november 1873

Two years ago, Desmond Hughes heard so many of his favorite podcasters extolling AirPods, Apple’s tiny, futuristic $170 wireless headphones, that he decided they were worth the splurge. He quickly became a convert.

Hughes is still listening to podcasters talk about their AirPods, but now they’re complaining. The battery can no longer hold a charge, they say, rendering them functionally useless. Apple bloggers agree: “AirPods are starting to show their age for early adopters,” Zac Hall, an editor at 9to5Mac, wrote in a post in January, detailing how he frequently hears a low-battery warning in his AirPods now. Earlier this month, Apple Insider tested a pair of AirPods purchased in 2016 against a pair from 2018, and found that the older pair died after two hours and 16 minutes. “That’s less than half the stated battery life for a new pair,” the writer William Gallagher concluded.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain saw in each other a willingness to buck the Republican Party and became fast friends and political allies. Mindful of McCain’s legacy, the former California governor said on Wednesday that he couldn’t stay silent in the face of President Donald Trump’s recent spate of attacks on the late senator.

He told me that Trump’s swipes at McCain are both disgraceful and destructive. “He was just an unbelievable person,” Schwarzenegger said. “So an attack on him is absolutely unacceptable if he’s alive or dead—but even twice as unacceptable since he passed away a few months ago. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to do that. I just think it’s a shame that the president lets himself down to that kind of level. We will be lucky if everyone in Washington followed McCain’s example, because he represented courage.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged among virologists that a single virus, carrying a full set of genes, must be in want of a cell. A virus is just a collection of genes packaged into a capsule. It infiltrates and hijacks a living cell to make extra copies of itself. Those daughter viruses then bust out of their ailing host, and each finds a new cell to infect. Rinse, and repeat. This is how all viruses, from Ebola to influenza, are meant to work.

But Stéphane Blanc and his colleagues at the University of Montpellier have shown that one virus breaks all the rules.

Faba bean necrotic stunt virus, or FBNSV for short, infects legumes, and is spread through the bites of aphids. Its genes are split among eight segments, each of which is packaged into its own capsule. And, as Blanc’s team has now shown, these eight segments can reproduce themselves, even if they infect different cells. FBNSV needs all of its components, but it doesn’t need them in the same place. Indeed, this virus never seems to fully come together. It is always distributed, its existence spread between capsules and split among different host cells.

Less than a week after a gunman killed 50 people inside two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the eyes of the world have focused on the country’s leader as she has sought to unify her reeling country.  

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has called for a global fight against racism, said that her government will examine what role social media played in the carnage, and on Thursday announced a ban on semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles, the kinds of arms the suspect used in the attack. As if following the lead of the prime minister, New Zealanders publicly consoled one another, will stand for two minutes of silence on Friday, and will broadcast the Islamic call to prayer across the nation.

For those bombarded into numbness by headlines in the United States, which is convulsed by partisan politics, or Britain, paralyzed over Brexit, New Zealand’s response has been marked for the unity it has sought to foster. Beyond policy prescriptions, local communities have honored the dead while Ardern has taken on the role of national healer, visiting the mosques concerned; stopping for long, emotional hugs with the grieving; and admitting her own struggles along the way. On Wednesday, for example, she visited a school that lost two pupils in the shootings. A student raised her hand and asked Ardern the one question the prime minister had not yet been publicly asked: “How are you?”

When an ocean sunfish washed ashore in Australia a few days ago, the people who found it couldn’t help but gawk. The ocean sunfish is fundamentally bizarre, and the weirdest thing about it isn’t the teeth in its throat. It isn’t the way it plays dead on the ocean surface. It isn’t even the way its googly eyes make it perpetually look as if it’s just realized it left the stove on at home.

The strangest thing about an ocean sunfish, at least to Natasha Phillips, is its shape. Phillips, who studies the creatures at Queen’s University Belfast, called them a “giant pancake of a fish,” because they can grow to more than 5,000 pounds. Essentially, ocean sunfish look as if somebody began building a fish, added enormous vertical fins just behind its head, and then started laughing too hard to continue. And for scientists, these fish, with their unusual shape and inscrutable life, remain a “big bag of mysteries,” Phillips says.

Donald Trump once again overturned decades of U.S. policy via Twitter when he declared on Thursday that the United States should recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a disputed territory Israel seized in the 1967 war with Syria. The area, he wrote, is “of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!”

The timing of the announcement, ahead of Israeli elections on April 9, drew immediate accusations that it was aimed to benefit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces a competitive campaign as well as a looming indictment over alleged corruption. Following the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem last May, this was the second time that Trump reversed long-standing U.S. positions on Israel, appearing to offer a major gift to the Israeli prime minister without any obvious concessions in return. Yet the push for Trump to make such a move has been going on for more than a year, due to parallel efforts by Israeli officials and members of Congress.

When Alex, now a high-school senior, saw an Instagram account he followed post about something called QAnon back in 2017, he’d never heard of the viral conspiracy theory before. But the post piqued his interest, and he wanted to know more. So he did what your average teenager would do: He followed several accounts related to it on Instagram, searched for information on YouTube, and read up on it on forums.

A year and a half later, Alex, who asked to use a pseudonym, runs his own Gen Z–focused QAnon Instagram account, through which he educates his generation about the secret plot by the “deep state” to take down Donald Trump. “I was just noticing a lack in younger people being interested in QAnon, so I figured I would put it out there that there was at least one young person in the movement,” he told me via Instagram direct message. He hopes to “expose the truth about everything corrupt governments and organizations have lied about.” Among those truths: that certain cosmetics and foods contain aborted fetal cells, that the recent Ethiopian Airlines crash was a hoax, and that the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shootings were staged.

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.

President Donald Trump had not yet been in office for one month when he took to Twitter to scold a college. “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view,” he wrote, “NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” The tweet was in response to protests at the institution, and it worried college leaders—not least because as a candidate, Trump was rather reserved in higher-education-policy specifics.

On Thursday, Trump took action along the lines he set out in that early tweet, signing an executive order directing federal agencies to “take appropriate steps” to make sure that colleges receiving research funding from the federal government are promoting “free inquiry.” But the order essentially asks colleges to do what they’re already required by law to do, and it is still unclear whether there will be any enhanced policing of colleges by federal agencies as a result. The order does not have any impact on federal student-aid programs.

On Monday, another admissions scandal injected a new dose of disillusionment into the already disillusioned world of elite education. This time the revelations concern not higher education, but Stuyvesant High and New York City’s other elite public high schools. Of the 895 current eighth graders who secured a spot in next year's Stuyvesant freshman class, just seven identify as African American.

Every year, reports show abysmally low numbers of black or Latino students at all eight of the city’s elite specialized high schools whose admissions rely solely on a standardized exam. City officials including Mayor Bill de Blasio have led an ongoing, multifaceted effort to solve the problem through recruitment initiatives and a summer enrichment program designed to shepherd low-income youth into the rigorous institutions, but enrollment numbers remain disappointing.