october 1863

Last Tuesday, the Justice Department charged 50 people with involvement in an elaborate scheme to purchase spots in some of the country’s top schools. The tactics described in the indictment were complex and multipronged, requiring multiple steps of deception and bribery by parents and their co-conspirators to secure their children’s admission to the schools of their choice. The plot purportedly included faking learning disabilities, using Photoshopped images to make it seem as if students played sports that they did not actually play, and pretending that students were of different ethnicities in an effort to exploit affirmative-action programs. The alleged scheme was led by a man named William Singer, who called his business venture a “side door” into college. On Tuesday, Singer pleaded guilty to all charges.

Billions of years ago, something—perhaps the vibrations of an exploding star—jostled a cloud of cosmic gas and dust suspended in space. The cloud collapsed on itself and flattened into a spinning disk. The center grew heavy and ignited, forming our sun. The stuff that remained ricocheted, collided, and congealed. The biggest clumps of space stuff smoothed into spheres—the planets and moons. The smallest, the asteroids and comets, stayed as they were, like crumbs left over from an elaborate feast.

And right now one of those crumbs is exploding.

An asteroid named Bennu has been caught spewing particles into space—hundreds of gravel-size bits, hurtling from the surface at high speed.

The tiny explosions were spotted by a NASA spacecraft named OSIRIS-REx. The probe settled into an orbit around the asteroid in late December and noticed the first ejection within days. Over the next two months, OSIRIS-REx observed nearly a dozen of these events. And more are still being detected.

Previously on this topic: “Is It Time to Worry About the Boeing 737 Max?,” “A Shorter Guide to the Ethiopian Tragedy and the 737 Max,” “What Was On the Record About Problems With the 737 Max,” “‘Don’t Ground the Planes, Ground the Pilots,’” “The Implications of the 737 Max Crashes,” and “Training, Regulation, and the 737 Max.”

A few hours ago Bloomberg broke a story, by Alan Levin  and Harry Suhartono, with a potentially significant detail about the first of the recent two crashes of the Boeing 737 Max. This was the crash last October of a Lion Air flight, into the sea off Indonesia, in which all 189 people aboard died. (The second, outside Addis Ababa, was of an Ethiopian Airlines flight this month, causing 157 deaths.)

At 8:07 a.m. on January 13, 2018, every smartphone screen in Hawaii lit up with a single message, in all caps: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” In fact, it was a false alarm triggered by a Hawaii Emergency Management Agency worker who mistook instructions he had received during an unscheduled emergency drill for a real attack. Nevertheless, motorists drove erratically as they raced to park their car inside a freeway tunnel. Spectators fled sporting events, and college students ran to campus tsunami shelters. Some people called or texted their loved ones to say goodbye.

It was not until 8:38 a.m. that the State of Hawaii issued a correction on its emergency-alert system. It took nearly half an hour, the governor later confessed, because he could not remember the login for his official Twitter account. The White House issued no communication until later in the day, when a deputy press secretary said in a statement that the president had been briefed on the incident and that “this was purely a state exercise.”

Updated at 5:23 p.m. ET on March 18, 2019.

The first Facebook message arrived when Heather Woock was packing for vacation, in August 2017. It was from a stranger claiming to be her half sibling. She assumed the message was some kind of scam; her parents had never told her she might have siblings. But the message contained one detail that spooked her. The sender mentioned a doctor, Donald Cline. Woock knew that name; her mother had gone to Cline for fertility treatments before she was born. Had this person somehow gotten her mother’s medical history?

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Her mom said not to worry. So Woock, who is 33 and lives just outside Indianapolis, flew to the West Coast for her vacation. She got a couple more messages from other supposed half siblings while she was away. Their persistence was strange. But then her phone broke, and she spent the next week and a half outdoors in Seattle and Vancouver, blissfully disconnected.

Shortly before he gave speeches launching his 2020 campaign earlier this month, Bernie Sanders emailed his supporters, urging them to “do our very best to engage respectfully with our Democratic opponents—talking about the issues we are fighting for, not about personalities or past grievances. I want to be clear that I condemn bullying and harassment of any kind and in any space.”

What he didn’t include was that one of the people already advising him and helping him write those launch speeches is one of his most famously aggressive supporters online.

Since December, David Sirota has, on Twitter, on his own website, and in columns in The Guardian, been trashing most of Sanders’s Democratic opponents—all without disclosing his work with Sanders—and has been pushing back on critics by saying that he was criticizing the other Democrats as a journalist. He centered many of his attacks on Beto O’Rourke, but he also bashed Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Joe Biden, Kirsten Gillibrand, Michael Bennet, John Hickenlooper, Mike Bloomberg, and even Andrew Cuomo.

“The days of the casting couch—if they ever existed—are over.”

That was the Hollywood casting director Marvin Paige, speaking to the celebrity columnist Dick Kleiner in 1965. Kleiner had noticed that Paige’s office lacked that most metaphorically laden of furniture items—a couch—and Paige had explained its absence in decidedly optimistic terms. Paige, in his pronouncement, may have been willfully ignorant; he may have been simply naive. Either way, he was wrong. The casting couch, as a metonym for sexual exploitation in the entertainment industry, lives on because the exploitation itself lives on. Today, though, it has become broader than an object, and something more than a metaphor: It’s become digitized.

I have been in school for more than 40 years. First preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, and high school. Then a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, followed by a doctoral program at Princeton. The next step was what you could call my first “real” job—as an economics professor at George Mason University.

Thanks to tenure, I have a dream job for life. Personally, I have no reason to lash out at our system of higher education. Yet a lifetime of experience, plus a quarter century of reading and reflection, has convinced me that it is a big waste of time and money. When politicians vow to send more Americans to college, I can’t help gasping, “Why? You want us to waste even more?”

It has taken her two decades, but Chi-Hing Christina Cheng has finally solved her ultimate cold case—a fishy mystery that extends from one frigid end of the planet to the other.

Cheng, a Chinese-born biologist, moved to the United States as a teenager and began working in Antarctica in 1984. There, she and her partner, Arthur DeVries, studied the notothens—a group of fishes that swim in the continent’s subzero waters. These animals survive at temperatures that would kill other fish because they produce their own antifreeze—a protein that courses through their blood and prevents ice from forming.

The protein is incredibly simple. It comprises the same three chemical building blocks, repeated over and over—one threonine and two alanines. This repetitive unit, which I’ll call “thralala” for convenience, is perfectly shaped to stick to ice crystals, creating a barrier that stops water molecules from joining and prevents the crystals from growing. Hence: antifreeze.

Big-agenda, partisan issues—the census, reapportionment and gerrymandering, the Second Amendment, abortion—are bearing down on the Supreme Court like a ship with black sails. I am not optimistic that a majority will defy Republican orthodoxy on any of these—and if that is correct, the Court will emerge next spring as both a very live political issue and a shadow of its former self.

Not every case is an agenda case, though. On Monday, the Court granted certiorari in four new criminal-justice cases that, by and large, lack a strong partisan valence. These cases will involve the Court doing, well, you know, law, and in particular cleaning up some loose ends of its criminal jurisprudence.

Did I mention that they are really, really interesting?