Newsweek 01/04/2019

2005 With John Kerry’s bruising defeat still recent, Barack Obama’s “electrifying speech” at the 2004 Democratic convention had made him a top contender for 2008. “Obama isn’t cocky, but he is confident and fully prepared to step into a leadership role for the Democrats,” Jonathan Alter reported. The 43-year-old senator was not accustomed to the attention. “I’m so overexposed, I make Paris Hilton look like a recluse,” he joked. The accompanying photos reveal just how much his subsequent presidency aged him. 1941 Germany had conquered France in 1940, and a profile of Walther von Brauchitsch, Hitler’s “guiding spirit in all expansionist moves,” had Newsweek alarmed by its aggression toward Britain. The U.S. had yet to enter World War II, but President Franklin Roosevelt told the nation, “Frankly and definitely, there is…

AN UNSEASONABLE ICY COLD SWEPT INTO Washington in mid-December, like a celestial omen that winter was coming for Donald Trump’s presidency. With the sentencing of three former key aides, including his personal lawyer Michael Cohen, and the guilty pleas and prosecutorial cooperation agreements of others, the administration seemed suspended between the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end. In guarded conversations on the edges of holiday cocktail parties in the capital’s power corridors, Republicans, Democrats and longtime “deep state” bureaucrats seemed to recognize that a turning point had been reached. The end, perhaps, was in sight, if not near. “I can’t imagine he’ll escape the traps Robert Mueller has set for him,” one top former national security official whispered, speaking of the special counsel investigation on condition of…

FOR A MOMENT, THE SOUTH Korean official was silent. It was late December, and, with negotiations between the United States and North Korea at a stalemate, I had asked a straightforward question: What, exactly, does the “denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula mean? The matter is at the heart of the historic talks Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un began in Singapore last June. The South Korean official, a senior adviser to President Moon Jae-in, let out a deep sigh. “There is no consensus,” the official said, “not between us and the U.S., not between North Korea and the U.S.; not, frankly, even within our own government.” That answer is the principal reason why the once-thawing relations between the two sides now seem to be getting colder. Trump, of course, had famously declared…

AT A GLAMOROUS EVENT IN DECEMBER AT THE NEW York Public Library in Manhattan, an international who’s who—Princess Beatrice of York, model Karlie Kloss, David Rockefeller, Wendi Deng Murdoch and Kerry Kennedy among them—gathered to honor the closest thing philosophy has to a rock star: Martha Nussbaum. The elegant source of their admiration was being celebrated at the third annual Berggruen Prize Gala; the award, which includes a $1 million endowment, is given to “thinkers whose ideas have helped us find direction, wisdom, and improved self-understanding in a world being rapidly transformed by profound social, technological, political, cultural, and economic change.” The 71-year-old Nussbaum, a moral philosopher and law professor at the University of Chicago, is passionately concerned with justice and how it affects the personal and political. But her interest…

MASS SHOOTINGS, #METOO, FAMILY separation, climate change, impeachment. The world is dark and getting darker. Or at least that’s what it seems like from the relentless barrage of push alerts and Facebook posts blowing up our phones. In turn, we get angry, we despair, we withdraw. It’s a vicious cycle, with seemingly no reprieve. “We in the media—because of our own need for eyeballs and clicks and profits—we’re not telling the healing stories,” says author Irshad Manji, who is among the people Newsweek spoke to about how to move beyond fear and begin to fix our nation’s problems. “We’re telling the stories of the conflicts. We need to hear both.” BY Stacey Abrams I BELIEVE IN ASKING THREE questions before moving forward: What do I want? Why do I want it? And how…

JUST AS DINOSAURS CHARACTERIZED THE CRETACEOUS PERIOD, which ended with their extinction 66 million years ago, and mammals made up the Holocene, which extends to the present day, many scientists believe we need to designate a new geologic age, called the Anthropocene, that reflects the impact of humankind on the planet. That raises the question, What will constitute the most salient feature of the Anthropocene in the fossil record? It’s likely to be chicken bones, according to a study by Carys Bennett, from the U.K.’s University of Leicester, and colleagues published last month in Royal Society Open Science. Humans eat a lot of chicken, which means a lot of chicken bones are being buried, and many of them are likely to survive in fossilized form. According to Bennett’s paper, 65.8 billion chickens…