Aglaia Kremezi

In Manhattan, the homeless shelters are full, and the luxury skyscrapers are vacant.

Such is the tale of two cities within America’s largest metro. Even as 80,000 people sleep in New York City’s shelters or on its streets, Manhattan residents have watched skinny condominium skyscrapers rise across the island. These colossal stalagmites initially transformed not only the city’s skyline but also the real-estate market for new homes. From 2011 to 2019, the average price of a newly listed condo in New York soared from $1.15 million to $3.77 million.

But the bust is upon us. Today, nearly half of the Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold, according to The New York Times.

I’ve covered sports for 40 years, not politics. Maybe that’s why I’m so bamboozled by this impeachment case in the U.S. Senate. Republicans are going to try Donald Trump with no witnesses? Some jurors have already announced they’re voting not guilty? The guy who makes the rules—Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky—gets his marching orders from the accused himself?

Can you imagine if we did sports like this?

Kyle Shanahan, the coach of the San Francisco 49ers, walks to the middle of the field and shakes hands with Andy Reid, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs. Fifty-seven cameras, 65,000 people in the stands, and 100 million people around the world eavesdrop.

Referee: Gentlemen, welcome to the Super Bowl. One thing I want to make clear before we start: The 49ers are going to win.

On January 13, 2020, a political scientist named Daniel Drezner tweeted a screenshot of a Washington Post article, along with a cheeky comment: “I’ll believe that Trump is growing into the presidency when his staff stops talking about him like a toddler.” The screenshot showed a quotation about handling the president from a former senior administration official: “He’d get spun up, and if you bought some time, you could get him calmed down, and then explain to him what his decision might do.”

Drezner’s tweet was part of a lengthy thread. A very lengthy thread. The tweet, in fact, was the 1,163rd entry in a thread that began back in April 2017, with the same comment appended to a screenshot from The Washington Post: “Trump turns on the television almost as soon as he wakes, then checks in periodically throughout the day in the small dining room off the Oval Office, and continues late into the evening when he’s back in his private residence. ‘Once he goes upstairs, there’s no managing him,’ said one adviser.” Drezner had highlighted the quotation from the adviser.

In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for “constructive, nonviolent tension” to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation magazine, The New Leader, and The Christian Century. The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue.

Many college-educated people think they are deeply engaged in politics. They follow the news—reading articles like this one—and debate the latest developments on social media. They might sign an online petition or throw a $5 online donation at a presidential candidate. Mostly, they consume political information as a way of satisfying their own emotional and intellectual needs. These people are political hobbyists. What they are doing is no closer to engaging in politics than watching SportsCenter is to playing football.

For Querys Matias, politics isn’t just a hobby. Matias is a 63-year-old immigrant from the Dominican Republic. She lives in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a small city on the New Hampshire border. In her day job, Matias is a bus monitor for a special-needs school. In her evenings, she amasses power.

What has made Ray Dalio, the billionaire who founded the biggest hedge fund in the world, so financially successful? Dalio himself has offered an explanation: In 2017, he summed up his accumulated wisdom in a book called Principles: Life & Work, which was purchased by more than 2 million people worldwide and received testimonials from a phalanx of other billionaires, including Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, and Michael Bloomberg.

Now, so that an even broader audience may access his insights, Dalio has condensed the nearly 600 pages of Principles down to 157, in the form of a picture book released late last year called Principles for Success. This simpler version—a mostly abstract blueprint for accomplishing one’s goals—is intended, Dalio told me, for readers ages 6 to 60, and beyond.

Few places in the United States concentrate as much history in 14 acres as the grounds of the Virginia state capitol. Thomas Jefferson designed the capitol building; Patrick Henry laid its cornerstone; in 1807, Chief Justice John Marshall sat there to preside over the treason trial of former Vice President Aaron Burr. The capitol’s second floor displays a Carrara-marble statue of George Washington made by sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, considered the most accurate rendering of its subject. In 1861, a state convention voted there to secede; in 1865, United States Colored Troops re-raised the Stars and Stripes above it as Robert E. Lee’s retreating troops burned the city around them. A few days later, Abraham Lincoln stood at the equestrian statue of George Washington in Capitol Square and—for the first and only time—addressed an audience of freed slaves. In 1990, Lawrence Douglas Wilder, the first African American ever elected governor of a state, was sworn in on the capitol’s north steps.

SAN MARCOS, Texas—In the autumn of 2012, Ricardo Gonzalez Jurado was 25 feet off the ground, balancing on metal scaffolding as he sawed a stack of wood. Gonzalez Jurado owns a Central Texas yoga retreat—an oasis deep in the woods where he’s built a cluster of small houses for customers seeking a few days of bodily and spiritual cleansing. That day, he was precariously constructing a large, hollow pyramid—intended as a meditation room—out of the mountain cedar that grows all over his land.

Suddenly, the saw snagged on Gonzalez Jurado’s clothing. He jumped back instinctively and stepped off the metal platform. Plummeting toward the pyramid’s wood floor, he tucked his knees to his chin, so that his heels took the brunt of the impact. There was a loud crack, then searing pain radiating up his left foot. He dragged himself out of the pyramid and called an ambulance.

Alexander Hamilton called it—almost. In his essay “Federalist No. 65,” Hamilton recognized the possibility that the Senate’s judgment in an impeachment trial “will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” He pushed that concern aside, though, and concluded that only the Senate was up to the task of conducting a presidential-impeachment trial with the “requisite neutrality.” No other body was “sufficiently dignified” and “sufficiently independent” to serve as a “fit depositary of this important trust.”

Hamilton’s confidence is hard to square with the Senate leadership’s own stated approach to the proceedings to come. Last month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell set off waves of indignation among Democrats and reportedly unsettled members of his own party when he announced that he would be working “in total coordination with the White House counsel's office" throughout the Senate impeachment trial process.

In the scramble to find a model for its post-Brexit relationship with the European Union, Britain has considered a series of options: the Norway model, the closest of all trading relationships available absent actual membership of the bloc; the Swiss model, more complicated but with more sovereignty; and the Canada model, the loosest of all.

But perhaps this has been the entirely wrong way of looking at the challenge. For too long, Brexit has been viewed as an end in itself, not a beginning. At the root of much of the back-and-forth between Brexiteers and Remainers has been the fallacy that whichever model is chosen, that will be the end of the matter—that the politics of Britain’s relationship with its continental neighbors will come to an end, the new state of affairs locked in from then on.