august 1979

The change can be baffling to many parents: Their young girls are masters of the universe, full of gutsy fire. But as puberty sets in, their confidence nose-dives, and those same daughters can transform into unrecognizably timid, cautious, risk-averse versions of their former self.

Over the course of writing our latest book, we spoke with hundreds of tween and teen girls who detailed a striking number of things they don’t feel confident about: “making new friends,” “the way I dress,” “speaking in a group.” In our research, we worked with Ypulse, a polling firm that focuses on tweens and teens, to survey more than 1,300 girls from the ages of 8 to 18 and their parents. (The sample was broadly representative of the country’s teen population in terms of race and geographic distribution.) The data is more dramatic than we’d imagined: The girls surveyed were asked to rate their confidence on a scale of 0 to 10, and from the ages of 8 to 14, the average of girls’ responses fell from approximately 8.5 to 6—a drop-off of 30 percent.

The manner in which Senate Republicans and Brett Kavanaugh’s supposed allies are championing the judge’s innocence should sting as the ultimate humiliation. They apparently don’t have sufficient confidence in the nominee to let a routine investigation take place before holding a hearing. They apparently don’t believe in him enough to make minor accommodations on the date of a hearing to a woman who is receiving death threats. They are publicly floating theories naming an alternative perpetrator—and then removing them and apologizing after those theories are picked up by Fox & Friends. Having held up Merrick Garland’s nomination for the better part of a year to get past one election, they are apparently so fearful of further erosion of support for their nominee that they feel the need to rush this matter to a vote just weeks before another one. In the era of #MeToo, their actions bespeak the fear of et tu. Their solution is haste—and not the sort of haste that suggests faith. It is the sort of haste that that has one eye on the midterms and the other eye cast downward.

What kind of threat does Paul Manafort now pose to Donald Trump? Robert Mueller’s indictment of the fallen lobbyist is a masterful portrait of a craven man and his methods. But the chronology contained in the document filed this morning takes us right up to the eve of Manafort joining the Trump campaign, and then leaves the reader bursting with curiosity about what comes next. While Mueller has tied up all sorts of narratives about Manafort’s strange career in Ukraine, so many strands of the Manafort story remain maddeningly untidy.

Paul Manafort’s decades of shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

Perhaps not even Mueller fully knows what Manafort has to offer about his time in the Trump campaign. But in the unresolved threads of the tale, there are hints of the subjects that Manafort could clarify. When we look at ellipses in the case that Mueller has laid out, all the chapters of the Manafort story he hasn’t yet officially pursued, we can guess the lines of questioning that might dominate Manafort’s meetings with the lawyers in the special counsel’s office.

When Gül Dölen first gave ecstasy to octopuses, she didn’t know what to expect.

Dölen is a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who studies how the cells and chemicals in animal brains influence animals’ social lives. Ecstasy, also known as MDMA, interests her because it’s known to make people feel more sociable, more interested in others, and less defensive. The same effects also occur in rats and mice—the animals that Dölen usually studies.

But octopuses are very different creatures. They’re clearly intelligent and their behavior is undoubtedly sophisticated, but their brains have a completely different architecture than those of mammals—for one thing, they’re shaped like donuts. “It’s organized much more like a snail’s brain than ours,” Dölen says. With such a dissimilar anatomy, she wondered whether these animals would respond to drugs in unpredictable ways. And to find out, she needed a way of assessing how sociable an octopus is.

As soon as Christine Blasey Ford went public with her accusation that the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when the two were teens, a chorus of conservative political commentators came to his defense. Some of them aimed primarily to sow doubt about Ford’s story, but others weighed the accusations, only to conclude that the behavior described was characteristically adolescent and thus dismissable.

For instance, Stephen L. Miller, a writer for Fox News’s website, tweeted that the allegations didn’t amount to sexual assault, but rather “drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven.” The radio-show host and columnist Dennis Prager advised his readers not to be shocked if a future Republican nominee “is accused of sexual misconduct … from when he was in elementary school.” Going back to an even earlier developmental stage to make her point, the Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wondered, “What’s next, his potty training?" On Instagram, Donald Trump Jr. engaged in his own infantilizing of Ford’s accusations, likening the scene she described to the result of a schoolyard crush.

Early this week, Christine Blasey Ford came forward: She was the woman, the research psychologist said, who had earlier alleged that in 1982, she had attended a house party that had also been attended by the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh; that during the party, Kavanaugh and his friend had corralled her into an empty bedroom; that Kavanaugh had pinned her down on a bed; that he had groped her; that he had tried to remove her clothes; that his fervor had been so violent that she had feared he might inadvertently kill her.

It was a horrific allegation that, filtered and flattened through the cynicisms of the American political system, presented a predicament for Kavanaugh’s supporters, as he adamantly claimed his innocence: How should they respond, in public, to Ford’s own claims? How would they situate her stated memories within the roiling context of #MeToo and due process and the blunt-force demands of partisanship? Should they simply, as they might have done in the past, denigrate Ford as a liar, as an opportunist, as an erotomaniac? Should they delay Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote, to give themselves time to discern the truth of what had taken place, all those years ago? Or should they forge ahead with a previously established timeline, unwavering in their support of the man who would be justice?

“Dear Caitlin,” an inscription in my 12th-grade yearbook begins. “I’m really very sorry that our friendship plummeted straight downhill after the first few months of school. Really, the blame rests totally on my shoulders. To tell you the truth, I’ve wanted to say this all year. I know you’ll succeed because you’re very smart and I regard you with the utmost respect … Take care—love always.”

He was headed to a prestigious college. I was headed to a small, obscure liberal-arts college, which was a tremendous achievement, not just because I was a terrible student, but also because I had nearly killed myself as a response to what he apologized for in my yearbook. He had tried to rape me during a date that I was very excited to have been asked on, and his attempt was so serious—and he was so powerful—that for a few minutes, I was truly fighting him off.

There are three things, once one’s basic needs are satisfied, that academic literature points to as the ingredients for happiness: having meaningful social relationships, being good at whatever it is one spends one’s days doing, and having the freedom to make life decisions independently.

But research into happiness has also yielded something a little less obvious: Being better educated, richer, or more accomplished doesn’t do much to predict whether someone will be happy. In fact, it might mean someone is less likely to be satisfied with life.

That second finding is the puzzle that Raj Raghunathan, a professor of marketing at The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, tries to make sense of in his recent book, If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy? Raghunathan’s writing does fall under the category of self-help (with all of the pep talks and progress worksheets that that entails), but his commitment to scientific research serves as ballast for the genre’s more glib tendencies.

When actors play doctors on TV, that does not make them actual doctors. And that does not mean they should scour some Internet boards, confront their pediatricians, and demand fewer vaccinations for their children, as some Hollywood parents in Los Angeles have apparently been doing.

The Hollywood Reporter has a great investigation for which it sought the vaccination records of elementary schools all over Los Angeles County. They found that vaccination rates in elite neighborhoods like Santa Monica and Beverly Hills have tanked, and the incidence of whooping cough there has skyrocketed.

Here's a map of the schools with dangerously low vaccination rates (an interactive version is on their site). Note how the schools cluster together as little red dots all over the wealthy, crazy Westside—not unlike crimson spots on a measles patient:

A White Walker roams Northern Ireland; mass performances take place in Mexico and North Korea; Chinese tourists dine in a cliffside restaurant; Cher performs in New Zealand; the sun rises over Japan; flooding threatens parts of the U.S. and Mali; artworks are displayed in England, Italy, and Turkey; a Japanese satellite visits an asteroid; American bison are raised in Mexico; and much more