april 1999

White conservative evangelicals in America are anxious people. I know because I am one.

Our sense of fear, perhaps more than any other factor, explains why evangelicals voted in such large numbers for Donald Trump in 2016 and continue to support his presidency.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson once wrote, “Fear is not a Christian habit of mind.” The great poet of the Jersey shore, Bruce Springsteen, sings, “Fear’s a dangerous thing. It can turn your heart black you can trust. It can take a God-filled soul, and turn it to devils and dust.”

Robinson and Springsteen echo verses in nearly every book of the Bible, the sacred text that serves as the source of spiritual authority in evangelical life. Moses told the Israelites to “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today.” The Hebrew God told Job: “At the destruction and famine you shall laugh, and shall not fear the beasts of the earth.” The Psalmist wrote: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff they comfort me.”

Claire is a 14-year-old girl with short auburn hair and a broad smile. She lives outside Philadelphia with her mother and father, both professional scientists. Claire can come across as an introvert, but she quickly opens up, and what seemed like shyness reveals itself to be quiet self-assuredness. Like many kids her age, she is a bit overscheduled. During the course of the evening I spent with Claire and her mother, Heather—these aren’t their real names—theater, guitar, and track tryouts all came up. We also discussed the fact that, until recently, she wasn’t certain she was a girl.

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Sixth grade had been difficult for her. She’d struggled to make friends and experienced both anxiety and depression. “I didn’t have any self-confidence at all,” she told me. “I thought there was something wrong with me.” Claire, who was 12 at the time, also felt uncomfortable in her body in a way she couldn’t quite describe. She acknowledged that part of it had to do with puberty, but she felt it was more than the usual preteen woes. “At first, I started eating less,” she said, “but that didn’t really help.”

I’m sure I looked comical as I staggered down a downtown San Francisco street on a recent weekday, arms full of packages—as I dropped one and bent down to pick it up, another fell, and I as I tried to rein that one in, another toppled.

Yet it wasn’t funny, not really. There I was, wearing a bright-yellow safety vest and working for Amazon Flex, a program in which the e-commerce giant pays regular people to deliver packages from their own vehicles for $18 to $25 an hour, before expenses. I was racing to make the deliveries before I got a ticket—there are few places for drivers without commercial vehicles to park in downtown San Francisco during the day—and also battling a growing rage as I lugged parcels to offices of tech companies that offered free food and impressive salaries to their employees, who seemed to spend their days ordering stuff online. Technology was allowing these people a good life, but it was just making me stressed and cranky.

Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes—car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost seems easier to list the things they don’t mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.

Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids’ development, but it’s probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents.

Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend more time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly low-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children’s lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. To be clear, I’m not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn’t have survived infancy if I’d had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.

In May 2016, a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for $57.3 million. One year later, another painting of his from 1982, Untitled, sold for $110.5 million, making it the sixth-most-expensive work of art ever purchased at auction, and setting a record for an American artist. Basquiat is not the first painter to have a canvas sell for a price that strikes ordinary people as obscene. But when Jeffrey Deitch, a prominent curator and dealer, said after the sale, “He’s now in the same league as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso,” it was hard to pin down the precise meaning of the word league. Was Basquiat now considered as great an artist as Picasso? Or was he merely as expensive to own?

Basquiat became famous in the early 1980s, when the idea that artists were supposed to be commercial innocents fell apart for good, and when the idea of the “art star”—a funnily abbreviated inversion, if you think about it, of starving artist—first came into vogue. In 1985, The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on Basquiat, titled “New Art, New Money.” Its tone was both awed and suspicious, with constant references to a hot, possibly gullible, market in contemporary art. His work was said to be selling “at a brisk pace—so brisk, some observers joked, that the paint was barely dry,” and Basquiat himself was quoted as worrying he had become a “gallery mascot.” Whatever else was true, as the art historian Jordana Moore Saggese has said since, “this was not the starving artist the public was accustomed to seeing.”

The drive to the little white dome on the northern slope of Mauna Loa is a bumpy one. Mauna Loa, the “Long Mountain,” is a colossal volcano that covers half of the island of Hawaii. The rocky terrain, rusty brown and deep red, crunches beneath car tires and jostles passengers. Up there, more than 8,000 feet above sea level and many miles away from the sounds of civilization, it doesn’t feel like Earth. It feels like another planet. Like Mars.

For the past five years, small groups of people have made this drive and moved into the dome, known as a habitat. Their job is to pretend that they really are on Mars, and then spend months living like it. The goal, for the researchers who send them there, is to figure out how human beings would do on a mission to the real thing.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed rumors that she was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant on Friday evening. “Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left,” Sanders tweeted on Saturday. “Her actions say far more about her than about me.”

In a widely shared tweet about the incident, Brennan Gilmore, director of the environmental group Clean Virginia, posted what appears to be a note left by the restaurant’s staff for the morning manager, reading: “86 — Sara Huckabee Sanders.”

.@PressSec got kicked out of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va tonight. Apparently the owner didn’t want to serve her and her party out of moral conviction. pic.twitter.com/jr3bfiY3XY

— Brennan Gilmore (@brennanmgilmore) June 23, 2018

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

For Markus Heilig, the years of dead ends were starting to grate.

A seasoned psychiatrist, Heilig joined the National Institutes of Health in 2004 with grand ambitions of finding new ways to treat addiction and alcoholism. “It was the age of the neuroscience revolution, and all this new tech gave us many ways of manipulating animal brains,” he recalls. By studying addictive behavior in laboratory rats and mice, he would pinpoint crucial genes, molecules, and brain regions that could be targeted to curtail the equivalent behaviors in people.

It wasn’t to be. The insights from rodent studies repeatedly proved to be irrelevant. Many researchers and pharmaceutical companies became disillusioned. “We cured alcoholism in every rat we ever tried,” says Heilig, who is now at Linköping University in Sweden. “And at the end of every paper, we wrote: This will lead to an exciting treatment. But everything we took from these animal models to the clinic failed. We needed to go back to the drawing board.”

President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the FBI planted a “spy” in his campaign has handed his associates a new way to characterize any suspicious interactions they may have had during the election: those interactions, especially those being examined by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, were an FBI setup. Mueller is investigating whether the Trump campaign abetted a Russian disinformation campaign, and whether the president sought to obstruct that investigation.

Earlier this month, The Washington Post revealed that Roger Stone and Michael Caputo, two former advisers to Trump’s campaign team of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller, were approached during the election by a Russian national who was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. Stone and Caputo told the Post that they believe the man was acting as an informant for the FBI. The wife of another campaign aide now cooperating with Mueller, George Papadopoulos, is telling a similar story: Papadopoulos did nothing without the campaign’s consent, she has said, and was targeted by western agents trying to entrap him.