november 1999

It was the hippies who drove Nancy Hale over the edge. She had spent three days listening respectfully to the real people of Middle America, and finally she couldn’t take it any longer.

She turned off the tape recorder and took several deep breaths, leaning back in the passenger seat of the rented GMC Yukon. The sun had just come out from behind a mass of clouds, casting a gleam on the rain-soaked parking lot in rural Wisconsin.

Hale, who is 65 and lives in San Francisco, is a career activist who got her start protesting nuclear plants and nuclear testing in the 1970s. In 2005, she was one of the founders of Third Way, a center-left think tank, and it was in that capacity that she and four colleagues had journeyed from both coasts to the town of Viroqua, Wisconsin, as part of a post-election listening tour. They had come on a well-meaning mission: to better understand their fellow Americans, whose political behavior in the last election had left them confused and distressed.

When the Harvey Weinstein story broke, I thought of something my mother told me when I was a little girl. She said: To be a free woman, you have to be a financially independent woman. She wasn’t wrong. I studied economics in college and went to New York to become an investment banker. To be blunt, I wanted the freedom money can buy.

I had a sudden change of heart while working at Goldman Sachs as a summer analyst. I decided that if the world required me to sell the hours of my life in exchange for access to what had long ago been free—food, water, shelter—I wanted to at least be doing something that stirred my soul. This is, granted, a privileged position. But as a young woman that was the conclusion I came to.

“You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country,” White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said Thursday. Among those were Gold Star families: “I just thought—the selfless devotion that brings a man or woman to die on the battlefield, I just thought that that might be sacred.”

But Kelly acknowledged that might no longer be true: “Gold Star families, I think that left in the convention over the summer.”

Then on Monday morning, Kelly’s boss decided to prolong a feud with the widow of a fallen American soldier:

I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 23, 2017

It was a week of powerful speeches. The least memorable, oddly, was delivered by the most naturally gifted speaker, former President Barack Obama, at a campaign rally in Virginia. “Our democracy is at stake,” he said, before harking back to the trope of his 2008 campaign: “Yes, we can.” Compelling in the setting, but not special.

Far more powerful was former President George W. Bush’s indictment of Donald Trump that didn’t mention the 45th president by name. It was a cry for freedom as a theme in American policy, a denunciation of “casual cruelty” in American discourse, of “nationalism distorted into nativism,” of isolationism, of attempts to turn American identity away from American ideals and into something darker, driven by “geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood.” In itself it would have been noteworthy.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

Emma Perrier spent the summer of 2015 mending a broken heart, after a recent breakup. By September, the restaurant manager had grown tired of watching The Notebook alone in her apartment in Twickenham, a leafy suburb southwest of London, and decided it was time to get back out there. Despite the horror stories she’d heard about online dating, Emma, 33, downloaded a matchmaking app called Zoosk. The second “o” in the Zoosk logo looks like a diamond engagement ring, which suggested that its 38 million members were seeking more than the one-night stands offered by apps like Tinder.

She snapped the three selfies the app required to “verify her identity.” Emma, who is from a volcanic city near the French Alps, not far from the source of Perrier mineral water, is petite, and brunette. She found it difficult to meet men, especially as she avoided pubs and nightclubs, and worked such long hours at a coffee shop in the city’s financial district that she met only stockbrokers, who were mostly looking for cappuccinos, not love.

Updated on October 22, 2017.

The Trump administration is scrambling to defend the president’s characterization of his communications with grieving military families, including rush-delivering letters from the president to the families of servicemembers killed months ago. Donald Trump falsely claimed this week that he had called “virtually” all fallen servicemembers’ families since his time in office.

Timothy Eckels Sr. hadn’t heard anything from President Trump since his son Timothy Eckels Jr. was killed after a collision involving the USS John S. McCain on August 21. But then, on October 20, two days into the controversy over the president’s handling of a condolence call with an American soldier’s widow, Eckels Sr. received a United Parcel Service package dated October 18 with a letter from the White House.

I met the future prime minister of the Czech Republic early in 2014, at a Washington, D.C. breakfast organized by the “No Labels” movement. Andrej Babis had recently been appointed his nation’s finance minister. He and the No Labels organizers had met at a conference in Europe and been mutually fascinated by each other’s promises of trans-ideological problem-solving.

I was less impressed. Babis looked to me less like a problem solver, more like an example of the problem to be solved. Babis had become very rich, very fast, in a very murky way. A hereditary member of the pre-1989 communist elite, in the post-communist scramble he had gained managerial control of very valuable state assets, including the great preponderance of the country’s agricultural land. Through complex financial transactions, he soon emerged as those assets’ outright owner—and reputedly his country’s richest or second-richest man. At every step of the way, Babis was dogged by accusations of financial fraud and past collaboration with the communist-era secret police—accusations he dismisses as the work of a “deep state” conspiracy against him.

When Chris Lowe first saw the buck stoop to lick the small, silver-speckled fox, he thought his eyes might be playing tricks on him. He’d just gotten back from a run on Santa Catalina, a remote Southern Californian island where he studies sharks, and came upon the two animals in the scrub. Mule deer and island foxes, the rascally miniature descendants of gray foxes, are everyday sights on Catalina’s grassy hills. But to see them nuzzling was downright weird.

Was the buck simply nibbling on a plant behind the fox? Had the fox happened to hop in front of the buck’s face? Lowe dashed into his apartment to grab his camera, and made it to the window to catch the deer taking another lick. The fox, docile in the shade of its antlered friend, wasn’t just tolerating the apparent cleaning, Lowe realized. “It looked like it was actually enjoying this,” he says.

One of the most succinct definitions of sexual harassment I’ve read over the past few weeks goes like this: For men, it’s anything they might say to a woman that would make them uncomfortable if it were said to them, but in prison. It’s glib, sure. But it gets at the fundamental imbalance of power that characterizes relationships between men and women. To understand what it’s like for a woman to be catcalled, or harassed, or propositioned, it isn’t enough for men to simply put themselves in that woman’s place. They also have to imagine what it’s like to sense the imminent danger in those interactions—to be weaker than their aggressor in every way, and to have that weakness woven into the fabric of society itself. As the adage often attributed to Margaret Atwood goes, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”