Peter Pomerantsev

Donna Chambers first heard about weighted blankets when her grandson was diagnosed with autism. It was just before his third birthday, and someone Chambers knew recommended giving him a heavy quilt with plastic pellets sewn in to help him relax and fall asleep. “It was like somebody’s grandma was making them,” Chambers remembers. “They said, ‘You can talk to this lady, and she can make you one.’” She looked online and found a few other options; mostly, though, she saw an opportunity. She contacted a friend from her church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who could sew: “I was like, ‘I want to make one of these blankets. Do you think you could help me?’”

So when Chambers started her weighted-blanket company, SensaCalm, in 2008, she knew she hadn’t invented the device. Rather, she’d joined a tiny cottage industry of weighted-blanket makers—many of them small companies with names such as Therapy Shoppe, DreamCatcher, and Salt of the Earth Weighted Gear that sold blankets alongside products such as weighted vests, shoulder wraps, and lap pads. Research suggests that deep pressure on the body can calm the nervous system. One parent of a 12-year-old with Asperger’s wrote in a heartfelt product testimonial that her son’s first night with a weighted blanket was his best night of sleep ever.

This year, Heather Hund and her family will gather in West Texas on December 25 and solidify a new Christmas tradition, in which each relative is randomly assigned to give a gift to another family member and to a house pet. “The rules are basically a regift for the human and then $10 for the pet,” Hund told me. “And my 18-month-old son got put in [the latter] category too, so it’s small humans and small animals.”

Hund and her family downscaled their gift-giving six years ago after considering how much work Christmas shopping was. “I just remember coming home and being super stressed and last-minute trying to run out to the mall or looking online and seeing what I could get shipped in like three days,” said Hund, who’s 35 and works in tech in San Francisco.

Comedy often thrives in specificity, and a sketch that came late in the most recent episode of Saturday Night Live was the perfect example, mining laugh after laugh from the minutiae of the band Weezer’s discography. Three couples, all neighbors, get together for dinner, and Weezer’s recent cover of Toto’s “Africa” randomly comes on the playlist. Two guests, played by Leslie Jones and the episode’s host, Matt Damon, have very strong opinions about the song, and about Weezer in general. The four others barely care about the disagreement that ensues, but they are suddenly a captive audience to a screaming argument.

Damon, wearing black-framed glasses, gives a spot-on performance as the self-satisfied nerd whose opinions are absolute, whether people like it or not. The equally brilliant Jones initially entertains his defense of the band’s more recent output, before hitting him with: “Real Weezer fans know that they haven’t had a good album since Pinkerton in ’96!” Their purist-versus-completist showdown continues, first in good fun, before descending into charged personal insults. “Oh, I’m sorry! You’re dumb!” Jones yells. “No offense, but burn in hell,” Damon shoots.

A man rejected by a woman pops up unannounced at her workplace with roses, asking her to reconsider. Adorable or creepy? The case for creepy would seem easy to make, what with the guy’s violation of space, forcing of a private matter into a communal spectacle, and implication that love can be bought with gifts. In some cases, such a stunt can even be a tell for something more dangerous: “Showing up unannounced” is one of four things listed in an article titled “It’s Not Cute, It’s Stalking: The Warning Signs” on the website of One Love, a nonprofit “working to ensure everyone understands the difference between a healthy and unhealthy relationship.”

Popular culture has other ideas about such gestures, though. Romantic comedies regularly broadcast the desperate-love gambit—Love Actually’s sign at the door, Say Anything...’s boom box over the head—as a rite of passage on the way to a happy ending. Usually, it is men who make the supposedly noble overture; the idea that the story might be flipped led to the subversive TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

By this point in his presidency, George H. W. Bush was preparing for battle with Iraq, Bill Clinton had begun bombing Serb targets in the former Yugoslavia, George W. Bush had invaded Afghanistan, and Barack Obama was about to encounter the Arab Spring.

Donald Trump, by contrast, has been lucky.

That is the conclusion of a report released Monday by the Council on Foreign Relations ranking the conflicts that could most threaten the United States in the coming year. The study notes that the Trump administration “has yet to confront a serious international crisis in which the president has had to wrestle with the agonizing decision over whether to commit the United States to a new and potentially costly military intervention.”

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s 33-year-old speechwriter and senior adviser, is a true believer. He was an immigration hard-liner before Trump descended the golden escalator and made anti-immigration sentiment the hallmark of his campaign and his presidency. Miller has been a right-wing provocateur since high school, according to a profile from earlier this year in The Atlantic.

He’s made appearances on national television since his college years at Duke University, where he was an early defender of the lacrosse players accused of rape in an incident that divided the campus, and the nation, before the case fell apart. Yet he’s rarely seen on TV anymore. This weekend, in his first Sunday-show appearance in nearly a year, he reminded viewers why: The id of “Make America Great Again” is just too angry.

Perhaps the most striking takeaway from a pair of new reports released by the Senate Intelligence Committee is the consistency and persistence with which Russian trolls sought to depress the black vote in the 2016 election.

That workers for the Internet Research Agency—a “troll farm” with close ties to the Kremlin—targeted African Americans has been clear for more than a year, emerging in a series of reports in fall 2017, and then receiving new attention in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s February 2018 indictment of the IRA and several associated individuals.

But the two reports, commissioned from Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and New Knowledge, provide an overwhelming amount of detail and information. There’s a remarkable amount of crossover between the Russians’ tactics and what the Donald Trump campaign said it was doing late in the 2016 race.

I. An Angry Little Town

Soon after the snows of 1977 began to thaw, the residents of Greenfield, Massachusetts, received a strange questionnaire in the mail. “Try to recall the number of times you became annoyed and/or angry during the past week,” the survey instructed. “Describe the most angry of these experiences.” One woman knew her answer: Recently, her husband had bought a new car. Then he had driven it to his mistress’s house so she could admire the purchase. When the wife found out, she was livid. Furious. Her rage felt like an eruption she couldn’t control.

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

The survey was interested in the particulars of respondents’ anger. In its 14 pages, it sought an almost voyeuristic level of detail. It asked the woman to describe the stages of her fury, which words she had shouted, whether punches had been thrown. “In becoming angry, did you wish to get back at, or gain revenge?” the survey inquired. Afterward, did you feel “triumphant, confident and dominant” or “ashamed, embarrassed and guilty”? There were also questions for people like her husband, who had been on the receiving end: “Did the other person’s anger come as a surprise to you, or did you expect that it would occur?”

George Soros is mad. Susie Tompkins Buell hasn’t forgiven her. Other Democratic mega-donors are still burning with anger over Al Franken, too. But Kirsten Gillibrand is doing just fine without them.

The New York senator, who’s expected to launch a presidential campaign soon, can’t go anywhere without hearing the noise about her decision—now over a year ago—to call for Franken to go in a #MeToo scandal. But the numbers tell a different story: Gliding to another term in November, she put $17.5 million in the bank the last two years, more than any potential presidential contender in the Senate other than Elizabeth Warren. She’s finishing the year with $10.5 million in the bank that can be transferred right into a 2020 run, only $2 million behind Warren. She raised $5.5 million in low-dollar donations, behind only Warren and Bernie Sanders.