february 1877

Louisa Muskovits appeared to be having a panic attack. It was March of 2016, and Louisa, a 33-year-old with a history of alcohol abuse, was having a regular weekly session with her chemical-dependency counselor in Tacoma, Washington.

Louisa had recently separated from her husband, Steven. When the counselor asked about her marriage, she said she wasn’t ready to talk about it. The counselor pressed, and again Louisa demurred. Eventually the conversation grew tense, and Louisa started to hyperventilate, a common symptom of a panic attack.

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

The counselor rushed down the hall to get Louisa’s therapist, Amy Harp. Together they moved Louisa to Harp’s office, where they felt they could better calm her. But once Louisa was there, Harp recalls, her demeanor transformed. Normally friendly and open, she started screaming and pulling out clumps of her hair. She growled and glared. Her head flailed from side to side, cocking back at odd angles. In jumbled bursts, she muttered about good and evil, God and the devil. She told the counselors that no one there could save “Louisa.”

CHICAGO—The midterms are done, and Barack Obama is trying to get back to his post-presidency. He still thinks the country and the world are broken, but he’s dropping back out of the public debate, urging those who came to his foundation’s second annual summit here on Monday that they need to pick back up the charge for change.

“You literally can remake the world right now, because it badly needs remaking,” Obama said.

The answers to fixing problems in agriculture, education, sustainable energy, and other fields, he said, aren’t as complicated as they’re made out to be. But, he insisted, “the reason we don’t do it is because we are still confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues.”

Nearly 45 years ago, the House Judiciary Committee concluded that President Richard Nixon’s contact with high-level Justice Department officials overseeing the Watergate investigation, detailed in a 62-page “road map” of evidence collected by prosecutors in 1972–73, amounted to an impeachable misuse of executive power.

A half century later, the FBI’s former top lawyer, Jim Baker—a close friend and associate of fired FBI Director James Comey—is laying out parallels, albeit subtly, to President Donald Trump’s interactions with the law-enforcement officials who have been investigating him and his campaign team since July 2016.

In a piece for Lawfare published on Monday, Baker and co-author Sarah Grant, a student at Harvard Law School, used the newly unsealed Watergate road map to show how one president’s attempts to control an investigation targeting him and his associates were quickly exposed and, ultimately, used against him. As the road map laid out, Nixon interacted regularly with the man supervising the Watergate investigation—Henry Petersen, then the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division—and pumped him for information.

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.

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

For the last five years, a small Mars colony thrived in Hawaii, many miles away from civilization.

The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, was carried out in a small white dome nestled along the slope of a massive volcano called Mauna Loa. The habitat usually housed six people at a time, for as long as eight months. They prepared freeze-dried meals, took 30-second showers to conserve water, and wore space suits every time they left the dome. To replicate the communication gap between Earth and Mars, they waited 20 minutes for their emails to reach their family members, and another 20 to hear back. Sometimes, as they drifted off to sleep, with nothing but silence in their ears, they really believed they were on Mars.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

Fifteen years ago, an assistant federal public defender and a defense investigator found a cross commemorating a murder beside a deserted road in eastern Oklahoma. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Law-enforcement records said it should have been about a mile and a quarter away. That slight discrepancy has led to a Supreme Court case slated for oral arguments on November 27. Formally at stake is the fate of a brutal murderer, Patrick Dwayne Murphy. But the Court must also decide whether that roadside crime scene is now and has always been a part of the Muscogee Creek Reservation.

Not just that scene—as much as 5,000 other square miles, including much of the city of Tulsa.

If the answer is “Yes,” there is a chance that the same will be true of historic reservations originally granted to the other “civilized tribes” that were removed to what is now Oklahoma by Andrew Jackson—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole nations—meaning that roughly half of Oklahoma might be reservation land.

YELLVILLE, Arkansas — It is October in the Ozarks. The grass has dried out and the trees have bronzed and browned. Deer lie glaze-eyed in the back of camouflaged pickup trucks. High-school football helmets crack every Friday night. And seven days a week, workers in processing plants are helping to kill, gut, pluck, and truss turkeys for Thanksgiving tables around the country.

Here in Yellville, this cold and rainy weekend, there are turkeys everywhere—turkey shirts and turkey costumes and turkey paraphernalia. There is a raffle giving away birds for Thanksgiving dinner. There’s a brisk trade in turkey legs too, pulled out of a barrel smoker. At the bandstand, a judge announces the winner of the “Miss Drumsticks” contest, who gleams and sparkles in her pageant finery. “It’s Miss Drumsticks because they’re judging who has the best thighs,” an older woman explained to me, matter-of-fact.

In the spirit of a holiday when people, in claustrophobic proximity to their loved ones, feel compelled to take stronger-than-usual positions on issues of even minuscule import, I have a conclusion to share: The correct time to eat Thanksgiving dinner is 4 p.m.

There are many obvious reasons why this is the case. Start with the turkey. It needs about four hours in the oven (give or take, depending on the size). It also needs to be prepped before it can go in, and then should rest for about a half hour afterward before being carved.

Read: How Friendsgiving took over Millennial culture

Let’s say this process, from raw bird to neat slices, takes about five hours (and that is if everything goes exactly to plan). If Thanksgiving dinner is to take place at 2 p.m., as many incorrect people have suggested, cooking must commence at 9 a.m. Does that sound like an unhurried, cozy holiday morning? No. It sounds like a workday.

The Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams won’t call her opponent, the Republican Brian Kemp, the legitimate winner of the 2018 gubernatorial election, although she concedes that he is the legal winner.

“We know sometimes the law does not do what it should and something being legal does not make it right,” Abrams told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday. Her reasoning is that Kemp, currently the secretary of state of Georgia, abused his authority in an effort to suppress black votes and grant himself an unfair advantage. “I will never deny the legal imprimatur that says he is in this position, and I pray for his success … But will I say that this election was not tainted, was not a disinvestment and a disenfranchisement of thousands of voters? I will not say that.”