august 1998

The first Facebook message arrived when Heather Woock was packing for vacation, in August 2017. It was from a stranger claiming to be her half sibling. She assumed the message was some kind of scam; her parents had never told her she might have siblings. But the message contained one detail that spooked her. The sender mentioned a doctor, Donald Cline. Woock knew that name; her mother had gone to Cline for fertility treatments before she was born. Had this person somehow gotten her mother’s medical history?

Her mom said not to worry. So Woock, who is 33 and lives just outside Indianapolis, flew to the West Coast for her vacation. She got a couple more messages from other supposed half siblings while she was away. Their persistence was strange. But then her phone broke, and she spent the next week and a half outdoors in Seattle and Vancouver, blissfully disconnected.

A coast-to-coast FBI probe alleges that a network of celebrities, business executives, and other powerful figures is at the center of a massive bribery scheme to secure admission into some of the country’s most elite colleges, according to court documents unsealed earlier today.

Among the defendants are nearly three dozen parents whom federal prosecutors are charging with conspiracy and other crimes for allegedly using hefty sums of money to get their children into schools such as Yale, Georgetown, and the University of Southern California. Specifically, the newly unsealed court documents contend that these high-rolling parents—some of them public figures such as the actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, as well as Loughlin’s husband, the fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli—paid hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of dollars per child to a fixer who would then use that money to allegedly bribe certain college officials or other conspirators to help secure the child’s admission.

Dear Therapist,

My best friend is currently in a romantic and sexual relationship with a 50-year-old professor at our university. I'm extremely worried, since I suspect the professor is emotionally manipulating her so he can sexually exploit her.

Over the summer, my friend starting working as a nanny for the professor and his wife. After three days on the job, he told her that he "fell in love with her at first sight" and suggested that she was his soulmate. Since this confession, they've been dating and having sex. I was disgusted by this, but refrained from criticizing the relationship, since I thought it could lead to the end of our friendship and also figured the relationship would be short-lived given the age difference.

Robert Bowers wanted everyone to know why he did it.

“I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” he posted on the social-media network Gab shortly before allegedly entering the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27 and gunning down 11 worshippers. He “wanted all Jews to die,” he declared while he was being treated for his wounds. Invoking the specter of white Americans facing “genocide,” he singled out HIAS, a Jewish American refugee-support group, and accused it of bringing “invaders in that kill our people.” Then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions, announcing that Bowers would face federal charges, was unequivocal in his condemnation: “These alleged crimes are incomprehensibly evil and utterly repugnant to the values of this nation.”

The American legal system pretends to marble-and-mahogany majesty, but is in fact often a rickety, underfunded contraption, run by overworked mortals who are sometimes incompetent and sometimes actually ill-intentioned. But even amid law’s cratered landscape, sometimes a specific case presents facts simply beyond belief; sometimes the “system” stands revealed as nothing more than one human being tormenting another because he can.

For me, such a case is Flowers v. Mississippi, a death-penalty appeal to be argued before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. The specific issue the Court will hear is whether, during a murder trial in 2010, a Mississippi prosecutor named Doug Evans deliberately used “peremptory challenges” to remove potential jurors because of race. If the U.S. Supreme Court agrees, then Flowers’s conviction for multiple murders in 1996 will be set aside.

Shakespeare had it wrong: All the world’s a script, and all the men and women merely players missing opportunities to zhuzh up their dialogue. At least, that’s what he might’ve meant if he’d had the ear for chinwagging that the actor and matriarch Moira Rose (played by Catherine O’Hara) regularly displays on the Canadian series Schitt’s Creek. It’s not often that a modern-day sitcom entwines a character’s speech with sesquipedalian expressions like “jabberwocky,” “callipygian,” and “prestidigitator.” Yet Moira’s vocabulary is so highbrow it’s practically vertiginous.

O’Hara’s penchant for character comedy has found form in an array of personalities, taking shape through affectations like Delia’s screeching snobbery in Tim Burton’s 1988 film Beetlejuice or Cookie’s wobbled walk in the 2000 comedy Best in Show. In O’Hara’s latest role, Moira’s absurdity comes across visually and verbally. She uses her words in tandem with her wardrobe, employing both as a kind of plumage. Whether it’s her diction or her elocution—a throwback to the famed transatlantic accent that actresses like Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, and Irene Dunne perfected—it all folds into her over-the-top self-presentation. “[O’Hara is] really brilliant when it comes to understanding the minutiae of a character and really squeezing every last laugh,” the show’s co-creator Dan Levy told Vulture.

For the second time in just a few months, admissions at America’s elite colleges are under a microscope. In late 2018, the scrutiny was on T. M. Landry, a predominantly black private school in Louisiana that had garnered a national reputation for sending dozens of graduates to the Ivy League and other prestigious institutions. A New York Times report revealed the school as a fraud, faking transcripts and hiding allegations of abuse. The Landry scandal caused tremors in higher education, but damage was limited by the fact that colleges could plausibly claim victimhood—although, I argued at the time, it was difficult not to come away from the debacle with a sense that it called into question core tenets of the American educational meritocracy.

In 2007, Poorvi Patodia was pregnant and felt like she was eating too many chips. Her cravings for salty, crunchy snacks were intense, but what moms should eat while pregnant is a touchy subject. “I had this thought of, What else could I be eating that’s better for me?” she says. “I remembered these roasted chickpeas that my mom used to make.”

Patodia started roasting chickpeas for herself. She had her baby and went on with her life, but the thought stuck with her. Her fellow Americans were missing out on something delicious.

Five years later, Patodia put her pregnancy cravings, Indian background, and professional experience in the food industry together and started Biena Snacks, which offers more than a dozen varieties of crunchy, flavored chickpeas. It was the right thing at the right time, even in a country that has long ignored the ingredient: The snacks are now available in more than 12,000 retail locations.

In the 1960s, reporters became attuned to the power they had over the public’s attention, and some tried to use it judiciously. While white supremacists, especially members of the Ku Klux Klan, offered privileged insider access to reporters who provided favorable coverage, the black press chose to ignore the Klan unless it was to highlight the group’s decreasing power. Jewish civil-rights organizations suggested that journalists practice “quarantine” and actively choose not to cover the American Nazi Party. The Klan and the Nazis wanted attention. In each of these situations, media outlets acted as gatekeepers that could strategically silence those seeking to use the press as a megaphone.

Social media have fundamentally changed who controls the volume on certain social issues. Facebook, Google, and other platform companies want to believe they have created a circumvention technology that connects people directly to one another without any gates, walls, or barriers. Yet this connectivity has also allowed some of the worst people in this world to find one another, get organized, and use these same platforms to harass and silence others. The platform companies do not know how to fix, or perhaps do not understand, what they have built. In the meantime, previously localized phenomena spread around the globe, so much so that the culture of American-style white supremacy turned up in a terrorist attack on Muslims in New Zealand.

Vern Loomis, a retired structural draftsman in West Bloomfield, Michigan, had a standard office lunch: a peanut-butter sandwich, with various fruit, vegetable, and dessert accompaniments. He ate this, he estimates, nearly every workday for about 25 years.

His meal underwent slight modifications over time—jelly was added to the sandwich in the final five or so years—but its foundation remained the same. The meal was easy to prepare, cheap, and tasty. “And if you happen to be eating at your desk … it was something that was not too drippy,” he told me, so long as one applied the jelly a bit conservatively.

Last year, Loomis retired from his job but not his lunch, which he still eats three or four days a week (now with sliced bananas instead of jelly). “I never stopped liking it,” he says. “I still do.”