James Fallows, “The Early-Decision Racket”; Caitlin Flanagan, “Confessions of a Prep School College Counselor”; Samantha Power, “Bystanders to Genocide”; William Hamilton, “Suitably Attired”; fiction by Beth Lordan; Philip Hensher on Dawn Powell; and much more.
Early-decision programs—whereby a student applies early to a single school, receives an early answer, and promises to attend if accepted—have added an insane intensity to middle-class obsessions about college. They also distort the admissions process, rewarding the richest students from the most exclusive high schools and penalizing nearly everyone else. But the incentives for many colleges and students are as irresistable as they are perverse
With her inclusion in The Library of America, the neglected novelist Dawn Powell has finally achieved literary canonization. Our critic assesses the contrasting worlds of Powell's fiction
The author's exclusive interviews with scores of the participants in the decision-making, together with her analysis of newly declassified documents, yield a chilling narrative of self-serving caution and flaccid will—and countless missed opportunities to mitigate a colossal crime
As always in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, two narratives are vying for primacy. In one, Israel is simply defending itself against a fresh attack. In the other, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is the latest example of a desire to punish and humiliate Palestinians. These two narratives are not reconcilable, which makes reasoned discussion an exercise in futility. But any sophisticated argument must contend with the long, winding lead-up to the current crisis. Why is war in Gaza returning now, and why does it always seem to return, with stubborn, periodic insistence?
Despite inching toward the Democratic Party’s left flank on various domestic- and foreign-policy issues, the Biden administration has fallen back on the usual formulas, offering robotic recitations about “Israel’s right to defend itself.” On Thursday, President Joe Biden said that he hadn’t seen a “significant overreaction” from Israel, while failing to mention a word about Palestinian deaths. In so doing, he gave Israel what amounts to a green light to intensify its bombing campaign.
It’s time to prepare for a new and better normal than your pre-pandemic life.
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
Arthur C. Brooks will discuss the science of happiness live at 11 a.m. ET on May 20. Register for In Pursuit of Happiness here.
Many years ago, I met a woman who had had the kind of experience you ordinarily only find in fiction. As a young adult, she was in a serious car accident, resulting in a head injury. She suffered a period of total amnesia, followed by months of convalescence. When she recovered, she was never the same: Her family relationships weakened; she cut out former friends and found new ones; she moved halfway across the world; her interests and tastes changed; she became more outgoing and less self-conscious; she no longer cared much what other people thought about her.
Domesticated betta fish have evolved a sex gene not found in wild fish of their species.
In 1975, scientists tried spaying a few hundred female betta fish. We all know what happens to spayed cats and dogs: They become sterile. Betta fish are different. A third of the surviving bettas regenerated an ovary—which, okay, interesting enough. But the remaining two-thirds did something much, much stranger: They grew testes. They turned brighter and darker in color too—like male bettas. They grew elongated fins—like males. They even started making sperm—like males, obviously. When mated with other female betta fish, these females-turned-males produced offspring that looked perfectly healthy. The only notable oddity was that the resulting broods were usually, but not always, exclusively female.
In Peru, a nation once marked by its successful fight against poverty, voters now face a pair of unappealing alternatives.
The first choice facing voters is a little-known union leader who leads a Marxist-Leninist party that wants to rewrite the constitution to eliminate congress.
The alternative is the daughter of a former dictator who has surrounded herself with kleptocrats and COVID-19 deniers.
Welcome to Round 2 of the Peruvian presidential election. How did one of the success stories of the developing world end up in such a crazy place?
Many democracies have suffered a collapse of the political middle, but few so starkly as Peru—or so unexpectedly. For years, Peru reported some of the highest growth rates in South America. It reduced the proportion of its people in poverty from 58 percent in 2004 to 23 percent by 2014. Exciting new mining discoveries promise more growth ahead.
The animals are so destructive that they cost the United States billions every year, but actually doing something about it isn’t so simple.
Early one winter morning in 2020, Kurt VerCauteren discovered a cluster of dead birds in a barren field in northwest Texas. They were small birds, mostly dark-eyed juncos, but also a smattering of white-crowned sparrows.
VerCauteren’s team had poisoned them, inadvertently. The clues were clear, the death uncomplicated: The birds had flown in before dawn to scavenge deadly morsels of a contaminated peanut paste, left behind after a sounder of wild hogs had torn through the area in a feeding frenzy. The birds likely died within minutes of eating.
“I couldn’t even see the crumbs,” says VerCauteren, a wildlife biologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Fort Collins, Colorado, who has spent years developing and testing pig poisons. The birds were the unintended victims of a field experiment to test a toxicant—one intended for feral pigs, but no other animals—that had been developed in Australia. In the days before, VerCauteren and his collaborators had assembled heavy, sophisticated feeders and filled them with the mash laced with a heavy dose of sodium nitrite, a salt often used in processed meats. When the pigs ate, they’d left tainted crumbs behind—not many, but enough.
