may 1998

A few months ago, when millions of Americans were watching the Netflix series Emily in Paris because it was what we had been given that week, I cued up the first episode and was beset almost immediately by an intense longing. Not for travel, or for opportunities to wear beautiful clothes—two commonly cited high points in an otherwise charmless show—but for sports. Specifically, watching sports in a packed bar, which is what the titular character’s boyfriend is doing when the viewer meets him.

The scene is fleeting, and it’s also pretty bad. It doesn’t come close to capturing the sweaty intensity of a horde of nervous fans, poised to embrace each other in collective joy or drink through despair. I know this because I am, sometimes unfortunately, a person who has spent a good chunk of her adult social life watching sports in bars, both with my actual close friends and with 500 or so fellow travelers at the New York City bar that hosts expatriated University of Georgia alumni during college-football season.

When Americans began receiving coronavirus vaccines last month, people started fantasizing about the first thing they’d do when the pandemic ends: go back to work, visit family, hug friends. But the public discussion soon shifted. One news article after another warned about everything that could go wrong: Protection isn’t immediate; vaccinated people can still transmit the virus; vaccinated people might get mild infections that could become chronic; vaccines might not work as well against new coronavirus variants. “COVID-19 Vaccine Doesn’t Mean You Can Party Like It’s 1999,” one headline admonished. Can vaccinated people at least hang out with one another? Nope, masks and distancing are still required. “Bottom line,” another article concluded ominously: “You will need to wear a face mask after you’re vaccinated until COVID-19 cases become nearly nonexistent.”

Before Arsène Lupin was the inspiration for an out-of-nowhere Netflix smash hit, projected to be watched by 70 million subscribers, the character was a French literary legend, a gentleman thief with the moral code of Robin Hood, the wits of Sherlock Holmes, and the anti-aristocratic instincts of Robespierre. In the 1906 story “The Queen’s Necklace,” one of Maurice Leblanc’s first outings for the character, his origins are explained: Lupin’s first robbery was staged when he was 6 years old, after witnessing his mother, an impoverished gentlewoman, being ill-treated by her monied employer. The necklace the child managed to pinch also features in the first episode of Lupin, in which a janitor working at the Louvre stages a dazzling heist inspired by his fictional hero. Both crimes are audacious, seemingly impossible, and conducted with a strong amount of swagger: Lupin might be a master of disguise, but he’s also a peacock who learns to play on his notoriety as often as he makes himself invisible.

You couldn’t have blamed Anthony Fauci if at any point over the past year he’d told Donald Trump he’d had enough, thank you, and quit. Everyone has a breaking point. There was the time the former president called him “a disaster” on a call with Trump-campaign staff. Or the day a White House official gave reporters an oppo-research-style memo claiming that Fauci had been “wrong on things” related to COVID-19. And Trump’s retweet of “Time to #FireFauci” would have been one humiliation too many for most.

But in the end, Trump got fired, and Fauci got promoted—he’s now the chief medical adviser to the Biden White House. “The thing that got me through it was, I did not let that bother me,” Fauci told me in an interview this week. “People cannot believe that. But it’s true. The problem is so enormous. People’s lives are at stake. I’m a physician. I’m a scientist. I’m a public-health expert. I know what I need to do. All that other stuff is just a distraction. Quite frankly, it’s bullshit.”

When you think of messiness, you might think of the unsavory ways it manifests: sweaty socks left on the floor, food-encrusted dishes piled in the sink, crumbs on the counter. Messes themselves are easy to identify, but the patterns of behavior that produce them are a bit more nuanced. Really, messiness has two ingredients: making messes, and then not cleaning them up.

There is a widely held belief that boys—and later on, men—are particularly messy. At least some grounds for this stereotype exist, but sex has little to do with it. “There’s no evidence of inherent, biologically based sex differences in cleanliness or messiness,” Susan McHale, a professor of human development and family studies at Penn State, told me. She said innate preferences for orderliness might vary from child to child, but cultural factors have a significant influence, and it’s worth investigating which half of the messiness recipe is driving the gender disparity.