october 2003

Updated on March 22 at 9:06 p.m. ET.

Two years ago, Desmond Hughes heard so many of his favorite podcasters extolling AirPods, Apple’s tiny, futuristic $170 wireless headphones, that he decided they were worth the splurge. He quickly became a convert.

Hughes is still listening to podcasters talk about their AirPods, but now they’re complaining. The battery can no longer hold a charge, they say, rendering them functionally useless. Apple bloggers agree: “AirPods are starting to show their age for early adopters,” Zac Hall, an editor at 9to5Mac, wrote in a post in January, detailing how he frequently hears a low-battery warning in his AirPods now. Earlier this month, Apple Insider tested a pair of AirPods purchased in 2016 against a pair from 2018, and found that the older pair died after two hours and 16 minutes. “That’s less than half the stated battery life for a new pair,” the writer William Gallagher concluded.

As the nation awaits the Mueller report, a return to first principles is in order. One relevant first principle was dramatically illustrated in the breach during the waning weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign. Then–FBI Director James Comey announced at a press conference that no criminal charges would be brought against Hillary Clinton. Comey didn’t stop there, however. In that press conference, which will continue to live in infamy, Comey sharply criticized the former secretary of state for her ill-considered conduct in housing a server in her private residence, only to receive official and—not infrequently—classified information.

The nation should have risen, as one, in righteous indignation in the aftermath of the Comey press conference. In a single misadventure, Comey both seized power that was not his—the power to seek an indictment, a prerogative that was entrusted to the attorney general—and then violated one of the fundamental principles of public prosecution: Thou shalt not drag a subject or target of the investigation through the mud via public criticism. Prosecutors either seek an indictment, or  remain quiet.

My body’s preferred way to remind me that I’m aging is through pain. In recent years, my level of consequence-free drinking has plummeted from “omg liMitLe$s!!” to one and a half standard glasses of Chardonnay. In yoga, I am often forced not to enter the “fullest expression of the pose” and instead to just kind of lie there.

And then there is The Tweak. About once a month—not at any certain time of the month, but roughly 12 times a year—I will wake up feeling like someone French-braided my neck muscles overnight. The pain burns from the base of my skull, down one side of my neck or the other, and onto the adjacent shoulder blade. The Tweak makes it impossible to rotate my head fully to one side or the other for the day. It’s not an athletic injury—I know no sport. It’s also not related to any underlying medical conditions that I know of, though when I talked with experts for this article, they asked me “if I am stressed,” which I took to be a rhetorical question.

In March 1997, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Jehovah’s Witnesses, sent a letter to each of its 10,883 U.S. congregations, and to many more congregations worldwide. The organization was concerned about the legal risk posed by possible child molesters within its ranks. The letter laid out instructions on how to deal with a known predator: Write a detailed report answering 12 questions—Was this a onetime occurrence, or did the accused have a history of child molestation? How is the accused viewed within the community? Does anyone else know about the abuse?—and mail it to Watchtower’s headquarters in a special blue envelope. Keep a copy of the report in your congregation’s confidential file, the instructions continued, and do not share it with anyone.

The camera flies high above the palm trees of Hollywood, soaring north and west, all the way to the suburb of Simi Valley, where it slows down to seek out a certain street, and then slows some more until it finds a particular house. It hovers above it, and then swoops down, pushing in all the way to the doorstep, where it rests, impatient. It is the house where James Safechuck, one of the two men at the center of Leaving Neverland, an HBO documentary, grew up, but in a way it might as well be the Darlings’ house: “Peter Pan chose this particular house because there were people here who believed in him.”

But the Safechucks are not the only people who believe, because here is another suburban house, and here again is that seeking, searching intelligence, the camera pushing closer and closer. It is the house in Brisbane, Australia, where the other subject of the documentary, Wade Robson, grew up. The implication is clear: Michael Jackson could have any little boy in the world; all he needed were parents who would serve up their sons to him.

No matter what Attorney General William Barr reveals—or doesn’t—about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, everything Congress needed to know about Donald Trump and Russia was already clear.

October 7, 2016, was the near-death experience of the Trump campaign. That Friday afternoon, David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post reported on an Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasts of grabbing women. The shock battered the campaign. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan declared publicly that he was “sickened” by Trump, canceled a joint appearance with him, and declined to answer whether he still supported the Trump candidacy.

Less than one hour later, WikiLeaks dumped its largest and most damaging trove of hacked emails to and from Democratic operatives. It included two emails sent years before to the future Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The messages criticized the teachings of the Catholic Church on women and sexuality. The Trump campaign instantly seized on them as proof of the Clinton campaign’s supposed anti-Catholic animus—a useful weapon to help erase memories of Trump’s Twitter attacks on the pope earlier in 2016.

In an essay on TheAtlantic.com last week, Senators Rand Paul and Tom Udall urged members of Congress to support their bipartisan joint resolution, the American Forces Going Home After Noble (AFGHAN) Service Act. The bill, they wrote, would “return our combat forces home from Afghanistan in an orderly and responsible way, while also setting a framework for political reconciliation in Afghanistan without a permanent U.S. presence.” It would also provide a $2,500 bonus to members of the military who have served in the Global War on Terror.

“Congress must step up and step in to ensure that another generation of Americans is not sent to fight a war with no end in sight,” Paul and Udall wrote, “especially when there is no military solution to the challenges facing Afghanistan.”

Today, March 23, has been set aside as National Puppy Day—founded in 2006 by the author Colleen Paige, and adopted by other groups and organizations since. The idea is to focus attention on puppies in need of adoption and the abuses found in puppy mills, but also to celebrate these furry little companions. In the spirit of the day, I am once more obligated to share some adorable images of pups around the world.

Updated at 5:23 p.m. ET on March 18, 2019.

The first Facebook message arrived when Heather Woock was packing for vacation, in August 2017. It was from a stranger claiming to be her half sibling. She assumed the message was some kind of scam; her parents had never told her she might have siblings. But the message contained one detail that spooked her. The sender mentioned a doctor, Donald Cline. Woock knew that name; her mother had gone to Cline for fertility treatments before she was born. Had this person somehow gotten her mother’s medical history?

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Her mom said not to worry. So Woock, who is 33 and lives just outside Indianapolis, flew to the West Coast for her vacation. She got a couple more messages from other supposed half siblings while she was away. Their persistence was strange. But then her phone broke, and she spent the next week and a half outdoors in Seattle and Vancouver, blissfully disconnected.

The artist Sarah Walker once told me that becoming a mother is like discovering the existence of a strange new room in the house where you already live. I always liked Walker's description because it’s more precise than the shorthand most people use for life with a newborn: Everything changes.

Because a lot of things do change, of course, but for new mothers, some of the starkest differences are also the most intimate ones—the emotional changes. Which, it turns out, are also largely neurological.

Even before a woman gives birth, pregnancy tinkers with the very structure of her brain, several neurologists told me. After centuries of observing behavioral changes in new mothers, scientists are only recently beginning to definitively link the way a woman acts with what's happening in her prefrontal cortex, midbrain, parietal lobes, and elsewhere. Gray matter becomes more concentrated. Activity increases in regions that control empathy, anxiety, and social interaction. On the most basic level, these changes, prompted by a flood of hormones during pregnancy and in the postpartum period, help attract a new mother to her baby. In other words, those maternal feelings of overwhelming love, fierce protectiveness, and constant worry begin with reactions in the brain.