october 1979

The jokes write themselves, though if you search Twitter for “but her emails,” it turns out that hundreds of people write the jokes as well.

As The Washington Post reported Monday evening, Ivanka Trump, the president’s oldest daughter and a senior White House adviser, sent hundreds of emails pertaining to government business using a personal email account in 2017, in violation of federal records laws. As the Post drily noted, “The discovery alarmed some advisers to President Trump, who feared that his daughter’s prac­tices bore similarities to the personal email use of Hillary Clinton, an issue he made a focus of his 2016 campaign.”

This would be extremely embarrassing for the Trump administration were it capable of embarrassment.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

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Louisa Muskovits appeared to be having a panic attack. It was March of 2016, and Louisa, a 33-year-old with a history of alcohol abuse, was having a regular weekly session with her chemical-dependency counselor in Tacoma, Washington.

Louisa had recently separated from her husband, Steven. When the counselor asked about her marriage, she said she wasn’t ready to talk about it. The counselor pressed, and again Louisa demurred. Eventually the conversation grew tense, and Louisa started to hyperventilate, a common symptom of a panic attack.

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The counselor rushed down the hall to get Louisa’s therapist, Amy Harp. Together they moved Louisa to Harp’s office, where they felt they could better calm her. But once Louisa was there, Harp recalls, her demeanor transformed. Normally friendly and open, she started screaming and pulling out clumps of her hair. She growled and glared. Her head flailed from side to side, cocking back at odd angles. In jumbled bursts, she muttered about good and evil, God and the devil. She told the counselors that no one there could save “Louisa.”

Today the president of the United States released a statement reaffirming his support for Saudi Arabia and its regent, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, known as MbS. The process of separating the substance of the document from its mortifying semiliteracy took me approximately 15 minutes, but I think I managed it without permanent damage to the Broca region of my brain. There lies the seat of the language faculty, easily the most punished neuroanatomical structure of the Trump era. Here’s what close study reveals.

We knew—we always knew—that Donald Trump would never ditch an ally who would always support him as long as he reciprocated with loyalty of his own. MbS is such an ally. Recall that Trump’s first foreign trip was to Saudi Arabia, a curious choice for a president widely believed to hate and distrust Muslims. His love for MbS is a romance that is perpetually new, a cloudless day of picnics in the park, sweet-nothings of arms- and oil-deals, and promises of mutual defense. The affirmation of this relationship should be read not as the product of deliberation but as an exercise in apologetics: an explanation of a decision that was never in doubt, even if the explanation proved inadequate. All of Trump’s romances are like this. That is why his supporters love him; he loves them back unconditionally—whether they are racist or murderers or cretins.

There was no horizon in Oakland on Saturday, and the air smells dirty. It’s not like fresh smoke. It’s a staleness. If you stay outside too long you get a little headache. The newest numbers say 71 people have died, more than a thousand missing, and 12,000 buildings burned in the Camp Fire. You’d have to drive well over three hours from here, if the roads were open, to get to anything that’s still on fire, but the smoke makes it feel like it’s happening a couple towns away. The smoke, made of forests and houses and people’s bodies, sinks in.

Neighbors and coworkers are passing around lists of who has respirators in stock, collaborative scratch pads with links to donation programs for the homeless encampments, posts about how refusing to wear a mask is internalized ableism, and instructions on taping a HEPA filter to a house fan. It’s hard to know what to call this. It’s not a disaster. It’s not your house burning down and your neighbors dying. But it’s not just another November, either. It’s schools closing, reminders to stay inside, and a lot of pulmonary and cardiovascular stress that will only be understood in retrospective statistics. It’s a crisis without a moment of crisis. It’s what it looks like: a slightly caustic, minimally dramatic haze over everything.

Seventy-five.

That’s how long I want to live: 75 years.

This preference drives my daughters crazy. It drives my brothers crazy. My loving friends think I am crazy. They think that I can’t mean what I say; that I haven’t thought clearly about this, because there is so much in the world to see and do. To convince me of my errors, they enumerate the myriad people I know who are over 75 and doing quite well. They are certain that as I get closer to 75, I will push the desired age back to 80, then 85, maybe even 90.

I am sure of my position. Doubtless, death is a loss. It deprives us of experiences and milestones, of time spent with our spouse and children. In short, it deprives us of all the things we value.

In the spirit of a holiday when people, in claustrophobic proximity to their loved ones, feel compelled to take stronger-than-usual positions on issues of even minuscule import, I have a conclusion to share: The correct time to eat Thanksgiving dinner is 4 p.m.

There are many obvious reasons why this is the case. Start with the turkey. It needs about four hours in the oven (give or take, depending on the size). It also needs to be prepped before it can go in, and then should rest for about a half hour afterward before being carved.

Read: How Friendsgiving took over Millennial culture

Let’s say this process, from raw bird to neat slices, takes about five hours (and that is if everything goes exactly to plan). If Thanksgiving dinner is to take place at 2 p.m., as many incorrect people have suggested, cooking must commence at 9 a.m. Does that sound like an unhurried, cozy holiday morning? No. It sounds like a workday.

YELLVILLE, Ark.—It is October in the Ozarks. The grass has dried out and the trees have bronzed and browned. Deer lie glaze-eyed in the back of camouflaged pickup trucks. High-school football helmets crack every Friday night. And seven days a week, workers in processing plants are helping to kill, gut, pluck, and truss turkeys for Thanksgiving tables around the country.

Here in Yellville this cold and rainy weekend, there are turkeys everywhere—turkey shirts and turkey costumes and turkey paraphernalia. There is a raffle giving away birds for Thanksgiving dinner. There’s a brisk trade in turkey legs, too, pulled out of a barrel smoker. At the bandstand, a judge announces the winner of the “Miss Drumsticks” contest, who gleams and sparkles in her pageant finery. “It’s Miss Drumsticks because they’re judging who has the best thighs,” an older woman explained to me, matter-of-fact.

Nearly 45 years ago, the House Judiciary Committee concluded that President Richard Nixon’s contact with high-level Justice Department officials overseeing the Watergate investigation, detailed in a 62-page “road map” of evidence collected by prosecutors in 1972–73, amounted to an impeachable misuse of executive power.

A half century later, the FBI’s former top lawyer, Jim Baker—a close friend and associate of fired FBI Director James Comey—is laying out parallels, albeit subtly, to President Donald Trump’s interactions with the law-enforcement officials who have been investigating him and his campaign team since July 2016.

In a piece for Lawfare published on Monday, Baker and co-author Sarah Grant, a student at Harvard Law School, used the newly unsealed Watergate road map to show how one president’s attempts to control an investigation targeting him and his associates were quickly exposed and, ultimately, used against him. As the road map laid out, Nixon interacted regularly with the man supervising the Watergate investigation—Henry Petersen, then the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division—and pumped him for information.

CHICAGO—Barack Obama refused to answer directly when asked if he could beat Donald Trump in a head-to-head race, but he said on Tuesday that he believes his vision of America is already more in touch with most Americans, and will win out in the end.

However, the man who burst upon the national political scene with his 2004 Democratic convention speech declaring that there’s no red or blue America agreed with his old political consultant David Axelrod that America is redder and bluer than ever.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, he said in a live interview for Axelrod’s “Axe Files” podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. It’s just that he and President Donald Trump “have contrasting visions of what America is, and that’s self-apparent.”