David Shenk

Updated at 11:34 a.m. ET on June 7, 2023.

“How are we gonna cover Trump? That’s not something I stay up at night thinking about,” Chris Licht told me. “It’s very simple.”

It was the fall of 2022. This was the first of many on-the-record interviews that Licht had agreed to give me, and I wanted to know how CNN’s new leader planned to deal with another Donald Trump candidacy. Until recently Licht had been producing a successful late-night comedy show. Now, just a few months into his job running one of the world’s preeminent news organizations, he claimed to have a “simple” answer to the question that might very well come to define his legacy.

“The media has absolutely, I believe, learned its lesson,” Licht said.

On Tuesday morning, the PGA Tour and LIV Golf announced a planned merger that ended nearly a full year of antitrust litigation between the two rivals. Until recently, LIV Golf, an upstart league founded in 2021, had portrayed the PGA Tour as a monopoly that illegally controlled the market for professional golf competitions. Meanwhile, the PGA Tour and its commissioner, Jay Monahan, had blasted LIV Golf for partnering with the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, which is largely controlled by the Saudi royal family and has been accused of funding terrorism. The announcement brought sudden peace to a bitter, dramatic conflict.

The logic of the deal is easy to see. The PGA Tour was feeling pressure from LIV Golf, which had poached some marquee golfers. To keep up with the Saudis’ lavish spending, it was forced to pay out bigger prizes and dip deeper into its reserves. And the two organizations were enmeshed in an expensive lawsuit. “We were competing against LIV,” Monahan said after the deal was announced. The merger, he explained, was a way “to take the competitor off the board, to have them exist as a partner.”

Groups calling themselves the Free Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps have launched raids inside Russia. Drones have flown over Moscow, damaging what may be the homes of Russian intelligence officers and buzzing the Kremlin itself. Unusually intense fighting has been reported this week in several parts of eastern Ukraine, with completely different versions of events provided by Russians and Ukrainians. Conflicts have also been reported between the Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group and the soldiers of the regular Russian army.

What does it all mean? That the Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun.

In a week that also marks the 79th anniversary of D-Day, we should note the many ways in which this military action does not, and probably will not, resemble the Normandy landing. Perhaps at some point there will be a lot of Ukrainian troops massed in one place, taking huge casualties—or perhaps not. Perhaps there will be a galvanized, coordinated Russian military response—or perhaps the response will look more like it did on Tuesday, when a dam that was under direct Russian control collapsed, leading to the inundation of southern Ukraine. Nor was that the only disaster: A series of smaller man-made floods has also washed over Russian-occupied territories in the past few days.

Gen Z is poised to massively expand its influence in the 2024 election. But its impact may be more complex than typically assumed.

As many as 7 million to 9 million more members of the racially and culturally diverse Gen Z could cast ballots in 2024 than did in 2020, while the number of the predominantly white Baby Boomers and older generations voting may decline by a corresponding amount, according to nonpartisan forecasts. As a result, for the first time, Gen Z and Millennials combined could account for as many votes next year as the Baby Boomers and their elders—the groups that have made up a majority of voters for decades.

That generational transition represents a clear opportunity for Democrats, who have consistently amassed solid, sometimes overwhelming, margins among both Millennials and Gen Z voters. But an analysis of previously unpublished election data from Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm, by Michael Podhorzer, the former political director for the AFL-CIO, shows that even the emergence of these new voters may not break the larger political stalemate that has partitioned the country into seemingly immovable blocks of red and blue states.

In May 2019, I was invited to give a lecture at my old high school in Scarsdale, New York. Before the talk, I met with the principal and his top administrators. I heard that the school, like most high schools in America, was struggling with a large and recent increase in mental illness among its students. The primary diagnoses were depression and anxiety disorders, with increasing rates of self-harm; girls were particularly vulnerable. I was told that the mental-health problems were baked in when students arrived for ninth grade: Coming out of middle school, many students were already anxious and depressed. Many were also already addicted to their phone.

Ten months later, I was invited to give a talk at Scarsdale Middle School. There, too, I met with the principal and her top administrators, and I heard the same thing: Mental-health problems had recently gotten much worse. Even many of the students arriving for sixth grade, coming out of elementary school, were already anxious and depressed. And many, already, were addicted to their phone.

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If the job-search firm Monster.com is right in its survey research, you are probably looking for a new job. According to its data at the end of last year, that’s what an eye-popping 96 percent of Americans workers reported doing. And yet, you probably won’t actually make that change: One Pew Research Center study found that only about 30 percent of workers changed jobs at least once in 2022, which was roughly on par with the level of turnover in 2021.

What accounts for the 66-point difference between aspiration and action? Psych Central, a mental-health website, notes that a common reason people stay in jobs they want to leave is fear of the unknown: Will the new job be worse than the old one? This is a powerful emotion, liable to dominate other ones because evolutionarily it was so important to our survival. Our ancestors passed on their genes because they did not say, “I don’t know what kind of mushrooms those are, but I bet they’re delicious!”

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The first time it happened, I assumed it was a Millennial thing. Our younger neighbors had come over with their kids and a projector for backyard movie night—Clueless, I think, or maybe The Goonies.

“Oh,” I said as the opening scene began, “you left the subtitles on.”

“Oh,” the husband said, “we always leave the subtitles on.”

Now, I don’t like to think of myself as a snob—snobs never do—but in that moment, I felt something gurgling up my windpipe that can only be described as snobbery, a need to express my aesthetic horror at the needless gashing of all those scenes. All that came out, though, was: Why? They don’t like missing any of the dialogue, he said, and sometimes it’s hard to hear, or someone is trying to sleep, or they’re only half paying attention, and the subtitles are right there waiting to be flipped on, so … why not?

JFK Terminal 8—It is 9:22 a.m., and I am learning about consumer protections from a food-safety inspector who is on her second Bloody Mary. There is nothing quite like alcohol to facilitate an expansive conversation: I should encourage young people, she tells me, to consider careers in food safety. She’s on her way back from a work trip, and I learn that she always drinks Bloody Marys when she travels, which is often, but never drinks them at home. We move on to other topics: reincarnation, ExxonMobil, karma, the state of labor unions. The only thing that seemed to be off limits was her full name (her job, she said, prevents her from speaking with the media).

We’re sitting in the New York Sports Bar across from Gate 10, which is next to Solstice Sunglasses and a vending machine selling ready-to-eat salads in plastic mason jars. In the corner, two blond women drink white wine. A passing traveler pops her head in: Does the bar serve French fries? The bartender says no, they don’t start serving French fries until 10:30. It is too early for French fries. But it is not too early for white wine.

“I’m about to cancel all my Zoom meetings.” It was May 2021, and Jamie Dimon had had enough. The JPMorgan Chase CEO expected that “sometime in September, October,” the company’s office would “look just like it did before.” Two years later, his company is slashing its Manhattan footprint by a fifth.

Post-pandemic, kids are back in school, retirees are back on cruise ships, and physical stores are doing better than expected. But offices are struggling perhaps more than most casual observers realize, and the consequences for landlords, banks, municipal governments, and even individual portfolios will be far-reaching. In some cases, they will be catastrophic. But this crisis, like all crises, also represents an opportunity to reconsider many of our assumptions about work and cities.

In the crowded field of TV cooking shows, Gordon Ramsay looms large. Hell’s Kitchen began airing in 2005, during the heady days of the earliest reality-competition shows, premised on the notion that the art of cooking is best achieved through the craft of bullying. The celebrity chef berated the contestants who doubled as his sous-chefs. He screamed. He mocked. He, more than anyone else, made Hell’s Kitchen hellish—and, in that, his show captured something essential about the industry it claimed to portray. Food preparation is, traditionally, women’s work; commercial kitchens, hectic and hierarchical and male, tend to elide that fact. They take a restaurant’s most basic marketing proposition—it sells stuff you need in order to stay alive—and coat it in thick layers of machismo.