january 1933

To feel relief at my mother’s being dead was once unthinkable, but then the news came from Ireland. It would have crushed her. An immigrant’s daughter, my mother lived with an eye cast back to the old country, the land against which she measured every virtue. Ireland was heaven to her, and the Catholic Church was heaven’s choir. Then came the Ryan Report.

Not long before The Boston Globe began publishing its series on predator priests, in 2002—the “Spotlight” series that became a movie of the same name—the government of Ireland established a commission, ultimately chaired by Judge Sean Ryan, to investigate accounts and rumors of child abuse in Ireland’s residential institutions for children, nearly all of which were run by the Catholic Church.

Students taking the SAT will soon be subjected to a new kind of assessment. On top of their math and verbal results, indicating what knowledge they were able to summon internally while taking the exam, they’ll be placed along a scale of adversity: a representation of the external. By calculating students’ social, economic, and family background, the College Board hopes to add new context to students’ test scores. Evaluating students on factors far beyond their control might seem like a novel attempt in leveling the playing field, but in some ways, it actually brings the test closer to its conflicted origins.

The adversity index was first piloted by 10 colleges in 2017. It consists of 15 factors meant to approximate the degree of disadvantage a student has faced, including the crime rate in her neighborhood, the rigor of her high-school curriculum, and the estimated education level of her parents. Students don’t see their numbers, but admissions officers do, and have full discretion in whether or not to consider them when making admissions decisions. One of the pilot colleges, for example, only used the score when deciding whether to reevaluate an applicant it had initially rejected.

Hello. I’m a person who has never watched Game of Thrones. You’re a person who has watched every episode. Here is what I have learned about you through the cultural osmosis of seeing random tweets and eavesdropping on writers at The Atlantic.

You are obsessed with a show about dragons and sex. (I mean, fair.) You have memorized a very impressive roster of names with extra vowels in them that make them sound old-timey. You believe the show is either gorgeously shot or impossible to see because it is always nighttime in Westover. You are still traumatized by the Red Wedding, which was basically Kill Bill but in the Middle Ages. You have strong opinions about a person named John Snow, who is played by Peter Dinklage. You have equally strong views about a woman who is BFFs with a bunch of dragons and some other woman who just died. One of them is named Dionysus. (Love triangle with Snow, probably.) Wait—is one of these women an elf?

Desus and Mero are sitting and talking and making each other laugh. This is what they do, for hours on end, for growing audiences and rapidly increasing sums of money. The rooms change, the chairs change, but the basic idea remains. They sit. They talk. They laugh. They also drink: Desus takes slugs from a beer that’s been relabeled D+M, while Mero keeps a bottle of rum between his feet. This Thursday morning, Desus (a.k.a. Desus Nice, a.k.a. Daniel Baker) and Mero (a.k.a. The Kid Mero, a.k.a. Joel Martinez) are taping their new weekly Showtime series at a Manhattan TV studio that has been designed to look like a TV studio dropped onto a street corner in the Bronx, which is where they are from. The walls are graffitied. There’s a subway-etiquette poster, like the real ones New Yorkers see every day, only this one urges passengers not to blast music “unless that shit slaps.” Guests enter through a fake bodega storefront.

In 1996, a group of European researchers found that a certain gene, called SLC6A4, might influence a person’s risk of depression.

It was a blockbuster discovery at the time. The team found that a less active version of the gene was more common among 454 people who had mood disorders than in 570 who did not. In theory, anyone who had this particular gene variant could be at higher risk for depression, and that finding, they said, might help in diagnosing such disorders, assessing suicidal behavior, or even predicting a person’s response to antidepressants.

Back then, tools for sequencing DNA weren’t as cheap or powerful as they are today. When researchers wanted to work out which genes might affect a disease or trait, they made educated guesses, and picked likely “candidate genes.” For depression, SLC6A4 seemed like a great candidate: It’s responsible for getting a chemical called serotonin into brain cells, and serotonin had already been linked to mood and depression. Over two decades, this one gene inspired at least 450 research papers.

The final image of Knock Down the House, the hit documentary about a quartet of 2018 congressional primary candidates, shows Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her boyfriend newly arrived at the east plaza of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. She has just been elected to Congress, but not yet taken office. They both start to cry; the waterworks run at a low gurgle throughout the movie, and at this point the viewer won’t be alarmed by another eruption.

Suddenly scooters appear, and the couple, with infectious delight, takes off in zigzags across the plaza, which is usually closed to tourists. The image thus combines three elements—Millennials, scooters, and trespassing—that seem designed to make a certain kind of conservative Republican’s head explode. The poor fellow will probably view the film as an exercise in trolling, a giddy, unapologetic version of his worst nightmare.

The first quotation from Donald Trump ever to appear in The New York Times came on October 16, 1973. Trump was responding to charges filed by the Justice Department alleging racial bias at his family’s real-estate company. “They are absolutely ridiculous,” Trump said of the charges. “We have never discriminated, and we never would.”

In the years since then, Trump has assembled a long record of comment on issues involving African Americans as well as Mexicans, Hispanics more broadly, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, women, and people with disabilities.

The NBA postseason needs to be shorter. This year’s playoffs started on April 13 and won’t end until sometime in June. Last year’s playoffs similarly lasted 55 days. That’s longer than NCAA basketball’s entire March Madness tournament, which runs for about three weeks. And it’s roughly as long as both the NFL and MLB playoffs combined.

Historically, the NBA playoffs have been one of the most entertaining postseasons in all of sports, where rivalries are born and great players become legends. This year’s games, for instance, have given fans series-ending buzzer beaters, like the one from the Portland Trail Blazers’ Damian Lillard in the first round against the Oklahoma City Thunder, and another from the Toronto Raptors’ Kawhi Leonard, who hit an improbable shot in Game 7 against the Philadelphia 76ers. But for every riveting series, there’s another one that’s tainted by the fatigue and injuries that come from athletes playing every 48 hours from October through April in the regular season, and then ratcheting up the intensity for two more months in the playoffs.

Just how bad are things between the United States and China? Over an evening beer in Beijing this week, a friend and I debated which prominent American company China would whack first. It’s a serious question—and the answer could be the next ugly step in the escalating economic dispute between the two powers.

The standard line from President Donald Trump and those who support his get-tough approach toward Beijing is that because China sells more to the U.S. than the other way around, Washington has the upper hand in its game of tariffs. “China buys MUCH less from us than we buy from them,” Trump recently tweeted, “so we are in a fantastic position.”

Statistically, that’s true: The U.S. exported only $120 billion worth of goods to China in 2018, compared with the $540 billion it imported. Beijing has a lot less stuff to tax, so the amount of damage it can inflict on the American economy and business through tariffs is much more limited. That view seemed confirmed when Beijing announced a surprisingly moderate package of new duties in retaliation for Trump’s latest broadside. While Washington hiked tariffs from 10 percent to 25 percent on $200 billion of Chinese products, and is threatening to slap on even more, Beijing responded by increasing tariffs on only about $60 billion of American goods.

Go beyond Earth and deeper into the solar system, past the craggy terrain of Mars and the shape-shifting storm of Jupiter, through the delicate rings of Saturn, beyond the silky clouds of Uranus and Neptune, and you will find a mysterious zone of small, icy objects. They number in the millions, some half the size of the continental United States, others as small as cities. They form a ring around the solar system, silent sentries guarding the blazing sun, which is so distant that it looks like any other star would.

Back in the day, about 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was little more than a cloud of cosmic dust spinning around a newborn star. Gravitational forces pulled and smoothed some of the dust into spheres—the planets and moons. The small bodies here, in a region known as the Kuiper Belt, were left out in the cold, and have remained virtually unchanged all this time.