American Airlines Plane Blows a Tire During Takeoff in Chicago; Passengers Safe

Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?

Kate Julian

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

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.

How the Democrats Took Back Michigan

Edward-Isaac Dovere

A Democratic tsunami in the midterms engulfed the state Trump won most narrowly in 2016—and could keep the state blue in 2020.

DETROIT—Gretchen Whitmer had her red water bottle with the Wonder Woman logo. Debbie Stabenow was touching up her make-up. Dana Nessel was up front, sitting with her wife, right behind the stack of boxed salads that was the food for the day.

The top of the Democratic ticket in Michigan—candidates for governor, Senate and attorney general—were rolling along to the 77^th and final stop of a statewide bus tour, hours before polls closed on election day. When the dust settled on 2016, no one would have been counting on any of them to be in contention, let alone win.

But with the way things were going now two years later, they felt like singing. “We need a Democratic fight song we can all agree on,” Whitmer said.

How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Plain Black Jacket Became a Controversy

Megan Garber

The backlash against the incoming congresswoman’s “very nice” outfit is both tedious and predictable.

Earlier this week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a tweet: At congressional events, she shared (the representative-elect of New York’s 14th Congressional District is currently in Washington for a series of orientations on the workings of the House), she keeps being mistaken for an intern. Or sometimes for the spouse of the person who must be the true new member of Congress. Ocasio-Cortez, a young woman who is also a woman of color who is also a democratic socialist—a politician who won her election, earlier this month, with 78 percent of her district’s vote—keeps getting told that she doesn’t quite belong in Congress. Her tweet sharing that experience was punctuated by a face-palm emoji. It went viral.

A Deadly Tsunami of Fire

Robinson Meyer

The Camp Fire now ranks among this century’s worst U.S. natural disasters, and the number of dead could still rise.

Seventy-six people are dead. At least 1,276 are missing. And more than 7 million have been confined to their homes, as a cloud of toxic, corrosive ash darkens their windows and creeps under their doors.

The Camp Fire—which is still burning across some 232 square miles of Northern California—now ranks among the worst natural disasters to hit the United States this century. Only a handful of hurricanes and a “super outbreak” of tornadoes in 2011 have killed more Americans. This fire has robbed more Californians of their lives than has any earthquake since 1933.

It came like an ocean of flame. At 6:33 a.m. on Thursday, November 8, someone called 911 about a fire in the woods on Camp Creek Road. (The road would lend the fire its bitterly ironic name.) When firefighters arrive 10 minutes later, they noted the parched conditions and the harsh, hot wind. “This has got the potential for a major incident,” one says over the radio.

Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck

Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen

Despite vast increases in the time and money spent on research, progress is barely keeping pace with the past. What went wrong?

The writer Stewart Brand once wrote that “science is the only news.” While news headlines are dominated by politics, the economy, and gossip, it’s science and technology that underpin much of the advance of human welfare and the long-term progress of our civilization. This is reflected in an extraordinary growth in public investment in science. Today, there are more scientists, more funding for science, and more scientific papers published than ever before:

On the surface, this is encouraging. But for all this increase in effort, are we getting a proportional increase in our scientific understanding? Or are we investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress?

A boy plays at a refugee camp for Haitians returning from the Dominican Republic on the outskirts of Anse-a-Pitres, Haiti, September 7, 2015. — Andres Martinez Casares / Reuters

What Happened When a Nation Erased Birthright Citizenship

Jonathan M. Katz

The Dominican Republic deported an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people of Haitian descent over three years. Those left behind live in a state of institutionalized terror.

This is a story about what happens when you limit birthright citizenship and stir up hate against a certain class of immigrants. It takes place in the Dominican Republic. Like most countries in the Americas, for a century and a half the Caribbean nation’s constitution guaranteed birthright citizenship for anyone born on its soil, with a couple of exceptions: the children of diplomats and short-term travelers. And like most other peoples in the Americas, Dominicans have had a more complicated relationship with immigration than the framers of that constitution might have anticipated.

The Dominican Republic has long been dependent on a steady stream of cheap immigrant labor that cuts its sugar cane, builds its buildings, and staffs the beach resorts that draw in billions of foreign dollars a year. Almost all of that labor comes from the only country close enough, and poor enough, to have people who want to immigrate in large numbers to the Dominican Republic: its Hispaniolan twin, Haiti. Some working-class Dominicans without clear Haitian roots resent poorer neighbors willing to accept lower wages and tough conditions. Many wealthy Dominicans who profit wildly off the cheap labor supply are eager to have strict immigration laws in place, too—not because they want less immigration, but because they want a freer hand. Immigrants in the country illegally have no protection from workplace regulations and can be rounded up, deported, and replaced whenever convenient—including right before payday. (Sound familiar?)

Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

Edward Jay Epstein

An unruly market may undo the work of a giant cartel and of an inspired, decades-long ad campaign

The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

One of the Best Fantasy Novels Ever Is Nothing Like The Lord of the Rings

Yosef Lindell

In The Last Unicorn, there are no maps, invented languages, or epic battles. But the 1968 tale has a timely message about the importance of reality over magic.

I encountered the cover of Peter S. Beagle’s fantasy novel The Last Unicorn years before I read the book. On the front of the Ballantine paperback edition that once sat on my parents’ shelf, there’s a white unicorn running in a forest as a small red sun sets behind the mountains. Where was this majestic creature going? I wondered.

It’s now been 50 years since the novel’s publication, and the unicorn’s journey still captures the minds and hearts of readers. This week marks the release of The Last Unicorn: The Lost Journey, a commemorative edition of Beagle’s first draft of the novel. The book’s early popularity was no doubt fueled by the Tolkien boom; J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings found legions of fans in the United States after it appeared in a paperback edition in 1965. But The Last Unicorn has since come into its own. In 1982, the novel was made into an animated film, which has become something of a cult classic. A novelette sequel that Beagle published in 2005 won both the Nebula and the Hugo Awards—the fantasy genre’s two highest honors. After all these years, The Last Unicorn still feels relevant. It’s not an epic fantasy, but a softer tale at the boundaries of magic and reality, that place where one grapples with what it means to be human.

Antonio Delgado speaks at a Democratic watch party in Kingston, N.Y., after defeating incumbent Republican John Faso on Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2018 — Seth Wenig / AP

The Midterms Revealed an America Less Divided Than Many Feared

Rahm Emanuel

In this year’s elections, many voters in previously red America supported candidates across racial, socioeconomic, and cultural lines.

Nearly every day, Americans are given fresh reasons to be horrified by Donald Trump. The president’s tweets are written to exacerbate social divisions, and his policy agenda is designed more to score political points than to solve actual problems. But beneath progressive outrage sits a deep unease, fueled by a gnawing question: How could America have elected both Barack Obama and a man so prone to race-baiting, tribalism, and transparent dishonesty?

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that America is coming apart at the seams, split not only by race, but also along socio-economic, educational, and cultural lines. But in ways that would have seemed improbable if not impossible just a few short years ago, voters in what hadbeen red America chose in this year’s midterms to support candidates across those various divides.

The First Lesson of Marriage 101: There Are No Soul Mates

Christine Gross-Loh

A course at Northwestern University teaches students about what makes a healthy relationship.

Research shows that practically every dimension of life happiness is influenced by the quality of one’s marriage, while divorce is the second most stressful life event one can ever experience.

Yet nearly half of all married couples are likely to divorce, and many couples report feeling unhappy in their relationships. Instructors of Northwestern University’s Marriage 101 class want to change that. The goal of their course is to help students have more fulfilling love relationships during their lives. In Marriage 101 popular books such as Mating in Captivity and For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage are interspersed with meaty academic studies. Students attend one lecture a week and then meet in smaller breakout groups to discuss the weekly topics, which range from infidelity to addiction, childrearing to sexuality in long-term relationships.