october 1998

Well past seven one evening in 1988, after the nurses and the office manager had gone home, as he prepared to see the last of his patients and return some phone calls, Dr. Lou Ortenzio stopped by the cupboard where the drug samples were kept.

Ortenzio, a 35-year-old family practitioner in Clarksburg, West Virginia, reached for a box of extra-strength Vicodin. The box contained 20 pills, wrapped in foil. Each pill combined 750 milligrams of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, with 7.5 milligrams of hydrocodone, an opioid painkiller.

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Ortenzio routinely saw patients long after normal office hours ended. Attempting to keep up with the workload on this day, he had grown weary and was suffering from a tension headache; he needed something to keep him going. He unwrapped a pill, a sample left by a drug-company sales rep, certain that no one would ever know he’d taken it. Ortenzio popped the pill in his mouth.

In the early 2000s Terry Mitchell’s dentist retired. For a while, Mitchell, an electrician in his 50s, stopped seeking dental care altogether. But when one of his wisdom teeth began to ache, he started looking for someone new. An acquaintance recommended John Roger Lund, whose practice was a convenient 10-minute walk from Mitchell’s home, in San Jose, California. Lund’s practice was situated in a one-story building with clay roof tiles that housed several dental offices. The interior was a little dated, but not dingy. The waiting room was small and the decor minimal: some plants and photos, no fish. Lund was a good-looking middle-aged guy with arched eyebrows, round glasses, and graying hair that framed a youthful face. He was charming, chatty, and upbeat. At the time, Mitchell and Lund both owned Chevrolet Chevelles, and they bonded over their mutual love of classic cars.

Just after midnight, I felt the first unmistakable contraction. I still had two days until my due date, but I knew it was time to get to the hospital. A bulldozer inside my uterus revved its engine, shifted into high gear, and rammed a baby out into the world less than two hours later. Her name would be Isobel, Izzy for short.

She weighed five pounds, three ounces, below the threshold for “normal.” This was surprising—I’d had an uneventful pregnancy, and in one of my last prenatal checkups, my obstetrician predicted that she’d weigh about seven pounds.

Did the doctor miscalculate my due date? I wondered. Should I have taken more prenatal vitamins? Eaten better, worked less?

There would be no explanation, at least not then. We moved upstairs into a recovery room with a view of the summer sun rising behind the Oakland, California, hills. In those early-morning hours, I cradled Izzy’s warm, powdery body and nestled into a feeling that everything was fine.

Ken Jennings rose to fame after an unprecedented run on Jeopardy 15 years ago: Over the course of 74 episodes, he won a total of roughly $2.5 million.

Recently, a contestant named James Holzhauer has been working toward Jennings’s record at an astonishing pace. After the Friday-evening broadcast of the quiz program, Holzhauer had won about $850,000 over just 12 episodes. If he keeps up that rate, he’ll reach $2.5 million in less than half the time it took Jennings to do so.

Before Holzhauer went on the show, the most money earned in a single episode of Jeopardy was $77,000. During his 12-episode streak, he’s beaten that total not once, but five times, and has set a new record of $131,127. Holzhauer’s success has been attributed not just to his deep trivia knowledge, but also to his aggressive style of play—he homes in on high-value tiles that might contain Daily Doubles, and then often bets enormous sums when he finds them—and his unmatched buzzer-pressing reflexes.

Every week for the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, three Atlantic staffers will be discussing new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners were made available to critics in advance this year, we’ll be posting our thoughts in installments.

David Sims: Last week’s episode of Game of Thrones was all about the human stakes of the conflict ahead, and the unlikely alliances and friendships that had been forged over the past seven seasons. “Winterfell” existed to build up serious dramatic tension ahead of the climactic clash with the Night King and his army of the dead. This week’s episode, titled “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” and written by series mainstay Bryan Cogman, served the exact same purpose. Set on the eve before battle, it saw almost all the show’s friendly characters gather at Winterfell to hash out old grievances, pursue long-simmering romances, and generally cast a wistful glance back at all the crazy circumstances that brought them together.

Updated on April 19 at 1:28 p.m. ET.

There has never been a town like the one San Francisco is becoming, a place where a single industry composed almost entirely of rich people thoroughly dominates the local economy. Much of the money that’s been squished out of the rest of the world gets funneled by the internet pipes to this little sliver of land on the Pacific Ocean, jutting out into the glory of the bay. The city now sits atop a geyser of cash created from what the scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls “behavioral surplus”—the natural resource created from your behavior, which is to say your mind.

Literal colonies of the working poor now cling to forgotten streets in RV communities. Homeless encampments are stitched onto any liminal plot of land. To lose your apartment doesn’t mean moving one neighborhood over but three cities away, to Antioch or Gilroy or Stockton.

The first time I tried on a pair of Allbirds sneakers, I was in the brand’s San Francisco boutique, sitting on a gently curved wooden stool designed to tip forward in aid of shoe-changing. The stool was created by the same people who design the start-up’s shoes, and it made me feel the same combination of familiarity and irritation: Do we really need tech to disrupt the established technology of stools and sneakers?

My answer, after sitting on the stool and trying the shoes, is a begrudging, contemptuous “sometimes.” The tip forward helped. And the shoes, I silently admitted to myself, were astonishingly comfortable.

Allbirds has been selling sneakers made from environmentally friendly materials since 2016. The brand’s most recognizable style is its Runner, which looks a lot like a logo-free, work-appropriate version of Nike’s popular Roshe One. It’s what a running shoe needs to be in order to fly under the radar in an office.

Sri Lanka has a bloody history marked by a brutal, nearly 30-year civil war. In recent years, it’s been mostly spared from violence, until Easter Sunday, when large-scale, apparently coordinated terrorist attacks on churches and hotels killed nearly 300 people.

The government blamed the attack on a little-known Islamist militant group, National Thowheed Jamath, which had gained notoriety in Sri Lanka for defacing four statues of the Buddha outside temples in Mawanella, a town in the country’s center, in December 2018. What investigators will now have to piece together is how the group’s capability skyrocketed from vandalism to a sophisticated, multipronged attack and, perhaps more important, why now.

Colleen Brown of Cleveland, Ohio, has been known to post on Facebook now and again about the dangers of not vaccinating kids—local news stories about schools closing because a student has been exposed to the measles, she says, that kind of thing. A few years back, she remembers, she shared an article on her Facebook page about a 2015 measles outbreak that originated at Disneyland and resulted in 125 new cases of the measles.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 20 percent of the patients treated in that particular outbreak were eligible for immunization but were unvaccinated “because of personal beliefs.” Sharing the story on Facebook resulted in one of the bigger disagreements Brown, 21, has had about vaccines with her sister, Colette Carroll, who lives a little more than an hour away, in Toledo. Carroll’s two daughters—Brown’s nieces—are unvaccinated.

Rudy Giuliani couldn’t have crystallized the stakes more clearly.

“There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians,” President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, discussing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

A quick survey of the American political scene indicates that much of the nation agrees. Nearly three years after the first reports of Russian hacking into Democratic National Committee computers, there’s been little effort to take action that would contradict Giuliani’s judgment. Individuals may disagree, but Congress has made little effort to deter Americans from coordinating with foreign actors. Not only has there been no 9/11 Commission–style attempt to understand what happened in 2016; there’s been no serious federal initiative to harden vulnerable election infrastructure, even after Russia once again meddled in the 2018 elections. By deciding not to act, the American government has effectively decided that foreign interference is acceptable.