october 1998

I was one of many people who found Jussie Smollett’s story a little off from the beginning. Two white men in ski masks are out in 10-degree weather in the middle of the night, equipped with a bottle of bleach or something like it and a rope that they fashioned into a mock noose. These thugs, who shouted Trump slogans as well as racist and homophobic slurs, seemed to know who Smollett was on sight, meaning they were aficionados of the splashy black soap opera Empire, on which Smollett is a main character. Somehow they were aware that Smollett, prominent but hardly on the A-list as celebrities go, was gay.

Yes, my skepticism made me feel a little guilty. We are justly sensitized to violence against people for being black and for being gay in the wake of incidents I need not name. We are also just past watching legions of people who should have known better refuse to credit Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Maybe fear and trauma distorted Smollett’s memory somewhat? Maybe the media were getting some of the details wrong? Wait and see, I and others thought.

Updated at 4:53 p.m. on February 20, 2019.

For several months, Cara has been working up the courage to approach her mom about what she saw on Instagram. Not long ago, the 11-year-old—who, like all the other kids in this story, is referred to by a pseudonym—discovered that her mom had been posting photos of her, without prior approval, for much of her life. “I’ve wanted to bring it up. It’s weird seeing myself up there, and sometimes there’s pics I don’t like of myself,” she said.

Like most other modern kids, Cara grew up immersed in social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were all founded before she was born; Instagram has been around since she was a toddler. While many kids may not yet have accounts themselves, their parents, schools, sports teams, and organizations have been curating an online presence for them since birth. The shock of realizing that details about your life—or, in some cases, an entire narrative of it—have been shared online without your consent or knowledge has become a pivotal experience in the lives of many young teens and tweens.

For Tim Caro, it was surprisingly easy to dress horses like zebras. Several vendors were already selling coats with black-and-white stripes, often as fun gimmicks. But, as Caro learned, such coverings have an unexpectedly serious effect. “There are enormous benefits to having a striped coat for a horse,” he told me.  

Caro, a biologist at the University of California at Davis, has spent years thinking about why zebras are striped, and has even written a book about this mystery. In his latest bid to get clear answers, he and his colleagues traveled to Hill Livery, a stable in southwest England that keeps several captive zebras alongside domestic horses. By comparing these two species, as well as horses that were comically cloaked in zebra-striped coats, the team found fresh evidence for what Caro thinks is the only plausible explanation for the striking stripes: They evolved to deter bloodsucking flies.

Imagine going to live on a planet where the sun never moves in the sky. No sunrise, no sunset.

Several years ago, I became obsessed with tidally locked planets. The notion of a world permanently caught between two extremes—with one half always illuminated, the other always in the dark—took hold of my imagination. I realized that planets like these were the surest bet in the search for Earth-like places that our descendants could settle on. Worlds of eternal darkness and never-ending sunlight could be the future of the human race—if we’re serious about living in other solar systems.

Astronomers believe that most of the planets in our galaxy that have Earth-like temperatures are likely to be tidally locked. Because their orbital period is the same as their period of rotation, these planets will always present the same face to their sun—just as we always see the same side of the moon, as it orbits Earth.

The Medicaid provider had assured her that this was the best option, so Marie Solomonik walked into the day-habilitation center in Queens, New York, with all the optimism she could muster. Marie was with her husband, Eddie, on this rainy March morning to scout out the facility for their son, Anthony, who has autism.

“This place makes my skin crawl,” Marie whispered.

“Just promise me you’ll keep an open mind,” Eddie responded.

In the past, centers like these had been a torment for Anthony. There was the time in middle school when another boy hit him in the face with a metal lunch box. There were the girls in the park who mocked him relentlessly for being nonverbal. And there was the incident during gym class when he tripped on the treadmill and got caught in the conveyor belt. By the time anyone noticed him trying to scream, nearly all the skin had been flayed from his knees.

In 1828, a teenager named Charles Darwin opened a letter to his cousin with “I am dying by inches, from not having anybody to talk to about insects.” Almost two centuries on, Darwin would probably be thrilled and horrified: People are abuzz about insects, but their discussions are flecked with words such as apocalypse and Armageddon.

The drumbeats of doom began in late 2017, after a German study showed that the total mass of local flying insects had fallen by 80 percent in three decades. The alarms intensified after The New York Times Magazine published a masterful feature on the decline of insect life late last year. And panic truly set in this month when the researchers Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris Wyckhuys, having reviewed dozens of studies, claimed that “insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.” The Guardian, in covering the duo’s review, wrote that “insects could vanish within a century”—a crisis that Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys believe could lead to a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems.”

There are a lot of people talking about socialism these days. Senator Bernie Sanders, who on Tuesday launched a bid for the Democratic nomination for president, calls himself a democratic socialist, and so does Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Public intellectuals are debating the label anew. And then there’s the most high-profile participant in the discussion: Donald Trump.

The president, of course, is not a proponent. But he has moved “socialism” to the center of his lexicon in February, deploying it in discussions of foreign policy as a weapon against domestic political opponents. He does so at a time when his political messaging has faltered and when the left wing is more energized than it has been in generations. How successful Trump’s attempt to revive an old but often successful line of attack is will be an important test, both for his reelection hopes and for the future of socialist ideas in this country.

Amid the human crush of Old Delhi, on the edge of a medieval bazaar, a red structure with cages on its roof rises three stories above the labyrinth of neon-lit stalls and narrow alleyways, its top floor emblazoned with two words: birds hospital.

On a hot day last spring, I removed my shoes at the hospital’s entrance and walked up to the second-floor lobby, where a clerk in his late 20s was processing patients. An older woman placed a shoebox before him and lifted off its lid, revealing a bloody white parakeet, the victim of a cat attack. The man in front of me in line held, in a small cage, a dove that had collided with a glass tower in the financial district. A girl no older than 7 came in behind me clutching, in her bare hands, a white hen with a slumped neck.

“My dearest Ulmus,” the message began.

“As I was leaving St. Mary’s College today I was struck, not by a branch, but by your radiant beauty. You must get these messages all the time. You’re such an attractive tree.”

This is an excerpt of a letter someone wrote to a green-leaf elm, one of thousands of messages in an ongoing correspondence between the people of Melbourne, Australia, and the city’s trees.

Officials assigned the trees ID numbers and email addresses in 2013 as part of a program designed to make it easier for citizens to report problems like dangerous branches. The “unintended but positive consequence,” as the chair of Melbourne’s Environment Portfolio, Councillor Arron Wood, put it to me in an email, was that people did more than just report issues. They also wrote directly to the trees—everything from banal greetings and questions about current events to love letters and existential dilemmas. “The email interactions reveal the love Melburnians have for our trees,” Wood said.

The economic thinker who most influenced the Green New Deal isn’t Marx or Lenin. No, if you want to understand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bid to remake the economy to fight climate change, you need to read Hamilton.

Yes, Alexander Hamilton. Long before he was associated with theatrical hip-hop, former Treasury Secretary Hamilton called for policies that sound familiar to us today. Like Representative Ocasio-Cortez, he wanted massive federal spending on new infrastructure. Like Donald Trump, he believed that very high tariffs can nurture American manufacturing. And like Elizabeth Warren, he was willing to bend the Constitution to reform the financial system.

Hamilton, in short, successfully used the power of the federal government to boost manufacturing, to pick winners and losers, and to shape the fate of the U.S. economy. He is the father of American industrial policy: the set of laws and regulations that say the federal government can guide economic growth without micromanaging it. And the Green New Deal, for all its socialist regalia, only makes sense in light of his capitalistic work.