David Ewing Duncan

Paying pregnant women’s bills was not exactly part of Nathan and Emily Berning’s life plan—until they realized that doing so actually helped dissuade women from getting abortions. One of the first was Atoria Foley, who was living in her car when she found out that she was pregnant. Atoria had scheduled an abortion and the Bernings sprang to action. They flew to Sacramento, California, where she lived, and put her up in a hotel. What Atoria needed—groceries, gas, car payments—they covered, sometimes with their own money. They signed her up for every government benefit they could. When Atoria finally canceled her abortion appointment, the Bernings were elated. Her son, Kiahari, turned 2 years old in March.

It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.

“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”

It’s suddenly become acceptable to say that COVID is—or will soon be—like the flu. Such analogies have long been the preserve of pandemic minimizers, but lately they’ve been creeping into more enlightened circles. Last month the dean of a medical school wrote an open letter to his students suggesting that for a vaccinated person, the risk of death from COVID-19 is “in the same realm, or even lower, as the average American’s risk from flu.” A few days later, David Leonhardt said as much to his millions of readers in the The New York Times’ morning newsletter. And three prominent public-health experts have called for the government to recognize a “new normal” in which the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus “is but one of several circulating respiratory viruses that include influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and more.”

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“The very first symptom of the general collapse was an old one: nothing worked.” The sentiment is old—it comes from Doris Lessing’s 1969 novel, The Four-Gated City—but it’s hard to think of a better epitaph for the economic vibes of 2022. From the oil markets to the baby-formula markets to the general sense of safety and disorder, the U.S. seems to suffer from chronic Nothing Works Syndrome.

The latest victim of acute NWS is air travel. Around the world, security lines are getting brutally long and cancellations and delays are spiking. The major carriers JetBlue, American Airlines, and Delta canceled nearly 10 percent of their flights last weekend, creating mayhem at major airports.

As best as I can tell, the puff-sleeve onslaught began in 2018. The clothing designer Batsheva Hay’s eponymous brand was barely two years old, but her high-necked, ruffle-trimmed, elbow-covering dresses in dense florals and upholstery prints—bizarro-world reimaginings of the conservative frocks favored by Hasidic Jewish women and the Amish—had developed a cult following among weird New York fashion-and-art girls. Almost all of her early designs featured some kind of huge, puffy sleeve; according to a lengthy profile in The New Yorker published that September, the custom-made dress that inspired Hay’s line had enough space in the shoulders to store a few tennis balls.

Batsheva dresses aren’t for everyone. They can cost more than $400, first of all, and more important, they’re weird: When paired with Jordans and decontextualized on a 20-something Instagram babe, the clothes of religious fundamentalism become purposefully unsettling. But as described in that cerulean-sweater scene from The Devil Wears Prada, what happens at the tip-top of the fashion hierarchy rains down on the rest of us. So it went with the puff sleeve. Batsheva and a handful of other influential indie designers adopted the puff around the same time, and the J.Crews and ASOSes and Old Navys of the world took notice. Puff sleeves filtered down the price tiers, in one form or another, just like a zillion trends have before—streamlined for industrial-grade reproduction and attached to a litany of dresses and shirts that don’t require a model’s body or an heiress’s bank account. And then, unlike most trends, it stuck around.

We blew it.

That is the queasy feeling I have as I watch borrowing costs surge, housing starts fall, and politicians rush to subsidize fossil-fuel consumption. Americans had a decade-plus in which interest rates were low and millions of workers were unemployed or underemployed. We could have made investments that would have benefited all of us. And we wasted that chance.   

This period of unusually low interest rates, which lasted from the 2008 global financial crisis until now, was horrible in many ways. Too many people were unemployed for too long, and too many found themselves trapped in dead-end, no-security jobs while the cost of living climbed to astronomical levels. But it was an opportunity too. Borrowing was cheap, and the government  could have built and built and built without crowding out private investment or overheating the economy.

The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, allowing state governments to force women to give birth, is the result of decades of right-wing political advocacy, organizing, and electoral victory. It is also just the beginning of the Court’s mission to reshape all of American society according to conservative demands, without fear of public opposition.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson contains a classic Alito disclaimer—an explicit denial of the logical implications of his stated position. In this case, Alito declares that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” even as he argues that when it comes to rights “not mentioned in the Constitution,” only those “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” are protected. If you’re asking yourself who decides which rights can be so described, you’re on the right track.

Everything seems to be falling apart. The Russians are occupying a neighboring state. A foreign crisis is causing spikes in the price of oil. Inflation is the worst it’s been in some 40 years. A Democratic president is facing the lowest approval ratings of his term and has openly admitted that he knows the public is in a foul mood. A virus is on the loose and making a lot of people sick.

Even the music charts are a mess, a horrid stew of disco and wimp-rock hits.

Wait. Disco?

I’m sorry, did you think I was talking about 2022? I was actually reminiscing about 1979, the year I turned 19, when the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution led to another round of oil shocks, inflation reached its worst levels since World War II, President Jimmy Carter was at 30 percent approval, and, yes, an influenza epidemic broke out.

This movie was not supposed to be good. Here’s the plot: A middle-aged cardiovascular surgeon’s wife is killed by a one-armed man, and said surgeon is sent to death row. But his bus crashes on the way to prison, then a train crashes into the bus crash, then Dr. Richard Kimble escapes to go on the run with five U.S. marshals on his heels. This is literally the opening 20 minutes of The Fugitive.

Not even the actors themselves were convinced The Fugitive was going to be good. Harrison Ford thought it would be his Hudson Hawk, Bruce Willis’s $51 million flop from 1991. Tommy Lee Jones, who plays the lead marshal, thought The Fugitive marked the end of his career. But then this action thriller, the one that was written off as quickly by its stars as its hero is by the law, became the third-highest-grossing film of 1993. And then it was nominated for seven (seven!) Oscars—including Best Picture. And then it actually won one of those Oscars (well, Jones did). Perhaps even more surprising is that this piece of $70 million popcorn amusement from the ’90s is still a cultural touchstone 25 years later, largely because action movies like it are so rare now.

Nearly half a century ago, Roe v. Wade secured a woman’s legal right to obtain an abortion. The ruling has been contested with ever-increasing intensity, dividing and reshaping American politics. And yet for all its prominence, the person most profoundly connected to it has remained unknown: the child whose conception occasioned the lawsuit.

Roe’s pseudonymous plaintiff, Jane Roe, was a Dallas waitress named Norma McCorvey. Wishing to terminate her pregnancy, she filed suit in March 1970 against Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade, challenging the Texas laws that prohibited abortion. Norma won her case. But she never had the abortion. On January 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court finally handed down its decision, she had long since given birth—and relinquished her child for adoption.