january 1973

When Bill and Melinda Gates announced on Monday that they would be ending their 27-year marriage, they tweeted in tandem that they “no longer believe [they] can grow together as a couple.” The reasoning wasn’t unusual for a 21st-century divorce, but their private emotional journey has highly atypical financial implications: Between their personal holdings and the charitable foundation they started together, the amount of money they control—somewhere around $180 billion—is roughly equal to the annual GDP of Kazakhstan or Qatar.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which they launched 25 years after Bill co-founded Microsoft, is one of the biggest private charitable foundations in the world, with an endowment of about $50 billion. In a sense, the jobs of its 1,600 employees and its investments in malaria prevention and early-childhood education have rested on the bedrock of Bill and Melinda’s marriage.

This article was published online on May 10, 2021.

Most of the people who come to Blandford Cemetery, in Petersburg, Virginia, come for the windows—masterpieces of Tiffany glass in the cemetery’s deconsecrated church. One morning before the pandemic, I took a tour of the church along with two other visitors and our tour guide, Ken. When my eyes adjusted to the hazy darkness inside, I could see that in each window stood a saint, surrounded by dazzling bursts of blues and greens and violets. Below these explosions of color were words that I couldn’t quite make out. I stepped closer to one of the windows, and the language became clearer. Beneath the saint was an inscription honoring the men “who died for the Confederacy.”

Unless you’re extraordinarily wealthy (congrats on that), your experience of working through the pandemic has probably been miserable. If you’ve had to work in person, your days have been dangerous and precarious. If you’ve been able to work from home, you’ve had an enormous privilege. But devoid of choice and novelty, remote work has lost some of its romance for office workers who previously dreamed of ending their commute. In home offices around the country, the wallpaper has begun to yellow.

WFHers have been working longer hours and more weekends than before the pandemic, and they’re more likely to report loneliness, depression, and anxiety than people working in person, according to Gallup. At the end of April, nearly 66 percent of respondents to a Morning Consult poll said they wanted to return to the office as soon as possible. Half of remote workers even miss their commute. But these data aren’t as conclusive as they might look. In the same Morning Consult poll, 84 percent of respondents said they enjoyed remote work. Gallup found that remote workers reported better overall well-being and higher engagement than those in the office. Many office workers also seem to be more productive at home, even in the middle of a disaster.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

Arthur C. Brooks will discuss the science of happiness live at 11 a.m. ET on May 20. Register for In Pursuit of Happiness here.

Think for a minute about your friendships. Some friends you would text with any silly thought; others you only call a couple of times a year. Some are people you look up to; others you like, but do not especially admire. You fit into these categories for others as well—maybe you are helpful to one person, and a confidant to another. We get different things out of different relationships, which is all well and good.

There is one type of friend almost everyone has: the buddy who can help you get ahead in life, the friend from whom you need or want something. You don’t necessarily use this person—the benefit might be mutual—but the friendship’s core benefit is more than camaraderie.

If you’ve searched St. Vincent on Twitter in the past few weeks, you haven’t seen chatter about the goofy soul sound of the 38-year-old rock star’s latest singles. You’ve seen snarky tweets about an interview that is mainly of interest to die-hard fans and people addicted to Twitter drama.

In late April, the journalist Emma Madden posted—and then deleted—a Q&A with St. Vincent that the artist’s press team had allegedly tried to stop from being published. A publicist said the singer thought that the questions had been too “aggressive.” In reality, Madden had gently asked about St. Vincent’s forthcoming sixth album, Daddy’s Home, and the situation that had loosely inspired it: St. Vincent’s father getting out of prison in 2019 after committing stock fraud. The artist’s unremarkable—though sometimes terse—answers normally would have gotten little notice. Instead, reports that she had tried to kill the piece ignited a few days of online blood sport. Commentators puzzled over her conduct, dissed her music, questioned her politics, and mocked the concept behind Daddy’s Home.