The Roberts court has had a lot to say about race. It upheld a Michigan ban on affirmative action for university admissions. It struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, arguing that laws addressing the South’s history of racial discrimination were no longer needed. And it nixed voluntary school-desegregation plans that assign students to schools based on racial quotas.

But the court isn’t blind to the effects that decades of discrimination have had on minorities in this country, as became evident Thursday in its 5-4 decision upholding the “disparate-impact” standard of the Fair Housing Act. That standard allows groups to challenge policies that adversely affect minorities, that, for instance, segregate them in high-poverty, high-crime areas of town. Discrimination doesn’t have to be intentional to be unlawful, the court found.

The case was brought by a Dallas-area non-profit, the Inclusive Communities Project, who argued that the Texas Department of Housing and Community Development had approved housing projects predominantly in high-poverty, minority neighborhoods, a policy that had a “disparate impact” on minorities.

The court agreed, writing that disparate-impact claims have proven useful across the country as a way to combat discrimination that has gotten more subtle since the civil-rights era.

The decision was hailed as a win for civil-rights groups, who had argued that disparate-impact claims are the only way to remedy policies that lead to segregation. But it’s important to note that in this decision, the Supreme Court did not approve compulsory integration. In fact, Kennedy’s opinion specifically warns that policies that integrate housing by race quotas are unconstitutional. Instead, the ruling allows groups to continue to challenge the policies that perpetuate segregation, not segregation itself. The distinction may seem small, but it’s important.

ons that have discriminatory impact,” he said.

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As I’ve detailed before, the Inclusive Communities Project argued that the points system Texas formerly used to award low-income-housing tax credits to developers favored building projects in high-poverty areas, isolating poor, minority residents in poor, minority neighborhoods. Social scientists say this makes it more difficult for families to escape poverty and to access the resources, such as good schools and jobs, that they would be available in more affluent areas. But under this ruling, a remedy could not simply order the state to build housing projects for minorities in white areas. Instead, a remedy would have to address the policy guiding how tax credits are assigned, taking into account whether that policy as a whole perpetuates segregation. (In 2010, for instance, a District Court ordered Texas to change how it awards tax credits, which it did.)

When courts find remedies in disparate-impact cases, they should “concentrate on the elimination of the offending practice” that leads to arbitrary racial discrimination, Kennedy writes.

In that way, the decision is in line with the Parents Involved decision about school segregation, said Andrew Scherer, the policy director of the Impact Center for Public Interest Law at New York Law School.

“Inclusive Communities and Parents Involved are not about quotas, they are about the obligation to be aware of the consequences of government and private action, and to avoid acti

The remedy that Texas came up with back in 2010 as a result of the lawsuit was race-neutral, a giddy Mike Daniel, the lawyer for the Inclusive Community Project, told me on the phone.

“This says you have to give equal points to projects located in high income and low-poverty areas,” he said. “There’s no race there. And it did, in fact, work.”

After the state changed its formula, developers proposing projects in high-opportunity areas received more points than they had before. Since then, more developers have built tax-credit developments in the suburbs, Betsy Julian, the executive director of Inclusive Communities, told me.

Fearing legal action, Dallas-area cities with predominately white populations, including Frisco and McKinney, also agreed to build affordable properties in the last few years. Though Inclusive Communities had to fight “tooth and nail” to get these projects built, “what you’ll see is a lot of the fears that people had with regards to the effect of the project on the value of their homes didn’t really have merit,” Julian said. One of the projects built because of an Inclusive Communities is in Sunnyvale, a Texas town that banned multifamily units and fought multiple court orders to allow them. D Magazine recently called it “the whitest town in north Texas.”

Still, Justices Thomas, Scalia, Alito, and Roberts heartily dissent with the decision. In a separate opinion, Justice Thomas reminds the court that racial imbalances don’t always disfavor minorities—Chinese were minorities in Malaysia, for instance, but still controlled the industry in that nation.

But the majority does not see the policies behind Inclusive Communities as “racial balancing,” and indeed, warns against such policies. Instead, it allows housing developers to work with states to show that certain projects serve a valid interest, whether it be rejuvenating a depressed neighborhood or creating new housing for minorities in a wealthy area.

“The [Fair Housing Act] does not decree a particular vision of urban development; and it does not put housing authorities and private developers in a double bind of liability, subject to suit whether they choose to rejuvenate a city core or to promote new low-income housing in suburban communities,” Kennedy writes.

Many housing advocates still worry that this ruling will lead to less spending on housing in high-poverty, inner cities that need the most help.

“They're going to leave the neighborhood-based programs in the dust,” Mark Rogers, the executive director of Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation, an East Austin-based housing group, told me.

Indeed, some Austin projects built before the Inclusive Communities lawsuit that have helped to revitalize high-poverty neighborhoods would not have won tax credits now, Julian Huerta, the deputy executive director of Foundation Communities, an Austin tax-credit developer, told me. M Station, a project approved in 2009 and located in East Austin, would have lost in the tax-credit process to another Foundation Communities development in Austin’s wealthy west side, called Southwest Trails.

This was also a concern expressed by the minority in the Supreme Court case. Frazier Revitalization Inc. had filed a brief arguing that recognizing disparate-impact claims could limit its goal of bolstering a high-poverty neighborhood. Giving credits to wealthy areas violates “the moral imperative to improve the substandard and inadequate affordable housing in many of our inner cities,”the brief argued.

Failing to improve substandard housing could also be argued to have a “disparate impact” on minorities, Justice Alito argues. The decision leaves it up to HUD to decide which policies adversely affect minorities, and which don’t. But that plan is too vague to work.

“The effect of these regulations, not surprisingly, is to confer enormous discretion on HUD—without actually solving the problem,” he writes.

But John Henneberger, an affordable-housing advocate in Texas, says there is a way to balance both concerns, and the court’s majority understood that. At the end of the day, this case is less about race, he said, than it is about choice.

“There needs to be a balance, and everybody acknowledges that, between revitalization and creating choices in other areas,” he said. “What it means is that a state like Texas cannot deny applications, cannot steer all of its affordable-housing stock into the poorest and most racially segregated parts of the city. It has to provide its citizens choice.” ​

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable 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.

One 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 favorite 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 enjoy 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 30 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 teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show 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 hanging 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.”