february 1899

Gerta Keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t die,” she told me cheerfully as soon as I’d said hello. “I’ll bring you back.”

Death was not something I’d considered as a possible consequence of traveling with Keller, a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton University. She looked harmless enough: thin, with a blunt bob, wearing gray nylon pants and hiking boots, and carrying an insulated ShopRite supermarket bag by way of a purse.

I quickly learned that Keller felt such reassurances were necessary because, appropriately for someone who studies mass extinctions, she has a tendency to attract disaster.

On Thursday night, The New York Times published an interview with Elon Musk that offers a view into the billionaire entrepreneur’s life in the last year. Musk choked up “multiple times,” the Times reported in the story, and “alternated between laughter and tears.” He explained that he was overworked at Tesla, his electric-car company—which has spent the past several months scrambling to meet ambitious production goals—and that the situation has taken a toll on his physical health, family time, and social life.

“I thought the worst of it was over—I thought it was,” Musk said. “The worst is over from a Tesla operational standpoint. But from a personal pain standpoint, the worst is yet to come.”

"Here’s what’s worked: nothing." Scott Stossel writes with resignation in the cover article for the current issue of The Atlantic, "Surviving Anxiety." (Inside the magazine it's headlined "My Anxious, Twitchy, Phobic (Somehow Successful) Life".) The story, adapted from Stossel's forthcoming book, tells of his life with anxiety disorder; how he remains high-functioning despite it, and maybe in ways because of it.

The Atlantic editors invited readers to send in stories of their own experiences with anxiety. We said that "several" stories would be selected for publication on TheAtlantic.com. As you'll see by the length of this post, I failed handsomely at paring it down to several.

The news cameras showed up, like they always do, and Donald Trump was ready for them. He emerged from a helicopter with TRUMP stamped across the side. He grinned. Then he took one of the most absurd victory laps in modern American politics.

With every tweetstorm of his presidency, this is the moment—April 27, 2011, on a tarmac in New Hampshire—that should flicker across the national memory.

Donald Trump’s Original Sin

Trump’s story that day was about the birth certificate of the man who was president at the time, the man whom Trump would eventually replace in the Oval Office. After years of badgering Barack Obama about his birthplace, after relentless attempts to discredit the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency by falsely claiming Obama wasn’t really born in the United States, Trump had succeeded in getting the White House to release the president’s long-form birth certificate. And there in Portsmouth, Trump took credit for settling the matter—a frenzy of his own creation.

On June 25, Timm Wrase awoke in Vienna and groggily scrolled through an online repository of newly posted physics papers. One title startled him into full consciousness.

The paper, by the prominent string theorist Cumrun Vafa of Harvard and his collaborators, conjectured a simple formula dictating which kinds of universes are allowed to exist and which are forbidden, according to string theory. The leading candidate for a “theory of everything” weaving the force of gravity together with quantum physics, string theory defines all matter and forces as vibrations of tiny strands of energy. The theory permits some 10⁵⁰⁰ different solutions: a vast, varied “landscape” of possible universes.* String theorists like Wrase and Vafa have strived for years to place our particular universe somewhere in this landscape of possibilities.

I am staring at a photograph of myself that shows me 20 years older than I am now. I have not stepped into the twilight zone. Rather, I am trying to rid myself of some measure of my present bias, which is the tendency people have, when considering a trade-off between two future moments, to more heavily weight the one closer to the present. A great many academic studies have shown this bias—also known as hyperbolic discounting—to be robust and persistent.

Most of them have focused on money. When asked whether they would prefer to have, say, $150 today or $180 in one month, people tend to choose the $150. Giving up a 20 percent return on investment is a bad move—which is easy to recognize when the question is thrust away from the present.

This week, retired Admiral William McRaven published an unsparing open letter to President Trump requesting that, in the wake of the president’s decision to strip former CIA Director John Brennan of a security clearance, the president grant him the same honor. It is a startling intervention by a luminary of military leadership—the man responsible for the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden—who has not previously publicly criticized this president, nor any other for that matter.

To understand the meaning of McRaven’s intervention, one must recognize the ongoing challenge faced by former national security officials and military officers regarding appropriate responses to this president. National security is supposed to exist apart from politics—the identity of the president might change the list of national intelligence priorities or military objectives, but the job stays the same. This is a realm in which everyone is supposed to be on the same team; permitting cracks in that foundation leads to rapid erosion. Even after retirement, former military officers and similarly situated national security officials typically refrain from overt political participation: What is a formal rule during the period of service transforms into a powerful norm of silence upon return to civilian life. The candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump has upended this tradition.

LONDON—For more than a year, the British government has insisted that the only thing worse than leaving the European Union with no deal would be to leave it with a bad one. Implicit in this proclamation was that Britons would have nothing to fear if negotiations between the U.K. and the EU went sour; that while every effort would be made to get the best deal for Britain, Britons would never have to bow to European demands U.K. voters thought unreasonable.

But nearly two years on, the forecast for a “no deal” Brexit—in which the U.K. would leave the EU without an agreement on the terms of its withdrawal or their future trading relationship—has started to look grim. Recent concerns over potential food shortages prompted the newly appointed Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab to offer what for a wealthy nation was the remarkable assurance that the government will “make sure that there is adequate food supplies.” Health Secretary Matt Hancock, facing similar anxieties over the possibility of medicine shortages, confirmed that the National Health Service would prepare to stockpile essential materials, including vaccines and blood products.

Kofi Annan, who died Saturday at the age of 80 in Bern, Switzerland, will be remembered as the UN’s first secretary-general from sub-Saharan Africa, a courtly figure who oversaw the global organization during a period of tumult, and as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. But in many ways, Annan’s legacy will be defined as much by his failures, and what he did with them, as by his many successes.

Prime among those failures was his perceived inaction to stop the genocide of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994 when he ran the UN’s peacekeeping operations, and, a year later, the Srebrenica massacre in which 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces. As Samantha Power, later the U.S. ambassador to the UN, wrote in Chasing the Flame, her biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN diplomat who was killed in Iraq, Annan’s “name would appear in the history books beside the two defining genocidal crimes of the second half of the twentieth century.”

The first two telephone numbers a little kid learns are usually 911 and their own.

When I was about 5 years old, I decided to call 911—just to see what would happen, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to. When a dispatcher answered, I promptly hung up. They promptly called back.

This led to a conversation I suspect many mothers have had with many curious children. It must have been around the same era when I learned of what seemed at the time to be a great secret of telephony. There was another number I could call, and I could call it any time and as many times as I wanted, without getting in trouble.

In Baltimore in the 1980s, if you dialed 844-1212, a pleasant automated voice would tell you the exact time. The message was something like this: “Good morning. At the tone, the time will be 8:55 and 50 seconds.” Then there was a curt beep, and the message would repeat with an updated time. You could keep listening as it counted up in increments of 10 seconds. Eventually, you got disconnected.