january/february 2003

When Max Vest shook hands with the host of his Miami Airbnb back in January, the man introduced himself as Ralph—even though “Ray” was the name he’d used in all their prior communication.

This was the first and only indication that something was wrong. But his host had a great rating on the home-sharing site, and many of the comments mentioned how friendly and accommodating he was. So Vest, a children’s-camp director from Gainesville, Florida, didn’t think much of the discrepancy and settled into the two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment he’d be sharing with Ralph—or was it Ray?—and his girlfriend for the next five days. At about 8 or 9 p.m., he went out for dinner; by the time he got home, his hosts had gone to bed in the room adjacent to his, and he prepared to do the same.

The Senate rejected the Green New Deal on Tuesday, in a decisive 57-0 vote that Democrats decried as a political stunt meant to divide their caucus.

Every Republican opposed the measure. They were joined by four senators who caucus with the Democrats—Senator Joe Manchin, from the coal-heavy state of West Virginia, along with Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Doug Jones of Alabama, and Angus King of Maine.

Uniting the four dissenters: a sense that the Green New Deal, in its current form, is neither practical nor attainable.

“I agree with proponents of the Green New Deal that we need decisive action and ambitious goals to protect our planet for future generations,” said King, an independent who usually votes with Democrats, in a statement. “But at the same time, I believe that the best way to fully address this challenge is to set realistic goals.”

On Sunday afternoon, Attorney General Bill Barr presented a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusions that contained a few sentences from Mueller’s final report, one of which directly addressed the question of collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” In a footnote, Barr explained that Mueller had defined “coordination” as an “agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump campaign and the Russian government on election interference.”

Mueller’s full report has not been made available to the public yet, so it’s not clear whether it sets forth everything the special counsel’s office learned over the course of its nearly two-year investigation—including findings about conduct that was perhaps objectionable but not criminal—or whether it is more tailored and explains only Mueller’s prosecution and declination decisions. But national-security and intelligence experts tell me that Mueller’s decision not to charge Trump or his campaign team with a conspiracy is far from dispositive, and that the underlying evidence the special counsel amassed over two years could prove as useful as a conspiracy charge to understanding the full scope of Russia’s election interference in 2016.

Al Franken, the former Democratic senator from Minnesota, should never have been pressured, even bullied, into resigning from office. The accusations against him were not properly vetted. Their seriousness was not properly weighed. Nevertheless, the frenzy that followed the accusations resulted in his Democratic colleagues making it impossible for him to continue as a senator.

His departure from the Senate—he officially resigned on January 2, 2018—continues to rankle and reverberate. The lessons of this debacle remain unlearned, and the consequences of Franken’s case continue to play out, in the presidential race and beyond. The Democratic reaction to the Franken allegations and the precedents it set will present a danger to the Democratic Party until it reconsiders the episode, and thinks about ways to stop such unfair and swift destruction from happening.

In the lobby of a deserted student-union building in Peoria, Illinois, the George Mason University speech team falls into formation. Following their coach, a petite, white-haired man in a silk designer tie, they walk single file down an empty hallway and into an empty classroom, where someone plugs in a speaker, turns up the music, and announces that it’s time to dance.

On this rainy Saturday morning in April 2017, no one really wants to dance. It’s 6:30 a.m., and most team members are running on four hours’ sleep and a granola bar for breakfast. Everyone is in a suit. Still, they sway their hips, kick the air, jump up and down, bang on the walls, and belt out their best rendition of Nicki Minaj’s “Starships.” At least one person leaps on top of a chair. Because standing off to the side, arms crossed, their coach, Peter Pober, is watching.

In early June, California labor regulators ruled that a driver for Uber, the app-based car service, was, in fact, an employee, not an independent contractor, and deserved back pay. The decision made national news, with experts predicting a coming flood of lawsuits. Two weeks later, FedEx agreed to a $288 million settlement after a federal appeals court ruled that the company had shortchanged 2,300 California delivery drivers on pay and benefits by improperly labeling them as independent contractors. The next month, the company lost another case in a federal appeals court over misclassifying 500 delivery drivers in Kansas. Meanwhile, since January, trucking firms operating out of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have lost two major court battles with drivers who claim that they, too, have been robbed of wages by being misclassified as independent contractors.

It was the final day of AIPAC’s annual policy conference in Washington, D.C., and the star of the gathering had finally appeared: Benjamin Netanyahu. An estimated 18,000 attendees sat in rows in a large downtown convention center, watching the Israeli prime minister address them through a patchy satellite feed on gigantic blue screens; although Netanyahu met with President Donald Trump in Washington this week, he cut short his trip after rockets fired from Gaza struck a home outside Tel Aviv.

It was difficult to hear what Netanyahu was saying at times, but the audience didn’t care: The staunch Israel supporters who filled the room gave him standing ovations. The only other speaker who won nearly as much applause on Tuesday morning was David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel. He brought greetings from Trump, “Israel’s greatest ally ever to reside in the White House,” as Friedman put it. The whole event underscored the enthusiastic Trump-Netanyahu alliance, even by the standard of the traditionally strong U.S.-Israel relationship. In his meeting with Trump at the White House on Monday, Netanyahu compared him to Cyrus the Great, the Persian king, and Harry Truman, the U.S. president who recognized Israel.

No one has more nemeses than the writer Roxane Gay. Since 2011, she has tweeted blind items about various foes in a stream of captivating updates. “All last night, I visualized crushing my nemesis this weekend,” she tweeted in 2013. “My nemesis is having a good year professionally and has clear skin. It’s a lot to take,” she noted last summer.

Gay’s anonymous nemeses have become so well known that on Friday, Monica Lewinsky declared she would be dressing up as one for Halloween. “Not that i know who it is … just, ya know, generic nemesis costume,” she tweeted.

While having an opponent is nothing new, the nebulous concept of having a secret digital adversary is a more modern condition. Broadcast-based social-media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have allowed everyone to have real-time updates on other people’s biggest accomplishments, and that can make it feel as if everyone on the planet is getting married, writing a book, or winning an award. It’s easy, when you see someone leading a seemingly perfect life, to want to tear that person down.

I have four kids. I don’t strike people as the type to have so many, nor does my wife. We’re professors. Neither of us is conventionally religious. We spent our 20s in Brooklyn as vegetable-blending free spirits. I drive a Prius on principle, even though I’m 6 foot 8 and my head hits the ceiling.

It’s hard to say how we ended up with such a large family. When people ask, I say (1) my wife likes babies, (2) I tend to assume I won’t regret having another child, and (3) we love the kids we have. But there’s an element of mystery, even to me. Any answer feels incomplete. Maybe that’s because the fuller explanation is buried too deep, in layers of instinct and social expectation. I think it’s hard for people to say exactly why they have kids or not—and if they do, how many.

This article contains mild spoilers for the film Us.

In his newest film, the Hitchcockian horror Us, the writer, director, and producer Jordan Peele offers a sharp, often funny meditation on the terrifying power of human connection. Bonds are broken, ties are severed. No relationship, even the most fundamental, is quite what it seems.

As the film’s lead, the 12 Years a Slave and Black Panther actor Lupita Nyong’o plays two roles: the seemingly normal human mother Adelaide Wilson, and Adelaide’s nefarious doppelgänger, Red. Early in the film, a family of red-jumpsuit-clad clones, each creepily resembling a member of Adelaide’s family, arrives to wreak havoc upon the Wilsons while they’re on vacation. Red leads this eerie, scissor-toting assembly, who announce themselves as “the Tethered,” as they attempt to exact vengeance upon the humans for reasons that are initially unclear.