Jeffrey Goldberg

"It’s not true that no one needs you anymore.”

These words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The plane was dark and quiet. A man I assumed to be her husband murmured almost inaudibly in response, something to the effect of “I wish I was dead.”

Again, the woman: “Oh, stop saying that.”

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I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but couldn’t help it. I listened with morbid fascination, forming an image of the man in my head as they talked. I imagined someone who had worked hard all his life in relative obscurity, someone with unfulfilled dreams—perhaps of the degree he never attained, the career he never pursued, the company he never started.

1. The Disappearance

At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator.

Updated at 2:48 p.m. ET

On Tuesday, Marissa Casey Fuchs, a fashion influencer known on Instagram as @fashionambitionist, shared a video to her 160,000-plus followers. In it, her boyfriend, Gabriel Grossman, professes his love and tells her that she’s about to embark on “an extraordinary adventure.”

“I have the most important question of my life to ask you,” he says. “The problem is, we’re not really into traditional weddings. It’s not really our style.” But, he adds, he figured out how to provide “something to experience, enjoy, and, you know, capture for the ’gram so we know it happened.” The video had originally come from Grossman’s feed, and when Fuchs reposted it to her own, she added a caption: “WHAT IS HAPPENING?!”

In April 2018, I spent three days in Austin, Texas, in the company of more than 2,500 people, most of them women, who are deeply concerned about the problem of workplace sexual harassment. The venue was the city’s convention center, and when a man named Derek Irvine took the vast stage and said that there had been “an uprising in the world of those who refuse to be silent,” the crowd roared its support. He introduced a panel of speakers who have been intimately involved with the #MeToo movement: Tarana Burke, the creator of the original campaign and hashtag; Ronan Farrow, who broke the Harvey Weinstein story in The New Yorker; and Ashley Judd, one of the actors who says she was harassed by Weinstein. Adam Grant, the author of many highly regarded books on management theory and a professor at the Wharton School, interviewed them, and their remarks were often interrupted by loud, admiring applause.

In the late 1980s, an Inuit subsistence hunter named Jens Larsen killed a trio of very strange whales off the western coast of Greenland.

He and his fellow subsistence hunters would regularly catch two species: narwhals, whose males famously have long, helical tusks protruding from their snouts; and belugas, with their distinctive white skin. But Larsen’s new kills were neither. Their skin wasn’t white, nor mottled like a narwhal’s, but uniformly grey. The flippers were beluga-like, but the tails were narwhal-esque. In all his years of hunting, Larsen had never seen anything like them. He was so struck that he kept one of their skulls on the roof of his toolshed.

In 1990, it caught the attention of Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen, a scientist who studies marine mammals. With Larsen’s permission, he took it to the Greenland Fisheries Research Institute in Copenhagen for study. And after comparing it to the skulls of known belugas and narwhals, he suggested that it might have been a hybrid between the two species—a narluga.

Anyone can tell from President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed that he’s furious with congressional Democrats for even contemplating impeachment. But to get a better sense of what he’s telling friends, I went to one of his confidants and occasional golf partners: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “Does Trump ever mention impeachment to you?” I asked, trailing the senator through the hallways of the Russell Senate Office Building. “Yeah! He’s really pissed,” Graham said.

“What does he say about it?” I pressed, looking for specifics. Graham had reached his private office by this point, but he re-created Trump’s end of the conversation before closing the door: “I’m really pissed.”

Trump’s advisers believe that impeachment is inevitable: Though Speaker Nancy Pelosi has spent weeks rebuffing House Democrats who want to open proceedings, the party’s base will force her to eventually relent, they reckon.

Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in the linguistic hot seat yet again. This time, she is taking heat for accusing Donald Trump’s administration of operating “concentration camps” on the southern border. Some people, it appears, would prefer that she refer to them as “tender-age facilities,” as the administration has proposed. Or, at least, some believe it is below the belt for Ocasio-Cortez to use a term that implies a parallel between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.

However, the idea that Ocasio-Cortez is coarsening public discourse in all its recreational nastiness is based on an almost willfully immature take on how language works. In general, the right is acutely aware that a great deal of communication is based on metaphor and playfulness. For Ocasio-Cortez’s critics to suddenly pretend that language is a matter of blankly stating observations—à la the foreign-language textbook’s “My uncle is a lawyer but my aunt has a spoon”—is a high-school debate-team feint.

Every morning for 20 years, Karl-Heinz Martens steered his yellow mail truck through the narrow streets of Eutin, a market town arranged around a little castle in northern Germany, near the Baltic Sea. On his route, Martens would drive through miles of farms and fields before disappearing into a deep, enchanted forest, where he unlocked a gate using a special key and reversed into his parking spot—as all mailmen do—facing outward to ensure a quick exit. As he crunched into the woods carrying his mailbag, his tidy beard and glasses were sometimes flecked with snowflakes or sleet, and every morning, just before the clock struck 12, he arrived beneath a towering oak.

“People used to memorize my route and wait for me to arrive because they couldn’t believe that a postman would deliver letters to a tree,” Martens told the press, who called the now-retired mailman the “messenger of love.” The Bräutigamseiche, or Bridegroom’s Oak, is the only tree in Europe with its own mailing address. Every day the 500-year-old tree receives dozens of lonely-hearts letters, and singletons arrive from near and far to reach into a small knothole in the trunk, hoping to find a match. The tree is believed to possess magical matchmaking powers.

Updated at 12:07 p.m. on June 19, 2019

Like most other colleges across the country, Newbury College, a small, private liberal-arts school in Brookline, Massachusetts, held classes through the end of this past spring semester and then bid farewell to cap-and-gown-wearing seniors. But unlike almost every other college, those classes, and that farewell, were the school’s last: Newbury officially ceased operations at the end of May.

One of the first sources to publicly confirm the long-rumored closure was the president’s blog, where the news was shared last December. “It is with a heavy heart,” the school’s president, Joseph Chillo, wrote, “that I announce our intention to commence the closing of Newbury College, this institution we love so dearly.”