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            <h1 class="hed" itemprop="headline">September Is the Strongest Hurricane Month Ever Recorded—<em>Probably</em></h1>
            
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                        <span class="caption">The eye of Hurricane Jose over the open Atlantic Ocean, as captured by the Sentinel-2A satellite on September 9</span>
                    
                    
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        <section id="article-section-1"><p>Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katia, and Maria. Over the past 30 days, some of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean have prompted a diluvial flood, a mass migration, and an ongoing humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico.</p><p>It can feel like there’s little precedent for so many hurricanes in so short a time. In fact, there isn’t—at least within living memory.</p><p>According to early estimates, September 2017 is already the most energetic month for hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean ever recorded, even though the month is not yet over. The month’s accumulated cyclone-energy index of 155.4 breaks the previous record of 155.0, set in September 2004.</p><p>“September 2017 has also set the monthly record for major hurricane days and looks to probably set the record for hurricane days (and possibly named storm days) as well,” says Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University who researches the history of Atlantic hurricanes.</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector1" targeting-pos="boxinjector1" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-2"><p>The month was so powerful that it has assured certain records for the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season as a whole, which is already among the 10 strongest seasons ever measured. Two Category 5 storms (with wind speeds exceeding 157 miles per hour) formed this year. Only a handful of years before this one have seen multiple Category 5 storms take shape: 1932, 1933, 1961, 2005, and 2007.</p><p>And only once before in history, in 2007, did multiple Category 5 storms make landfall in North America.</p><p>The new record verifies that something extremely unusual is happening in the Atlantic Ocean this year. It also sets the coming autumn in perspective: <a href="https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/near-la-nina-atlantic-hurricane-season-oct-nov2017" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'541185'">With a La Niña current budding in the Pacific</a>, the final two months of the Atlantic season will likely see a higher-than-normal number of tropical cyclones. (Hurricanes normally stop forming around November 30.)</p><p>But the record also provides a glance into the messy nature of the Atlantic hurricane record. Over the past decade, our understanding of that record has changed—as has what researchers can safely say about the effects of human-caused climate change.</p><aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore">“It’s unambiguous that over the last 30 years, hurricane activity in the Atlantic has increased.”</aside><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accumulated_cyclone_energy" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'1',r'541185'">Accumulated cyclone energy</a>, abbreviated ACE, measures the strength of a single hurricane over its lifetime. Because it’s a durational measure, it can also gauge the intensity of an individual month or an entire hurricane season. Meteorologists calculate ACE by taking a hurricane’s maximum wind speed every six hours, then summing the squares of those figures. They divide the final product by 10,000 to make it easier to use.</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector2" targeting-pos="boxinjector2" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-3"><p>Hurricane records in some form go back more than a century. The U.S. Signal Service, a predecessor to the National Weather Service, began tracking Atlantic hurricanes in 1878. In that context, September 2017’s record can seem extraordinary: <em>the strongest hurricane month in 139 years</em>.</p><p>But climate scientists say that there are issues extrapolating hurricane history that far back, especially when measuring storms with ACE. Accumulated cyclone energy requires that meteorologists correctly observe the strongest winds in a cyclone every day. The National Weather Service does a much better job of that now, they say, than they did even a couple decades ago.</p><p>“The probability of us observing the true maximum of a storm now is much higher than it was 50 years, or 100 years, or even 20 years ago, honestly,” says Gabriel Vecchi, a professor of geoscience at Princeton University and a former climate modeler for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.</p><p>Why? In part, weather satellites have gotten better and more accurate. But meteorologists didn’t always have access to weather satellites. In fact, this exact problem—comparing hurricane intensity across 100-year time spans—is a microcosm of the current challenge facing climate scientists studying hurricanes. Over the past decade, it’s become clear that long-term hurricane data does not mesh together as seamlessly as some researchers had once hoped.</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector3" targeting-pos="boxinjector3" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-4"><p>Before satellites, the National Weather Service (and its predecessors) pieced hurricanes together from a few types of data. The most significant of these were shipping records: observations taken by commercial or passenger vessels caught up in a storm. By slicing together multiple observations of the same storm, hurricanes emerge from the data.</p><p>The National Weather Service also monitors tropical cyclones through research flights and historical landfall accounts. It merges all of these different data—from ships, satellites, and land-bound weather stations—into a common set called HURDAT.</p><aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore">“We know our data is problematic.”</aside><p>For many years, researchers knew HURDAT to have problems, especially further back in time. The National Hurricane Center suspected that the earliest part of the record missed between zero and five storms per year. But about 10 years ago, Vecchi and his colleagues at NOAA sought to model exactly how many tropical hurricanes it might be missing in the early 20th century.</p><p>They <a href="https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibliography/related_files/gav0802.pdf" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'2',r'541185'">split HURDAT in two parts</a>—to see if the technological past could detect the climatic present. First, they took the 40 years of hurricanes observed by satellites and made small, random changes to their paths, essentially creating a library of 650 years containing storms that <em>did</em> exist and storms that <em>could</em> have existed. Second, the team ran these 650 simulated years through each year of the observational network. They essentially asked: Would the ships and weather stations of 1878 detect storms across these 650 years? Would the ships and weather stations of 1879 detect storms across these years? And so on for all the years in the pre-satellite record.</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector4" targeting-pos="boxinjector4" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-5"><p>They found that the pre-satellite record might have missed several storms per year, about as many as the National Hurricane Center estimated. It was most likely to miss storms before 1914, because—before the Panama Canal was opened—most ships stayed in the North Atlantic near Europe, and few traveled to the tropical Atlantic, where most hurricanes form. The record was also more likely to miss hurricanes during the two world wars.</p></section><figure class="full-width" style="max-width: 945.0px;"><picture style="display: block; position:relative; width:100%; height:0; overflow:hidden; padding-bottom:66.2433862434%;"><img alt="" data-srcset="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/09/Screen_Shot_2017_09_27_at_12.24.04_PM/5dd6704e4.png" class="lazyload" style="position:absolute; width:100%; height:100%; top:0; left:0; border:0;"></picture><figcaption class="caption">A graphic from Vecchi and colleagues’s 2008 paper. Figure A shows every known tropical storm path from 1966 to 2006. Figures B, C, and D show the density of ship routes through the North Atlantic Ocean at different periods of the 20th century. Notice how many ships avoided the tropical Atlantic before the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. (Vecchi, et al. / <em>Journal of Climate</em>)</figcaption></figure><section id="article-section-6"><p>Over the next few years, the NOAA team was able to show how disjointedly the data sets fit together. Vecchi and his colleagues showed that most of the rise in hurricanes over the past century was due to the rise of small, one- or two-day storms. These hurricanes were mostly observed during the satellite era. Once they were accounted for, then the century-scale rise in hurricane intensity went away.</p><p>This isn’t to say that there <em>hasn’t</em> been an increase in storms over the last century, only that you can’t find it in the data. At the same time, the satellite record shows a clear increase in hurricane activity since 1980.</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector5" targeting-pos="boxinjector5" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-7"><p>“I think it’s unambiguous that over the last 30 years, hurricane activity in the Atlantic has increased. I don’t think there’s reason to doubt that,” Vecchi told me. “The question then becomes, how does this increase fit into the larger century-scale record? And then there’s a lot more room for reasonable people to disagree there.”</p><p>The problems in long-term hurricane data have left hurricane researchers with a dilemma.</p><aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore">“People say, the data in the past isn’t good, so we don’t know anything. That’s not true.”</aside><p>“Our theory, our understanding of how the atmosphere works—which is based on decades of research, thousands of studies by hundreds of people—indicates to us that as the planet continues to warm from greenhouse gases, we expect that the strongest storms on the planet should get stronger,” Vecchi told me. “That is what our theoretical expectation is, and it’s rooted in a lot of research and experience.”</p><p>“At the same time, looking back, we know our data is problematic, and that means that we can’t see that signal in the data. And that’s a troublesome situation to be in,” he said.</p><p>How long will it take to see a signal in the data? Vecchi and his colleagues have estimated that a human-caused climate-change signal should appear in the observational data by the middle of the century. And of course, the theory tells them what they should already expect.</p><p>All of these data problems point to why it’s difficult to compare hurricane records—especially durational records like ACE—from the early 1900s to those that follow the Carter administration. While the issues of merging disparate data sets isn’t limited to hurricane data, it is more acute there, because tropical cyclones are singular events that form and often die in the open ocean. Temperature records, for instance, are considered much more robust.</p><p>While September 2017 has broken records, it has not shot completely off the chart, only slightly exceeding the last strongest-ever month. But there are certain ways that the 2017 season really is anomalous, Klotzbach said. As late as the first of the month, 2017 seemed like an average hurricane season. But hurricane activity rapidly crescendoed after that, diverging from the historical norm.</p><hr><p><big><strong>2017 Hurricane Season ACE for the North Atlantic Ocean, Compared With the 1981-2010 Average </strong></big></p></section><figure class="full-width" style="max-width: 858.0px;"><picture style="display: block; position:relative; width:100%; height:0; overflow:hidden; padding-bottom:62.8205128205%;"><img alt="" data-srcset="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/09/unnamed/ed6021458.png" class="lazyload" style="position:absolute; width:100%; height:100%; top:0; left:0; border:0;"></picture><figcaption class="credit">Phil Klotzbach</figcaption></figure><section id="article-section-8"><p></p><hr><p>Vecchi said that the problems facing hurricane climatology do not make its findings any less stark.</p><p>“People say, the data in the past isn’t good, so we don’t know anything,” he told me. “That’s not true. We have our theory. We know the physics. We make forecasts of storms that we’ve never seen before—the forecast of Hurricane Sandy, for instance, was accurate many days out. So we can’t discount the theory going forward just because we know the data going backward are problematic.”</p><p>“It’s just that now we have to make decisions in this strange world,” he said.</p></section>
    
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">A Better Way to Look at Most Every Political Issue</h3>
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        <p class="dek">Americans would be less alienated from one another and solve problems more easily if they recognized one little-noticed distinction in policy debates.</p>
        
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            <p>We sometimes think of political issues in binary terms. Is someone pro-life or pro-choice? But most individuals hold views that are more complicated than a binary can capture.</p>

<p>An alternative is to describe a given position on a spectrum. On abortion, an outright ban sits at one extreme; at the other is the elimination of all restrictions on the procedure. In between are a staggering array of coherently distinguishable positions.</p>

<p>Politicians seeking to win votes express their stances either in terms of a binary or as a spot on a spectrum, depending on where they see the greatest advantage. Though their beliefs don’t change, how they frame them makes a political difference.</p>

<p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p>

<p>There’s a different set of frames, though, that are as relevant as binaries and spectrums, though they are less familiar and less discussed: equilibriums and limits.</p>


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        <p class="dek">Will Toronto turn its residents into Alphabet’s experiment? The answer has implications for cities everywhere.</p>
        
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            <p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">Q<span class="smallcaps">uayside is a</span> nondescript, 12-acre chunk of land on the southern edge of Toronto’s downtown. It’s just three miles from my apartment, but getting there takes almost an hour by subway, bus, and foot. When I finally arrive at 333 Lake Shore Boulevard East on a windy day in early January, I find a vacant parking lot full of snow. The abandoned Victory Soya Mills silos loom at its edge—a remnant of the city’s industrial heyday. The plot is half of the future site of Sidewalk Toronto, a “<a href="https://sidewalktoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Sidewalk-Labs-Vision-Sections-of-RFP-Submission.pdf">neighborhood built from the internet up</a>” by Google’s sister company, Sidewalk Labs. Lake Ontario is frozen and it’s <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/cold-weather-united-states-mars/549386/">colder</a> than the surface of Mars the day I go to look at the site.</p>

<p>It’s a far cry from the vision that fills the Sidewalk Toronto <a href="https://sidewalktoronto.ca/">webpage</a>, where a crisp video shot on a sunny day makes the Victory silos look cheerful and full of potential. Torontonians in puffer vests and toques describe a vibrant city bursting at the seams. Toronto’s population <a href="http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/details/Page.cfm?Lang=E&amp;Geo1=CSD&amp;Code1=3520005&amp;Geo2=PR&amp;Code2=35&amp;Data=Count&amp;SearchText=Prince&amp;SearchType=Begins&amp;SearchPR=01&amp;B1=All">grew</a> by 4.5 percent between 2011 and 2016. The city tolerates a <a href="https://www.lowestrates.ca/blog/finance/how-much-it-costs-live-young-person-toronto-2018">high cost of living</a> and a <a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/11/28/rental-vacancy-rates-lowest-in-16-years.html">low rental-vacancy rate</a>.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">How the White House Gamed the Security-Clearance System</h3>
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        <p class="dek">Even when the FBI recommends against granting a clearance, there’s nothing to prevent a president from simply overriding the system.</p>
        
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            <p>The <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/new-kids-on-the-block/552911/">Rob Porter fiasco</a> has exposed the White House’s duplicity, disorganization, and disregard for domestic violence, but it has also exposed some of the issues with the system for granting security clearance to federal employees.</p>

<p>Until his <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/john-kelly-rob-porter/552704/">abrupt resignation last week amid allegations of physical and verbal abuse by two ex-wives</a>, Porter had served as staff secretary, handling classified material under an interim security clearance. The question is when the White House learned about the allegations against Porter, when it learned that he would not be recommended for a permanent security clearance, and whether he would have been allowed to continue working barring the press reports about the allegations.</p>


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    <a href="/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous/386255/" class="article-link" data-article-id="386255" data-omni-click="inherit" itemprop="mainEntityOfPage">
        
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/gabrielle-glaser/" itemprop="url" title="Gabrielle Glaser" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Gabrielle Glaser</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek"><span><span>Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in the United States. But researchers have debunked central tenets of AA doctrine and found dozens of other treatments more effective.</span></span></p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p><span class="smallcaps">J.G. is a lawyer</span> in his early 30s. He’s a fast talker and has the lean, sinewy build of a distance runner. His choice of profession seems preordained, as he speaks in fully formed paragraphs, his thoughts organized by topic sentences. He’s also a worrier—a big one—who for years used alcohol to soothe his anxiety.</p>

<p>J.G. started drinking at 15, when he and a friend experimented in his parents’ liquor cabinet. He favored gin and whiskey but drank whatever he thought his parents would miss the least. He discovered beer, too, and loved the earthy, bitter taste on his tongue when he took his first cold sip.</p>

<p>His drinking increased through college and into law school. He could, and occasionally did, pull back, going cold turkey for weeks at a time. But nothing quieted his anxious mind like booze, and when he didn’t drink, he didn’t sleep. After four or six weeks dry, he’d be back at the liquor store.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Abraham Lincoln's Secret Visits to Slaves</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/william-r-black/" itemprop="url" title="William R. Black" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">William R. Black</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">In the mid-1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project interviewed thousands of former slaves, some of whom claimed the president came to their plantations disguised as a beggar or a peddler, telling them they’d soon be free.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Shortly before the election of 1860, a man <a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mesn.130/?sp=231">came upon</a> a plantation near Marlin, Texas, some 20 miles southeast of Waco. Though nobody knew who he was, the plantation owner took him in as a guest. The stranger paid close attention to how the enslaved people working on the plantation were treated—how they subsisted on a weekly ration of “four pounds of meat and a peck of meal,” how they were whipped and sometimes sold, resulting in the tearing apart of families. Eventually, the stranger said goodbye and went on his way, but a little while later he wrote a letter to the plantation owner, informing him he would soon have to free his slaves—“that everybody was going to have to, that the North was going to see to it.” The stranger told the owner to go into the room where he’d slept, and see where he’d carved his name into the headrest. And when the slaveholder went and looked, he saw the name: “A. Lincoln.”</p>


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    <a href="/health/archive/2018/02/bill-gates-america-first-annual-letter/553109/" class="article-link" data-article-id="553109" data-omni-click="inherit" itemprop="mainEntityOfPage">
        
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">'America First' Is Straining Bill Gates's Optimism</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/rachel-gutman/" itemprop="url" title="Rachel Gutman" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Rachel Gutman</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">The philanthropist still thinks the world is getting better. But he says pulling foreign aid from global-health measures would reverse that trend.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Bill Gates isn’t a big fan of “America First.” In a recent episode of <em>The Atlantic Interview, </em>he told Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of <em>The Atlantic</em>, “the long-term benefit of [nations] trusting each other, even beyond one or two terms of office, is a pretty gigantic thing.”</p>

<p>That’s not to say Gates is pessimistic about the future. His and Melinda Gates’s tenth annual letter, <a href="https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual-Letter">released</a> Tuesday, is otherwise sunny in its global outlook. Even after 2017, when 59 percent of Americans <a href="https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2017/state-nation.pdf">told</a> the APA they were currently living through the lowest point in the nation’s history, the couple wrote that “we see a world that’s getting better.”</p>

<p>But as Gates stressed to Goldberg, the modern world still faces serious threats, especially those that transcend geopolitical borders. “We have more connectivity working against us,” he said. And because of this connectivity, Gates fears a new global pandemic. More spending on global health could avert such a crisis, but a dip in public-health spending could hasten catastrophe.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Russia Can Keep the Peace Between Israel and Iran</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/joost-hiltermann/" itemprop="url" title="Joost Hiltermann" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Joost Hiltermann</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">But following the hostilities over the weekend, does Putin want to?</p>
        
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            <p>There are still many unanswered questions about the reported incident with the Iranian drone in northern Israel last week, but two things should be clear. First, the 12-year-old lull <a href="https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/eastern-mediterranean/syria/182-israel-hizbollah-and-iran-preventing-another-war-syria">between Israel and Hezbollah</a> will come to an end if a new understanding about the rules governing conflict in this region is not reached. And second, Russia will need to help broker that new understanding.</p>

<p>As for the incident itself: Israel claimed that it shot down an Iranian reverse-engineered Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel drone as it entered the country’s airspace from Jordan on February 10. The RQ-170 is a surveillance drone the size of a small airplane, with a wingspan of over 65 feet. Iran claimed to have downed one in 2011—a fact that the United States has acknowledged—and then used it to build one of its own. According to Israel, this RQ-170 was launched and operated from an Iranian base near the Syrian city of Palmyra. Israeli planes retaliated, targeting both the launch site and various other Iranian and Syrian regime assets in Syria. Iran has denied any role, and Jordan has yet to make a public statement about the apparent violation of its airspace.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">What It Takes to Actually Convict Police of Misconduct</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/david-a-graham/" itemprop="url" title="David A. Graham" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">David A. Graham</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">Officers involved in fatal incidents keep getting acquitted, but a team of Baltimore cops who stole from suspects and taxpayers alike during a years-long criminal spree are facing serious jail time.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Something amazing happened over the course of a recent trial in Baltimore: Witnesses laid out the way that the city’s Gun Trace Task Force <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/baltimore-gun-trace-task-force-abuses/551663/">acted as a de facto criminal gang</a>, but with the advantages of a police badge and the power of the state. Officers assigned to the unit robbed hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug dealers, pocketing the money. They targeted cars for searches based on makes and models, and stopped adult black men just for carrying backpacks. They drove at groups of men and detained anyone who ran. They bilked taxpayers by charging for fraudulent overtime.</p>

<p>On Monday, something even more amazing happened. Two officers were <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-gttf-verdict-20180208-story.html">convicted</a> of racketeering and robbery charges in federal court. They joined six others who had already pleaded guilty. Stories of police misconduct have become bracingly common in recent years, but convictions have remained rare. The failure to convict any Baltimore officer in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray is the obvious contrast, but similar cases all over the country, from Tamir Rice to Eric Garner to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/footage-of-a-police-killing-that-jurors-didnt-punish/547868/">Daniel Shaver</a>, have also ended without convictions.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Sympathy for Janet on <i>The Good Place</i></h3>
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        <p class="dek">The show is the latest example of pop culture thinking through whether Siri has a soul.</p>
        
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            <p><strong><em>This article contains mild spoilers through Season 2 of </em>The Good Place.</strong></p>

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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The American Dream on Thin Ice</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/erik-malinowski/" itemprop="url" title="Erik Malinowski" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Erik Malinowski</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-13T13:46:36" />
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        <p class="dek">A decision by the International Olympic Committee has all but guaranteed a loss for Team USA in hockey. But don’t count them out just yet.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>It’s an undeniable fact that the United States’ standing as an international power has taken a serious hit over the past year. And this emerging, still unfamiliar reality is about to be put on full display. As America falls a few notches in the eyes of its peers, Russia and other nations stand to gain in tremendous ways.</p>

<p>This dire-sounding analysis centers on—what else?—the Olympic men’s ice hockey tournament, which <a href="https://www.olympic.org/pyeongchang-2018/results/en/ice-hockey/daily-schedule.htm">commences Wednesday</a> as the United States faces Slovenia and Russia tussles with Slovakia in the first two matches of the opening round. As two-time Olympic champions, the Americans have a history of capping off historic runs at just the right time. But their status as a quadrennial medal contender all but evaporated in the wake of a controversial decision last spring.</p>


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