december 1903

A few months ago, when millions of Americans were watching the Netflix series Emily in Paris because it was what we had been given that week, I cued up the first episode and was beset almost immediately by an intense longing. Not for travel, or for opportunities to wear beautiful clothes—two commonly cited high points in an otherwise charmless show—but for sports. Specifically, watching sports in a packed bar, which is what the titular character’s boyfriend is doing when the viewer meets him.

The scene is fleeting, and it’s also pretty bad. It doesn’t come close to capturing the sweaty intensity of a horde of nervous fans, poised to embrace each other in collective joy or drink through despair. I know this because I am, sometimes unfortunately, a person who has spent a good chunk of her adult social life watching sports in bars, both with my actual close friends and with 500 or so fellow travelers at the New York City bar that hosts expatriated University of Georgia alumni during college-football season.

When Americans began receiving coronavirus vaccines last month, people started fantasizing about the first thing they’d do when the pandemic ends: go back to work, visit family, hug friends. But the public discussion soon shifted. One news article after another warned about everything that could go wrong: Protection isn’t immediate; vaccinated people can still transmit the virus; vaccinated people might get mild infections that could become chronic; vaccines might not work as well against new coronavirus variants. “COVID-19 Vaccine Doesn’t Mean You Can Party Like It’s 1999,” one headline admonished. Can vaccinated people at least hang out with one another? Nope, masks and distancing are still required. “Bottom line,” another article concluded ominously: “You will need to wear a face mask after you’re vaccinated until COVID-19 cases become nearly nonexistent.”

When you think of messiness, you might think of the unsavory ways it manifests: sweaty socks left on the floor, food-encrusted dishes piled in the sink, crumbs on the counter. Messes themselves are easy to identify, but the patterns of behavior that produce them are a bit more nuanced. Really, messiness has two ingredients: making messes, and then not cleaning them up.

There is a widely held belief that boys—and later on, men—are particularly messy. At least some grounds for this stereotype exist, but sex has little to do with it. “There’s no evidence of inherent, biologically based sex differences in cleanliness or messiness,” Susan McHale, a professor of human development and family studies at Penn State, told me. She said innate preferences for orderliness might vary from child to child, but cultural factors have a significant influence, and it’s worth investigating which half of the messiness recipe is driving the gender disparity.

You couldn’t have blamed Anthony Fauci if at any point over the past year he’d told Donald Trump he’d had enough, thank you, and quit. Everyone has a breaking point. There was the time the former president called him “a disaster” on a call with Trump-campaign staff. Or the day a White House official gave reporters an oppo-research-style memo claiming that Fauci had been “wrong on things” related to COVID-19. And Trump’s retweet of “Time to #FireFauci” would have been one humiliation too many for most.

But in the end, Trump got fired, and Fauci got promoted—he’s now the chief medical adviser to the Biden White House. “The thing that got me through it was, I did not let that bother me,” Fauci told me in an interview this week. “People cannot believe that. But it’s true. The problem is so enormous. People’s lives are at stake. I’m a physician. I’m a scientist. I’m a public-health expert. I know what I need to do. All that other stuff is just a distraction. Quite frankly, it’s bullshit.”

Forty-five senators voted yesterday not to proceed with a second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. That should come as some relief for the ex-president: Twice impeached, he will likely be twice acquitted. But how much relief?

The Senate will still hold a trial. The whole country will again view the video of Trump inciting a crowd to attack Congress as he aimed to coerce his own vice president into somehow overturning the 2020 election. They will see the scenes of violence and death wrought by Trump supporters—supporters who plastered their crimes all over social media because they trusted Trump to protect and pardon them.

Trump wants Senate Republicans to defend him; most Senate Republicans want Trump to go away.