David Ewing Duncan

Close to 5 million people follow Influencers in the Wild. The popular Instagram account makes fun of the work that goes into having a certain other kind of popular Instagram account: A typical post catches a woman (and usually, her butt) posing for photos in public, often surrounded by people but usually operating in total ignorance or disregard of them. In the comments, viewers—aghast at the goofiness and self-obsession on display—like to say that it’s time for a proverbial asteroid to come and deliver the Earth to its proverbial fiery end.

Influencers in the Wild has been turned into a board game with the tagline “Go places. Gain followers. Get famous. (no talent required)” And you get it because social-media influencers have always been, to some degree, a cultural joke. They get paid to post photos of themselves and to share their lives, which is something most of us do for free. It’s not real work.

The dilemma for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles may be simultaneously strengthening him as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination and weakening him as a potential general-election nominee.

In the days leading up to the indictment of the former president, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced two days ago, a succession of polls showed that Trump has significantly increased his lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his closest competitor in the race for the Republican nomination.

Yet recent surveys have also signaled that this criminal charge—and other potential indictments from ongoing investigations—could deepen the doubts about Trump among the suburban swing voters who decisively rejected him in the 2020 presidential race, and powered surprisingly strong performances by Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms.

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Here is a history of work in six words: from jobs to careers to callings.

Until quite recently, we had little concept of “progress” in our labor. Around the world, people hunted or harvested, just as their parents and grandparents had. They hammered nails. They assembled gears and sewed thread and patched homes. Their work was a matter of subsistence and necessity; it was not a race for status or an existential search for meaning. These were jobs. And for hundreds of millions of people everywhere, work is still work—grueling or boring or exploited or poorly paid, or all of the above.

When Tess Camp was pregnant with her second child, she knew she would need to get to the hospital fast when the baby came. Her first labor had been short for a first-time mother (seven hours), and second babies tend to be in more of a hurry. Even so, she was not prepared for what happened: One day, at 40 weeks, she started feeling what she thought was just pregnancy back pain. Then her water broke, and 12 minutes later, she was holding a baby in her arms.

Needless to say, she didn’t make it into the hospital in time. But the first contraction after Camp’s water broke at home had been so intense—“immediate horrific pain; I could barely talk”—that she and her husband rushed into the car. He drove through town like a madman, running red lights. They were turning into the ER when she saw the baby’s head between her legs. Her husband tore out of the car, yelling for help. A security guard ran over to a terrified Camp in the passenger’s seat, and in that moment, her son slipped out and into the security guard’s hands. His umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. An ER nurse finally appeared to take the baby—still blue and limp—and resuscitated him right on the curb.

After his historic indictment was announced Thursday night, former President Donald Trump reacted with his characteristic cool and precision: “These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45th President of the United States of America.” Presumably this was a typo, and he meant INDICTED. But the immediate joining of arms around the martyr was indeed a perfect indication of precisely who the Republicans are right now.

“When Trump wins, THESE PEOPLE WILL PAY!!” Representative Ronny Jackson of Texas vowed.

“If they can come for him, they can come for anyone,” added Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona—or at least come for anyone who has allegedly paid $130,000 in hush money to a former porn-star paramour (and particularly anyone who allegedly had unprotected sex with her shortly after his third wife had given birth).

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Nearly half a decade has elapsed since I last worked in the fashion industry, but one thing from my previous career remains a compulsion to this day: I look at people’s purses. In the brain space that might otherwise be occupied by dear childhood memories or the dates and times of future doctor appointments, I tend to an apparently undeletable mental spreadsheet of who is carrying what. Bottega Veneta Cassette, green padded leather, Soho, 20-something woman. Louis Vuitton Pochette Métis, logo canvas, Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway stop, 40-ish woman. For 10 years, these data points informed my obsessive, detailed coverage of the luxury-handbag market. Now they just accumulate. Rarely do I see something I can’t place.

In 2018, I paid a man a couple hundred dollars to repeatedly jam several needles into the skin of my right wrist. I felt as if I were being attacked by a microscopic cavalry of crabs. Into every jab went black ink, eventually forming the shape of double quotation marks. It was my first tattoo, and likely not my last.

In the thousands of years that tattoos have been around, not much has changed. The practice still involves carving wounds into permanent, inked-in shapes that we find aesthetically pleasing. But much of tattooing remains mysterious: Scientists still aren’t sure what makes certain tattoos fade fast, why others stick around when they’re supposed to disappear, or how they react to light. One of the strangest and least-studied enigmas, though, is how tattoos survive at all. Our immune system is constantly doing its darndest to destroy them—and understanding why it fails could clue us in to one of our bodies’ most important functions, even when we leave the skin blank.

Motherhood has always been a subject ripe for mythmaking, whether vilification or idealization. Although fictional accounts, from antiquity until today, have offered us terrible, even treacherous mothers, including Euripides’s Medea and Livia Soprano, depictions of unrealistically all-good mothers, such as Marmee from Little Women, are more common and provide a sense of comfort. Maternal characters on the dark end of the spectrum provoke our unease because their monstrous behavior so clearly threatens society’s standards for mothers. They show that mother love isn’t inevitable, and that veering off from the expected response to a cuddly new infant isn’t inconceivable.

If motherhood brings with it the burden of our projected hopes, new mothers are especially hemmed in by wishful imagery, presumed to be ecstatically bonding with their just-emerged infants as they suckle at milk-filled breasts, everything smelling sweetly of baby powder. The phenomenon of postpartum depression, for instance, a condition that affects 10 to 15 percent of women, has been given short shrift in literature and other genres when not ignored entirely. This is true as well when it comes to the evocation of maternal ambivalence, the less-than-wholehearted response to the birth of a child, which is mostly viewed as a momentary glitch in the smooth transition from pregnancy to childbirth to motherhood instead of being seen as a sign of internal conflict.

The “next-gen remake” is the latest and safest cash cow in video gaming. Take a hit title that came out a decade or more ago on a prior console, spiff it up with updated graphics, controls, and maybe even some new content, and sell it at full price to a nostalgic audience. Since its 2005 debut on the Nintendo GameCube, Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 has been lightly reconfigured for a dozen different devices. But the most recent edition is a soup-to-nuts revamp, meant to bring in a new generation while still satisfying longtime players like me who are just looking to relive the glory days.

I was introduced to Resident Evil 4 in college, and I’ve replayed it countless times over the years as it’s been “ported” to new consoles. When it was first released, the game marked a departure from the rest of the Resident Evil series, in which the player navigates the fictional Raccoon City during a viral zombie outbreak. The first Resident Evil pioneered the “survival horror” genre, asking players to conserve ammunition, solve puzzles, and withstand jump scares as enemies swarmed from every dark corner. The best-selling horror franchise spawned rival series such as Silent Hill and Left 4 Dead, but by 2005, the Resident Evil formula had grown creaky, having gained sequels and prequels for almost a decade to diminishing returns.

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The internet was not exactly built to accommodate April Fools’ Day. As my colleague Megan Garber put it in 2015, our digital platforms don’t tend “to distinguish between stories and facts, between the earnest and the satirical.” And online misinformation has only become darker and more rampant in the years since Megan published her article. What was once a spring day for low-stakes fun has become a headache-inducing series of tests to figure out what’s real and what’s not.

If you’re one of those people who has managed to uphold the innocence of April Fools’ Day even in 2023, don’t let us ruin your fun. But we’ll spend today’s newsletter thinking about the range of low-stakes humor that exists in our daily lives—such as the nonsensical jokes of a child or the too-obvious jokes of a dad—and the joy this humor can bring.