Halo Have in Common

Michelle Ehrhardt

The ranking system that determines potential connections uses similar algorithms to multiplayer video games.

A familiar modern scenario: You spend hours in matchmaking waiting to get picked for a quick game of Halo, but see no results. You’re swiping right all day on Tinder, but nobody swipes back. In the 21st century, browsing for dates can seem a lot like being stuck while looking for matches in a multiplayer game lobby. Even when you’re itching to play, you can’t get started until the game shows you a match you might be interested in.

Comparisons between dating and gaming are commonplace in modern culture, and thanks to a recent profile on Tinder from Fast Company, it turns out this connection is less superficial than many might think. Just as more matches become available when a Call of Duty player “ranks up,” Tinder queues mysteriously start to fill with prospects when the app’s users deem you “more desirable.” So how does this happen?