Harry Shearer

Before this year, life at New College of Florida could feel like a retreat into a pleasantly forgotten corner of the country. Students walked on paths that wound past wisps of Spanish moss and a stately banyan tree to a park on Sarasota Bay, where the outside world often felt as distant as the sun setting into the Gulf of Mexico. Then on January 6, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s popular Republican governor, seized control of the college by appointing six new members to its board of trustees.

Suddenly, the Sarasota campus found itself at the center of the culture wars. A DeSantis spokesman declared that the college had been “completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning.” Christopher Rufo, the most outspoken new trustee, vowed to take it back. “We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within,” he tweeted. In New College, Rufo saw every excess of “wokeness” in academia. He believes that critical theorists spent decades pursuing the “ideological capture” of universities, installing “coercive ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ programs.” At New College, he charges, the students and faculty faced something like “a hostage situation.”

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.      

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.

The pandemic initiated a slew of transformations, and though many have not stuck, one indisputably has: Telehealth is booming in America. This golden age of electronic engagement has one massive benefit—doctors are more accessible than ever. Unfortunately, this virtue is also proving to be telehealth’s biggest problem. For patients, being able to reach their doctors by video visit, phone call, or email is incredibly convenient, but physicians have been overwhelmed by the constant communication. This cost is now being shifted back to the patients, and almost every interaction with a doctor, no matter how casual, counts as some form of “visit” now.

At the start of the pandemic, telehealth was lauded as the beginning of a revolution in medicine. Patients quickly became adept at using online portals to reach their doctors, frequently writing to them with quick questions or concerns in between visits. But when in-person visits largely resumed, this higher volume of online messaging did not go away. In fact, it did not even seem to decrease. And though a video appointment and office visit might be interchangeable in a doctor’s daily schedule, busy physicians found themselves with little time to respond to those smaller communications.

Just south of Hadrian’s Wall, the ancient stone barrier that cuts across England from coast to coast, is a Roman fort called Vindolanda. Built around 85 A.D. and occupied for more than 300 years, Vindolanda was the tense interstice between empire and unoccupied frontier—a largely self-contained city at the edge of the Roman world. Today, surrounded by green, picturesque countryside, it is a wellspring of insight into the human past.

Thousands of wooden objects have been found at Vindolanda, most of them mundane—bits of wheels, remnants of furniture, a toilet seat. Rob Sands, an assistant professor in archaeology at University College Dublin, was recently examining these objects for an upcoming exhibit when he came across one particular artifact and did a double take. The artifact’s official description labeled it as a darning tool, a crafting device that helps secure fibers and can be shaped like a mushroom or maraca. But to Sands, the “darning tool” looked much more like a wooden penis.

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

Are you looking to buy a house in 2023? Welcome to hell. The average 30-year mortgage rate has approximately doubled in the past year, following a nearly 8 percent increase in average home prices the year before. How does a two-bedroom fixer-upper a block from the airport sound? It’s just 40 percent over your price range.

Choosing whether and where to buy a home is nerve-racking even if your only concern is your wallet. But the decision is also, in no small part, an emotional one. When I was buying my first home, I remember a stew of feelings: the pride of owning such a huge physical thing (well, 20 percent of that thing—the bank owned the rest); the aggravation of working with a realtor who was angling to run up the price; the fear that I was buying at the wrong time (I was) and would lose money in the end (I did). I also felt excited, because I expected that owning that house would improve my happiness, although I couldn’t say exactly how or why.

Close your eyes and think about what rock and roll looks like. Do you see a gang of comrades wielding and/or destroying instruments onstage? Do you see Mick and Keef, or Buckingham and Nicks, or all of the Blink-182 boys acting simultaneously like friends, siblings, colleagues, and rivals? This image is, by some measures, old-fashioned—in rock and other genres, bands are no longer prime.

For example: If you scanned the highest reaches of Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart last week, you’d find many solo artists going by their birth name (Steve Lacy, Zach Bryan) or TikTok-friendly alias (d4vd, dazy). Not until spot No. 10 would you see an actual band (one whose heyday was long ago: Linkin Park). This week’s cross-genre Hot 100 chart is even starker—the highest placement by a band is at No. 50 (for a song that’s actually by two bands, Fuerza Regida and Grupo Frontera). Exceptions exist in many vibrant scenes, such as K-pop and the jam-band circuit. Yet even in indie rock, much of the buzz now goes to individuals.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.      

My 6-year-old boy died in January. We lost him after a household accident, one likely brought on by a rare cerebral-swelling condition. Paramedics got his heart beating, but it was too late to save his brain. I could hold his hand, look at the small birthmark on it, comb his hair, and call out for him, but if he could hear me or feel me, he gave no sign. He had been a child in perpetual motion, but now we couldn’t get him to wiggle a finger.

My grief is profound, ragged, desperate. I cannot imagine how anything could feel worse.

Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine last year and, for that matter, its first invasion of its neighbor eight years before are impossible to justify. Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to convince his public that this war is existential, but with little success. Russia’s existence as a strong, sovereign state is not dependent on its control of Ukraine or even parts of the Donbas or Crimea. That’s why, since Putin implemented a partial mobilization last fall, hundreds of thousands of men have fled Russia rather than march to the sound of the guns, and it’s why he still refuses to declare war and order a full mobilization.

And yet a small band of critics has rallied beneath the banner of realism to argue against continued Western support for Ukraine’s effort to defend itself. “Russia may be waging a war of aggression as a matter of law,” Mario Loyola wrote in a recent essay in The Atlantic, “but as a matter of history and strategy it is moving to forestall a grave deterioration in its strategic position, with stakes that are almost as existential for it as they are for Ukraine.” But actual realism must be grounded in the details of the situations it assesses. And in the case of Ukraine, those facts lead to very different conclusions.

Dear Therapist,

My husband of 19 years passed away in April. He had Stage 4 cancer, but was not bedridden. He was a positive, happy guy and just a very, very good husband. He spoiled me throughout our married life. I am so consumed with guilt, as I feel l neglected my husband, even though I was with him the whole time he was going for treatment. I did things like make him dinner and help him bathe, but I feel like I didn't take good-enough care of him.

Two days before he died, I yelled at him and said hurtful things to him. I feel guilty that I didn’t give him rice when he asked for it. It was late and I didn’t want to go out to buy it. I just have so much guilt; it seems like everything I did to him was hurtful, even though I didn't hurt him intentionally.

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.