november 1995

The proliferation of retail boutiques in California did not really bother him, Evan told me, but the billboards did. Advertisements for delivery, advertisements promoting the substance for relaxation, for fun, for health. “Shop. It’s legal.” “Hello marijuana, goodbye hangover.” “It’s not a trigger,” he told me. “But it is in your face.”

When we spoke, he had been sober for a hard-fought seven weeks: seven weeks of sleepless nights, intermittent nausea, irritability, trouble focusing, and psychological turmoil. There were upsides, he said, in terms of reduced mental fog, a fatter wallet, and a growing sense of confidence that he could quit. “I don’t think it’s a ‘can’ as much as a ‘must,’” he said.

Research shows that practically every dimension of life happiness is influenced by the quality of one’s marriage, while divorce is the second most stressful life event one can ever experience.

Yet nearly half of all married couples are likely to divorce, and many couples report feeling unhappy in their relationships. Instructors of Northwestern University’s Marriage 101 class want to change that. The goal of their course is to help students have more fulfilling love relationships during their lives. In Marriage 101 popular books such as Mating in Captivity and For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage are interspersed with meaty academic studies. Students attend one lecture a week and then meet in smaller breakout groups to discuss the weekly topics, which range from infidelity to addiction, childrearing to sexuality in long-term relationships.

For an adult who is no longer young but not yet old, there is perhaps no better preparation for death than sending a child to college.

That’s not because it’s a reminder of the ceaseless march of age, though it is. It’s not because it unleashes a stampede of wild memories, though it does. And it’s not because it’s a moment that marks multiple beginnings and endings, although those fires do ignite and extinguish.

It’s because adulthood distances you from the experience of dreading things that are certain to come about eventually. It’s not that you dread more things, or graver things, when you’re a kid—time seems to lurch slowly, death seems long off, bills don’t stack up, and all the rest. But for young people, dread for small things feels constant. They aren’t in as much direct control of their lives as adults are, and many things feel like they happen to them. By adulthood, that relationship with dread wanes (even if others, like the shadow of certain death, wax). Sending your child away to school offers a taste of that particular flavor of fate—as well as an inspiration to manage it more deliberately.

“I think, without any question, this is the biggest moment of the Trump presidency.”

It was the day in June when Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, and Chris Wallace was on Fox News explaining to viewers the gravity of the Court’s swing vote stepping down.

I’d been interviewing Wallace when the Kennedy news broke, and he’d politely excused himself from our call and hopped on the air. Within a few moments after he finished up his five-minute spot, he called me back.

Moments like this are what Wallace credits for reinforcing the importance of his primary news format: the political talk show broadcast from Washington, D.C., every Sunday morning. A stalwart of network television since the late 1970s, Wallace has hosted Fox News Sunday since 2003 and is the face of Fox’s hard-news division. “I think that the Sunday shows are more relevant and more important than ever in the Trump era,” Wallace explained during our interview. “And the reason I say that is because the velocity of news and the amount of news in a week is so much greater than we’ve ever seen before, and I’ve been doing Sunday talk shows since Reagan was president.” (Wallace also hosted Meet the Press from 1987 to 1988.)

Senator Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, leads the only credible congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

It is getting harder to have confidence in his leadership.

Last week, The New York Times published an op-ed by John Brennan, the Obama administration national-security official who presided over extrajudicial drone killings and made false statements to Congress about CIA spying on its congressional overseers during his tenure.

Lately, he has been criticizing President Trump, who decided to revoke his ability to view classified information. Brennan claimed that the decision to do so was politically motivated. But that wasn’t the focus of his op-ed.

Gerta Keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t die,” she told me cheerfully as soon as I’d said hello. “I’ll bring you back.”

Death was not something I’d considered as a possible consequence of traveling with Keller, a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton University. She looked harmless enough: thin, with a blunt bob, wearing gray nylon pants and hiking boots, and carrying an insulated ShopRite supermarket bag by way of a purse.

I quickly learned that Keller felt such reassurances were necessary because, appropriately for someone who studies mass extinctions, she has a tendency to attract disaster.

On Thursday night, The New York Times published an interview with Elon Musk that offers a view into the billionaire entrepreneur’s life in the last year. Musk choked up “multiple times,” the Times reported in the story, and “alternated between laughter and tears.” He explained that he was overworked at Tesla, his electric-car company—which has spent the past several months scrambling to meet ambitious production goals—and that the situation has taken a toll on his physical health, family time, and social life.

“I thought the worst of it was over—I thought it was,” Musk said. “The worst is over from a Tesla operational standpoint. But from a personal pain standpoint, the worst is yet to come.”

James Helming knew every corner in Fresno. He knew which roads were paved and he knew which way the smoke from nearby factories blew. He knew the houses, and he knew who lived in them. It was his job, after all, to assess every neighborhood in the city for “desirability.” The year was 1936, and Helming, a junior field agent from a federal agency formed under the New Deal, was charged with making sense of Fresno's shifting demographics.

Armenian, Russian, and Italian residents were moving north, and the black and Hispanic populations were growing and expanding in their place. And Helming's agency, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, drew color-coded maps to determine who would get the credit necessary to buy houses.

I am staring at a photograph of myself that shows me 20 years older than I am now. I have not stepped into the twilight zone. Rather, I am trying to rid myself of some measure of my present bias, which is the tendency people have, when considering a trade-off between two future moments, to more heavily weight the one closer to the present. A great many academic studies have shown this bias—also known as hyperbolic discounting—to be robust and persistent.

Most of them have focused on money. When asked whether they would prefer to have, say, $150 today or $180 in one month, people tend to choose the $150. Giving up a 20 percent return on investment is a bad move—which is easy to recognize when the question is thrust away from the present.

Dear Therapist,

My mother has textbook Borderline Personality Disorder—extreme insecurity, where anything can trigger her. When we were growing up, this manifested in physical abuse or destruction of some item, like throwing a TV on the ground. She would cut my hair as punishment for bad behavior, call me a whore, and, when I got my period, she told me "it wasn't real" and wouldn't buy me tampons. She walked out of my wedding two years ago because "clearly I didn't want her there.” My method of dealing since I was young was to try to become less visible.

I'm pregnant now, and she's a renowned certified nurse-midwife in high demand for jobs, teaching, and speaking. As a result, everyone is pressuring me, asking me how I could even think of not having my mom by my side during labor and recovery. They tell me that I need to let go of the past, and that everything is different with a grandchild.