Shadi Hamid

In 2018, I paid a man a couple hundred dollars to repeatedly jam several needles into the skin of my right wrist. I felt as if I were being attacked by a microscopic cavalry of crabs. Into every jab went black ink, eventually forming the shape of double quotation marks. It was my first tattoo, and likely not my last.

In the thousands of years that tattoos have been around, not much has changed. The practice still involves carving wounds into permanent, inked-in shapes that we find aesthetically pleasing. But much of tattooing remains mysterious: Scientists still aren’t sure what makes certain tattoos fade fast, why others stick around when they’re supposed to disappear, or how they react to light. One of the strangest and least-studied enigmas, though, is how tattoos survive at all. Our immune system is constantly doing its darndest to destroy them—and understanding why it fails could clue us in to one of our bodies’ most important functions, even when we leave the skin blank.

“While the U.S. has many vital national interests,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wrote recently, “becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.”  

The comments inspired a wave of disapproval from conservatives and Republicans, including The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the Washington Post columnist George Will, who quipped, “If that is his settled view after the dust settles and he elaborates on this, then he’s not fit to be president, period.”

As an inveterate critic of Woodrow Wilson, Will should know better. DeSantis was merely taking a realist foreign-policy stance at a time when elites in both parties have gotten into a dangerously Wilsonian frame of mind. With support for Ukraine aid falling among Republicans, DeSantis’s comments were also more in tune with where GOP voters are, and are likely to be in the months ahead.

Scolding regular people for contributing to climate change is out of fashion. But scolding people for making new people is, apparently, totally fine. Many climate activists say the worst thing an individual can do, from an emissions perspective, is have kids. The climate-advocacy group Project Drawdown lists “family planning and education,” which are intended to lower fertility rates, as leading solutions to global warming. Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian and celebrated climate researcher, published an op-ed in Scientific American this month titled “Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement.”

Trent McNamara: Liberal societies have dangerously low birth rates

In recent years, many climate advocates have emphasized human population itself—as opposed to related factors such as consumption and technology—as the driving force behind environmental destruction. This is, at bottom, a very old idea that can be traced back to the 18th-century cleric Thomas Malthus. It is also analytically unsound and morally objectionable. Critics of overpopulation down through the ages have had a nasty habit of treating people less as individuals with value and agency than as sentient locusts.

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 work 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.

The conservative writer Bethany Mandel, a co-author of a new book attacking “wokeness” as “a new version of leftism that is aimed at your child,” recently froze up on a cable news program when asked by an interviewer how she defines woke, the term her book is about.

On the one hand, any of us with a public-facing job could have a similar moment of disassociation on live television. On the other hand, the moment and the debate it sparked revealed something important. Much of the utility of woke as a political epithet is tied to its ambiguity; it often allows its users to condemn something without making the grounds of their objection uncomfortably explicit.

A few years ago, I wrote, “Woke is a nebulous term stolen from Black American English, repurposed by conservatives as an epithet to express opposition to forms of egalitarianism they find ridiculous or distasteful.” This is what people mean when they refer to “woke banks” or “woke capital,” when they complain that the new Lord of the Rings series or the new Little Mermaid is “woke” because it includes Black actors, or when they argue for a “great unwokening” that would roll back civil-rights laws. Part of the utility of the term is that it can displace the criticism onto white liberals who are insincere about their egalitarianism, rather than appearing to be an attack on egalitarianism itself. In fact, woke has become so popular as a political epithet that providing an exhaustive list of definitions would be difficult. It is a slippery enough term that you can use it to sound like you are criticizing behavior most people think is silly, even if you are really referring to things most people think of as good or necessary.

In the United States, a staggeringly wealthy country, one in nine people—and one in eight children—is officially poor. Those figures have fluctuated only slightly over half a century, during which scholars and journalists have exhaustively debated the reasons for the lack of progress. Training their attention on the lives of the dispossessed, researchers have identified barriers that keep people at the bottom of the social ladder from climbing its rungs, and offered arguments that usually play out along ideological lines. According to conservatives, the most significant obstacles are behavioral: family breakdown and debilitating habits such as dependency and idleness, exacerbated, they believe, by the receipt of government handouts. According to liberals, the real problems are structural: forces such as racism and deindustrialization, which, they contend, have entrenched inequality and prevented disadvantaged groups from sharing in the nation’s prosperity.

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“Time to stand!”

My wrist gets a buzz. The tiny computer strapped around it lights up with a message, rendered in lilac-blue: I am sitting, the watch informs me. I shouldn’t be. The screen sends the same reminder—cheery, vaguely judgy—several times a day. Sometimes I find myself refusing to heed, in an act of petty rebellion. And some of those times, I find myself wondering, as I stay in the chair, What exactly am I defying?

Watches mark time; they also impose it. I got the “smart” version of one as a gift over the holidays, and I thought of it, at first, as a way to add some order to a stretch of time that felt out of control. I’d been sleeping badly; quantifying the badness, I thought, might be the first step toward fixing it. If I could understand the rhythms of those wayward hours—the deep sleep, the REM sleep, the stretches of enervating wakefulness—maybe I could improve the rest, and with that, my life overall. My “new watch, new you” hopes soon expanded: I kept the “Stand!” reminders and the default step-counter. I added hourly exhortations to drink water. To help things along, I bought one of those enormous water bottles that break the day down into fluid ounces (7 a.m. at the top, 10 p.m. at the bottom), treating hydration as a winnable race against time.

There’s a moment in Parade, the musical revival that opened last week on Broadway, that encapsulates the show’s subversiveness. It’s also the moment that seals the demise of the drama’s protagonist, Leo Frank.

Frank, played by Ben Platt, is on trial for the murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old girl who was found dead in the Atlanta factory where he served as superintendent in 1913. (The plot is based on a true story.) A nerdy northern Jew in Georgia, Frank is an easy target for the ire of the public and the prosecution. In a taut and tense courtroom scene, he is implicated by a succession of coached but compelling witnesses. The most damning testimony comes from a janitor, Jim Conley (Alex Joseph Grayson), who claims that the Jew stereotypically attempted to buy his silence, recalling Frank’s words in a sinister song:

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Baby names just aren’t what they used to be. You can see it these days in all the little Blakes and Emersons and Phoenixes and Robins—and if you can’t immediately tell whether I’m talking about boy or girl names, then ah, yes, that’s exactly it. When it comes to baby naming, we’re at peak androgyny.

The rise of gender-neutral names has been particularly notable in the past few years, but the shift has been a long time coming, according to Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland at College Park. In 2021, 6 percent of American babies were bestowed androgynous names, approximately five times the number in the 1880s. This is a small minority of babies born every year—obviously boy names such as Liam and obviously girl names such as Olivia still top the charts—but “anything that has changed by a factor of five in our culture is a big deal,” says Laura Wattenberg, the author of The Baby Name Wizard. The jump is big enough to make you wonder what’s going on: Could it be, as some headlines have proclaimed, that baby-name trends herald a postgender world?

My mom has been warning me that I’m going to ruin my feet for almost as long as I’ve been able to walk. She has her reasons: I spent much of my childhood refusing to wear shoes more substantial than soccer slides. In high school, she wouldn’t buy me high heels, so I got an after-school job and bought them myself. During college, I added slipperlike ballet flats and Ugg boots to my repertoire. When I was 25, a physical therapist who was treating my ankle, destroyed years prior during rec-league soccer, told me that he’d never before had a client with a leg injury show up in flip-flops.

Now I am 37, and if you already have been 37, you probably know where this is going. I’ve cleaned up my worst shoe habits, but a moderate concession to podiatric health wasn’t enough to save me. Recently, I developed plantar fasciitis, a common, nagging injury to a band of connective tissue in the foot that most acutely afflicts people who spend a lot of time on their feet—nurses, bartenders, distance runners, seemingly everyone in the NBA. It is also possible to acquire plantar fasciitis by being a dumbass who loves traipsing around in terrible shoes, which was my method.