september 1897

Updated on March 22 at 9:06 p.m. ET.

Two years ago, Desmond Hughes heard so many of his favorite podcasters extolling AirPods, Apple’s tiny, futuristic $170 wireless headphones, that he decided they were worth the splurge. He quickly became a convert.

Hughes is still listening to podcasters talk about their AirPods, but now they’re complaining. The battery can no longer hold a charge, they say, rendering them functionally useless. Apple bloggers agree: “AirPods are starting to show their age for early adopters,” Zac Hall, an editor at 9to5Mac, wrote in a post in January, detailing how he frequently hears a low-battery warning in his AirPods now. Earlier this month, Apple Insider tested a pair of AirPods purchased in 2016 against a pair from 2018, and found that the older pair died after two hours and 16 minutes. “That’s less than half the stated battery life for a new pair,” the writer William Gallagher concluded.

As the nation awaits the Mueller report, a return to first principles is in order. One relevant first principle was dramatically illustrated in the breach during the waning weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign. Then–FBI Director James Comey announced at a press conference that no criminal charges would be brought against Hillary Clinton. Comey didn’t stop there, however. In that press conference, which will continue to live in infamy, Comey sharply criticized the former secretary of state for her ill-considered conduct in housing a server in her private residence, only to receive official and—not infrequently—classified information.

The nation should have risen, as one, in righteous indignation in the aftermath of the Comey press conference. In a single misadventure, Comey both seized power that was not his—the power to seek an indictment, a prerogative that was entrusted to the attorney general—and then violated one of the fundamental principles of public prosecution: Thou shalt not drag a subject or target of the investigation through the mud via public criticism. Prosecutors either seek an indictment, or  remain quiet.

Good news, America. Russia helped install your president. But although he owes his job in large part to that help, the president did not conspire or collude with his helpers. He was the beneficiary of a foreign intelligence operation, but not an active participant in that operation. He received the stolen goods, but he did not conspire with the thieves in advance.

This is what Donald Trump’s administration and its enablers in Congress and the media are already calling exoneration. But it offers no reassurance to Americans who cherish the independence and integrity of their political process.

The question unanswered by the attorney general’s summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report is: Why? Russian President Vladimir Putin took an extreme risk by interfering in the 2016 election as he did. Had Hillary Clinton won the presidency, the most likely outcome, Russia would have been exposed to fierce retaliation by a powerful adversary. The prize of a Trump presidency must have glittered alluringly indeed to Putin and his associates. Why?

Did they admire Trump’s anti-NATO, anti–European Union, anti-ally, pro–Bashar al-Assad, pro-Putin ideology?

Were they attracted by his contempt for the rule of law and dislike of democracy?

Did they hold compromising information about him, financial or otherwise?

Were there business dealings in the past, present, or future?

Or were they simply attracted by Trump’s general ignorance and incompetence, seeing him as a kind of wrecking ball to be smashed into the U.S. government and U.S. foreign policy?

Many public-spirited people have counted on Mueller to investigate these questions, too, along with the narrowly criminal questions in his assignment. Perhaps he did, perhaps he did not; we will know soon, either way. But those questions have always been the important topics.

The Trump presidency from the start has presented a national-security challenge first, a challenge to U.S. public integrity next. But in this hyper-legalistic society, those vital inquiries got diverted early into a law-enforcement matter. That was always a mistake, as I’ve been arguing for two years.

In March 1997, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Jehovah’s Witnesses, sent a letter to each of its 10,883 U.S. congregations, and to many more congregations worldwide. The organization was concerned about the legal risk posed by possible child molesters within its ranks. The letter laid out instructions on how to deal with a known predator: Write a detailed report answering 12 questions—Was this a onetime occurrence, or did the accused have a history of child molestation? How is the accused viewed within the community? Does anyone else know about the abuse?—and mail it to Watchtower’s headquarters in a special blue envelope. Keep a copy of the report in your congregation’s confidential file, the instructions continued, and do not share it with anyone.

Cottage cheese faced a problem: After World War II, batches of the soft, lumpy dairy concoction developed a propensity to take on a rancid odor and a bitter taste. That changed in 1951, when dairy researchers identified the culprits, three bacterial miscreants that produced this “slimy curd defect.” To prevent the condition, researchers advised cheesemakers to keep these bacteria from entering their manufacturing facilities in the first place. Thus ended the scourge.

Despite this and other advances in cottage-cheese production, like texture analyzers, high-powered microscopes, and trained human tasters, cottage cheese has never enjoyed the same popularity as yogurt. That’s because cottage cheese, once revered for its flavor and versatility, has taken a series of gut-punches in the dairy sector: enduring associations with weight loss, inconvenient packaging, and near-total displacement by its cousin, Greek yogurt, to name a few. But stalwart food scientists and artisanal dairy farmers have high hopes for the future of cottage cheese. With yogurt sales on the decline, a golden age of curds might be right around the corner.

BEIRUT—If you’re looking to transfer money here, there’s a chance you will be directed to Abu Shawkat. He works out of a small office in a working-class suburb of the Lebanese capital, but won’t give you its exact location. Instead, he’ll direct you to a nearby alleyway, and whether he shows up depends on whether he likes the look of you.

Abu Shawkat—not his real name—is part of the hawala system, which is often used to transfer cash between places where the banking system has broken down or is too expensive for some to access. If he agrees to do business, you’ll set a password and he will take your cash, then provide you with the contact information of a hawala broker in the city where your money is headed. Anyone who offers that specific password to that particular broker will get the funds. Thus, cash can travel across borders without any inquiry into who is sending or receiving it, or its purpose.

No matter what Attorney General William Barr reveals—or doesn’t—about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, everything Congress needed to know about Donald Trump and Russia was already clear.

October 7, 2016, was the near-death experience of the Trump campaign. That Friday afternoon, David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post reported on an Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasts of grabbing women. The shock battered the campaign. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan declared publicly that he was “sickened” by Trump, canceled a joint appearance with him, and declined to answer whether he still supported the Trump candidacy.

Less than one hour later, WikiLeaks dumped its largest and most damaging trove of hacked emails to and from Democratic operatives. It included two emails sent years before to the future Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The messages criticized the teachings of the Catholic Church on women and sexuality. The Trump campaign instantly seized on them as proof of the Clinton campaign’s supposed anti-Catholic animus—a useful weapon to help erase memories of Trump’s Twitter attacks on the pope earlier in 2016.

My body’s preferred way to remind me that I’m aging is through pain. In recent years, my level of consequence-free drinking has plummeted from “omg liMitLe$s!!” to one and a half standard glasses of Chardonnay. In yoga, I am often forced not to enter the “fullest expression of the pose” and instead to just kind of lie there.

And then there is The Tweak. About once a month—not at any certain time of the month, but roughly 12 times a year—I will wake up feeling like someone French-braided my neck muscles overnight. The pain burns from the base of my skull, down one side of my neck or the other, and onto the adjacent shoulder blade. The Tweak makes it impossible to rotate my head fully to one side or the other for the day. It’s not an athletic injury—I know no sport. It’s also not related to any underlying medical conditions that I know of, though when I talked with experts for this article, they asked me “if I am stressed,” which I took to be a rhetorical question.

Updated at 5:23 p.m. ET on March 18, 2019.

The first Facebook message arrived when Heather Woock was packing for vacation, in August 2017. It was from a stranger claiming to be her half sibling. She assumed the message was some kind of scam; her parents had never told her she might have siblings. But the message contained one detail that spooked her. The sender mentioned a doctor, Donald Cline. Woock knew that name; her mother had gone to Cline for fertility treatments before she was born. Had this person somehow gotten her mother’s medical history?

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Her mom said not to worry. So Woock, who is 33 and lives just outside Indianapolis, flew to the West Coast for her vacation. She got a couple more messages from other supposed half siblings while she was away. Their persistence was strange. But then her phone broke, and she spent the next week and a half outdoors in Seattle and Vancouver, blissfully disconnected.

As America’s big “superstar” cities pull away from the rest of the country, the former industrial hubs and rural towns left behind in today’s tech-driven economy are doing whatever they can to compete—and it isn’t always healthy. The contest to host Amazon’s second headquarters epitomized their problem. Desperate for tech cachet and tens of thousands of jobs, cities from Albany to Fresno stepped forward, in many cases by offering subsidies and tax breaks they could barely afford. Even then, Amazon anointed the thriving Washington, D.C., suburbs and (initially) New York City as its winners.

As I and my Brookings Institution colleagues Mark Muro and Bill Galston noted in a recent report, the U.S. economy suffers from a stark geographic divide. America’s largest cities—places such as New York, Seattle, and San Francisco—have accounted for 75 percent of the nation’s employment growth since 2015. Geographic inequality warps our politics. The counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2016 account for barely more than a third of the nation’s GDP.