august 1939

Parents know that winter is the season of sickness. Your kid will have approximately infinite colds. You, too, will have approximately infinite colds. Last winter, COVID precautions kept sickness at bay. But this year, school is in session, day-care colds are spreading fast, and the only cohort of people in America not yet eligible for COVID vaccination is our youngest children.

Aside from promises of clinical-trial data by the end of the year, the timeline on which children younger than 5 might be vaccinated is still unclear. The parents of these kids are staring down months more of carefully weighing the risks of COVID against the benefits of indoor cheer. My own child, now 20 months old, was born in March 2020, so my entire experience of parenting has been pandemic-inflected. As the cold creeps down the East Coast, where I live, and nudges the people around me inside, I have been thinking about how the responsibility and anxiety of navigating around this one infectious disease might linger longer for the parents of small children than for most other Americans.

More than 20,000 people died on American roadways from January to June, the highest total for the first half of any year since 2006. U.S. road fatalities have risen by more than 10 percent over the past decade, even as they have fallen across most of the developed world. In the European Union, whose population is one-third larger than America’s, traffic deaths dropped by 36 percent between 2010 and 2020, to 18,800. That downward trend is no accident: European regulators have pushed carmakers to build vehicles that are safer for pedestrians and cyclists, and governments regularly adjust road designs after a crash to reduce the likelihood of recurrence.

But in the United States, the responsibility for road safety largely falls on the individual sitting behind the wheel, or riding a bike, or crossing the street. American transportation departments, law-enforcement agencies, and news outlets frequently maintain that most crashes—indeed, 94 percent of them, according to the most widely circulated statistic—are solely due to human error. Blaming the bad decisions of road users implies that nobody else could have prevented them. That enables car companies to deflect attention from their decisions to add heft and height to the SUVs and trucks that make up an ever-larger portion of vehicle sales, and it allows traffic engineers to escape scrutiny for dangerous street designs.

Conservatives in America have, in recent months, used the idea of freedom to argue against wearing masks, oppose vaccine mandates, and justify storming the Capitol. They routinely refer to themselves as “freedom-loving Americans.” Freedom, as a cause, today belongs almost entirely to the right.

This was not always the case. In the early 1960s, civil-rights activists invoked freedom as the purpose of their struggle. Martin Luther King Jr. used the word equality once at the March on Washington, but he used the word freedom 20 times.

The conservative use of the idea of absolute freedom, of freedom as your personal property, to shift American politics to the right came shortly after King’s speech, and indeed was a direct reaction to his argument that one’s own freedom depended on everyone else’s. This wasn’t an organic response. Rather, conservative activists and business leaders designed an opposite idea of American freedom to protect their own interests. That effort can be seen in the role played by one of the most overlooked yet powerful forces in 20th-century America: the nation’s Realtors.

This article contains spoilers through the seventh episode of Succession Season 3.

Given how this season of Succession has gone so far, the Roy siblings should have reason to celebrate. They held on to control of the family’s company, Waystar Royco, after a Hail Mary negotiation. They helped choose the Republicans’ next presidential nominee from the comfort of their father’s hotel suite. And in tonight’s episode, they hear that the Department of Justice is considering dialing back its criminal investigation of the family conglomerate. Clearly, Kendall (played by Jeremy Strong) can’t choose a better time to throw himself the “fucking best birthday ever.”

Unsurprisingly, he turns out to be horribly wrong. The reason lies in Succession’s thesis: Money has bought these characters everything except an ounce of real joy. Even when the Roys have a party, they’re surrounded by yes-men, opportunists, and, worst of all, one another. The siblings have been taught that happiness comes only from attaining more power and wealth, so backstabbing and insulting others is second nature to them, even at festivities. From this setup—toxic people in a gilded cage—the HBO drama has repeatedly mined both laughs and schadenfreude, and at times the series has felt like it’s spinning its thematic wheels. Yet in examining the siblings’ maliciousness over the course of a single, cursed night, this latest episode captures in close-up the horror of the family’s perpetual cycle of pettiness and empty triumphs.

Congress has never been a place known for cutting-edge fashion. Instead, a stuffy formality has long been its trademark. As Allbirds and preppy quarter-zips swept into boardrooms and C-suites across the rest of the country, Capitol Hill remained one of the last bastions of traditional American business attire—the global headquarters of wing tips and ill-fitting suits, Tory Burch flats and bland Banana Republic pencil skirts. During sweltering D.C. summers, you could find communications directors and legislative aides wearing jackets and ties to work, wiping their sweaty brows on their uncuffed sleeves as the dew point climbed. The Hill is perhaps the last workplace in the country whose young employees still use the word slacks.