Edward Tenner

“Dear Caitlin,” an inscription in my 12th-grade yearbook begins. “I’m really very sorry that our friendship plummeted straight downhill after the first few months of school. Really, the blame rests totally on my shoulders. To tell you the truth, I’ve wanted to say this all year. I know you’ll succeed because you’re very smart and I regard you with the utmost respect … Take care—love always.”

He was headed to a prestigious college. I was headed to a small, obscure liberal-arts college, which was a tremendous achievement, not just because I was a terrible student, but also because I had nearly killed myself as a response to what he apologized for in my yearbook. He had tried to rape me during a date that I was very excited to have been asked on, and his attempt was so serious—and he was so powerful—that for a few minutes, I was truly fighting him off.

It’s been nearly two years since Donald Trump won enough Electoral College votes to become president of the United States. On the day after, in my concession speech, I said, “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” I hoped that my fears for our future were overblown.

They were not.

In the roughly 21 months since he took the oath of office, Trump has sunk far below the already-low bar he set for himself in his ugly campaign. Exhibit A is the unspeakable cruelty that his administration has inflicted on undocumented families arriving at the border, including separating children, some as young as eight months, from their parents. According to The New York Times, the administration continues to detain 12,800 children right now, despite all the outcry and court orders. Then there’s the president’s monstrous neglect of Puerto Rico: After Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, his administration barely responded. Some 3,000 Americans died. Now Trump flatly denies those deaths were caused by the storm. And, of course, despite the recent indictments of several Russian military intelligence officers for hacking the Democratic National Committee in 2016, he continues to dismiss a serious attack on our country by a foreign power as a “hoax.”

On December 31, 1999, we threw a party. It was the end of one millennium and the start of a new one; people very much wanted to celebrate, preferably somewhere exotic. Our party fulfilled that criterion. We held it at Chobielin, the manor house in northwest Poland that my husband and his parents had purchased a decade earlier, when it was a mildewed ruin. We had restored the house, very slowly. It was not exactly finished in 1999, but it did have a new roof. It also had a large, freshly painted, and completely unfurnished salon—perfect for a party.

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The guests were various: journalist friends from London and Berlin, a few diplomats based in Warsaw, two friends who flew in from New York. But most of them were Poles, friends of ours and colleagues of my husband, who was then a deputy foreign minister in the Polish government. A handful of youngish Polish journalists came too—none then particularly famous—along with a few civil servants and one or two members of the government.

When Beth Moore arrived in Houston in the 1980s, she found few models for young women who wanted to teach scripture. Many conservative Christian denominations believed that women should not hold authority over men, whether in church or at home; many denominations still believe this. In some congregations, women could not speak from the lectern on a Sunday or even read the Bible in front of men. But Moore was resolute: God, she felt, had called her to serve. So she went where many women in Texas were going in the ’80s: aerobics class. Moore kicked her way into ministry, choreographing routines to contemporary Christian music for the women of Houston’s First Baptist Church.

At the time, most Texas seminaries weren’t offering the kind of instruction she sought, so Moore found a private tutor. Slowly, she started getting invitations to speak at women’s luncheons and study groups, in exchange for a plate of food or a potted plant. In tiny church social halls, she laid the cornerstone of an evangelical empire.

Greg Lukianoff was preoccupied with political polarization—not just the divisiveness he observed, but the fallout—and specifically the effects of tribalism on college campuses. The year was 2015.

“It is a very serious problem for any democracy,” he and his co-author Jonathan Haidt wrote in a cover story for The Atlantic that year. “As each side increasingly demonizes the other, compromise becomes more difficult … So it’s not hard to imagine why students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past.”

In that story, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Lukianoff, a First Amendment lawyer and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, observed that “in the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like,” and argued that capitulating to requests to banish certain ideas from classrooms and campus events would likely increase student anxiety and depression, rather than ameliorate it.

The dubious notion that philosophy is a guide to calmer living is as old as the field itself. Saint Augustine described philosophy as a “harbor” for troubled souls in a fourth-century monograph on the happy life, and the sixth-century Roman senator Boethius titled the treatise he wrote while awaiting execution “The Consolation of Philosophy.” More recently, in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that the aim of philosophy is not to seek the truth but rather to provide relief—“to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” Wittgenstein didn’t embrace “a single philosophical method.” Instead he concluded, “There are indeed methods, different therapies” to quiet the buzz of our puzzlement.

DENVER—John Hickenlooper sits in the backseat of his official SUV, poring over a speech he’s about to deliver before the One Colorado Education Fund. He’s slated to receive an award from the group for his leadership on LGBT issues.

It’s a busy Saturday night in the life of Colorado’s popular Democratic governor, who is dressed in a royal blue, pin-striped zoot suit, having just left the annual Dancing With the Denver Stars fundraiser in late August.

He shows off a few steps from his dance routine to a small group of acquaintances once he arrives at the Four Seasons hotel. By the time he’s made his way to the lectern in the hotel’s ballroom and the applause died down, the governor’s prepared remarks have been superseded by the narratives that fill his head. “I had a speech, but I thought I’d tell two quick stories,” he says.

The scene is familiar: loud music, no parents, and beer. Christine Blasey Ford alleges that, in a Bethesda home in 1982, when she was in high school, then 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her. Kavanaugh categorically denies the accusation. His staunchest defenders say that, even if the accusation is true, his behavior as a young man should not derail his path to the Supreme Court.

Yet the repercussions many young people—particularly low-income youth of color—might face for the kind of conduct described by Ford are far more severe than a failed nomination. Our current laws and practices ensure that adolescent mistakes have lifelong consequences. People too young to buy cigarettes are regularly subject to adult punishments. There are roughly 1,000 people under 18 in adult prisons, and thousands more over that age serving time for offenses committed in their teenage years.

Sometimes it begins with the toothpaste. Whenever I go back to the United States from Europe, where I’ve lived for more than half my adult life, I’ll often find myself in a jet-lagged fog at a huge American drugstore staring at the toothpaste aisle. Why? I ask myself, or anyone who’s around. Why are there so many kinds of toothpaste? Whitening, baking soda, clean mint, fresh mint, gel, paste, swirls of gel and paste, kids’ toothpastes, sensitive-teeth toothpaste. Why?

It’s not that there isn’t a variety of toothpaste in Paris, where I live. France is a developed country with a market economy—well, mostly a market economy—and its own large supermarket chains. But there’s something about the toothpaste aisles of the United States that I find emblematic of America’s over-the-topness—the dozens of varieties of everything—everything!—when fewer varieties might suffice—and that I always find jarring every time I go back. New York City may be the logical extreme of this. Is there any other city in any other country on earth that’s so accustomed to shopping for anything at any hour of the day, and I mean in stores, not online?

There’s been a lot of talk, over the weekend, about youthful indiscretion—about kids being kids, about boys being boys, about the liminal space that separates adulthood and its stark accountabilities from the heady years that precede them. The discussion’s most recent round has come because, on Sunday, a research psychologist and professor named Christine Blasey Ford revealed that she was the author of the letter that had been sent to Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Anna Eshoo earlier this summer: a document addressing the character of the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

In the letter, Ford—she is speaking publicly only after an initial, and eminently reasonable, reluctance to come forward—alleges that Kavanaugh, when he was a 17-year-old in the early 1980s, sexually assaulted her. She was 15 at the time. She alleges further—the details of this allegation, as they will be with any such claim of sexual violence, are crucial—that Kavanaugh, “stumbling drunk” at a party, corralled Ford into a bedroom, with a friend of his, and then pinned her down onto a bed. That he groped her, grinding his body against hers. That he tried to remove her clothes, and then the bathing suit she wore underneath them. That he put his hand over her mouth, to muffle her screams.