july 1866

The fight for control of information from the Russia investigation is heading into uncharted legal territory. The House Judiciary Committee has voted to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for his refusal to provide the committee with the full, unredacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. Earlier this month, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff publicly signaled his intention to impose fines on the federal officials who refuse to comply with congressional subpoenas. “We’re looking through the history and studying the law to make sure we’re on solid ground,” the California Democrat said, revealing that he and his staff are aware that the move would be unorthodox and unconventional. Under these circumstances, the trepidations of the Democratic leadership are understandable. Yet the important thing is: Fining Barr would be legal—even if enforcing the fine could itself prove tricky.

Every week for the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, three Atlantic staffers have been discussing new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners were made available to critics in advance this year, we’ll be posting our thoughts on the series finale in installments.

The fight began with little subtlety. White, wealthy parents in the southeastern corner of East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, an area known as St. George, wanted their own school district. They argued that the schools in East Baton Rouge were routinely named as among the lowest performing in the state, and were unlikely to improve any time soon. So, in 2012, some of those parents went to the state legislature with a proposal: Create what would be called the Southeast Community School District.

The legislature shot it down. The parents needed a two-thirds majority for the creation of a school district, and they couldn’t martial the votes. A similar push in 2013 was rebuffed as well.

The organizers were discouraged, but undeterred. They needed a new strategy—and they didn’t have to look far. In 2005, a nearby community, Central, was unable to gather support for a school district from the legislature, so it incorporated as a new city. That helped it gain legislative approval to create its own school district, Central Community Schools, which opened its doors in 2007. The St. George supporters launched a petition drive and, in August 2013, registered a new website: StGeorgeLouisiana.com. They would try to create their own city.

Cancer cells grow in distinctive patterns that defy normal limitations.

That growth activity requires energy, and so, cancer cells metabolize nutrients in different ways from the healthy cells around them. In attempt to kill the tumor without killing the normally functioning cells, chemotherapy drugs target these pathways inside of cancer cells. This is notoriously difficult, expensive, and prone to toxic side effects that account for much of the suffering associated with the disease.

Now, doctors are starting to think more about specific nutrients that feed tumor cells. That is, how what we eat affects how cancers grow—and whether or not there are ways to potentially “starve” cancer cells without leaving a person undernourished, or even hungry.

In 1996, a group of European researchers found that a certain gene, called SLC6A4, might influence a person’s risk of depression.

It was a blockbuster discovery at the time. The team found that a less active version of the gene was more common among 454 people who had mood disorders than in 570 who did not. In theory, anyone who had this particular gene variant could be at higher risk for depression, and that finding, they said, might help in diagnosing such disorders, assessing suicidal behavior, or even predicting a person’s response to antidepressants.

Back then, tools for sequencing DNA weren’t as cheap or powerful as they are today. When researchers wanted to work out which genes might affect a disease or trait, they made educated guesses, and picked likely “candidate genes.” For depression, SLC6A4 seemed like a great candidate: It’s responsible for getting a chemical called serotonin into brain cells, and serotonin had already been linked to mood and depression. Over two decades, this one gene inspired at least 450 research papers.

Now in its 40th season, the PBS home-improvement show This Old House feels like the TV equivalent of New England clam chowder: hearty, wholesome, and old-school. The cast—headed up by master carpenter Norm Abram and rounded out by contractor Tom Silva, gardener Roger Cook, plumber Richard Trethewey, and host Kevin O’Connor—returns autumn after autumn, as consistently as uncles you might see every year at Thanksgiving dinner. The look and feel of the series hasn’t changed much since its debut in February 1979. Each episode still zeroes in on a few elements of home construction, like installing a skylight or shoring up a foundation. In one of the rare, subtle signs that four decades have passed, Silva appears to be wearing an Apple Watch in a recent episode.

To feel relief at my mother’s being dead was once unthinkable, but then the news came from Ireland. It would have crushed her. An immigrant’s daughter, my mother lived with an eye cast back to the old country, the land against which she measured every virtue. Ireland was heaven to her, and the Catholic Church was heaven’s choir. Then came the Ryan Report.

Not long before The Boston Globe began publishing its series on predator priests, in 2002—the “Spotlight” series that became a movie of the same name—the government of Ireland established a commission, ultimately chaired by Judge Sean Ryan, to investigate accounts and rumors of child abuse in Ireland’s residential institutions for children, nearly all of which were run by the Catholic Church.

The bet was on, and it was over the fate of humanity. On one side was the Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich insisted that it was too late to prevent a doomsday apocalypse resulting from overpopulation. Resource shortages would cause hundreds of millions of starvation deaths within a decade. It was cold, hard math: The human population was growing exponentially; the food supply was not. Ehrlich was an accomplished butterfly specialist. He knew that nature did not regulate animal populations delicately. Populations exploded, blowing past the available resources, and then crashed.

In his book, Ehrlich played out hypothetical scenarios that represented “the kinds of disasters that will occur.” In the worst-case scenario, famine rages across the planet. Russia, China, and the United States are dragged into nuclear war, and the resulting environmental degradation soon extinguishes the human race. In the “cheerful” scenario, population controls begin. Famine spreads, and countries teeter, but the major death wave ends in the mid-1980s. Only half a billion or so people die of starvation. “I challenge you to create one more optimistic,” Ehrlich wrote, adding that he would not count scenarios involving benevolent aliens bearing care packages.

As our political discourse generates derision and dissension, our time in the virtual world crowds out our time in the actual one, and trust in our institutions and one another has plummeted, local places such as markets, libraries, and coffee shops can help. A new study shows that living near community-oriented public and commercial spaces brings a host of social benefits, such as increased trust, decreased loneliness, and a stronger sense of attachment to where we live.

Americans who live in communities with a rich array of neighborhood amenities are twice as likely to talk daily with their neighbors as those whose neighborhoods have few amenities. More important, given widespread interest in the topic of loneliness in America, people living in amenity-rich communities are much less likely to feel isolated from others, regardless of whether they live in large cities, suburbs, or small towns. Fifty-five percent of Americans living in low-amenity suburbs report a high degree of social isolation, while fewer than one-third of suburbanites in amenity-dense neighborhoods report feeling so isolated.

Martin Surbeck remembers the episode vividly. He was in the Congo’s LuiKotale rain forest, watching a group of bonobos, African apes that are closely related to chimpanzees. Two of them—Uma, a female, and Apollo, a young, low-ranking male—were trying to have sex. Camillo, the highest-ranked male in the group, caught wind of their liaison and tried to come between them. But Hanna, Apollo’s mother, rushed in and furiously chased Camillo away, allowing her son and his mate to copulate in peace.

This was just one of the many memorable incidents that Surbeck and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have observed over 16 years of watching bonobos. At first, before getting to know individuals involved, Surbeck was surprised. “It’s not typical female behavior,” he says, in that female apes often stop unwanted males from mating with them, but very rarely police the mating attempts of other couples. He only worked out what was happening by collecting the bonobos’ poop, and sending the samples off to colleagues who sequenced the DNA within. Their analysis confirmed how the different bonobos were related, and clearly showed that mothers were repeatedly and actively improving their sons’ sex lives.