Ellen Ruppel Shell

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In the course of a single month this year, the following news reports emanated from Florida: A gun enthusiast in Tampa built a 55-foot backyard pool shaped like a revolver, with a hot tub in the hammer. A 32-year-old from Cutler Bay was arrested for biting off the head of his girlfriend’s pet python during a domestic dispute. A 40-year-old man cracked open a beer during a police traffic stop in Cape Coral. A father from East Orlando punched a bobcat in the face for attacking his daughter’s dog.

In headlines, all of these exploits were attributed to a single character, one first popularized in 2013 by a Twitter account of the same name: “Florida Man,” also known as “the world’s worst superhero,” a creature of eccentric rule-breaking, rugged defiance, and unhinged minor atrocities. “Florida Man Known as ‘Sedition Panda’ Arrested for Allegedly Storming Capitol,” a recent news story declared, because why merely rebel against the government when you could dress up in a bear suit while doing it?

Winter is over, and what a wretched one it was. There came a point in the season when everyone in our house was sick. I stood at the top of the stairs one cold morning, gazing down blearily at the pile of mail and magazines that had accumulated by the door, knowing there were dishes dumped in the sink to match and laundry heaped in the hampers as well. I thought of Henry Knighton, a medieval cleric who witnessed the Black Death’s scouring of Europe. I once read his firsthand account of the sheep and cattle that went wandering over fields where the harvest had rotted on the vine, crops and livestock returning to wilderness amid the great diminishing of human life. I now reigned over my own plagued realm, having lost this latest confrontation with nature.

In the midst of the pandemic, hundreds of dollars began to appear each month in the bank accounts of American parents. The deposits were an expansion of the child tax credit, meant to help families cope with the pressures of lockdown, and recipients no longer needed to earn a minimum income to be eligible. Unlike before, unemployed parents could benefit too. Reaching many of the families left out by other cash-aid programs, the expanded child tax credit lifted millions of kids out of poverty, reducing food insecurity and anxiety among low-income parents along the way. But amid concerns from politicians and pundits that the credit would discourage parents from working outside the home, Congress allowed it to expire at the end of 2021. The decision reflected a position toward needy families that has dominated policy making for decades: The government doesn’t just give money away. If parents want help, they’re going to have to work for it.

Last night, hundreds of thousands of Israelis poured into the streets, believing their country’s democracy to be in peril. The immediate precipitant for this popular protest was the firing of Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister. A former general tasked with overseeing the Jewish state’s security, Gallant had called for his own coalition to pause its attempted overhaul of the Israeli judicial system, arguing that division around the plan was undermining national cohesion. Rather than accede to Gallant’s proposal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired him. But although this removal provided the spark for Israel’s extraordinary explosion of civil dissent, the tinder had been building for months.

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At his rally in Waco this weekend, Donald Trump stood at attention as a choir of jailed January 6 rioters sang an anthem of sedition, and media outlets barely blinked.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?

• Netanyahu flinched.

• The catch-22 for working parents

• Dear Therapist: We set a deadline to decide about marriage, and we still don’t know.

Every Day, Every Medium

Almost 30 years after a cult leader caused a disaster in Waco, Trump rallied his own political cult—and the location cannot be a coincidence—in that same Texas city. The Waco tent revival featured the usual Trumpian cast of grifters, carnies, and misfits, including the fan favorites Mike Lindell and Ted Nugent. Most of the former president’s speech was, of course, about himself and his many grievances, and the crowd reportedly began to thin out somewhat early.

In the summer of 2015, one of my best friends died at work. Shannon was 38, childless, single and thriving, and working as an executive at a global public-relations firm, where she handled a major client. She was set to take a family vacation—treating her nephews to a Disney trip or some such—when her boss sent down an edict that no one on her account was allowed to take time off. Saying no to your boss is hard, but disappointing your nephews is even harder, so Shannon stood her ground and refused to cancel her trip.

She then proceeded—in a conference room—to have a panic attack about how the decision might affect her career. The panic attack triggered a heart attack; the heart attack revealed a preexisting tear in a heart valve; the tear led to internal bleeding that, after a two-week-long coma, led to her death. You can see why, though it isn’t technically true, I say that Shannon “died at work.” You can also see how my 36-year-old self—also single, also childless, also stuck in a successful but frustrating career and in need of some time off—–was very messed up by this. Everyone who knew Shannon was. As the bench in Prospect Park we dedicated to our friend says: Shannon, she gave a lovely light.

Dear Therapist,

My boyfriend and I have been dating for about a year and a half. About six months in, I could tell he was uncomfortable with the subject of marriage—he is divorced and a bit jaded by the experience. A year into dating, we sat down and talked. He said he didn’t know whether he wanted to get married again, whereas I knew I wanted to get married one day. We agreed that two people should know whether or not they want to get married after two years of dating, so one year from that conversation was going to be our deadline.

Since then, we have tried to determine if we are suited to marriage with each other. There is so much that is going well. He treats me very well, and does romantic, kind things that I imagine only someone who truly cares about me would do. We were friends before we started dating, and I treasure this friendship and love the time we spend together.

These days, when I explain to a fellow parent that I write novels for children in fifth through eighth grades, I am frequently treated to an apologetic confession: “My child doesn’t read, at least not the way I did.” I know exactly how they feel—my tween and teen don’t read the way I did either. When I was in elementary school, I gobbled up everything: haunting classics such as The Witch of Blackbird Pond and gimmicky series such as the Choose Your Own Adventure books. By middle school, I was reading voluminous adult fiction like the works of Louisa May Alcott and J. R. R. Tolkien. Not every child is—or was—this kind of reader. But what parents today are picking up on is that a shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun.

Silicon Valley churns out new products all the time, but rarely does one receive the level of hype that has surrounded the release of GPT-4. The follow-up to ChatGPT can ace standardized tests, tell you why a meme is funny, and even help do your taxes. Since the San Francisco start-up OpenAI introduced the technology earlier this month, it has been branded as “remarkable but unsettling,” and has led to grandiose statements about how “things will never be the same.”

But actually trying out these features for yourself—or at least the ones that have already been publicly released—does not come cheap. Unlike ChatGPT, which captivated the world because it was free, GPT-4 is currently only available to non-developers through a premium service that costs $20 a month. OpenAI has lately made other moves to cash in on its products too. Last month, it announced a partnership with the consulting firm Bain & Company to help automate marketing campaigns and customer-service operations for its clients. And just a few weeks ago, the start-up announced a paid service that would allow other companies to integrate its technology into their own products, and Instacart, Snapchat, and Shopify have already done so.

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Last spring, my boyfriend sublet a spare room in his apartment to an aspiring model. The roommate was young and made us feel old, but he was always game for a bottle of wine in the living room, and he seemed to like us, even though he sometimes suggested that we were boring or not that hot.

One night, he and my boyfriend started bickering about which Lorde album is better, the first one or the second one. This kind of argument can be entertaining if the participants are making funny or interesting points, but they weren’t, and they wouldn’t drop it. The roommate was getting louder and louder; my boyfriend was repeating himself. It was Friday; I was tired. I snapped and said, loudly, “This conversation is dumb, and I don’t want to keep having it.” I knew it was rude, but I thought it was expedient, eldest-sibling rude. So I was sort of shocked when the roommate got up without a word, went into his room, slammed the door, and never spoke to me again.