march 2000

As a young child I missed a question on a psychological test: “What comes in a bottle?”

The answer was supposed to be milk. I said beer.

Milk almost always came in cartons and plastic jugs, so I was right. But this isn’t about rehashing old grudges. I barely even think about it anymore! The point is that the test was a relic of a time before me, when milk did come in bottles. It arrived on doorsteps each morning, by the hand of some vanishing man. And just as such a world was alien to me as a kid, the current generation of small children might miss a similar question: “Where does milk come from?”

Many would likely answer almonds or beans or oats.

Indeed, the already booming nut-milk industry is projected to grow another 50 percent by 2020. Much of this is driven by beliefs about health, with ads claiming “dairy free” as a virtue that resonates for nebulous reasons—many stemming from an earlier scare over saturated fat—among consumers lactose intolerant and tolerant alike. The dairy industry is now scrambling to market milk to Millennial families, as the quintessential American-heartland beverage once thought of as necessary for all aspiring, straight-boned children has become widely seen as something to be avoided.

This week, Mark Zuckerberg kicked off another firestorm about Facebook when he appeared to defend the intentions of Holocaust deniers on the platform. In an interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher, the Facebook CEO was asked why the site doesn’t just remove malevolent misinformation, like the claim that the Sandy Hook massacre never happened. Zuckerberg responded with an example from his own experience.

“I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened,” he said. “I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think it’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent.” Unless individuals are “trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone,” he went on, “you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.”

It was AncestryDNA’s customer-service rep who had to break the news to Catherine St Clair.

For her part, St Clair thought she was inquiring about a technical glitch. Her brother—the brother who along with three other siblings had gifted her the DNA test for her birthday—wasn’t showing up right in her family tree. It was not a glitch, the woman on the line had to explain gently, if this news can ever land gently: The man St Clair thought of as her brother only shared enough DNA with her to be a half-sibling. In fact, she didn’t match any family members on her father’s side. Her biological father must be someone else.

“I looked into a mirror and started crying,” says St Clair, now 56. “I’ve taken for granted my whole life that what I was looking at in the mirror was part my mother and part my dad. And now that half of that person I was looking at in the mirror, I didn’t know who that was.”

We still do not know what hold Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump, but the whole world has now witnessed the power of its grip.

Russia helped Donald Trump into the presidency, as Robert Mueller’s indictment vividly details. Putin, in his own voice, has confirmed that he wanted Trump elected. Standing alongside his benefactor, Trump denounced the special counsel investigating Russian intervention in the U.S. election—and even repudiated his own intelligence appointees.

This is an unprecedented situation, but not an uncontemplated one. At the 1787 convention in Philadelphia, the authors of the Constitution worried a great deal about foreign potentates corrupting the American presidency.

When Gouverneur Morris famously changed his mind in favor of an impeachment clause, he explained his new point of view by invoking a situation very similar to the one now facing the United States:

Give Donald Trump and his team this much: They didn’t have a lot to work with.

Facing an uproar even among allies, the president on Tuesday sought to reverse the controversial comments he’d made alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin in Finland. Speaking before a meeting with members of Congress, Trump said that in contrast to his remarks in Helsinki, he accepted the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion blaming Russia for election interference—though he immediately undercut that by saying others might have been involved. (“Could have been other people also. There’s a lot of people out there.”) He also claimed that he had misspoken.

“In a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word would instead of wouldn’t,” Trump said. “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t or why it wouldn’t be Russia.’”

President Trump’s news conference Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin has quickly become the sort of gift that keeps on giving: The focus, initially, was on Trump saying he believed Putin’s assertion that Russia didn’t interfere in the 2016 presidential election over U.S. intelligence assessments that it did. Now, the question is just how seriously the Trump administration is considering what the president called an “incredible” offer from Putin.

Putin apparently made that offer during the more than two-hour one-on-one meeting between the two men, who were accompanied only by their translators. According to Putin’s own account in a news conference in Helsinki, as well as later Russian accounts, the offer involved allowing Robert Mueller, the special counsel, to interview 12 Russian intelligence officials indicted in the U.S. last week as part of the investigation into Russia’s election interference in 2016. In exchange, the U.S. would allow Russian officials to question 11 prominent Americans, including Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, for what Putin alleges to have been illegal activities—allegations the U.S. firmly denies. How the Trump administration plans to respond to this “incredible” offer depends, as such things often do, on who you ask.

There’s a reason why Sacha Baron Cohen left the “Kinderguardians” segment to the end of the first episode of Who Is America?, his new satirical Showtime series. The 10-minute sequence is Cohen at his best, playing a swollen, testosteronic Israeli pro-gun advocate called Colonel Erran Morad who’s able—by sheer force of character—to get politicians and lobbyists to argue that children as young as 3 should be armed. The more people Morad talks to, the more preposterous the sketch feels, until you’re cupping your jaw trying to fathom how actual lobbyists and politicians are saying these things.

“A 3-year-old cannot defend itself from an assault rifle by throwing a Hello Kitty pencil case at it,” says Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC). “Our Founding Fathers did not put an age limit on the Second Amendment.”

In the canon of sex research, far more energy and attention has been devoted to the act of having sex—how, when, and with whom—than to how people think about it when they are on their own. Which is one reason why Justin Lehmiller, a research fellow at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction and author of the blog Sex and Psychology, decided to conduct the largest-ever research project on sexual fantasy and desire, and write a book about it—Tell Me What You Want, published earlier this month.

“If you look back to, say, Alfred Kinsey, he was focused much more on people's behaviors rather than their desires. Same with [William] Masters and [Virginia] Johnson. They were focused more on studying the physiological side of sex,” Lehmiller told me in an interview. The last significant scientific publication on the topic dates to 1995, before the popularization of the Internet, which has made pornography, sexual information, and sexual misinformation all much more widely available.

For people with bipolar disorder, manic episodes can be euphoric, but they can also be terrifying. In the throes of mania, some people feel like they are superhuman. They start new projects and stay up all night to work on them. In the worst cases, they cease thinking coherently: They might attempt to walk into the sea or fly off the roof.

Though medications can help manage the symptoms, no pill is perfect, and all of them have side effects. Bipolar disorder appears to be at least partly genetic, but environmental factors also play a role, perhaps by switching different genes on and off, which might spark manic episodes. And the thing that might be switching on some of these genes, according to a new study, is rather surprising: a category of preservatives in beef jerky called nitrates.

The first step to re-creating 50,000-year-old technology is to collect a bunch of rocks. So began Andrew Sorensen’s plan to study a great mystery in archaeology: how Neanderthals controlled fire.

Sorensen, an archeologist at Leiden University, collected a special kind of rock called flint off the beaches of England. If you hit it in just the right ways, flint will break to expose sharp edges that can be used to butcher meat, scrape hides, and cut wood. And if you strike it against a mineral called pyrite, sparks will fly. Flint plus pyrite plus tinder equals fire.

Archeologists have found evidence of Neanderthal fire pits. They have even found tar that Neanderthals likely made by deliberately heating birch bark. What they have never found are tools that Neanderthals could have used to start fires on demand. Without it, Neanderthals would have needed to collect fire from natural sources such as lightning strikes, which would have required walking long distances to find fuel to keep fires going and enduring cold spells with raw food when they went out. The mastery of fire would have made life much easier. Many think it was a key turning point in human evolution.