july 1994

I don’t remember what specific combo of frustration and busyness led me to wear leggings to the office one day recently, but I do remember it felt magical. With nothing but a stretchy band and Nulu(™) fabric holding me in, I felt freer, like I was dancing through my duties, rather than trudging through them encased in polyester and wool. My computer seemed to run more quickly; my sources were more responsive; the PR people were less angry.

Normally, I only wear leggings in the culturally appropriate setting of Clarendon, the Washington, D.C., suburb where I live. Whenever I see adult humans out and about, they are wearing leggings. Their sweat has been wicked away. Their barre-weary haunches have been compressed by elite performance mesh. Leisurely, but athletic: This is how Clarendonians live.

It was a pair of feather earrings that helped Ann Miceli get out from underneath strangers’ cars. For years, Miceli had worked as an auto mechanic and picked up shifts in her spare time at Indianapolis restaurants. One day, she came across those earrings, and “it kind of sparked something.” Miceli bought a pair, and then some supplies to make her own. She listed some of her creations in a shop on Etsy and named it PrettyVagrant.

That was in 2011. In the intervening years, Miceli has sold nearly 30,000 of her handmade earrings and feather hair extensions, all of which she assembles by hand at home. After a couple of years, Miceli quit her job as a mechanic. Etsy “has given me the opportunity to work from home and watch my grandkids,” she told me. Everything was humming along nicely until last summer, when the site began implementing a new search algorithm that gives priority to sellers who guarantee free shipping. Those who charged even a few dollars, like Miceli, were removed from their spots on the first page of search results. In August, Miceli’s revenue was down 40 percent from the previous year—a huge dip that she blames on the free-shipping finagling.

Joseph Bondy-Denomy knew he could find viruses that would be hard to kill. But he wasn’t expecting to discover one that was quite so invincible.

The viruses that Bondy-Denomy studies at the University of California at San Francisco don’t bother humans. Known as phages, they infect and kill bacteria instead. Bacteria can defend themselves against these assaults. They can recognize the genes of the phages that threaten them, and deploy scissorlike enzymes to slice up those genes and disable the viruses. This defense system is known as CRISPR. Billions of years before humans discovered it and used it as a tool for editing DNA, bacteria were using CRISPR to fight off phages.

But phages have their own countermeasures. In 2012, Bondy-Denomy discovered that some of these viruses are resistant to CRISPR, because they have proteins that stick to those scissorlike enzymes and blunt them. A bacterium can mount its CRISPR defense, but ultimately the virus can still force itself in and triumph. This suggested that bacteria and phages are likely locked in an arms race. The former evolve new kinds of scissor enzymes, and the latter evolve new ways of disabling them. Intrigued, Bondy-Denomy started searching for more CRISPR-resistant phages.

1. The Disappearance

At 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator.

Last month, a source emailed a colleague of mine with a complicated theory that, the source claimed, proved Pete Buttigieg had been in the CIA. “The American people have the right to know if he was ever an agent or officer,” the person wrote, with the kind of baseless confidence that lives on the internet.

By then, Buttigieg’s critics on the left had started to focus more on what the South Bend, Indiana, mayor could have been doing at McKinsey, a company that seems to look worse with each passing week. Progressives, and in particular the Elizabeth Warren campaign, pounced: What was Buttigieg doing at McKinsey for two and a half years? How many people had lost their jobs because of him? How shady was the work conveniently hidden behind a standard McKinsey nondisclosure agreement?