The Week Magazine September 2, 2022

Help wanted: Frontline soldier in the culture wars. Willing to take flak from all directions. Responsible for keeping 30 young people safe. Expect battles with bureaucracy, active shooter drills, deteriorating physical plants, and low professional respect. Summers and most holidays off, except for the paperwork. Not rushing to apply? You’re not alone. As we head into the school year, districts in the U.S. are contending with a grave shortage of teachers (see Briefing, p.11). Teachers are quitting, and the ones who are staying are unhappy; 90 percent say they are suffering from burnout. There’s no puzzle about why. In red states, teachers are threatened with criminal sanctions for saying the wrong thing, and the very notion of education as anything more than training for efficient workers is treated with contempt.…

What happened Donald Trump left the White House with more than 700 pages of classified material, including some at “the highest levels of classification,” according to a letter to a Trump lawyer from the National Archives that was revealed this week. The letter, sent in May by acting U.S. archivist Debra Steidel Wall, spoke of the “urgency” and “important national security interests” of having law enforcement and intelligence officials review 15 boxes of documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago in January, a move Trump’s lawyers were trying to prevent. More than 150 documents were marked as classified. The tranche included some of “the most sensitive secrets we hold,” a government source told The Washington Post, including U.S intelligence-gathering methods. Trump’s legal team petitioned a federal judge to appoint an independent expert to…

Robert Pope settled in with friends for a pint of Guinness in Galway last month. Then, he set off on a 134-mile run across the width of Ireland, arriving in Dublin 23 hours later. The record-setting run, which raised funds for the World Wildlife Foundation, is the latest feat in the storied career of the ultramarathoner, who ran across the U.S. in 2018. Supporters along the way cheered, provided energy bars, and redirected traffic. “The plan was to get to Dublin for [another] pint before the end of the 24 hours,” Pope said. “And you’ll be glad to hear we did.” Jamil Jan Kochai earned wide acclaim for two best-selling works of fiction but never got a chance to thank the person he credits with putting him on the road…

What happened President Biden signed an executive order this week to forgive $10,000 in federal student debt for each borrower earning under $125,000 a year. Students from low-income backgrounds who received Pell Grants can get up to $20,000 canceled. The plan, which is estimated to cost $300 billion, also extends the pandemic freeze on loan payments through the end of the year. About 45 million people in the U.S. owe a total $1.6 trillion in student debt—more than is owed on credit cards or car loans—and Black students are disproportionately represented, because they have historically borrowed in much greater numbers than their white peers and borrowed larger sums. The executive order would give 40 million Americans some amount of debt forgiveness, while half of those would see their student…

What happened Florida Democrats nominated Charlie Crist this week over a more liberal opponent to take on Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who ran unopposed but whose hard-right politics proved popular in GOP primaries across the state. Crist, a former Republican governor who switched parties before winning a House seat in St. Petersburg, campaigned on ending DeSantis’ scorched-earth culture wars, but remains a significant underdog in the general election. However, Rep. Val Demings, the winner of Florida’s Democratic Senate primary, is polling neck and neck with GOP incumbent Marco Rubio. Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz beat back a primary challenger despite facing a child sex-trafficking investigation, while Army veteran Cory Mills won a GOP primary after likening mask mandates to Taliban control and boasting about selling the tear gas used on…

We still don’t know the contents of the classified and top-secret documents Donald Trump kept “stashed in his safe, closets, and socks at Mar-a-Lago,” said Timothy O’Brien in Bloomberg. But one central question is why? What were the former president’s motives in taking at least 26 boxes of federal property to his Florida home when he left the White House, and after he was compelled to turn over one trove of 15 boxes, why did he hide an additional 11 boxes in the basement? The potential reasons range from “relatively harmless” to “deeply damaging.” The most benign: Trump is a childish pack rat who liked collecting “some of the cool doodads you get your hands on as president.” A darker possibility emerges from the fact that the former president…