It’s Tuesday, May 12. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Kat Rosenfield on the lethal price of suicidal empathy. The congresswoman who wants to shoot sea lions. Frannie Block’s deep dive into the persecution of Chinese Christians. Aaron MacLean and Dan Blumenthal preview the Trump-Xi summit. And more.
But first: What did Harvard’s slavery reckoning achieve?
Four years ago, Harvard University committed $100 million to what it called the “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative,” an excavation of its historical involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. Harvard was hardly unique among American universities in launching a racial justice self-examination, but the scope and price of Harvard’s undertaking were extraordinary.
And so was its failure, writes Novi Zhukovsky. Checking in on the project four years later, Novi discovered “a cascade of institutional embarrassments: high-profile resignations, the dismissal of an entire research team, a string of HR complaints, and a rebuke from Antigua’s ambassador to the United States.” Most damning of all: “Its signature effort—to find descendants of people Harvard had enslaved and then do something for them, presumably financially—has so far failed miserably.” How did America’s most prestigious school get it so badly wrong? Read Novi’s story to find out.
—The Editors
‘I Don’t Want to Put Another Black Man in Jail’ |
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Last Thursday night, a 76-year-old man died after he was shoved down a flight of subway stairs by someone who had just been released from a New York City psychiatric ward. The alleged killer had been arrested four times since February, but one of his victims, a 23-year-old woman, declined to press charges because, as she said, “I don’t want to put another black man in jail.” You would struggle to find a clearer example of suicidal empathy, Kat Rosenfield writes, born out of a belief that “those who hurt us can be loved into submission, that the goal of justice is to humanize rather than punish.” Read her piece on a murder that shouldn’t have happened, and the dangerous idea that enabled it. | | |
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And for more on suicidal empathy, be sure to catch Rafaela Siewert’s conversation with the man who coined the phrase, Gad Saad. He explains to Rafaela why he thinks the West is on a suicide mission.
Arthur Brooks: Inside the Mind of an Internet Troll |
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Online trolls are the masked bandits of the internet Wild West. Almost anybody, no matter their age, can point to a run-in with a troll, especially those who write for a living like Arthur Brooks. How are we to understand these comment-section bullies? Today, Brooks leverages his study of psychology, harnessing the character traits and personality types of the humans behind the online abusers, concluding that the trolls are, in most instances, destroying themselves as much as they are hurting the victims of their online scorn. | | |
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Trump Heads to China: Who Has the Upper Hand? With Dan Blumenthal |
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This week, President Donald Trump will travel to China to meet with Xi Jinping. Ever the wild card, Trump’s mindset going into the meeting with China’s president remains a mystery—not to mention whatever fruit the bilateral meeting between the two superpowers will bear. One of the foremost experts on China and the Chinese Communist Party, Dan Blumenthal, joins Aaron MacLean on ‘School of War’ to discuss the high-stakes meeting in Beijing. | | |
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China vs. God |
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One thing that Trump says will be on the agenda when he meets Xi this week is the case of Ezra Jin, a Christian pastor who has been behind bars and unable to talk to his family since October. Frannie Block has followed Jin’s case closer than any other reporter, and has obtained exclusive access to never-before-seen footage of Chinese police arresting Christians, audio recordings of police interrogations, and testimony from those who have witnessed the raids firsthand. Read her eye-opening report on Jin’s case, and the persecution of Christians in China. | | |
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