february 1999

Modern life is full of potentially terrifying “What if?” possibilities. What if a pharmacist decided to substitute morphine pills or strychnine for the next prescription you pick up? What if a school-bus driver decided to swing the wheel, and plow a full load of children head-on into incoming traffic, or off an overpass?

What if a FedEx or UPS courier decided to deliver a box full of explosives, or anthrax spores, to an office building, rather than business supplies? What if a disturbed student, teacher, or parent walked into a public school and opened fire on everyone in sight?

The last possibility is a reminder that there are risks some societies will define as acceptable. All the rest illustrate the reality that our lives hang by threads that someone else could decide to cut. The ability to inflict harm, whether intentionally or accidentally, rises more or less in pace with the technological complexity and interdependence of modern life.

Donald Trump isn’t particularly nice to anyone. His standard demeanor and language in disagreement or debate resemble the union of a road-rage incident and a bad game of the dozens. Even in agreement, he’s not a person for whom respect—of others or of the office he holds—is necessarily a guiding light. He does not run out of venom for opponents, and rarely has a word of unqualified praise for people who haven’t praised him first.

But if one pattern in his remarks about other people has crystallized in the past few months, it’s that the president employs a particular species of dismissive language when he’s talking about black women. After spending a good chunk of his first year in office attacking black men, his sophomore year has involved high-profile verbal attacks against high-profile black women. And, as evidenced by his recent remarks on the death of the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, his need to subordinate black women, even without enmity, is a primary drive.

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.

You’re at a party and you see someone cute across the room. They glance at you, maybe even smile for a second, then carry on with their conversation. You feel the room shrink, your heart rate quicken, your face go red: You’re crushing on this stranger, hard. But then the sensible part of your brain tells you to forget it: That person’s way, way out of your league.

Wait a second, you counter: Do dating “leagues” even exist?

At this point, Elizabeth Bruch, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, crashes in to your thought process (and this news article). Yep, she says. Leagues do seem to exist. But you’re not alone in trying to escape yours: “Three-quarters, or more, of people are dating aspirationally,” she says. And according to a new study, users of online-dating sites spend most of their time trying to contact people “out of their league.”

America’s Founding Fathers, after breaking free from monarchical subjugation, were determined to construct a government of checks and balances on absolute concentrated power. So they created a federal system that differentiated between state and national control, as well as three branches of government with distinct powers and responsibilities that had to answer to one another. But, not satisfied that that was enough, they added 10 amendments to the Constitution. And in the very first of those amendments, they established what has become an insurance policy for the continued health of the republic: a free press. As a working journalist, I know I have a stake in this concept. But as a grandfather who wants to see his grandchildren live in a country at least as free as the one I have enjoyed, a free press is even more relevant now than ever.

Few have enjoyed quite so spectacular a comeback under President Donald Trump as the conservative polemicist and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. In 2012, D’Souza resigned as president of a Christian college amid charges of adultery and deception. In 2014, D’Souza pleaded guilty to violating federal campaign-finance laws. He was sentenced to eight months of confinement followed by 52 months probation.

Now, as the saying goes, D’Souza is back—and bigger than ever. He has reinvented himself as something like the court intellectual of the age of Trump. Trump pardoned D’Souza on May 31, 2018. At the beginning of August, Donald Trump Jr. co-hosted the premiere of D’Souza’s latest movie, Death of a Nation. The movie compares Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln, and his Democratic opponents to Nazis. Afterward, Trump Jr. delivered a memorable summation of what he had learned from the film. “You see the Nazi platform in the early 1930s and what was actually put out there … and you look at it compared to, like, the DNC platform of today, and you’re saying, man, those things are awfully similar, to a point where it’s actually scary.”  

Omarosa Manigault-Newman has provided recordings on which nervous aides discuss how to cover for something hideous they believe Donald Trump has uttered.

And we hardly need question whether the N word is the one at issue. What would that hideous utterance have been if not the word currently treated as the most taboo in the English language? In an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Rob and Laura Petrie are chilled that their son Richie had used a “bad word,” which the script must leave unspoken given the public standards of the era. It is clear, however, that the word was fuck. In 2018, the word those aides are so worried about is just as clearly nigger.

But the question is whether this is truly big news.

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.

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—The trial of President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been anything but sexy. A document-heavy, jargon-laden slog, the tax-and-bank-fraud case has disappointed many who expected bombshell testimony and allusions to a grand Trump-Russia conspiracy—but left the courthouse gossiping about $15,000 ostrich jackets and the extramarital affairs of Manafort’s ex–business partner instead.

In U.S. District Court on Wednesday, the lead prosecutor, Greg Andres, acknowledged the case’s complexity and thanked the jurors for their patience, while leaving unsaid perhaps the most significant nexus to the broader Russia investigation: With every new foreign bank account, fraudulent loan application, and falsified tax return the government presented, we learned more about the lengths the president’s campaign chairman was willing to go to hide his financial relationships with Russian or pro-Russian oligarchs (at least one of whom he continued to leverage while working on the Trump campaign).

Scientists decoded the genome of rice in 2002. They completed the soybean genome in 2008. They mapped the maize genome in 2009. But only now has the long-awaited wheat genome been fully sequenced. That delay says nothing about wheat’s importance. It is arguably the most critical crop in the world. It’s grown on more land than anything else. It provides humanity with a fifth of our calories. But it also has one of the most complex genomes known to science.

For a start, wheat’s genome is monstrously big. While the genome of Arabidopsis—the first plant to be sequenced—contains 135 million DNA letters, and the human genome contains 3 billion, bread wheat has 16 billion. Just one of wheat’s chromosomes—3B—is bigger than the entire soybean genome.