january 1881

Earlier this week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a tweet: At congressional events, she shared (the representative-elect of New York’s 14th Congressional District is currently in Washington for a series of orientations on the workings of the House), she keeps being mistaken for an intern. Or sometimes for the spouse of the person who must be the true new member of Congress. Ocasio-Cortez, a young woman who is also a woman of color who is also a democratic socialist—a politician who won her election, earlier this month, with 78 percent of her district’s vote—keeps getting told that she doesn’t quite belong in Congress. Her tweet sharing that experience was punctuated by a face-palm emoji. It went viral.

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.

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The little girl in the photograph squints and smiles broadly in the sunlight. According to a now-deleted public post on Second Chance Adoptions’ Facebook page, the girl, who the agency calls “Reese” to protect her privacy, is 10 years old, and she has been a member of her family since she was born—first in foster care, then legally adopted just before her first birthday. She loves to laugh, her adopted mom says, and she smiles all the time. She loves pink. She has no special needs. But she needs a new home.

In other posts with more pictures, the reader learns that Reese is the youngest of four daughters; the other three are the biological children of her parents. She gets straight A’s. She loves her parents and her sisters. She grumbles only when her siblings ask her to clean her room. She rarely lies and loves to wear skirts and dresses and listen to music. But according to the information provided by her parents, “This family has drastically changed their lifestyle and have left their faith and extended family for a quiet, secluded life.” It is their hope that “a different family will step forward who can provide her with the socialization and continued relationship with God that she desires.” After spending her whole life thus far with her family, Reese was being advertised on Facebook and the internet at large as available for re-adoption.

The writer Stewart Brand once wrote that “science is the only news.” While news headlines are dominated by politics, the economy, and gossip, it’s science and technology that underpin much of the advance of human welfare and the long-term progress of our civilization. This is reflected in an extraordinary growth in public investment in science: Today, there are more scientists, more funding for science, and more scientific papers published than ever before:

On the surface, this is encouraging. But for all this increase in effort, are we getting a proportional increase in our scientific understanding?  Or are we investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress?

Last Saturday night, a Fox News contributor named Kat Timpf was at a bar in Brooklyn. As she recounted the incident to National Review, a man asked her where she worked. A while later, she said, a woman began “screaming at me to get out.” Timpf walked away, but the woman followed her around the bar while other patrons laughed. Fearing physical attack, Timpf left. She told National Review and The Hill that it was the third time she has been harassed since 2017. A few months earlier, a woman yelled at her during dinner at a Manhattan restaurant. The year before, while she was about to give a speech, a man dumped water on her head.

Protests like these, that target people’s private lives, are wrong. They violate fundamental principles of civil disobedience, as understood by its most eminent practitioners and theorists. And they threaten the very norms of human decency that Trump and his supporters have done so much to erode.    

Back in 2013, many women of a certain ideological stripe and geographic location (D.C., New York, or basically any big city) wanted to be just like a woman most of us had only recently heard of: Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook.

With her blockbuster book, Lean In, she seemed to offer women a way—as long as we had nannies, an education, and smart biz-cazh attire—to finally get treated the way men do at the office.

The answer: It was on us. She had anodyne advice for being noticed: “Sit at the table,” literally. She had tips for tricking your boss into thinking you’re working harder than you are: “Holding my first and last meetings of the day in other buildings to make it less transparent when I was actually arriving and departing.”

Thursday was a bad day for House Republicans.

In the morning, Maine officials declared that Democrat Jared Golden had defeated Representative Bruce Poliquin, the last Republican in Congress from New England, with the aid of the state’s new instant-runoff voting system. Then, in the evening, the Associated Press projected that Democrat Katie Porter would unseat Representative Mimi Walters, yet another loss for the GOP in historically rock-ribbed Orange County, California. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the O.C., Democrat Gil Cisneros edged ahead of Republican Young Kim.

There have been a surprising number of these bad days for Republicans since November 6, which was itself a pretty bad day. As the outstanding races continue to gradually come in, they are changing the way the midterm elections look. Instead of the “blue wave” that pundits predicted before Election Day, it’s more like a blue tide—rolling slowly but inexorably in and washing Republicans away.

In last week’s election, the bill came due on the defining bet placed by congressional Republicans during the Donald Trump era.

Led by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House and Senate Republicans made a strategic decision to lock arms around Trump over the past two years. They resolutely rejected any meaningful oversight of his administration; excused, or even actively defended, his most incendiary remarks; buried legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller; and worked in harness with the president to pass an agenda aimed almost entirely at the preferences and priorities of voters within the GOP coalition, including tax cuts and the unsuccessful attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Even as Trump’s presidency careened through daily storms, many of his own making, they lashed themselves to its mast.

In early October, a publicist received an irresistible message via email. The publicist’s client is a top “influencer”—someone who leverages a social media following to exert influence and, usually, make money, often by selling sponsored posts. “We would be extremely interested in a business partnership,” a man calling himself “Joshua Brooks” wrote. His pitch was eye-popping: He was offering “80 Thousand US Dollars” for a single picture.

The publicist hastily agreed. Brooks, who claimed to have worked with other internet stars including Bella Thorne, Amanda Cerny, and Jake Paul, said that to get started, the influencer would simply need to log into a third-party Instagram analytics tool, Iconosquare—a common request; many brands use tools such as Iconosquare to track the success of their influencer campaigns.

When Lila Cerullo disappears at the beginning of Elena Ferrante’s first Neapolitan novel, My Brilliant Friend, it’s not a passive act but a violent one. Lila doesn’t vanish, she doesn’t evaporate; she erases herself, cutting her image out of family photographs as determinedly as she removes clothes from her closet. It isn’t enough for Lila to make herself disappear, Ferrante writes; she has to “eliminate the entire life that she had left behind.” But Lila’s ambition backfires—she’s more present in those butchered snapshots with their glaring voids than she was in photographic form.

Aggression and dominance saturate the Neapolitan novels as surely as alcohol suffuses limoncello, bitter and sharp. Elena, the narrator whose coming of age occupies the first book, emphasizes early on that her tales of growing up aren’t nostalgic, because her childhood “was full of violence.” Every relationship is portrayed as being a negotiation in power. Elena’s mother conveys to her daughter how “superfluous” she is; the girl’s father beats “Lenù,” as Elena is called, after being goaded by her mother, who insinuates that he’s not manly enough to hit his child. The central relationship in the novels, Lenù and Lila’s friendship, is defined by the fluctuating dynamic between the two, encapsulated in the twist at the end of the first book when the “brilliant friend” of the title turns out to be not Lila, as assumed all along, but Lenù.