This morning, the White House announced that President Joe Biden has commuted the sentences of 37 men on federal death row to life without parole. The historic move came shortly after a batch of pardons and commutations for hundreds of people convicted of nonviolent crimes, as well as Biden’s pardon of his own son.
Hunter Biden has lived a troubled life, and faced years in prison—until Sunday, when his father rescued him, issuing a full executive pardon clearing him of all charges. Show me a parent who wouldn’t have done the same. If saving Hunter was politically improper or reputationally risky, it was also done in accordance with the higher and fiercer laws of familial love.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
In the decade since Donald Trump began to define American politics, critics have struggled to understand his massive appeal. They have perhaps sensed by now that Trump’s support comes from someplace underneath conscious and rational political analyses.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
When I think of death, I think of love. I am convinced that I’m not alone in this. The dying seem driven to meditate on love, and love suffuses the scene of an ideal death: lying in bed surrounded by family, reassured by the promise of enduring affection.
There’s something sermonic about the speeches of Shawn Fain, the president of the currently striking United Auto Workers. Since autoworkers began targeted work stoppages following the expiration of their contract on September 15, Fain has regularly addressed the public—and his message has a uniquely moral cast.“I’ve been without,” he told me last month.
Last year, the state of Alabama made history by botching three consecutive executions in its death chamber. Two of the condemned men survived their own executions: Alan Miller and Kenneth Smith. Both were pierced repeatedly with needles in an attempt to set IV lines until the midnight expiry of their death warrants forced their executioners to halt further attempts to kill them.
At Holman Correctional Facility, in Atmore, Alabama, the prisoners have a tradition of beating their doors when guards take a man from the holding area colloquially known as the “death cell” to the execution chamber to be killed. More than 150 men slam their full strength against solid steel, rolling thunder down the halls.
Immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs came down, anti-abortion groups began distributing press releases celebrating their victory and vowing to get around to something the movement has politically neglected for the past several decades: helping mothers afford children. For so many millions already distraught by the ruling, the ready promises of help on the way came not so much as a comfort but as an insult.
Immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs came down, anti-abortion groups began distributing press releases celebrating their victory and vowing to get around to something the movement has politically neglected for the past several decades: helping mothers afford children. For so many millions already distraught by the ruling, the ready promises of help on the way came not so much as a comfort but as an insult.
You develop certain psychological reflexes to get you through the initial shock of the first push alert: Some number dead, others wounded in a mass shooting someplace in America. At this point we all know that the earliest reports are typically flawed, so you can suspend belief a degree or two, just for the time being. It’s summer; school’s out, which means they—the murdered, whoever they were—likely weren’t children, which means you can exhale a little, uneasily.
Photographs by Andres GonzalezIn the halls of schools where students have learned about the archaeological remains of failed civilizations, they have unwittingly shed the wreckage of their own. The visual artist and author Andres Gonzalez spent six years dutifully photographing the debris of a society in a specific form of decline: the letters, cards, notes, mementos, keepsakes, toys, talismans, objects, and ephemera that accumulate following a school shooting.
Society cannot demand courageous self-sacrifice; we can only ask for it. Most of us know we ourselves would be too frightened to face an armed gunman in a direct confrontation, and we accordingly choose to seek work that doesn’t put us in such positions—or shouldn’t. But perhaps even some of those who do volunteer for danger now lack the fortitude, the relevant virtues of courage, honor, and selflessness, to take up the task.
We were told today, in the latest version of events offered by authorities in Texas, that police left children locked in a classroom with a gunman for 78 minutes as they repeatedly called 911 begging for help, not knowing that their would-be rescuers were standing idly by.
On a recent Thursday night in America, April 21, two different states planned to preside over the execution of two different men—Oscar Franklin Smith, 72, in Tennessee; and Carl Wayne Buntion, 78, in Texas—and yet, for similar reasons, neither plan went off precisely as expected.
As families around the country prepare to send out Christmas cards with letters and photos commemorating the year gone by, many elected officials do the same. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky tweeted one such family picture on Saturday, featuring himself and his clan armed to the teeth on a leather love seat, a merry tree glittering in the backdrop. Massie’s photo drew some ire.
Before the state of Oklahoma put John Marion Grant through the 12-minute ordeal of convulsions, vomiting, and heaving that eventually concluded with the 60-year-old’s death, it gave him a choice: How would he like to die?There were a number of options.
Adam Maida
A record of the plague dead: Stacy Forbess, 55, an Alabama twirling coach; Haley Mulkey Richardson, 32, a pregnant Alabama nurse; Cindy Dawkins, 50, a Florida restaurant worker; Martin and Trina Daniel, 53 and 49, a Georgia couple married for some 20 years; Lawrence and Lydia Rodriguez, 49 and 42, a Texas couple married for 21. All unvaccinated, and all whose deaths were covered by various papers and TV stations, with notes of shame or contempt subtle in some tales and bold in others.
Earlier this year, Manhattan’s prestigious Dalton School bid farewell to Justine Ang Fonte, its then-director of health and wellness, who had guided the academy’s sex education for years.
By the time Republicans and centrist Democrats had united late last week to scold Representative Ilhan Omar for a tweet—one of the few pastimes that still draw the two parties together, and something those selfsame chiders would doubtlessly decry, under different circumstances, as cancel culture or censorship—it no longer mattered what, exactly, Omar had said. They had already managed to make a news cycle out of it: mission accomplished.