march 1879

Dr. Sherman Hershfield woke up one morning and was surprised to find himself behind the wheel of his car. Somewhere between his Beverly Hills apartment and his practice in the San Fernando Valley, the silver-haired physician had blacked out. Somehow, he’d avoided a crash, but this wasn’t the first time. “I didn’t know what was going on,” he admitted.

Apart from his frequent blackouts, Hershfield was in fine health for a man in his 50s. He was tall and lean, ran six miles a day, and was a strict vegetarian. “I believe a physician should provide exemplary motivation to patients,” he once wrote. “I don’t smoke and have cut out all alcohol.” Hershfield specialized in physical medicine and rehabilitation, and for decades had helped patients with brain injuries learn to walk again and rebuild their lives. Even with his experience, Hershfield didn’t know what was wrong inside his own head.

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

Impeachment: An argument

This is not a partisan judgment. Many of the president’s fiercest critics have emerged from within his own party. Even officials and observers who support his policies are appalled by his pronouncements, and those who have the most firsthand experience of governance are also the most alarmed by how Trump is governing.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

The latest casualty of the partial government shutdown might be President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a letter to the president on Wednesday, suggested that the annual speech before Congress be postponed or scrapped altogether in light of the legislative impasse that has led to the ongoing shutdown, the longest in U.S. history.

“Sadly, given the security concerns and unless government re-opens this week,” the speaker wrote, “I suggest that we work together to determine another suitable date after government has re-opened for this address or for you to consider delivering your State of the Union address in writing to the Congress on January 29th.”

Pelosi’s missive was cloaked in the politesse of a formal communication from the leader of one branch of government to another. But it was nothing less than a threat to deploy Pelosi’s authority as speaker to deny Trump the use of perhaps the country’s most powerful pulpit in the middle of a partisan standoff.

Supervised, enriching playtime. Frequent conversations about thoughts and feelings. Patient, well-reasoned explanations of household rules. And extracurriculars. Lots and lots of extracurriculars.

These are the oft-stereotyped hallmarks of a parenting style that has been common in upper-middle-class households for at least a generation. But according to a recent survey, this child-rearing philosophy now has a much broader appeal, one that holds across race and class. The survey, which polled roughly 3,600 parents of children ages 8 to 10 who were demographically and economically representative of the national population, found evidence that hands-on parenting is not just what the well-off practice—it’s what everyone aspires to.

On Monday, the men’s shaving brand Gillette released a new commercial and social-responsibility initiative, and the internet had some feedback. The ad, which shifts Gillette’s longtime tagline from “The Best a Man Can Get” to “The Best Men Can Be,” is intended to mark the brand’s 30th anniversary and reflect on the masculine ideals the razor purveyor has endorsed in the past and will demonstrate going forward. It also promises million-dollar donations to nonprofits with related goals over the next three years, starting with the Boys & Girls Club of America.

Reactions were very mixed and very loud, even though the ad itself is pretty moderate and diverse in its depictions of male behavior. It features fictionalized scenes and clips from the news or viral videos. Some of the men depicted bully or sexually harass others, while other men are active parents and healthy conflict-resolvers. The spot’s voice-over ends by reminding viewers that what they do is important, because it sets an example for the next generation.

The arresting New York Times headline last Friday—“F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia”—sparked a strangely bifurcated reaction. A bombshell to some, a dud to others, the story has had lots of people scratching their heads: What does it even mean?

The confusion is understandable, as is the debate over the significance of this deceptively complex and nuanced report—a story that, through no fault of reporters Adam Goldman, Michael Schmidt, and Nicholas Fandos, remains incomplete in key respects.

“My concern with the story,” Goldman told The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, “was that it felt, to some extent, like a ‘duh’ story.” It was, after all, already well known that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was conducting a counterintelligence investigation of links between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government, and there was plenty of evidence already in the public record of the president’s alarming behavior with respect to Vladimir Putin. It was also nothing new that Mueller was investigating obstruction of justice in connection with the president’s interactions with law enforcement. We’ve known that ever since The Washington Post reported it back on June 14, 2017.

“We may not be Christian here, but we still pray,” said a woman dressed entirely in white as she addressed a large audience of African American women. Standing behind a lectern, speaking in the cadences of a preacher, she added, “I understand God more now, doing what I’m doing, than I ever did in the Church.”

The call and response that followed (“No one’s going to protect us but who?” “Us!”) was reminiscent of church—but this was no traditional sermon. The speaker, Iyawo Orisa Omitola, was giving the keynote address last month at the third annual Black Witch Convention, which brought together some 200 women in a Baltimore reception hall. The small but growing community points to the hundreds of young black women who are leaving Christianity in favor of their ancestors’ African spiritual traditions, and finding a sense of power in the process.

The fight might be over the last fruit strip or the TV or the best chair in front of the TV; it doesn’t really matter. My children’s conflict has many causes but only one true one: They are siblings, and that’s what siblings do. The war between brothers and sisters is eternal, each generation renewing the hostilities that have defined sibling relations since humanity began.

Although it seems as if my children never give it a rest, in fact they fight far less than the average. Statistically, they should be arguing more than three times an hour, a number researchers landed on not by interviewing children or parents but by installing microphones in the subjects’ homes. Younger children fight even more—six times each hour. This means they have a fight—a real fight, not just cross words—every 10 minutes.