When Bill and Melinda Gates announced on Monday that they would be ending their 27-year marriage, they tweeted in tandem that they “no longer believe [they] can grow together as a couple.” The reasoning wasn’t unusual for a 21st-century divorce, but their private emotional journey has highly atypical financial implications: Between their personal holdings and the charitable foundation they started together, the amount of money they control—somewhere around $180 billion—is roughly equal to the annual GDP of Kazakhstan or Qatar.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which they launched 25 years after Bill co-founded Microsoft, is one of the biggest private charitable foundations in the world, with an endowment of about $50 billion. In a sense, the jobs of its 1,600 employees and its investments in malaria prevention and early-childhood education have rested on the bedrock of Bill and Melinda’s marriage.

This article was published online on May 10, 2021.

Most of the people who come to Blandford Cemetery, in Petersburg, Virginia, come for the windows—masterpieces of Tiffany glass in the cemetery’s deconsecrated church. One morning before the pandemic, I took a tour of the church along with two other visitors and our tour guide, Ken. When my eyes adjusted to the hazy darkness inside, I could see that in each window stood a saint, surrounded by dazzling bursts of blues and greens and violets. Below these explosions of color were words that I couldn’t quite make out. I stepped closer to one of the windows, and the language became clearer. Beneath the saint was an inscription honoring the men “who died for the Confederacy.”

Unless you’re extraordinarily wealthy (congrats on that), your experience of working through the pandemic has probably been miserable. If you’ve had to work in person, your days have been dangerous and precarious. If you’ve been able to work from home, you’ve had an enormous privilege. But devoid of choice and novelty, remote work has lost some of its romance for office workers who previously dreamed of ending their commute. In home offices around the country, the wallpaper has begun to yellow.

WFHers have been working longer hours and more weekends than before the pandemic, and they’re more likely to report loneliness, depression, and anxiety than people working in person, according to Gallup. At the end of April, nearly 66 percent of respondents to a Morning Consult poll said they wanted to return to the office as soon as possible. Half of remote workers even miss their commute. But these data aren’t as conclusive as they might look. In the same Morning Consult poll, 84 percent of respondents said they enjoyed remote work. Gallup found that remote workers reported better overall well-being and higher engagement than those in the office. Many office workers also seem to be more productive at home, even in the middle of a disaster.

For a few weeks this spring, the United States was a world leader in vaccines, administering shots to a larger share of its population than even the United Kingdom or Israel. But since the middle of April, our vaccine campaign has stalled. The average number of people getting a first or single dose is down almost 50 percent from its peak on April 13.

What’s notable about that date? Well, it just happens to be the same day that the CDC and the FDA recommended a pause in the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

This is a coincidence too big to ignore, and so a lot of people haven’t ignored it. Several analysts and health-care experts have slammed the U.S. government for bringing America’s incredible vaccine acceleration to a sudden halt. (The Johnson & Johnson pause was lifted after 10 days). But a closer look at vaccine progress and polling suggests that this might not be the whole story.

If you’ve searched St. Vincent on Twitter in the past few weeks, you haven’t seen chatter about the goofy soul sound of the 38-year-old rock star’s latest singles. You’ve seen snarky tweets about an interview that is mainly of interest to die-hard fans and people addicted to Twitter drama.

In late April, the journalist Emma Madden posted—and then deleted—a Q&A with St. Vincent that the artist’s press team had allegedly tried to stop from being published. A publicist said the singer thought that the questions had been too “aggressive.” In reality, Madden had gently asked about St. Vincent’s forthcoming sixth album, Daddy’s Home, and the situation that had loosely inspired it: St. Vincent’s father getting out of prison in 2019 after committing stock fraud. The artist’s unremarkable—though sometimes terse—answers normally would have gotten little notice. Instead, reports that she had tried to kill the piece ignited a few days of online blood sport. Commentators puzzled over her conduct, dissed her music, questioned her politics, and mocked the concept behind Daddy’s Home.

Lurking among the jubilant Americans venturing back out to bars and planning their summer-wedding travel is a different group: liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic restrictions. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity—even when that means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit. In surveys, Democrats express more worry about the pandemic than Republicans do. People who describe themselves as “very liberal” are distinctly anxious. This spring, after the vaccine rollout had started, a third of very liberal people were “very concerned” about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, compared with a quarter of both liberals and moderates, according to a study conducted by the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington. And 43 percent of very liberal respondents believed that getting the coronavirus would have a “very bad” effect on their life, compared with a third of liberals and moderates.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Jane Austen begins Pride and Prejudice, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” In early-19th-century society—an aristocratic world of inherited wealth—marriage occupied center stage. A good spouse was an all-purpose resource: essential for moving up in the world, as for Austen’s heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, or for sustaining a dynasty, as for the object of her affections, Mr. Darcy.  

School and work were not a path to wealth and status—certainly not for women, nor even for men. Elites were indifferent to education and disdained work. The landed gentry in Pride and Prejudice look down on Elizabeth’s working uncle, no matter that he gets his income from “a very respectable line of trade.” The economic facts on the ground supported their antipathy. The highest-paying jobs tended to be in government. But even at the end of the century, an elite English civil servant made just 17.8 times the median wage, and his American counterpart just 7.8 times. Mr. Darcy’s £10,000 a year from inherited capital was more than 300 times the median wage.   

Will Hurd is the kind of politician who loves to find the middle ground. He spent six years as a Republican congressman from one of the most competitive districts in the country, a sprawling expanse that traces the southwest border of Texas along the Rio Grande. He’s got the jocular manner of a student-body president—which he was, at Texas A&M—and styles himself as a wonkish policy guy. “You said the magic word,” he told me cheerfully when I called him up recently. “I love complicated. I love nuance.”

Middle ground is hard to find in the Republican Party these days, though. Before he left Congress following the 2020 election, Hurd was the only Black GOP member of the House. (Two Black men are part of this year’s freshman Republican class.)He was consistently ranked as a relatively bipartisan member of Congress. Many of his former constituents are Latino voters, whom the Republican Party is focused on winning. Theoretically, Hurd is exactly the kind of politician Republicans should want in office. And yet he spent quite a bit of time over the past four years pushing back against the leaders of his own party. During his last two years in office, in particular, he was among the House Republicans who voted least frequently with Donald Trump. The most prominent young figures in the GOP are not moderates like Hurd, but vocal firebrands such as freshman Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado and freshman Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. “We have some serious, generationally defining challenges that we have to address, and these politics are getting in the way of having real discourse,” Hurd said. “That’s where I get frustrated.”

When the third coronavirus surge hit the U.S. last fall, the midwestern states were among the worst affected. Thousands of people in the region were being hospitalized with the virus every day. It was at this inauspicious time that a team of transplant doctors at University Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, received a pair of healthy-seeming lungs. According to a published case report, the donor had been in an automobile accident, and died from her injuries a few days later. She’d shown no signs of being sick, according to her family, nor had she been knowingly exposed to anyone with COVID-19. A radiologist did find an abnormality in her right lung but chalked it up to damage from the accident. Meanwhile, a nasal swab, taken at the hospital, confirmed her infection status: She was negative.

This article was published online on May 5, 2021.

On a Friday afternoon in early March, I felt an urge I hadn’t experienced in more than a year: I wanted to buy new clothes. Outside clothes. Clothes in which I would be perceived, by others. Clothes to wear to a party. The late-winter sun had started to warm things up a bit, I was a week and a half removed from my first Pfizer shot, and those two facts combined to cause a flare of optimism so intense that I needed to express it in what has historically been my preferred manner of celebration: by buying some stuff on the internet.

The first order of business was remembering where I had bought my outside clothes before everything went to hell—ASOS? Madewell? Nordstrom? As I dug through my brain, past all the recipes and the opinions about lesser Netflix shows that I had accumulated in the past year, I opened browser tabs. I was ready to be sold on the possibilities of the year ahead, and I wanted them to include sweaty crowds and recreational drugs and other people’s hands. I wanted to take as many steps as I possibly could toward the person I might be by July.