Richard A. Posner

Wisconsin Republicans are caught in a bind: What the base wants, the majority rejects. Because they see no way out, they’re angry, and the near future seems extremely volatile.

On Tuesday, Dan Kelly, a conservative, lost the most expensive judicial election in American history to the liberal Janet Protasiewicz, giving progressives a majority on Wisconsin’s high court for the first time in more than a decade. Abortion was clearly an animating issue; Wisconsinites voted for the candidate of the pro-choice movement.

Kelly didn’t go quietly or graciously. “I wish, in a circumstance like this, I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent,” Kelly said Tuesday night, “but I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede.” He said the campaign was “the most deeply deceitful, dishonorable, despicable” one he’d ever seen run for the courts, and called his opponent “a serial liar” who “has demeaned the judiciary with her behavior.”

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All of a sudden, Ozempic is everywhere. The weight-loss drug that it contains, semaglutide, is a potent treatment for obesity, and Hollywood and TikTok celebrities have turned it into a sensation. In just a few months, the medication has been branded as “revolutionary” and “game-changing,” with the power to permanently alter society’s conceptions of fatness and thinness. Certainly, a drug like semaglutide could be all of those things: Never in the history of medicine has one so safely led to such dramatic weight loss in so many people.

Dear President Biden,

Something remarkable happened on the morning of February 25, the day of the Nigerian presidential election. Many Nigerians went out to vote holding in their hearts a new sense of trust. Cautious trust, but still trust. Since the end of military rule in 1999, Nigerians have had little confidence in elections. To vote in a presidential election was to brace yourself for the inevitable aftermath: fraud.

Elections would be rigged because elections were always rigged; the question was how badly. Sometimes voting felt like an inconsequential gesture as predetermined “winners” were announced.

A law passed last year, the 2022 Electoral Act, changed everything. It gave legal backing to the electronic accreditation of voters and the electronic transmission of results, in a process determined by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The chair of the commission, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, assured Nigerians that votes would be counted in the presence of voters and recorded in a result sheet, and that a photo of the signed sheet would immediately be uploaded to a secure server. When rumors circulated about the commission not keeping its word, Yakubu firmly rebutted them. In a speech at Chatham House in London (a favorite influence-burnishing haunt of Nigerian politicians), he reiterated that the public would be able to view “polling-unit results as soon as they are finalized on election day.”

Board games are hostage situations. “C’mon, it’s fun!” your brother or so-called friend says, and then for the next two or eight hours you’re stuck. Rules are read, cardboard chits are distributed, and rounds of wit or chance (or both) transpire. But it is fun, because the joy of gaming first involves accepting arbitrary rules just to feel the sensation of having embraced them.

And yet, board games are terrible. Candy Land is stupid, Scrabble takes too long, Risk is how you learn your dad is an asshole, and Monopoly—let us not speak of Monopoly. Better, nerdier options have long existed (Diplomacy, Vector, Gettysburg—not to mention chess, go, backgammon), but the same few products dominated American rugs and tabletops for much of the 20th century, and thus defined board-gaming as a mainstream activity.

“Boy crazy” was what people called it. “She was so boy crazy,” I would hear about my girlfriends. I never heard the reverse, that a boy was “girl crazy.” Girls having crushes, sneaking out at night to have fun: It seems innocent enough. But in my small, conservative town, a “wrong” choice at a young age could cut girls off from their future dreams, leaving them mired in despair.

Growing up in the ’90s in Clinton, Arkansas, all that my best friend, Darci Brawner, and I dreamed about was getting out. “I want to see new people and new places,” I wrote in my journal when I was 12. I wanted to move to California but would take “any state besides Oklahoma or Mississippi.” We wanted careers, we wanted to be rich and famous, we wanted to be far away. Boys and sex would only stop us, catch us, or so my mother had warned.

In the 1990s, The New Republic and other magazines published, under the byline of the pathological fabricator Stephen Glass, a series of lies about Republicans: that a group of them worshipped at a literal “First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ” and considered the one-term president a messiah; that young Republicans would, when the bowtie-wearing portion of their conventions concluded, cut loose and put on orgies. Some lies are obvious even at the time but somehow become less so in retrospect. These ones seem more plausible in light of recent events.

Last week, the New York Young Republican Club posted a statement about former President Donald Trump’s indictment and hailed its own one-termer in terms normally reserved for deities and kings. “President Trump embodies the American people—our psyche from id to super-ego—as does no other figure,” wrote the club’s vice president, Nathan Berger, 32. “His soul is totally bonded with our core values and emotions, and he is our total and indisputable champion. This tremendous connection threatens the established order.”

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This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.

She is 76.

Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”

When they came up with machine-sliced bread, did we start referring to other bread as “annoying”? After the invention of the dishwasher, did we start calling our sinks “stupid”? Post-railroad, did we slander boats as “useless and embarrassing”?

Obviously not. Yet after the smartphone came along, a category of product that was once known simply as “phones” became, rudely, “dumb phones.” If a phone didn’t have an app store and a powerful operating system and an internet connection, it was no longer considered particularly admirable that it performed the core function of telephoning. It was dumb. If you held one, you’d be like, “This doesn’t do anything,” despite the fact that it did at least one thing perfectly well.

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Earlier this month, a brand-new Ford Mustang rolled into my driveway and hummed itself to a halt. The scene was a straight shot of Americana concentrate: The dirt crunched beneath the car’s tires; the sun glinted off the red paint on its aptly equine-esque snout, helping it easily outshine every other vehicle on the block. Then the front driver’s-side door opened, and out emerged not a middle-aged man who’d bought into the brand’s bid to be “cool, clever, and tough,” but instead … me.

Me, with my herbal tea and cat-fur-covered Patagonia backpack, my wallet full of Trader Joe’s receipts. Me, an Asian American woman in her 30s who hates roller coasters, who’s never finished an entire serving of beer, and whose ideal car for the past two decades has been a Toyota Prius. “You are the last person I would expect to buy a Mustang,” one of my colleagues told me after recovering from a laughing fit.

We are really very good at helping banks. Last month, in no time at all, the federal government calmed a crisis that began at just a few institutions but threatened to spread throughout the financial system.

According to CNBC, within four days, banks had borrowed roughly $12 billion from a fund set up to give financial institutions access to favorable loans. Through more traditional borrowing routes, banks were able to acquire more than $300 billion. All this without endless political hemming and hawing from Congress, without the president’s signature, without action by state legislatures or governors, and without need for city councils or mayors to weigh in.

This wasn’t a fluke, as the economist and lawyer Natasha Sarin told me recently: When a bank is on the verge of failure, “the FDIC is incredibly efficient—we come in on a Friday afternoon and shutter the bank, and by Monday morning, the bank is sold to someone else.”