october 2003

Late morning on Tuesday, July 23, the denouement in Boris Johnson’s lifelong quest for political power will be revealed, when the committee that has organized the Conservative Party’s leadership election will announce the winner of the race to replace Theresa May. The following day, the winner—Johnson is the heavy favorite—will be driven to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the Queen, and be formally appointed prime minister.

It will be the culmination of seven weeks of national campaigning in which Johnson has slowly and cautiously closed in on the prize. Yet in reality it has been a 40-year pursuit, relentlessly driving forward, each step a mere prelude to the next on his seemingly unstoppable rise.

In the early 1980s, a group of menacing outsiders arrived at the gates of American corporations. The “raiders,” as these outsiders were called, were crude in method and purpose. After buying up controlling shares in a corporation, they aimed to extract a quick profit by dethroning its “underperforming” CEO and selling off its assets. Managers—many of whom, to be fair, had grown complacent—rushed to protect their institutions, crafting new defensive measures and lodging appeals in state courts. In the end, the raiders were driven off and their moneyman, Michael Milken, was thrown in prison. Thus ended a colorful chapter in American business history.

Or so it seemed. Today, another effort is under way to raid corporate assets at the expense of employees, investors, and taxpayers. But this time, the attack isn’t coming from the outside. It’s coming from inside the citadel, perpetrated by the very chieftains who are supposed to protect the place. And it’s happening under the most innocuous of names: stock buybacks.

Raj Chetty got his biggest break before his life began. His mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Anbu showed the greatest academic potential of her five siblings, but her future was constrained by custom. Although Anbu’s father encouraged her scholarly inclinations, there were no colleges in the area, and sending his daughter away for an education would have been unseemly.

But as Anbu approached the end of high school, a minor miracle redirected her life. A local tycoon, himself the father of a bright daughter, decided to open a women’s college, housed in his elegant residence. Anbu was admitted to the inaugural class of 30 young women, learning English in the spacious courtyard under a thatched roof and traveling in the early mornings by bus to a nearby college to run chemistry experiments or dissect frogs’ hearts before the men arrived.

A predictable sequence of events nearly always ensues after I mention to someone that I’m adopted. First, people blink, then quickly apologize for whatever assumption forced the clarification—that it must be my dad who’s tall, or that it must be my mom who passed down her olive skin to me … that some distinctive feature of mine must run in my family. Then come the questions: “Do you know your birth parents?” “How old were you when you were adopted?” And, almost without fail, “When did you find out you were adopted?” Whatever conversation was going on before the subject of adoption came up, I am always sorry to find, is now lost to history and forgotten.

The enduring popularity of that third question surprises me. The two other questions are aimed at understanding the circumstances under which I joined my family; the third question, an arguably more invasive one, probes into how my family dealt with the aftermath. It is, essentially, asking whether my parents lied to me. (My answer is always that my parents made sure I grew up knowing from the start that I was adopted, and that I have memories both foggy and vivid of my family reading to me throughout my childhood from a storybook they made, which contained Scotch-taped photographs and the story of the day my parents picked me up from an adoption agency in Tennessee. My older brother, according to our book, “gave me a bottle and a kiss” as I rode home for the first time in my car seat.)

In the 1970s, a time when tens of millions of unwanted dogs were being euthanized in the United States annually, an orthodoxy began to take hold: Spay and neuter early. Spay and neuter everything. It’s what vets were taught. It’s what responsible pet owners were told to do.

A growing body of research, however, suggests that spaying and neutering—especially in some large breeds when very young—are linked to certain disorders later in life. “As time has gone on, vets are starting to question the wisdom,” says Missy Simpson, a veterinary epidemiologist with the Morris Animal Foundation, which recently published a study that found higher rates of obesity and orthopedic injury in golden retrievers that had been fixed. Other studies have linked early spaying and neutering to certain cancers, joint disorders, and urinary incontinence—though the risks tend to vary by sex, breed, and living circumstances. As such, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) now says in a guide for veterinarians, “There is no single recommendation that would be appropriate for all dogs.”

A few years ago, I lived in a walkup apartment in the East Village of New York. Every so often descending the stairway, I would catch a glimpse of a particular family with young children in its Sisyphean attempts to reach the fourth floor. The mom would fold the stroller to the size of a boogie board, then drag it behind her with her right hand, while cradling the younger and typically crying child in the crook of her left arm. Meanwhile, she would shout hygiene instructions in the direction of the older child, who would slap both hands against every other grimy step to use her little arms as leverage, like an adult negotiating the boulder steps of Machu Picchu. It looked like hell—or, as I once suggested to a roommate, a carefully staged public service announcement against family formation.

Commercial airliners are not usually restful environments, but February 2017 was a particularly fraught time for domestic air passengers. Donald Trump had become president a month earlier and had quickly issued his “travel ban” executive order, sparking chaos at the nation’s airports. Although on February 3 a federal district judge enjoined the ban, by February 21 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was telling a press briefing that “the President want[s] to take the shackles off individuals in [immigration agencies].” The very next day, Customs and Border Protection agents met Delta Airlines flight 1583 at the gate at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The agents, and the Delta cabin crew, told the passengers that to exit, they would have to show government-issued ID.

Dear Therapist,

My husband and I have been married for three years. It was like a whirlwind of romance when we first met, and we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We moved in together after just six months and were engaged after one year of being together. We got married two years later and I got pregnant soon after.

Our sex was always good before I got pregnant. When our baby was born, my husband had postnatal depression and I had to keep everything together. I was finding it hard inside, but just had to act strong for the both of us. That really put a strain on our marriage.

Our beautiful baby boy is now 15 months old and we never have sex. Our son has just started to sleep through the night, and I think we have gotten so used to taking care of our son at night and not having sex that now it feels so awkward. This is so upsetting, and I don’t know if we are attracted to each other anymore. We have date nights and nights off, but we still never want to have sex. He said it’s like having sex with his mate.

My maternal grandparents met through mutual friends at a summer pool party in the suburbs of Detroit shortly after World War II. Thirty years later, their oldest daughter met my dad in Washington, D.C., at the suggestion of a mutual friend from Texas. Forty years after that, when I met my girlfriend in the summer of 2015, one sophisticated algorithm and two rightward swipes did all the work.

My family story also serves as a brief history of romance. Robots are not yet replacing our jobs. But they’re supplanting the role of matchmaker once held by friends and family.

For the past 10 years, the Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld has been compiling data on how couples meet. In almost any other period, this project would have been an excruciating bore. That’s because for centuries, most couples met the same way: They relied on their families and friends to set them up. In sociology-speak, our relationships were “mediated.” In human-speak, your wingman was your dad.

Updated at 5:21 p.m. ET on July 22, 2019.

When Justina Walford moved to New York City nine years ago, she’d never felt more alone. She’d left behind her Church, her God, and her old city, Los Angeles. Then a secular congregation called Sunday Assembly filled the spiritual void—at least for a time.

Walford had just turned 40. As a child, she had been deeply religious. Her parents had no interest in religion, and didn’t understand why she would; they’d sent her to a Christian school in hopes of good discipline and education. But Justina fell headlong into faith, delighting in her Church community and dreaming of one day becoming a pastor herself.

By the time she turned up in New York, her faith had long since unraveled, a casualty of overseas travel that made her question how any one religious community could have a monopoly on truth. But still she grieved the loss of God. “It was like breaking up with someone that you thought was your soulmate,” Walford told me. “It’s for the better. It’s for your own good,” she remembered thinking. Even though it no longer made sense to her to believe, she felt a gaping hole where her Church—her people, her psalms, her stained-glass windows—used to be.