december 1859

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.

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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.

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?

The little girl in the photograph squints and smiles broadly in the sunlight. According to a now-deleted public post on Second Chance Adoptions’ Facebook page, the girl, who the agency calls “Reese” to protect her privacy, is 10 years old, and she has been a member of her family since she was born—first in foster care, then legally adopted just before her first birthday. She loves to laugh, her adopted mom says, and she smiles all the time. She loves pink. She has no special needs. But she needs a new home.

In other posts with more pictures, the reader learns that Reese is the youngest of four daughters; the other three are the biological children of her parents. She gets straight A’s. She loves her parents and her sisters. She grumbles only when her siblings ask her to clean her room. She rarely lies and loves to wear skirts and dresses and listen to music. But according to the information provided by her parents, “This family has drastically changed their lifestyle and have left their faith and extended family for a quiet, secluded life.” It is their hope that “a different family will step forward who can provide her with the socialization and continued relationship with God that she desires.” After spending her whole life thus far with her family, Reese was being advertised on Facebook and the internet at large as available for re-adoption.

In early October, a publicist received an irresistible message via email. The publicist’s client is a top “influencer”—someone who leverages a social media following to exert influence and, usually, make money, often by selling sponsored posts. “We would be extremely interested in a business partnership,” a man calling himself “Joshua Brooks” wrote. His pitch was eye-popping: He was offering “80 Thousand US Dollars” for a single picture.

The publicist hastily agreed. Brooks, who claimed to have worked with other internet stars including Bella Thorne, Amanda Cerny, and Jake Paul, said that to get started, the influencer would simply need to log into a third-party Instagram analytics tool, Iconosquare—a common request; many brands use tools such as Iconosquare to track the success of their influencer campaigns.

The change can be baffling to many parents: Their young girls are masters of the universe, full of gutsy fire. But as puberty sets in, their confidence nose-dives, and those same daughters can transform into unrecognizably timid, cautious, risk-averse versions of their former self.

Over the course of writing our latest book, we spoke with hundreds of tween and teen girls who detailed a striking number of things they don’t feel confident about: “making new friends,” “the way I dress,” “speaking in a group.” In our research, we worked with Ypulse, a polling firm that focuses on tweens and teens, to survey more than 1,300 girls from the ages of 8 to 18 and their parents. (The sample was broadly representative of the country’s teen population in terms of race and geographic distribution.) The data is more dramatic than we’d imagined: The girls surveyed were asked to rate their confidence on a scale of 0 to 10, and from the ages of 8 to 14, the average of girls’ responses fell from approximately 8.5 to 6—a drop-off of 30 percent.

Back in 2013, many women of a certain ideological stripe and geographic location (D.C., New York, or basically any big city) wanted to be just like a woman most of us had only recently heard of: Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook.

With her blockbuster book, Lean In, she seemed to offer women a way—as long as we had nannies, an education, and smart biz-cazh attire—to finally get treated the way men do at the office.

The answer: It was on us. She had anodyne advice for being noticed: “Sit at the table,” literally. She had tips for tricking your boss into thinking you’re working harder than you are: “Holding my first and last meetings of the day in other buildings to make it less transparent when I was actually arriving and departing.”

Last Saturday night, a Fox News contributor named Kat Timpf was at a bar in Brooklyn. As she recounted the incident to National Review, a man asked her where she worked. A while later, she said, a woman began “screaming at me to get out.” Timpf walked away, but the woman followed her around the bar while other patrons laughed. Fearing physical attack, Timpf left. She told National Review and The Hill that it was the third time she has been harassed since 2017. A few months earlier, a woman yelled at her during dinner at a Manhattan restaurant. The year before, while she was about to give a speech, a man dumped water on her head.

Protests like these, that target people’s private lives, are wrong. They violate fundamental principles of civil disobedience, as understood by its most eminent practitioners and theorists. And they threaten the very norms of human decency that Trump and his supporters have done so much to erode.    

As he sat beside the leader of a government that committed suspected genocide and jailed journalists who dared investigate the massacre, Mike Pence did something remarkable. Rather than speaking in Trumpian terms of narrow American interests, he employed the seemingly bygone, more universalist language of American values.

With the cameras rolling, the U.S. vice president told Myanmar state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi  this week during a summit in Singapore that there was no “excuse” for the Myanmar military’s violent persecution of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims. He reminded her that the United States places a “premium” on democratic institutions like “a free and independent press.”

The books have undoubtedly been taken down from the shelves of Island Trees High School and Island Trees Junior High: well-thumbed copies of popular 1960s books including The Fixer by Bernard Malamud and Soul on Ice by Eldred Cleaver, they were probably sold long ago to a used-book outlet.

But they (or rather the empty spaces on library shelves they left) stand for a principle that is important to reaffirm in the dispute between the White House and CNN. The first round of that dispute was resolved Friday, when Judge Timothy Kelly granted the network a temporary restraining order requiring the White House to restore correspondent Jim Acosta’s “hard pass” to cover White House events.

The judge, an appointee of President Trump, made the order with some hints of reluctance, telling the courtroom that “I want to emphasize the very limited nature of this ruling. I have not determined that the First Amendment was violated here.” Instead, he ruled that CNN had shown the likelihood that the procedures used by the White House violated the Fifth Amendment, which binds the federal government not to deprive any “person . . . of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The granting of the TRO indicates that the judge thinks CNN will likely win after a full hearing; but it doesn’t tell us whether that likely victory would be purely on procedure, or also on the important First Amendment questions raised by the case. (As of 5 p.m., Judge Kelly had not issued a written opinion and order.)