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U.S. president Donald Trump, who has called the United Nations one of the world’s “most valuable institutions,” arrived at U.N. headquarters in New York to deliver his first speech to the General Assembly, then praised the international body for having increased the value of his nearby Trump World Tower, a 72-story residential building whose construction the United Nations had opposed. The U.N. secretary-general told Trump that “fiery talk” could lead to “fatal misunderstandings”; Trump said that Venezuela is “collapsing,” that Iran is a “murderous regime,” and that North Korea is on a “suicide mission” that might require him to “totally destroy” the country of 25 million people; and North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, went apple picking. Trump warned that parts of the world are “going to hell,” then nominated for federal judgeship a man who once said transgender children are part of “Satan’s plan.” Four Republican senators introduced their plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act with a bill that would take away insurance from 32 million people and raise the cost of annual health care for the average senior citizen by $16,000; a senator from Kansas, which would lose an estimated 16 percent of its health care funding by 2036, said voting for the repeal was necessary so Republicans could “maintain control” of Congress; a senator from Iowa, which would lose an estimated 27 percent of funding by 2036, said he could think of “ten reasons why this bill shouldn’t be considered” but would vote for it anyway; Vice President Mike Pence, who once exacerbated an H.I.V. epidemic in Indiana when as governor he forced the state’s Planned Parenthood facilities to close, defended the bill by saying that the “government that governs least governs best,” a quote he attributed to Thomas Jefferson, who never said it; Trump said he would sign the health care bill, which would allow states to waive protections for people with preexisting conditions, because it included “coverage of preexisting conditions”; and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced plans to build a fence on the George Washington Bridge to stop people from killing themselves. Trump praised African leaders for the “increasingly self-sufficient” health system of the nonexistent country of Nambia and told the group that “so many friends” of his were “trying to get rich” on their continent; a senior Trump Administration official said the White House was working to give more “leeway” to U.S. arms dealers selling assault rifles to buyers in other countries; and the secretary of the interior installed the video game Big Game Hunter Pro in the employee cafeteria. U.S. first lady Melania Trump called for an end to cyberbullying, Trump retweeted a video edited by a white supremacist that appeared to depict Trump hitting and knocking down his former Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, with a golf ball, the G.O.P. majority whip in the South Dakota House of Representatives shared an illustration of a car running over protesters with the words “All Lives Splatter,” and the Twitter account of a Florida state representative who once declared pornography a “public health crisis” liked a porn video, days after a porn video was liked by the Twitter account of a senator from Texas who once called Trump a “rat” with whom he had “no desire” to have sex. “Outstanding,” said former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, whom Trump reportedly passed over for secretary of state because he didn’t like Bolton’s bushy white mustache.
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More from Joe Kloc:
Five years ago, Jean-Sebastien Hertsens Zune went looking for his parents. He already had one set, a Belgian church organist and his wife, who adopted him as a baby from Guatemala and later moved the family to France. But he wanted to find his birth mother and father. When Zune was a teenager, his Belgian parents gave him his adoption file, holding back only receipts showing how much the process had cost. Most people pay little attention to their birth certificates, but for adoptees, these documents, along with notes about their relinquishment, tell an often patchy origin story.
Alex and Wendy love culture. It’s how they spend their free time. It’s what they talk about at dinner parties. When they go jogging or to the gym, they listen to podcasts on their phones. On Sunday nights they watch their favorite new shows. They go to the movies sometimes, but they were bummed out when MoviePass went south, so now they mostly stream things. They belong to book clubs that meet every couple of weeks. Alex and Wendy work hard at their jobs, but they always have a bit of time to check their feeds at work. What’s in their feeds? Their feeds tell them about culture. Their feeds are a form of comfort. Their feeds explain things to them that they already understand. Their feeds tell them that everyone else is watching, reading, listening to the same things. Their feeds tell them about the people who make their culture, people who aren’t so different from them, just maybe a bit more glistening. Alex and Wendy’s feeds assure them that they aren’t lonely. Their feeds give them permission to like what they already like. Their feeds let them know that their culture is winning.
Once, in an exuberant state, feeling filled with the muse, I told another writer: When I write, I know everything. Everything about the characters? she asked. No, I said, everything about the world, the universe. Every. Fucking. Thing. I was being preposterous, of course, but I was also trying to explain the feeling I got, deep inside writing a first draft, that I was listening and receiving, listening some more and receiving, from a place that was far enough away from my daily life, from all of my reading, from everything.
All his life he lived on hatred.
He was a solitary man who hoarded gloom. At night a thick smell filled his bachelor’s room on the edge of the kibbutz. His sunken, severe eyes saw shapes in the dark. The hater and his hatred fed on each other. So it has ever been. A solitary, huddled man, if he does not shed tears or play the violin, if he does not fasten his claws in other people, experiences over the years a constantly mounting pressure, until he faces a choice between lunacy and suicide. And those who live around him breathe a sigh of relief.
Cost of renting a giant panda from the Chinese government, per day:
A recent earthquake in Chile was found to have shifted the city of Concepción ten feet to the west, shortened Earth’s days by 1.26 microseconds, and shifted the planet’s axis by nearly three inches.
In California, a 78-year-old patient and his family were informed that he would die within days from a doctor who was communicating via video call on a screen mounted to a robot on wheels.
“Nowadays, most states let just about anybody who wants a concealed-handgun permit have one; in seventeen states, you don’t even have to be a resident. Nobody knows exactly how many Americans carry guns, because not all states release their numbers, and even if they did, not all permit holders carry all the time. But it’s safe to assume that as many as 6 million Americans are walking around with firearms under their clothes.”
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