Volvo’s Electrical Future

The automaker says beginning in two thousand nineteen it will make only electrical or hybrid cars.

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Americans Have Given Up on Public Schools. That’s a Mistake.

• Erika Christakis
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• Krishnadev Calamur
• Jul Five, 2017
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  Volvo, the Chinese-owned Swedish automaker, announced Tuesday that commencing in two thousand nineteen it will only make fully electrical or hybrid cars.

  “This announcement marks the end of the solely combustion engine-powered car,” Håkan Samuelsson, Volvo’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.

  The stir is a significant bet by the carmaker that the age of the internal-combustion engine is quickly coming to an end—though the Gothenburg, Sweden-based automaker is lone among the world’s major automakers to budge so aggressively into electrified or hybrid cars. Volvo sold around half a million cars last year, significantly less than the world’s largest car companies such as Toyota, Volkswagen, and GM, but far greater than the 76,000 sold by Tesla, the all-electric carmaker.

  Volvo said Wednesday that beginning in two years, its cars will be electrified, plug-in hybrids or mild hybrids. Inbetween two thousand nineteen and 2021, Volvo will launch three fully electrical cars and two high-performance electrified cars from Polestar, which will be spun off into a separate premium car company. Volvo said these five cars “will be supplemented by a range of petrol and diesel cork in hybrid and mild hybrid forty eight volt options on all models.”

  “This means that there will in future be no Volvo cars without an electrified motor, as unspoiled ICE cars are step by step phased out and substituted by ICE cars that are enhanced with electrified options,” the company’s statement said.

  Ever since it was bought in two thousand ten by Geely, the Chinese automaker, from Ford, Volvo has invested strenuously in a range of fresh vehicles, and seen a sustained growth in its share of the market. The Fresh York Times adds:

  But by focusing on electrification, Volvo can concentrate its limited research and development resources on fresh technologies rather than continuing to invest in fuel-powered motors that may become obsolete. .

  Volvo … will also be able to draw on technology developed by its parent company. Geely sells electrical cars in China, one of the fastest growing markets for battery-powered vehicles.

  Samuelsson, the Volvo executive, said that Wednesday’s announcement is in line with the company’s plan to have sold one million electrified cars by 2025.

  “When we said it we meant it,” he said. “This is how we are going to do it.”

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  Khizr Khan on the Constitution

  The Lawyer and Gold Starlet father believes that Americans should look to its oldest documents for guidance.

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• Matt Pursue

Americans Have Given Up on Public Schools. That’s a Mistake.

The current debate over public education underestimates its value—and forgets its purpose.

Public schools have always occupied prime space in the excitable American imagination. For decades, if not centuries, politicians have made hay of their supposed failures and extortions. In 2004, Rod Paige, then George W. Bush’s secretary of education, called the country’s leading teachers union a “terrorist organization.” In his very first education speech as president, in 2009, Barack Obama lamented the fact that “despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we’ve let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall brief, and other nations outpace us.”

President Donald Trump used the occasion of his inaugural address to bemoan the way “beautiful” students had been “deprived of all knowledge” by our nation’s cash-guzzling schools. Educators have since recoiled at the Trump administration’s budget proposal detailing more than $9 billion in education cuts, including to after-school programs that serve mostly poor children. These cuts came along with enlargened funding for school-privatization efforts such as vouchers. Our secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, has repeatedly signaled her support for school choice and privatization, as well as her scorn for public schools, describing them as a “dead end” and claiming that unionized teachers “care more about a system, one that was created in the 1800s, than they care about individual students.”

What Will Hurricane Irma Do Next?

The hurricane was just upgraded to an “utterly dangerous” Category five storm.

The continental United States is preparing for another major hurricane just weeks after Harvey whipped out torrential rains over southeastern Texas, leading to catastrophic flooding, the displacement of thousands, and the deaths of at least sixty people.

Hurricane Irma strengthened into an “extremely dangerous” Category five storm early Tuesday, according to the National Hurricane Center. By Tuesday afternoon, Irma packed maximum sustained winds of one hundred eighty five miles per hour, making it the strongest hurricane recorded in the Atlantic basin outside of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, according to hurricane records.

Irma is expected to pass over the Leeward Islands, a chain that includes the British and U.S. Cherry Islands, Tuesday night or early Wednesday. The hurricane will then proceed its westward churn toward Puerto Rico. Later in the week and over the weekend, the storm could reach Hispaniola, Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, Cuba, and Florida.

Only Mueller’s Team Knows What It’s Actually Doing

With so little public information about a very significant probe, the urge to interpret—and overinterpret—each fresh morsel is strong.

Washington sometimes comes to resemble the sitting president. Like Donald Trump, the political and media establishments of the moment have come to expect—nay, demand—instant gratification. Trump’s chaotic style have produced an unintentional experiment in unprecedented White House transparency, in which a senior aide can scarcely sneeze without seven colleagues telling The Washington Post about it. This in turn has created the expectation that any fresh development will soon be explained with detailed accounts of what the major players are thinking and what their motivations are—sometimes relayed by anonymous sources, but periodically, as with Anthony Scaramucci, delivered in shockingly vivid terms by the principals themselves.

Have Smartphones Ruined a Generation?

More convenient online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

O ne day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her beloved songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d love a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every thirty minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teenagers of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that permits users to send pictures and movies that quickly vanish. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which showcase how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer stringing up out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

South Korea Is Right

Trump has characterized its policy as “appeasement.” But Seoul’s treatment is far more sensible than Washington’s.

Here’s a rallying sob for Democrats unassured what to say about the North Korean nuclear crisis: The South Koreans are right. On Sunday, in a typically self-aggrandizing and grammatically challenged tweet, Trump chastised America’s longtime ally. “South Korea is finding, as I have told them that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work,” he announced. “They only understand one thing!” The implication is that because Pyongyang understands only the logic of force, Trump’s policy of menacing war, and aggressively preparing for it, is the best way to persuade Kim Jong Un to relinquish his country’s burgeoning nuclear arsenal.

The premise is correct but the conclusion is exactly wrong. Yes, North Korea understands the logic of force. It says so all the time. Again and again, Pyongyang has observed that adversaries of the United States who abandon their nuclear weapons programs—Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi—end up dead. Kim thinks America wants to add his scalp to the list. And why shouldn’t he? The U.S. dropped more bombs on North Korea during the Korean War than it dropped on the entire Pacific region during World War II, George W. Pubic hair proclaimed the North a member of the “axis of evil” in 2003, and the United States regularly practices “decapitation raids” against Kim’s totalitarian regime. It is precisely because North Korea believes in the logic of force that it is accelerating its nuclear program despite economic sanctions. And it is precisely because North Korea believes in the logic of force that Trump’s policies are so frantically counterproductive. Imagine you’re in a standoff with a man you have bloodied before. You have an AK-47. He has a hunting rifle, which you consider a threat but he considers his best shot at staying alive. If you fire in the air and scream that you’re going to deep-throat him to smithereens, as Trump has done in latest weeks, you won’t make your adversary drop his weapon. You’ll make him to cling to it for dear life.

More Than one hundred Exceptional Works of Journalism

This fantastic nonfiction from two thousand sixteen is still worth discovering and pondering today.

Each year, I keep a running list of exceptional nonfiction that I encounter as I publish The Best of Journalism, an email newsletter that I curate weekly for its subscribers. This is my annual attempt to bring harshly one hundred of those stories that stood the test of time to a broader audience. I could not read or note every worthy article published in the past few years, and I haven’t included any paywalled articles or anything published at The Atlantic. But everything that goes after is worthy of broader attention and engagement. I hope it provides fodder for reflection and inspiration for future writing. My thanks to all of the publishers, editors and, writers who made these gems possible.

The Art of Storytelling

When Will Voyager Stop Calling Home?

The twin spacecraft still send data back to the planet they left forty years ago.

Forty years after they left Earth, the Voyager twin spacecraft are still chugging along, logging 35,000 miles an hour as they zoom further and further into the cosmos.

“I’ve had people ask me, you mean the mission is still going on?” says Suzanne Dodd, the Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “They assumed that it had stopped after it passed Neptune.”

Far from it. After the Voyagers ended their tours of the outer planets in the 1980s, providing humanity its very first real look at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, they continued on to the outer reaches of the solar system. In August 2012, Voyager one left the system entirely, emerging from inwards the protective bubble formed by the sun’s wind and exiting into interstellar space. Voyager two is on its way out; the spacecraft is presently coasting through the heliosheath, the outermost layer of the sun’s bubble. Voyagers one and two are presently about thirteen billion and ten billion miles from Earth, unfathomable distances that mean little more to us terrestrials than giant numbers on a page.

How America Lost Its Mind

The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional across its history.

When did America become untethered from reality?

I very first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious explore of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world indeed works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the very first few minutes of the very first gig, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His very first selection: truthiness. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books.

David Lynch Found the Ideal Ending for Twin Peaks

The 18-episode Showtime revival gave audiences both a clean conclusion and a messy, dreamlike unraveling of everything that came before it.

This story contains spoilers through the end of Twin Peaks: The Comeback.

Immigration Hardliners Cautiously Praise Trump for Ending DACA

Advocates of diminished immigration welcomed news of the program ending Tuesday, but voiced concern over what comes next.

On Tuesday, President Trump delivered on a promise that immigration hardliners have long been waiting for: ending the Deferred Activity for Childhood Arrivals Program.

For months, immigration-restrictionist groups have been pushing for Trump to end DACA, which they, along with Republicans, argue was an overreach of executive authority from the commence. The program shields toughly 800,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation and permits them to work legally, but only if they pass a criminal background check.

Many expected Trump, who had made immigration a cornerstone of his campaign, to take activity on day one. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors diminished immigration, even included the repeal of the Obama-era program in a transition document on immigration policy shortly after Election Day.

A Discussion on Barack Obama’s Unique Upbringing

Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks to PBS NewsHour about Obama’s childhood, his legacy, and how he connected with the American people.

Genetic Testing Is Recreating Bonds Violated by Slavery

Alondra Nelson discusses how ancestry tests can empower African Americans.

Against Empathy

From a moral standpoint, it makes the world worse.

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