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Updated at 3:04 p.m. ET on October 30, 2018. Besie Katz runs an Orthodox Jewish day school in Northeast Philadelphia. During Sunday classes this week, her students were confused and saddened by the shooting that had taken place at a synagogue the previous day on the other side of the state of Pennsylvania. “The overriding question” they had, she says, “was, in different iterations, how could somebody do something like this? How could this have happened? And of course, that’s the hardest question to answer.” She told her students at Politz Hebrew Academy that “hatred consumes people like a fire,” and she stressed that Saturday’s killings were the awful result of someone who had given up on compassion, kindness, and empathy. “They seemed comforted by that,” she told me, “as much as you can be.” Over the weekend and into the week, Katz and other educators at Jewish schools around the country have been considering how best to help their students make sense of the actions of a gunman ...

Little makes sense when it comes to the massacre of 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday. But after media identified the suspect, Robert D. Bowers, and duly excavated his apparent social-media postings, there was at least a hint of what was in his mind: By his own account, he was acting in the grip of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. In this, Bowers resembles the man who allegedly mailed pipe bombs to more than a dozen public figures last week, and whose purported social-media accounts were similarly awash in delusions of shadowy forces scheming at oppression. Their experiences were in keeping with those of extremists the world over. Where terrorists strike, whether it’s a lone extremist or a band of attackers, the perpetrators frequently embrace some kind of conspiratorial thinking. And anti-Semitism is a malevolent recurring theme. For jihadists, it’s the belief that Islam is under attack by a Judeo-Christian West. For neo-Nazis, it’s the belief that Jews are secr...

“It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties,” James Madison wrote in 1785. President Donald Trump confirmed Tuesday that he plans to move from experimentation on liberty into widespread application of the tyrant’s playbook.   In an interview with Axios on HBO, Trump confirmed what had been suspected since last summer: He is planning an executive order that would try to change the meaning of the Constitution as it has been applied for the past 150 years—and declare open season on millions of native-born Americans. The order would apparently instruct federal agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States if their parents are not citizens. The Axios report was unclear on whether the order would target only American-born children of undocumented immigrants, children of foreigners visiting the U.S. on nonpermanent visas—or the children of any noncitizen. [ Garrett Epps: The Fourteenth Amendment can’t be revoked by exec...

Paul Volcker’s 6-foot-7-inch frame was draped over a chaise longue when I spoke with him recently in his Upper East Side apartment, in Manhattan. He is in his 91st year and very ill, and he tires easily. But his voice is still gruff, and his brain is still sharp. We talked about his forthcoming memoir, Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government —about why he wrote the book and the lessons he hopes to impart. Volcker is not a vain man, but he knows that his public life was consequential, and he wants posterity to get it right. He also does not mince words. In our conversation, he assailed the “greed and grasping” of the banks and corporate leadership, and the gross skewing of income distribution in America. Keeping at It , written with Christine Harper, an editor at Bloomberg, is primarily the chronicle of Paul Volcker’s public life, which was spent in the thin air of global finance. After graduating from Princeton in 1949, he studied economics at Harvard and then in...

President Donald Trump is proposing removing the right to U.S. citizenship for children born to noncitizens on U.S. soil—a move that could spark fierce debate over the Fourteenth Amendment and American identity. In a new interview with Axios , the president said he intends to revoke birthright citizenship through an executive order. “It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” Trump said in the interview, part of which aired Tuesday morning. He continued: “You can definitely do it with an act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.” This isn’t the first time the president has suggested he’d like to end the right. In 2015, then-candidate Trump also expressed an intent to end birthright citizenship, calling it “the biggest magnet for illegal immigration.” His stated intent takes direct aim at the Constitution and the millions of people who were born in the United States to immigrant parents. “This ...

Meters, kilograms, degrees Celsius. To most Americans, these units of measurement are little more than funny inconveniences on trips abroad. To scientists, they’re the very standards that allow for meaningful comparisons of experiments. But to historians of metrology—the study of measurement—those innocuous-looking units are something else entirely: the culmination of a long, fraught battle against tyranny. In centuries past, lords and ministers in Europe and beyond often manipulated units to steal land, fix commodities markets, cheat peasants out of goods, and wring extra labor and taxes out of them. Fluctuating units also helped concentrate power in the hands of despots. Using a ruler or scale might not seem like a political act, but according to the late Polish historian Witold Kula, in his book Measures and Men , units of length, weight, and volume in the past were both “instrument[s] of asserting class privilege” and “the center of a bitter class struggle” dating back several mil...

Before the Pod Save America podcast even existed, there was Keepin’ It 1600 , a breezy political roundtable hosted by four strategists and speechwriters who used to work in Barack Obama’s administration—Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor. In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, they offered their perspectives from campaigns past, discussed strategies for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and commented, aghast, on the rise of Republican nominee Donald Trump. “I thought of Keepin’ It 1600 as the last thing I was gonna do in politics,” Pfeiffer recalled recently in an Atlantic interview with the four hosts. The election, of course, didn’t go the way they expected, and that initial calculation about Keepin’ It 1600 quickly shifted. We had “watched political punditry for all those years, become frustrated by it, and now we had a podcast where we could blow off some steam,” Favreau said. “What changed with Trump’s election was us thinking—instead of us b...

It’s not that I think wearing Toms with socks to work is a good look, per se. I admire your d’Orsay oxfords and fun mules. But unfortunately, when it comes to shoes, my only criteria is “Will these cause my feet to dribble blood all over my open-plan office?” I am simply not meant to wear professional office flats. I can’t wear Payless flats, but I also can’t wear the premium, handcrafted-in-Italy, join-the-wait-list flats. I don’t even attempt heels. No matter what brand they are, what width or size, any shoes that you can’t play basketball in will, inevitably, rub Medieval-looking holes into my foot skin. Every month, I succumb to an Instagram advertisement or a Strategist post purporting to have found the holy grail of women’s footwear: comfortable and work-appropriate. Reluctantly, my shoe-price ceiling has risen with the number of subcutaneous infections brewing on my heels. I buy them with a renewed sense of hope every time. Every time, I eagerly unwrap the shoes, slide th...

Climate change is crashing into America’s courts. As the science gets more conclusive, the reality more sobering, and the predictions more dire, the executive and legislative branches have refused to act. That leaves the judicial branch. In theory, courts are a good place for climate science. Unlike legislative bodies, where bills based on science can be derailed just because a few people say they don’t “believe in” climate change, the courts have evidentiary standards. If something’s real, it’s real. The facts accepted by 98 percent of scientists worldwide represent pretty convincing evidence. In the past couple of years, activists and attorneys and even state governments have been trying to use the courts to force action, protect those who take matters into their own hands, and wring payouts from offending companies. These climate cases are taking a number of different forms. And they’re lined up to the horizon. First there are civil-rights cases, which fault the government for ...

Here’s the real news of the 2018 midterm elections. One week out, Democrats appear poised to win big on two of the three big playing fields. They were never going to retake the Senate, if only because of the mix of seats up for election this year—10 of those held by Democrats are in states Donald Trump carried in 2016. But in the House of Representatives and in state houses around the country, Democrats are on the verge of scoring huge victories. Given the underlying economic reality, that’s entirely unexpected. It’s a story the Democratic National Committee has, until recently, utterly failed to tell. Until recently, the DNC was focused almost exclusively on the battle for Congress. I’m glad it has finally taken notice of the fact that 36 states are holding gubernatorial contests this year and that Democrats are likely to flip many of the most important state houses from red to blue. But from a strategic standpoint, it’s been very late to the game—although it’s better to be late tha...

President Donald Trump doesn’t get enough appreciation for the fact that the national-security policies he campaigned on, he is carrying out: withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iranian nuclear deal; renegotiating NAFTA ; trying to have good relations with Russia; resetting the rules of international institutions, agreements, and relationships, including getting tough on allies. What he said he would do, he has largely done. What his administration has not done is align its policies so that they are mutually supporting. The Trump-administration policies are contradictory, and undercut one another to an extent that verges on professional malpractice. So, for example, Trump bewails German dependence on Russian gas with respect to Germany’s participation in the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline while insisting we need better relations with the Russians, while withdrawing from the INF Treaty over bitter Russian objections, while expecting Russian support for more draconian sanctio...