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"Nothing here but Oxy and coal," says one of the subjects of Sean Dunne's mournful documentary Oxyana. The "here" is Oceana, a once-bustling mining town in West Virginia, now decimated by Oxycontin addiction to the point where the media have rebranded it "Oxyana.

An entire generation has been wiped out, and addiction touches everyone's lives. One guy interviewed says, "I'm 23. Half my graduating class is dead." The destruction is almost unbelievable, although it is no secret that painkiller addiction, and Oxy in particular, is a huge problem in America. But Oxyana zooms in on one community, and the result is a powerful documentary, covering well-trodden ground perhaps, but filmed in a way that feels like an elegy.

“This is the crisis of the conservative intellectual,” writes Matthew Continetti,

“After years of aligning with, trying to explain, sympathizing with the causes and occasionally ignoring the worst aspects of populism, he finds that populism has exiled him from his political home.”

“what makes this crisis acute is the knowledge that he and his predecessors may have helped to bring it on themselves.”

Ben Carson Says He Has No Memory of Running for President

Appearing on the Fox News Channel, Dr. Carson responded to host Sean Hannity’s question about his ten-month-long candidacy by saying, “I do not recall any of that occurring.”

“Someone is trying to mess with my mind,” he said. “And when I find out who is doing that I will make them pay dearly.”

Conservative talk-show hosts, who stoke right-wing populism for a living, reacted very differently. Sean Hannity appeared in one of Trump’s campaign videos. Laura Ingraham spoke at the Republican National Convention. Rush Limbaugh declared in March that, “with the case of Trump, there’s a much bigger upside than downside.” In July, Hugh Hewitt wrote, “Of course I am voting for Donald Trump.”

Even the most moralistic conservative talkers—including William Bennett and Dennis Prager, who have made careers of arguing that private character is key to political leadership—endorsed Trump. Mark Levin, who hosts a popular show on the Westwood One radio network, vowed not to. “Count me as Never Trump,” he declared in April. But in September he announced, “I’m voting for Trump.”

Among big-time national conservative talk-show hosts, Beck—who is tied with Levin for the third-largest listenership after Limbaugh and Hannity—was a rare exception. He didn’t just oppose Trump. He compared him to Hitler. He warned that Trump was a possible “extinction-level event” for American democracy and capitalism.

Since the election, numerous congressional Republicans have refused to publicly weigh in on any Trump proposal at odds with Republican orthodoxy, from his border wall to his massive infrastructure package. The most common reason, stated repeatedly but always privately: They’re afraid of being attacked by Breitbart or other big-name Trump supporters.

. “People are naturally reticent to be the first out of the block for fear of Sean Hannity, for fear of Breitbart, for fear of local folks.”

An editor at Breitbart, formerly run by senior Trump adviser Steve Bannon, said that fear is well-founded.

What is the psychological mechanism underpinning this resentment?

Democratic politicians and the media have struggled to enter the minds of Trump voters, who are evidently enraged by the imposition of norms of political correctness that they see as enforced by “Stalinist orthodoxy.”

Trump has capitalized on the visceral belief of many white voters that government-enforced diversity and other related regulations are designed “to bring Americans to submission” by silencing their opposition to immigration — legal and illegal — to judicial orders putting low-income housing in the suburbs, and to government-mandated school integration, to name just a few of their least favorite things.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan finds himself in the middle of yet another Republican civil war as the battle over LGBT rights has come to Congress, threatening to divide an already fractured GOP.

Democrats won an opening salvo late Wednesday night, when the House approved on a vote of 223 to 195, a measure by Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) to deny payment to federal contractors who discriminate against LGBT employees.

Maloney’s victory does not mean that House conservatives — angry over what they view as overreaching by President Obama — will not continue to wage the fight.

a wide array of figures whose own commitments seemed incompatible with Trumpism decided that he was worth defending and eventually supporting.

These figures, strikingly, came from both sides of the pre-existing civil war

Early in the campaign, when it seemed as if Jeb Bush had a chance to coast to the nomination as the standard-bearer of the establishment, it was mostly voices from the professional base — talk-radio voices, Fox News voices and for a time Cruz himself — who worked to build up Trump as a populist alternative

it is utterly impossible for Obama to open his arms and gather all Americans together in an embrace of unity.

There are multiple reasons why.

The first — and you’ll forgive me for sounding divisive and partisan at a time like this — is that his opponents have guaranteed that he would never be able to unite Americans about anything. A healthy chunk of the country, spurred on by their political leaders and media figures, has spent the last eight years becoming convinced that nothing Obama does, no matter the situation or the issue, is ever for admirable or even mundane reasons. Those politicians and media commentators have told their constituents, thousands upon thousands of times, that Obama is not merely wrong or misguided but is literally trying to destroy America.

Astronomers discover 7 Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby star

TRAPPIST-1 barely classifies as a star at half the temperature and a tenth the mass of the sun. It is red, dim and just a bit larger than Jupiter. But these tiny ultracool dwarf stars are common in our galaxy.

Over the next decade, the researchers want to define the atmosphere of each planet, as well as to determine whether they truly do have liquid water on the surface and search for signs of life.

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s foreign minister drew a sharp line against “unilateral” U.S. immigration policies before talks Thursday with a top-level Trump administration team seeking to cool tensions that threaten to derail trade and other key agreements.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer played down the apparently deepening rift, characterizing the relationship between the two nations as “phenomenal.”

In a meeting with Mexican media executives, Peña Nieto said NAFTA may change in name only, according to the El Universal daily. But, he cautioned, relations with the Trump administration are “a panorama of uncertainty,” the newspaper reported.

Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.

What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.

the American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency.

according to reporting by Sciutto and colleague Evan Perez, “multiple current and former U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials tell CNN that intelligence intercepts of foreign nationals confirm that some of the conversations described in the dossier took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same locations as detailed in the dossier.

So what did White House press secretary Sean Spicer say? “We continue to be disgusted by CNN’s fake news reporting.”

The response from officialdom aligns with an authoritarian’s refusal to face facts. After CNN broke its January story of high-level briefings on the dossier, Trump attempted to discredit the outlet by lumping it with BuzzFeed’s hasty and irresponsible decision to simply plop the unconfirmed dossier on its website. “You are fake news,” thundered Trump

Mr. Trump understands that attacking the media is the reddest of meat for his base, which has been conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of the conservative media ecosystem.

For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined.

The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.

“Were the United States and China to wage war on one another, the whole world would divide itself,” the People’s Daily newspaper argued in a commentary, paraphrasing Henry Kissinger

Fears of a potentially calamitous trade war, or even a military clash between the two nuclear powers, have been building since Trump’s shock election win last November.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s influential chief strategist, was last week reported to have warned last year that war between the US and China in the resource-rich waterway was inevitable.

Trump Intensifies His Attacks on Journalists and Condemns F.B.I. ‘Leakers’

President Trump turned the power of the White House against the news media on Friday, escalating his attacks on journalists as “the enemy of the people” and berating members of his own F.B.I. as “leakers” who he said were putting the nation at risk.

“The grass is dry on both sides,” said Ari Fleischer, who was press secretary to George W. Bush, “so it only takes a very small match to light it on fire.”

one can divide the reaction among conservative commentators into three categories.

At one extreme sit those conservatives who championed Trump during the campaign, and still do: Breitbart, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, among others. Their base is talk radio. They pride themselves on speaking for those plainspoken, dirt-under-the-fingernails conservatives who loathe not only Hillary Clinton, but Paul Ryan.

Their ideological forefathers are Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace and Pat Buchanan, who claimed that America’s cosmopolitan, deracinated ruling elite had betrayed the white Christians to whom the country truly belonged.

To discuss the wider cultural implications of Seau's death, the Saints' scandal, and football's ongoing identity crisis, The Atlantic spoke with documentary filmmaker Sean Pamphilon. He recently released audio of former New Orleans defensive coordinator Gregg Williams imploring his players to injure opponents and is working on a film, The United States of Football, which explores the sport's dark, beloved place in America society.

What is The United States of Football about? Why are you making it? It's a cultural examination of football from pee-wee to the pros. It's about the motivation for playing and enjoying the sport. The escapism. The violence, for sure—it feeds something in our culture. There's a reason why baseball isn't the top sport anymore. It's too slow. People aren't getting the shit knocked out of them. We're a very aggressive culture.

I started working on it because I realized I was basically training my son to play football. Playing in the park all the time. We had this one patch of grass in a park in Brooklyn that was our field. It was our special place. In 2004, I was interviewing Kyle Turley for Run Ricky Run. He said to me, "If you have a kid, don't let him play football. Let him play any other sport." He was adamant about that. My son was six at the time. We kept playing in the park. Five years later, I read an article about Turley having a seizure. I had heard of CTE before. It never stuck with me. But after reading about Kyle, it did. I felt a personal connection with him. Because of his issues, I was becoming more interested in the health issues that players were having. And I had to decide: Did I still want my son to play football?

While the United States and Israel are using the weapons to slow the nuclear bomb-making abilities of Iran, they could also be used to disrupt power grids and financial systems or even wreak havoc with military defenses.

The United States has long objected to the Russian crusade for an online arms control ban. “There is no broad international support for a cyberweapon ban,” says James A. Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “This is a global diplomatic ploy by the Russians to take down a perceived area of U.S. military advantage.”

The wide disclosure of the details of the Flame virus by Kaspersky Lab also seems intended to promote the Russian call for a ban on cyberweapons like those that blocked poison gas or expanding bullets from the armies of major nations and other entities.