Stan Lee on the American Idea

Why We Think Cats Are Psychopaths

Sarah Zhang

It’s just “resting cat face.”

When Becky Evans started studying cat-human relationships, she kept hearing, over and over again, about how cats are psychopaths.

On one hand, anyone who has looked into the curiously blank face of a catloaf knows exactly what that means. But also, exactly what does it mean to apply a human mental diagnosis to felines? We let these clawed creatures into our homes and our beds, but we still have trouble understanding them on anything but our own human terms.

Evans, a psychology graduate student at the University of Liverpool, recently devised a survey for owners who think that their cats are psychopaths. The survey asks owners to describe the allegedly psychopathic behaviors, and so far they have included bullying other pets, taking over the dog’s bed, and waiting on the kitchen counter to pounce on unsuspecting family members. In short, pretty typical cat behavior.

Climate Change Enters Its Blood-Sucking Phase

David Dobbs

As winters grow warmer in North America, thirsty ticks are on the move.

We found the moose calf half an hour in. He lay atop thin snow on a gentle slope sheltered by the boughs of a big, black spruce, curled up as a dog would on a couch. He had turned his long, gaunt head to rest against his side and closed his eyes. He might have been sleeping. The day before, April 17, 2018, when the GPS tracker on the moose’s collar stopped moving for six hours, this stillness had caused both an email and a text to alert Jake Debow, a Vermont state field biologist who stood next to me now with Josh Blouin, another state biologist, that moose No. 75 had either shucked his collar or died.

“You want pictures before we start?” Debow asked me. He’s the senior of the two young biologists, both still in grad school, both in their late 20s, young and strong and funny, from families long in the north country, both drawn to the job by a love of hunting and being outside. Debow had always wanted to be a game warden; in college, he “fell in love with the science.” His Vermont roots go back 10 generations. “Jake Debow,” Josh told me, “is about as Vermont as you can get.” It was Debow’s second season on the moose project, and Blouin’s first. This was the sixth calf, of 30 collared, that they’d found sucked to death by ticks this season. They were here to necropsy the carcass, send the tissues to a veterinary pathology lab in New Hampshire, and try to figure out as much as possible about how and why these calves were dying.

Naming and Shaming the Pro-Trump Elite

McKay Coppins

The Bulwark’s writers are the new outlaws of conservative media.

Charlie Sykes is sitting behind a desk in a sparse, disheveled office—blank walls lined with empty filing cabinets, windows covered with crooked blinds—as he tries to conjure the perfect metaphor for The Bulwark, the anti–Donald Trump conservative news site he recently helped start.

“We are the ultimate wilderness!” he declares to me.

But that doesn’t sound quite lonely enough for the political niche they’re occupying, so he tries again: “We’re on a desert island.”

Sykes continues to riff like this in his chirpy, midwestern accent, comparing The Bulwark’s writers to a band of “Somali pirates,” and then to a contingent of “guerrilla fighters.” He’s so enthusiastic about the exercise that before long I am tossing out my own overwrought suggestions. Perhaps, I muse at one point, they are soldiers on the final front of the Republican Civil War—making one last stand before the forces of Trumpism complete their conquest.

These Are the Americans Who Live in a Bubble

Emma Green

A significant minority seldom or never meet people from another race, and they prize sameness, not difference.

Most Americans do not live in a totalizing bubble. They regularly encounter people of different races, ideologies, and religions. For the most part, they view these interactions as positive, or at least neutral.

Yet according to a new study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic, a significant minority of Americans do not live this way. They seldom or never meet people of another race. They dislike interacting with people who don’t share their political beliefs. And when they imagine the life they want for their children, they prize sameness, not difference. Education and geography seemed to make a big difference in how people think about these issues, and in some cases, so did age.

A young boy faces a wall of candy dispensers. — Corbis / Getty

The Latest Diet Trend Is Not Dieting

Amanda Mull

“Intuitive eating” encourages people to eat whatever they want. It might be great advice.

In 2016, Molly Bahr changed her whole life with a Google search. Bahr, a therapist, was at a professional training on eating disorders when a speaker mentioned in passing that participants might be interested in something called intuitive eating. Bahr looked up the term. “I went home that day and it was like a light switch,” she says. “I felt like I got hit by a truck.”

Bahr decided that she wanted to spread the word about intuitive eating, but there was one problem. Up to that moment, she had been dedicated to traditional ideas of dieting and health, encouraging followers of her growing fitness-focused Instagram account to weigh their food, watch their nutritional macros, and fret over their weight as a primary indicator of their health. Intuitive eating, on the other hand, is a theory that posits the opposite: Calorie counting, carb avoiding, and waistline measuring are not only making people emotionally miserable, but contributing to many of the health problems previously attributed to simple overeating.

The 3 Big Things That People Misunderstand About Climate Change

Robinson Meyer

David Wallace-Wells, author of the new book The Uninhabitable Earth, describes why climate change might alter our sense of time.

The year is 2100. The United States has been devastated by climate change. Super-powerful hurricanes regularly ravage coastal cities. Wildfires have overrun Los Angeles several times over. And it is dangerous to go outside on some summer days—children and the elderly risk being broiled alive.

In such a world as that one, will we give up on the idea of historical progress? Should we even believe in it now? In his new book, The Uninhabitable Earth, the writer David Wallace-Wells considers how global warming will change not only the experience of human life but also our ideas and philosophies about it. It’s possible, he told me recently, that climate change will make us believe that history is “something that takes us backward rather than forward.”

Jeffrey Markowitz / Sygma via Getty Images

John Wayne Bobbitt Still Sends Love Letters to Lorena

Megan Garber

A documentary reconsidering the story that transfixed Americans in the 1990s emphasizes the horror in an event that many remember for its humor.

Before Lorena Bobbitt’s story was treated as a great tragedy, it was treated as great comedy.

Bobbitt was 24, a relatively recent immigrant to the U.S., when, in the summer of 1993—finally breaking, she would later say, after years’ worth of escalating physical and mental abuse from her husband, John Wayne Bobbitt—she took a large knife from their kitchen, approached her sleeping spouse, and severed his penis. What happened next was profoundly predictable, even without the aid of some 25 years’ worth of retrospect: all the gleeful “A Night to Dismember” and “A Slice of Wife” headlines. All the jokes about the need for men to be wary of women lest they, too, be Bobbitted.

Soon, the Late Show with David Letterman was offering up a list of Top 10 Lorena Bobbitt Excuses. Robin Williams was including a Lorena bit in one of his stand-up shows—complete with a mocking Spanish accent (born in Ecuador, Lorena had moved from Venezuela to Virginia, where she had family, in the late 1980s). Rosie O’Donnell and Mike Myers appeared as Lorena and John, respectively, on Saturday Night Live, speaking with Al Franken’s character, Stuart Smalley, the perma-smiled self-help guru. After asking the faux Lorena why she’d been mad at John—“He forced me to have sex!,” she replied—Smalley asked her to speak to John’s penis and apologize for what she had done to it. SNL’s studio audience howled with laughter.

When Kids Realize Their Whole Life Is Already Online

Taylor Lorenz

Googling yourself has become a rite of passage.

Updated at 4:53 p.m. on February 20, 2019.

For several months, Cara has been working up the courage to approach her mom about what she saw on Instagram. Not long ago, the 11-year-old—who, like all the other kids in this story, is referred to by a pseudonym—discovered that her mom had been posting photos of her, without prior approval, for much of her life. “I’ve wanted to bring it up. It’s weird seeing myself up there, and sometimes there’s pics I don’t like of myself,” she said.

Like most other modern kids, Cara grew up immersed in social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were all founded before she was born; Instagram has been around since she was a toddler. While many kids may not yet have accounts themselves, their parents, schools, sports teams, and organizations have been curating an online presence for them since birth. The shock of realizing that details about your life—or, in some cases, an entire narrative of it—have been shared online without your consent or knowledge has become a pivotal experience in the lives of many young teens and tweens.

How to Stop Hating Your Least Favorite Food

Amanda Mull

I can’t stand cucumbers, but I’m ready to change if I can.

Cucumbers are my nemesis. I want to fight every food in the melon family and many melon-adjacent foods, but melons avoid my primary disdain because they usually take their rightful place as easily avoidable fruit-salad filler. Cucumbers, though. Cucumbers. They hide in all kinds of things that otherwise seem safe to put in my mouth: sushi rolls, salads, sandwiches, the takeout “lunch bowls” that restaurants near my office sell for $14.

As far as I can remember, I’ve never liked cucumbers, mostly because they taste bad. If they’re present, they’re the first thing I notice, and it’s like someone has sprayed a middle schooler’s eau de toilette from 2002 on my food. Most other people appear to live on slightly different planes of cucumber reality from mine, which I’ve learned over several decades of watching people somehow eat them voluntarily.

Jussie Smollett exits the Cook County Department of Corrections in Chicago after posting bail on Thursday. — Joshua Lott / Reuters

The Lesson of the Jussie Smollett Case

Adam Serwer

Allegedly fraudulent reports support a narrative that many wish to believe.

In 1880, Johnson Chesnut Whittaker, one of the earliest black cadets at West Point, was found bound, gagged, and unconscious in his room. He had been slashed with a knife; pages of his Bible were found torn and strewn around the room. Whittaker had been ostracized by white students, who now insisted that he had made the whole thing up. The school decided that a threatening letter Whittaker had received matched his own handwriting, and that he had fabricated the entire incident to make West Point look bad.

Black papers such as The People’s Advocate called the West Point report “partisan, unjust and flagrantly prejudiced,” and stood by Whittaker. But as the historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote in The Death of Reconstruction, white newspapers, Democratic and Republican alike, attacked Whittaker, describing him as a “clumsy trickster and deceitful rogue” guilty of a “mad criminal act.”