february 1997

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.

One of the most compelling characters in the recent Showtime documentary miniseries The Fourth Estate is the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. Haberman joined the newspaper in 2015 to help cover Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and since then, she explains, her workload has been all-encompassing. Haberman is rarely seen on camera without a phone in her hand or attached to her ear. “The biggest mistake I made was promising my children that they would get their mother back at the end of the campaign,” she says. In one memorable scene, she takes a break in the middle of recording a podcast to reassure her son that he can’t die in a nightmare.

The Fourth Estate makes for fascinating television despite the fact that the majority of the series simply captures people in meetings or people making calls or people commuting back and forth to work. As Stephen Marche wrote in 2014 for Esquire, the reality of journalists is that they’re “one of the less glamorous species of humanity,” and the most reliable trait of the truly gifted ones is that they’re perpetually on the phone—which is presumably why the entertainment industry has long preferred an alternate depiction of journalists, particularly when it comes to women. On television and in film, the fictional lady reporter tends to look less like Haberman and more like Camille Preaker, portrayed in the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects by Amy Adams.

It was like clockwork: On Sunday morning, Rudy Giuliani appeared on Meet the Press and, as he seems to do every time he gives a televised interview, delivered a head-slapping remark.

“Truth isn’t truth,” President Donald Trump’s attorney told Chuck Todd in the midst of a heated back-and-forth. As Giuliani later explained, he wasn’t making a metaphysical point but simply saying that sometimes the law hinges on he-said, she-said problems. One flaw is that in the example Giuliani cited, the president either spoke with former FBI Director James Comey about Michael Flynn, or he didn’t. There is a reality, and if Trump is confident his is true, it remains unclear why Giuliani doesn’t want his client to say so in an interview with the special counsel.

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.

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.

The new Netflix romantic comedy To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, an adaptation of the Jenny Han novel, revels in the in-between. Protagonist Lara Jean Covey (Lana Condor) finds herself perpetually stuck in the middle: She’s the biracial daughter of an American father (John Corbett) and a deceased Korean mother; she’s the second of three sisters. She’s not quite awkward enough to be a social outcast at school, but she’s certainly not as cool as her former best friend, Gen (short for Genevieve), whose heartthrob boyfriend Peter Kavinsky (Noah Centineo) is their high school’s “king of the cafeteria.”

But for much of the film’s 99-minute run, the most nebulous territory Lara Jean occupies is the space between “real” and “fake” girlfriend. The central tension of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before begins when, unbeknownst to Lara Jean, her little sister, Kitty (Anna Cathcart), mails the love letters Lara Jean has written to her five crushes over the years. “My letters are my most secret possessions,” Lara Jean explains early into the film. “There are five total: Kenny from camp, Peter from seventh grade, Lucas from homecoming, John Ambrose from Model UN, and Josh. I write a letter when I have a crush so intense I don’t know what to do.” That Josh is Lara Jean’s older sister’s boyfriend (and later, ex) renders that specific crush most dangerous.

When Peter, the first boy to address Lara Jean’s affections after having received his letter, approaches her on the track field, Lara Jean notices the envelope in his hands and faints. She recovers from the fainting spell only to notice Josh rapidly walking toward her carrying a letter of his own. Lara Jean adopts a swift, uncharacteristic course of action: She pins Peter onto the track and kisses him. Later, bumping into her at a café, Peter gently reiterates his disinterest in Lara Jean and tells her that he and Gen are only newly broken up. In the delightfully awkward conversation that ensues, Lara Jean admits to Peter that she kissed him to avoid the discomfort of Josh thinking that she likes him. The revelation sets Peter’s scheme into motion, and he proposes a perfect, fraudulent solution:

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.

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.

The goldfish were the first to vanish. Every so often, a few would go missing overnight from the office’s tiny outdoor pond. But goldfish were cheap, so no one in the building—an environmental nonprofit in the bustling, sweaty center of Colombo, Sri Lanka—bothered investigating.

Then the dragon koi began to disappear. Lustrous and ethereal, each of these whiskered Japanese carp cost around 10,000 Sri Lankan rupees, or $65. In a fit of extravagance, the building’s landlord had bought 10. Soon, he had seven. Then three.

Panicked, the landlord installed four security cameras to catch the thief. The pond rested at the end of a narrow driveway surrounded by tall concrete walls, so whoever was swiping the carp had either a key or the superhuman ability to bound up nearby roofs and drop in undetected. The landlord couldn’t imagine what kind of person would steal a fish, but he was eager to find out.

Turn on the TV or scroll through Instagram, and it’s not difficult to find a sea of blond politicians, news commentators, celebrities, and social-media influencers. Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Kim Kardashian, and Justin Bieber have all, at some point, traded their dark locks for golden hues. Hillary Clinton, the first woman to get a presidential nomination from a major political party, colored her hair blond. And in the administration of Donald Trump alone, there’s the president himself, Ivanka Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Kirstjen Nielsen, Betsy DeVos, and Linda McMahon—even Hope Hicks highlighted her brunette hair when she served as communications director.  

Why, exactly, is blond hair so popular in America? The poet Claudia Rankine, the author of Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), and the photographer and filmmaker John Lucas were first inspired to explore the prevalence of blond hair—dyed-blond hair, in particular—in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. A black professor had asked Rankine, who teaches poetry at Yale, what she should say to her black students who were bleaching their hair. But Rankine wasn’t quite sure how to answer at first.