Zachary Karabell

Emma Perrier spent the summer of 2015 mending a broken heart, after a recent breakup. By September, the restaurant manager had grown tired of watching The Notebook alone in her apartment in Twickenham, a leafy suburb southwest of London, and decided it was time to get back out there. Despite the horror stories she’d heard about online dating, Emma, 33, downloaded a matchmaking app called Zoosk. The second “o” in the Zoosk logo looks like a diamond engagement ring, which suggested that its 38 million members were seeking more than the one-night stands offered by apps like Tinder.

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She snapped the three selfies the app required to “verify her identity.” Emma, who is from a volcanic city near the French Alps, not far from the source of Perrier mineral water, is petite, and brunette. She found it difficult to meet men, especially as she avoided pubs and nightclubs, and worked such long hours at a coffee shop in the city’s financial district that she met only stockbrokers, who were mostly looking for cappuccinos, not love.

Days after finishing Cheer, Netflix’s popular new docuseries about a cheerleading team’s pursuit of its 14th national championship in 19 years, two scenes keep replaying in my head. In one, an athlete named TT arrives to practice with a back injury sustained at an event with a club cheerleading team, and Navarro College’s head cheerleading coach, Monica Aldama, forces him to practice, punishing him for failing to put her team first. As practice wears on, TT’s injury is exacerbated while catching female cheerleaders as they plunge to the ground. By the end of the scene, he’s sobbing.

In the second, an athlete named Morgan clutches her ribs and writhes in pain on the floor. She was injured on the opposite end of competitive cheerleading’s basic tandem: repeatedly falling from great heights with only the arms of her teammates to cushion her. She’s ignored by the coaches and, afraid to tell Aldama that she’s injured, confides in a teammate that she might sneak off to the hospital for treatment in between practices. At the ER, Morgan refuses treatment because the muscle relaxers she’s prescribed would keep her from participating in that afternoon’s practice. She leaves, against medical advice and with a warning that more stress on her ribs could damage her organs or kill her, and returns to the gym. When told that Morgan had been to the ER, Aldama appears annoyed. Morgan practices.

With much fanfare, The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue in August to what it called the 1619 Project. The project’s aim, the magazine announced, was to reinterpret the entirety of American history. “Our democracy’s founding ideals,” its lead essay proclaimed, “were false when they were written.” Our history as a nation rests on slavery and white supremacy, whose existence made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident” truth that all men are created equal. Accordingly, the nation’s birth came not in 1776 but in 1619, the year, the project stated, when slavery arrived in Britain’s North American colonies. From then on, America’s politics, economics, and culture have stemmed from efforts to subjugate African Americans—first under slavery, then under Jim Crow, and then under the abiding racial injustices that mark our own time—as well as from the struggles, undertaken for the most part by black people alone, to end that subjugation and redeem American democracy.

College-sports fans have generally become desensitized to the cognitive dissonances of the NCAA’s amateurism policies. The rules, which prevent the payment of cash or other “extra benefits” to student athletes or their families, are necessary to retain the purity of amateur competition, according to the association. Without such restrictions, supporters argue, NCAA sports would devolve into just another minor league of professional sports, with capitalism becoming the athletes’ sole driving source of loyalty to their university. These guidelines usually operate in the public consciousness as a low hum—background noise that doesn’t distract from the compelling sporting events that audiences allow themselves to enjoy. But every now and then, the humming erupts into a roar. And in those moments, viewers are forced to confront the system they have embraced. Odell Beckham Jr. delivered one of those moments last week.

The American Revolution had scarcely been over a month when, in a farewell letter to the Continental Army, General George Washington admitted something startling: The War of Independence wasn’t necessarily a good thing. At least, it wasn’t yet.

“It is yet to be decided,” he wrote, “whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse.” His audience had just spent eight years on this fight, but he urged them to look past the current decade and even the current century. The new country would shape the future of far more people than just the troops themselves, he cautioned, and the success or failure of the United States would determine the life course of every American who would ever be born. “For with our fate,” Washington wrote, “will the destiny of unborn Millions be involved.”

“Personally I believe wanting bangs is almost never about wanting bangs and if u want bangs u should go to therapy first,” the writer Allie Wach tweeted in February 2018. This personal belief was retweeted 15,000 times and received hundreds of replies. They were mostly from women tagging a friend, without explanation, to come see this truth universally known but slightly less frequently acknowledged: Cutting off the front of your hair is the ultimate expression of self-delusion, a desperate attempt to right something deeply wrong—with a pair of scissors.

This trope of emotional-distress bangs is almost upsettingly widespread. No one specific age group seems to be more familiar with it than any other. The Millennial fashion site Man Repeller has called “Should I get bangs?” one of the top three “existential questions that have plagued the human psyche since the dawn of time.” The New Yorker has printed a quiz titled “Are You Emotionally Stable Enough to Get Bangs?” Teenage YouTubers make videos such as “having a mental breakdown and cutting my own bangs,” and Michelle Obama referred to her own bangs as a “midlife crisis” in 2013. (I’ve given myself bangs more times than I can count or recall.)

The two men sit barely six feet apart, stationed across the Senate chamber’s center aisle, but they seldom cast so much as a sidelong glance each other’s way. Sometimes, they actually lean to opposite sides, as if their souls were repellent magnets. They speak to each other—if at all—only through the mediation of Chief Justice John Roberts.

As the impeachment trial into President Donald Trump gets under way, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Democratic counterpart, Chuck Schumer, personify the polarized politics playing out before them—or, perhaps, because of them. Now, just two days into the trial, their dysfunctional relationship has turned a proceeding that is by its nature adversarial into a sulfurous show.

The White House’s messaging throughout the impeachment process has been wildly inconsistent on nearly every count save one: Democrats are trying to overturn the 2016 election.

Other ideas have come and gone. President Donald Trump has insisted that he wasn’t pressuring foreign countries to intervene, and then done so again publicly. He has flip-flopped on what kind of trial he wants in the Senate. White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney even changed his mind on whether there was a quid pro quo in the course of one afternoon.

Yet the claim of overturning has remained constant since shortly after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry, in late September. In a reply brief over the weekend, the president’s lawyers accused Democrats of a “brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election” and of “nullifying an election and subverting the will of the American people.” The White House team made the same point on the Senate floor yesterday during debate on the rules for the trial.

In Manhattan, the homeless shelters are full, and the luxury skyscrapers are vacant.

Such is the tale of two cities within America’s largest metro. Even as 80,000 people sleep in New York City’s shelters or on its streets, Manhattan residents have watched skinny condominium skyscrapers rise across the island. These colossal stalagmites initially transformed not only the city’s skyline but also the real-estate market for new homes. From 2011 to 2019, the average price of a newly listed condo in New York soared from $1.15 million to $3.77 million.

But the bust is upon us. Today, nearly half of the Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold, according to The New York Times.

Two of the world’s richest humans, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, were allegedly having a nice chat on WhatsApp in 2018 when the latter sent Bezos an infected file that exfiltrated data from the CEO’s phone. That’s according to a new report in The Guardian, which detailed the exchange according to anonymous sources.

In the shadow of the new report, there is an indication of the murky reality of the network of the über-rich. The Bezos phone data may or may not have sparked the National Enquirer’s look at Bezos’s romantic life. Bezos may or may not have been targeted because he is the owner of The Washington Post, which had run critical editorials by the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was later murdered.