august 1897

On a Sunday morning in 2017 I took down his picture, and by afternoon it was in the alley with other rubbish awaiting transport to the local landfill for final burial. Hardly a hero’s end.

The painting had no monetary value; it was really just a print of an original overlaid with brushstrokes to appear authentic. But 40 years earlier it had been a gift from a young Army wife to her lieutenant husband when the $25 price (framed) required juggling other needs in our budget.

The dignified likeness of General Robert E. Lee in his Confederate Army uniform had been a prized possession of mine. I’d grown up not far from the Custis-Lee Mansion, and at West Point, Lee, the near-perfect cadet, Mexican War hero, academy superintendent, and, finally, the commander of the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia, cast a long, ever-present shadow. Later, in Army quarters from Fort Benning, Georgia, to Fort Lewis, Washington, the painting reflected my fascination with leadership, and it spoke of duty and selfless service.

Americans over 50 are worse than younger people at telling facts from opinions, according to a new study by Pew Research Center.

Given 10 statements, five each of fact and opinion, younger Americans correctly identified both the facts and the opinions at higher rates than older Americans did. Forty-four percent of younger people identified all five opinions as opinions, while only 26 percent of older people did. And 18-to-29-year-olds performed more than twice as well as the 65+ set. Of the latter group, only 17 percent classified all five facts as factual statements.

On the individual questions, the identification gap was particularly large regarding the nature of the American government and questions about immigration, but there was no statement that younger Americans did not identify with equal or higher accuracy than their elders.

Short of an election-eve exoneration by Robert Mueller, it would be hard to imagine a nicer October surprise for Donald Trump than an attempt by thousands of unauthorized immigrants to force the borders of the United States. It dramatizes every one of his themes, but none more spectacularly than this: his claim that his opponents will not defend the borders of the United States.

On Sunday, some thousands of people rafted across the Suchiate River, which separates Guatemala from Mexico. Mexico did not detain or expel them, and soon they were on the move again. Organizers seem to hope that the unprecedented mass of the caravan will overawe Mexican and U.S. authorities.

What it is also doing is testing the U.S. political system.

Quick, think of a college athlete. Chances are the person who comes to mind is a football or basketball player at a powerhouse Division I school like Louisiana State University or the University of Kentucky. Maybe the player resembles, say, Joel Embiid, who turned a chiseled, 7-foot frame into a full-ride scholarship at the University of Kansas before ascending to NBA stardom.

But the typical student athlete looks a lot more like Matteo DiMayorca, a Harvard junior recruited to play offensive tackle on the college’s football team. DiMayorca isn’t angling for a future career in the NFL, and after a nagging string of knee injuries, he’s transitioned into a managerial role on the team. He has been playing football since the fourth grade, but he says he only seriously started considering playing in college as a junior in high school. “With the help of my parents,” DiMayorca says, “I put together a highlight tape, sent out emails, and reached out to a couple of coaches.” That summer, he attended football camps put on by colleges to register on coaches’ radars. And then, the offer letters started trickling in: First from Colgate University, and then Harvard, where he applied early action.

When Eleanor Vance first encounters the eponymous mansion in Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House, it seems to consume her before she even enters it. The house is “vile,” she thinks; “it is diseased.” It looms over her, “enormous and dark,” twisting her stomach and chilling the air around her. As Eleanor stands on the veranda of Hill House, it comes “around her in a rush,” enveloping her, swallowing her whole.

Hill House is less a home than a panic attack, a fog of anxiety and dread that disrupts Eleanor’s physiological state. But anxiety is nothing new to Eleanor, a shy 32-year-old woman who’s spent the past 11 years nursing her invalid mother. Eleanor finds it exceedingly difficult to talk to strangers, and her negative thoughts about herself pervade the book, which is told almost entirely from her perspective. “I am very foolish,” she frets in one moment. During a conversation, she thinks, “Why am I talking?” Later, she confesses, “I’m no good at talking to people and saying things.” Eleanor, rootless in the wake of her mother’s death, has come to Hill House for the summer to assist Dr. Montague, an investigator of paranormal phenomena who believes that the house is haunted. As the novel proceeds, it’s hard to discern where Hill House’s darkness ends and Eleanor’s personal agitation begins.

Two years ago, I walked downstairs and saw one of my teenage sons watching a strange YouTube video on the television.

“What is that?” I asked.

He turned to me earnestly and explained, “It’s a psychology professor at the University of Toronto talking about Canadian law.”

“Huh?” I said, but he had already turned back to the screen. I figured he had finally gotten to the end of the internet, and this was the very last thing on it.

That night, my son tried to explain the thing to me, but it was a buzzing in my ear, and I wanted to talk about something more interesting. It didn’t matter; it turned out a number of his friends—all of them like him: progressive Democrats, with the full range of social positions you would expect of adolescents growing up in liberal households in blue-bubble Los Angeles—had watched the video as well, and they talked about it to one another.  

On October 13, a group of hundreds of people gathered together to flee their impoverished home country of Honduras in a caravan headed toward the United States, seeking a better life for themselves and their families. That caravan quickly swelled to approximately 7,000 Central American immigrants as it passed north through Guatemala. As of today, most of these men, women, and children have just entered Mexico, yet they remain more than a thousand miles south of the U.S. border. President Donald Trump has called the approaching group a “national emergency,” vowed to cut tens of millions of dollars in aid to three Central American countries, and will possibly cancel a recent trade deal with Mexico if the caravan isn’t stopped before it reaches the U.S. Below, photographs of the caravan from its first 10 days and some of the difficult paths taken by those involved.

As DNA-testing companies sell millions of kits, they’ve started to rearrange families. The tests have reunited long-lost cousins and helped adoptees find their birth parents, donor-conceived kids their sperm donors. They have also, in some cases, uncovered difficult family secrets.

Earlier this year,  I heard from dozens of people who took a DNA test only to discover their fathers were not their biological fathers. Many of them belonged to a private Facebook support group called DNA NPE Friends—where NPE stands for “not parent expected”—that sprang up to connect the thousands of people who’ve had their identities altered by a DNA test.

There are other sides to the story, too. The creator of DNA NPE Friends, Catherine St Clair, recently created a group for the fathers. One such father is Christopher, whose real name we are withholding at his request. Earlier this year, after buying his now-15-year-old daughter an AncestryDNA test, Christopher found out that he is not her biological father. His wife had an affair. (They also have a 13-year-old son, who is his biological child.)

A whole new world—that is what Ted Cruz wanted to give her.

It was the spring of 2001, and Heidi Nelson was planning her nuptials to the man she’d met just over a year earlier. On Christmas break from Harvard Business School, she’d encountered the cocky and cerebral Cruz in Austin, Texas, where they were both working on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. He was “super-smart” and “really fun” and looked like a “1950s movie star.” “It was love at first sight,” she told me.

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They filled those three weeks with movies and dinners and drives. Then he took her to the airport, where she’d get on a plane back to Boston. Call me every day when your day is done, she instructed him. And he did call her, every day that spring, at about 3 or 4 a.m. Later that summer, Ted gave her a strand of pearls. Probably fake, she still thinks, but they were from Bergdorf Goodman. And this was special: She’d mentioned once that she liked to go to Bergdorf’s, to look at the china and other delicate things behind glass, and he’d listened.

Before the fall of 2004, wearing a Boston Red Sox hat outside of New England elicited the sort of sympathy or solicitude more commonly extended to a lost child or a wounded faun. Red Sox fans were objects of pity. To the extent we attracted admiration, it was for our dedication to suffering.

Wearing a Red Sox hat outside of New England today elicits looks of resentment or hostility, as if for a John Hughes villain or a hedge-fund plutocrat. Red Sox fans are objects of contumely. To the extent we attract admiration, it’s for … well, we don’t attract admiration anymore, actually—only envy, at best.

But I’m not like that, I want to say. I still carry decades of epic futility and loss with me! I’m an avatar of humility on behalf of Boston’s sports teams and its tragic Puritan character! For Red Sox fans above a certain age, years of humbling defeat—crushing, gutting, ripped-from-the-jaws-of-victory defeat, mostly at the hand of the Evil Empire, the Yankees—is seared into our souls: 1978 (the Boston Massacre; Bucky F—ing Dent) and 1986 (Bob Stanley’s wild pitches; the bum-kneed arch of Bill Buckner’s legs) and 2003 (Why is Pedro still in the game?; Aaron F—ing Boone)—all the accumulated weight of 86 years of championship famine brought on by the Curse of the Bambino, incurred when the ill-starred Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000 in 1919.