Jeffrey Goldberg

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Late last month, analysts at the investment bank Credit Suisse published a research note about America’s new climate law that went nearly unnoticed. The Inflation Reduction Act, the bank argued, is even more important than has been recognized so far: The IRA will “will have a profound effect across industries in the next decade and beyond” and could ultimately shape the direction of the American economy, the bank said. The report shows how even after the bonanza of climate-bill coverage earlier this year, we’re still only beginning to understand how the law works and what it might mean for the economy.  

This fall, unlike the one before it, and the one before that, America looks almost like its old self. Schools and universities are in session; malls, airports, and gyms are bustling with the pre-holiday rush; handwashing is passé, handshakes are back, and strangers are packed together on public transport, nary a mask to be seen. On its surface, the country seems ready to enjoy what some might say is our first post-pandemic winter.

Americans are certainly acting as if the crisis has abated, and so in that way, at least, you could argue that it has. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” President Joe Biden told 60 Minutes in September, after proclaiming the pandemic “over.” Almost no emergency protections against the virus are left standing; we’re dismantling the few that are. At the same time, COVID is undeniably, as Biden says, “a problem.” Each passing day still brings hundreds of deaths and thousands of hospitalizations; untold numbers of people continue to deal with long COVID, as more join them. In several parts of the country, health-care systems are struggling to stay afloat. Local public-health departments, underfunded and understaffed, are hanging by a thread. And a double surge of COVID and flu may finally be brewing.

Pull up to any intersection in Los Angeles, and you will see a column of illegally posted signs forming a kind of capitalist totem pole. Most advertise services catering to the darker side of life: “Cheap Divorce!” “Fix Your Credit!” “Liquidation Sale!” Even the now-ubiquitous “Sell Your House Fast” calls to mind desperate families collapsing under the weight of a mortgage. Yet over the past couple of years, a more hopeful sign has joined the mix: “Free ADU Consultation.”

The abbreviation needs no explanation in California, where accessory dwelling units have graduated from wonky planning jargon to popular parlance. Variously known as granny flats, mother-in-law units, or casitas, ADUs are small, additional rental units that share a lot with another structure—typically a single-family home.

Several years ago, I was driving on a rural road when I came up behind a pickup truck with a Confederate-flag sticker on the back window. This isn’t such an unusual sight in some parts of the United States, but this instance surprised me: The truck had Pennsylvania plates, and the road was in Gettysburg, where an invading force of tens of thousands of Confederates, formed to defend Black slavery, arrived in summer 1863 on a pillaging expedition.

But though the Civil War was a battle between two regions of the country, sympathy for the Confederacy is no longer confined to states that seceded and border states. Support for Confederate symbols and monuments now exists across the country, following lines of race, religion, and education rather than geography. This is one of many ways in which the South is no longer simply a region: A certain version of it has become an identity shared among white, rural, conservative Americans from coast to coast. That’s one takeaway from a new survey about Confederate symbols from the Public Religion Research Institute and E Pluribus Unum.

By the time I arrived at Brooklyn’s Park Slope farmers’ market in search of a pawpaw one morning last week, it was already too late: The weird green fruit had sold out within an hour. “You have to get here early,” Jeff Rowe of Orchard Hill Organics, the market’s lone pawpaw vendor, told me. The day before, I had struck out in Manhattan’s expansive Union Square Greenmarket, where a seller told me pawpaws were extremely rare. The most upscale grocery stores—the kind that sell black garlic and cotton-candy grapes—also had none to offer.

I yearned to taste the enigmatic fruit that so many people seem to be talking about lately. Food writers marvel at how “magical” it is. Bartenders mix rum-and-pawpaw cocktails. At pawpaw festivals across the country, chefs whip up dishes such as pawpaw chicken wraps and pawpaw curry puffs. The pawpaw is having a moment, perhaps because it is a mass of contradictions: Its custardy flesh, ranging in color from butter yellow to sunset orange, tastes like a mix of banana, mango, and pineapple (or so I’d heard). But unlike those fruits, pawpaws are not native to the tropics; instead, the fruit grows across the Eastern United States and up into Canada. Pawpaw trees thrive along creeks and rivers, and there’s a good chance you’ve passed one without even knowing it.

Predicting the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a fool’s errand. I should know: For the past seven years, I’ve tried to guess the winner based on odds from the British sportsbook Ladbrokes and never once gotten it right. I have gotten it spectacularly wrong several times, however—including in 2016, when I said that Bob Dylan would definitely not win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he did days later.

Despite this track record, I continue to make predictions about the prize. Why? Two reasons. One is that it’s a fun, low-stakes way to engage with the literary world, which most people take way too seriously. And the other is that it remains the single best global survey of literature. Despite recent scandals, controversy, and silliness (here, I mean the Dylan win), the Nobel has maintained its place as not just the world’s most important literary award, but its most important cultural one.

We Millennials can feel it in our hips: our coolness curdling. Jokes about our fashions and facial expressions have proliferated, and they don’t just mock the idea of circa-40-year-olds hissing yas while squeezing into skinny jeans. They paint a caricature of a generation as business-casual incarnate, careerists in a failing corporation, who have been deluded into thinking that individuality consists of peppiness, baby-speak, and indie. Squad, how’d we get this way?

Cool It Down, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ first album in nine years, sheds some light on that question. Life-affirming and eclectic dance-rock with apocalyptic themes, the music is lovely, and a reminder of how long the 21st century has been. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a trio of Gen Xers, accidentally helped create one of the dominant youth aesthetics—idealistic, scruffy, sellable—of the past two decades. Perhaps the band even foresaw where their listeners would end up today. “It’s our time … to be hated,” Karen O sang lovingly in 2001, on the band’s first EP.

As a pulmonary specialist, I spend most of my clinical time in the hospital—which, during pandemic surges, has meant many long days treating critically ill COVID-19 patients in the ICU. But I also work in an outpatient clinic, where I also treat those same sorts of patients after they’re discharged: people who survived weeks-long hospitalizations but have been dealing ever since with lung damage. Such patients often face the same social and economic factors that made them vulnerable to COVID-19 to begin with, and they require attentive care.

Patients like these undoubtedly suffer what researchers have been calling post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, or PASC—which, according to one highly publicized recent CDC study, afflicts some 20 percent of COVID-19 survivors ages 18 to 64. Other studies have yielded lower estimates of the condition also called long COVID, and while differences in study methodology account for some of this variability, there’s a more fundamental issue eluding efforts to uncover the one “true” estimate of the likelihood of this condition. Quite simply, long COVID isn’t any one thing.

Five years ago, after Hurricane Irma pummeled Florida’s Gulf Coast, I rode a boat through the canals of Cape Coral, the “Waterfront Wonderland,” America’s fastest-growing city at the time. It was a sunny day with a gentle breeze and just a few puffs of clouds, so as I pointed to the blown-out lanais and piles of storm debris, my guide, a snowbird named Brian Tattersall, kept teasing me for missing the point of a magical afternoon. He said I sounded like his northern friends who always told him he was crazy to live in the Florida hurricane zone.

“Come on. Does this feel crazy?” he asked, as we drifted past some palm trees. Cape Coral is a low-lying, pancake-flat spit of exposed former swampland, honeycombed by an astonishing 400 miles of drainage ditches disguised as real-estate amenities, but to Tattersall it was a low-tax subtropical Venice where he could dock his 29-foot Sea Fox in the canal behind his house. When I asked if Irma would slow down the city’s population boom, he scoffed: “No way.”

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Yesterday, the world got a look inside Elon Musk’s phone. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is currently in litigation with Twitter and trying to back out of his deal to buy the platform and take it private. As part of the discovery process related to this lawsuit, Delaware’s Court of Chancery released hundreds of text messages and emails sent to and from Musk. The 151-page redacted document is a remarkable, voyeuristic record of a few months in the life of the world’s richest (and most overexposed) man and a rare unvarnished glimpse into the overlapping worlds of Silicon Valley, media, and politics. The texts are juicy, but not because they are lurid, particularly offensive, or offer up some scandalous Muskian master plan—quite the opposite. What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.