february 1877

About 4.5 billion years ago, according to the most popular theory of the moon’s formation, a mysterious rocky world the size of Mars slammed into Earth. From the fiery impact, shards swirled and fused into a new, airless world, itself bombarded with rocky objects. In the absence of the smoothing touch of weather and tectonic activity, every dent remained. And then, one day, among craters both microscopic and miles-wide, two guys came along and stepped on the surface, carving new hollows with their boots.

Buzz Aldrin, seeing the moon from the surface for the first time, described it as “magnificent desolation.”

It was not so desolate when they departed. The Apollo 11 astronauts discarded gadgets, tools, and the clothesline contraption that moved boxes of lunar samples, one by one, from the surface into the module. They left behind commemorative objects—that resplendent American flag, mission patches and medals honoring fallen astronauts and cosmonauts, a coin-size silicon disk bearing goodwill messages from the world leaders of planet Earth. And they dumped things that weren’t really advertised to the public, for understandable reasons, such as defecation-collection devices. (Some scientists, curious to examine how gut microbes fare in low gravity, even proposed going back for these.)

There’s a scene midway through When Harry Met Sally that finds the rom-com’s title couple, one evening, in bed—separate beds, each in their respective apartments, shown on a split screen. The will-they-or-won’t-they best friends, currently in the won’t-they stage of things, are talking on the phone as they watch Casablanca on TV. “Ingrid Bergman,” Harry muses. “Now she’s low-maintenance.”

“Low-maintenance?” Sally asks.

“There are two kinds of women,” Harry explains, anticipating her question: “high-maintenance and low-maintenance.”

“And Ingrid Bergman is low-maintenance?”

“An L-M, definitely,” Harry replies.

“Which one am I?”

Harry has anticipated this question, too—of course Sally would wonder. “You’re the worst kind,” he says, coolly. “You’re high-maintenance, but you think you’re low-maintenance.”

The conservative intelligentsia flocked to the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., this week for the National Conservatism Conference, an opportunity for people who may never have punched a time clock to declare their eternal enmity toward elites and to attempt to offer contemporary conservative nationalism the intellectual framework that has so far proved elusive.

Yoram Hazony, the Israeli scholar who organized the conference, explicitly rejected white nationalism, barring several well-known adherents from attending, my colleague Emma Green reported. But despite Hazony’s efforts, the insistence that “nationalism” is, at its core, about defending borders, eschewing military interventions, and promoting a shared American identity did not prevent attendees from explicitly declaring that American laws should favor white immigrants.

GREENVILLE, N.C.—Before the rally began, I wanted to know why they’d come.

In the heavy, humid hours, I walked up and down the line winding through a parking lot at East Carolina University to interview some two dozen people who wanted to see the president. Many didn’t make it inside. About 90 minutes before Donald Trump took the stage, police announced that the 8,000-person basketball arena was full and those still waiting would have to watch on an oversize TV monitor set up outside. Rather than head home, they stuck around for a tailgate party of sorts.

Some cracked open beers and lit cigars, sitting on folding chairs in front of the TV. People walked by in shirts that read In Trump We Trust and Fuck Off, We’re Full. Earlier, in the 100-degree heat, a four-member family band called the Terry Train entertained the crowd with a song mocking CNN. Lying Wolf Blitzer and Lying John King. Don Lemon lies about everything … Erin Burnett, can you hear us yet? We’ll give you a story you can never forget. It built to this refrain: CNN sucks!

Raj Chetty got his biggest break before his life began. His mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Anbu showed the greatest academic potential of her five siblings, but her future was constrained by custom. Although Anbu’s father encouraged her scholarly inclinations, there were no colleges in the area, and sending his daughter away for an education would have been unseemly.

But as Anbu approached the end of high school, a minor miracle redirected her life. A local tycoon, himself the father of a bright daughter, decided to open a women’s college, housed in his elegant residence. Anbu was admitted to the inaugural class of 30 young women, learning English in the spacious courtyard under a thatched roof and traveling in the early mornings by bus to a nearby college to run chemistry experiments or dissect frogs’ hearts before the men arrived.

1. The Disappearance

At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator.

A few years ago, I lived in a walkup apartment in the East Village of New York. Every so often descending the stairway, I would catch a glimpse of a particular family with young children in its Sisyphean attempts to reach the fourth floor. The mom would fold the stroller to the size of a boogie board, then drag it behind her with her right hand, while cradling the younger and typically crying child in the crook of her left arm. Meanwhile, she would shout hygiene instructions in the direction of the older child, who would slap both hands against every other grimy step to use her little arms as leverage, like an adult negotiating the boulder steps of Machu Picchu. It looked like hell—or, as I once suggested to a roommate, a carefully staged public service announcement against family formation.

Robert Spada walked into the decrepit warehouse in Detroit and surveyed the chaos: Thousands of cardboard boxes and large plastic bags were piled haphazardly throughout the cavernous space. The air inside was hot and musty. Spada, an assistant prosecutor, saw that some of the windows were open, others broken, exposing the room to the summer heat. Above the boxes, birds glided in slow, swooping circles.

It was August 17, 2009, and this brick fortress of a building housed evidence that had been collected by the Detroit Police Department. Spada’s visit had been prompted by a question: Why were police sometimes unable to locate crucial evidence? The answer lay in the disarray before him.

When you’re mad at “the man,” it’s easier to direct your anger at an actual person: parents, bankers, lawyers, and so on. When you’re heartbroken at how systemic inequality leaves people clinging to the edges of society lest they fall off forever, you may donate a few dollars to a homeless person. And when you’re mad about the tightening noose of surveillance capitalism, fastened so snugly around daily life that even our toilets are hackable and walking outside means you risk appearing in a database, you get mad at FaceApp.

The backlash against FaceApp, which uses artificial intelligence to apply a filter that ages users’ selfies by 50 years, has nearly kept apace with its viral popularity. Just as Drake, Steph Curry, and Cardi B were posting their own aged selfies, journalists and researchers were noting that Wireless Lab, FaceApp’s maker, is headquartered in St. Petersburg, Russia. As millions shared their photos to Facebook and Instagram, researchers continued to ring alarm bells about how the app’s privacy policy grants “perpetual” access to photos, including photo uploads of friends or family, regardless of whether these people agreed to the app’s terms of use. And by the time Wireless Lab CEO Yaroslav Goncharov defended the app in The Washington Post, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was calling for an FBI investigation into its data-usage policies.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series reflecting on the Apollo 11 mission, 50 years later.

For 18 minutes and maybe 19 seconds, only one human being had ever set foot on the surface of the moon. Neil Armstrong made his famous one small step, and then started unpacking the most important thing the astronauts brought with them: a 70-mm color camera.

Armstrong’s first shot, per the instructions taped to his wrist cuff, showed the landing area, including one leg of the lunar lander Eagle. He pivoted to take a panorama, showing the terrain where he’d touched down as the spacecraft burned precious fuel. He was so caught up in the first moments of moon-based photography that mission controllers in Houston had to keep reminding him to collect some moon samples, in case he and Buzz Aldrin had to evacuate suddenly.