Newsweek 02/15/2019

1964 In the U.S. at mid-century, poverty carried “a special frustration,” Newsweek wrote, because “to be poor in America today is to be out of step with the nation, a stranger in paradise, a frequently faceless member of an alien culture.” Society had finally “attained the technological resources to wipe out poverty,” yet those advancements were the very things “aggravating the plight” of the have-nots. Over 50 years later, with poverty affecting over 11.5 million American children and looming anxieties about artificial intelligence, technology has taken that “special frustration” and raised it. 1974 William Friedkin’s massive hit The Exorcist “brought into frenzied focus the underground anxieties, fantasies and fears that have lately broken through the surface of contemporary society,” Newsweek wrote. The “rare and dying art” of exorcism tapped into that confusion, raising…

Opposition leader and self-proclaimed “acting president” of Venezuela Juan Guaidó stands with his family and addresses the press outside his home on January 31. That declaration by the 35-year-old leader of the National Assembly set off international controversy and was a direct challenge to President Nicolás Maduro, whose landslide re-election last year was widely seen as rigged. Thousands of supporters took to the streets to cheer Guaidó. At least 27 countries, including the U.S., have recognized Guaidó’s government. Concerned about setting a precedent for coups, though, EU ministers are backing him only until a new election can be held.…

CHRIS CHRISTIE IS A MAN OF DONALD TRUMP’S ilk. Both grew up in the shadows of Manhattan dreaming of the riches that come with success and notoriety. Both are boisterous but make up for their bombast with charm. And both men always take it personally. Their political paths diverged from there. Trump became president, while Christie, once America’s favorite bully, saw his White House ambitions engulfed in scandal over, of all things, a traffic jam (remember Bridgegate?). The two-term governor of New Jersey ended his tenure as the least popular chief executive in state history, after being fired from running Trump’s transition team. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, Christie’s thirst for vengeance reaches Princess Bride levels in Let Me Finish, his first book, published by Hachette in late January. The book works to settle…

WHEN THE NEW YORK TIMES printed a wild headline asserting that the FBI had investigated whether President Donald Trump was possibly a Russian agent, I was furious. However, I was also reminded of another time in our nation’s history in which the press was this hostile to the American president. I called Trump and told him no president since Abraham Lincoln had faced the kind of unending bias and hostility that he is living through. Indeed, the conservative Media Research Center reported for both 2017 and 2018 that the mainstream evening TV newscasts had been at least 90 percent anti-Trump in their reporting. This relentless hostility parallels what Lincoln had to endure in the media. Many news outlets opposed Lincoln from the beginning—much like Trump. Upon Lincoln’s election, the Memphis Daily Appeal wrote on…

IN EARLY JANUARY, LESS THAN a week after Democrats took control of the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi stood before a podium and made one of her highest priorities clear: gun control. It was the eighth anniversary of a grim day in modern American history—the shooting that nearly killed then-Representative Gabby Giffords at a constituent event in Arizona. “It’s a day of grief,” Pelosi said at a crowded press conference in the Capitol, “but also a day of action.” She introduced Giffords, who now runs a political action committee dedicated to gun safety, and veteran Representative Mike Thompson of California, the chairman of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force. Congress, they say, must pass legislation to expand background checks before gun purchases. But then Pelosi did something unusual: She turned to acknowledge…

THE GUN VIOLENCE ARCHIVE DEFINES A SCHOOL shooting as “an incident that occurs on property of the elementary, secondary or college campus where there is a death or injury from gunfire.” The archive, a nonprofit that began tracking school shootings in 2014, after a gunman killed 20 first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, has recorded 239 subsequent school shootings nationwide, with 438 people shot and 138 killed. Our list—which begins in 1999 with Columbine High School and ends this past December in Indiana—is more expansive. Some media outlets don’t count incidents that result in no fatalities or injuries. We decided to include them to show the scope of the problem of guns on campuses, which receive little publicity except in local news when there are no…