january/february 2005

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.

A coast-to-coast FBI probe alleges that a network of celebrities, business executives, and other powerful figures is at the center of a massive bribery scheme to secure admission into some of the country’s most elite colleges, according to court documents unsealed earlier today.

Among the defendants are nearly three dozen parents whom federal prosecutors are charging with conspiracy and other crimes for allegedly using hefty sums of money to get their children into schools such as Yale, Georgetown, and the University of Southern California. Specifically, the newly unsealed court documents contend that these high-rolling parents—some of them public figures such as the actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, as well as Loughlin’s husband, the fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli—paid hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of dollars per child to a fixer who would then use that money to allegedly bribe certain college officials or other conspirators to help secure the child’s admission.

Robert Bowers wanted everyone to know why he did it.

“I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” he posted on the social-media network Gab shortly before allegedly entering the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27 and gunning down 11 worshippers. He “wanted all Jews to die,” he declared while he was being treated for his wounds. Invoking the specter of white Americans facing “genocide,” he singled out HIAS, a Jewish American refugee-support group, and accused it of bringing “invaders in that kill our people.” Then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions, announcing that Bowers would face federal charges, was unequivocal in his condemnation: “These alleged crimes are incomprehensibly evil and utterly repugnant to the values of this nation.”

Dear Therapist,

My best friend is currently in a romantic and sexual relationship with a 50-year-old professor at our university. I'm extremely worried, since I suspect the professor is emotionally manipulating her so he can sexually exploit her.

Over the summer, my friend starting working as a nanny for the professor and his wife. After three days on the job, he told her that he "fell in love with her at first sight" and suggested that she was his soulmate. Since this confession, they've been dating and having sex. I was disgusted by this, but refrained from criticizing the relationship, since I thought it could lead to the end of our friendship and also figured the relationship would be short-lived given the age difference.

The American legal system pretends to marble-and-mahogany majesty, but is in fact often a rickety, underfunded contraption, run by overworked mortals who are sometimes incompetent and sometimes actually ill-intentioned. But even amid law’s cratered landscape, sometimes a specific case presents facts simply beyond belief; sometimes the “system” stands revealed as nothing more than one human being tormenting another because he can.

For me, such a case is Flowers v. Mississippi, a death-penalty appeal to be argued before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. The specific issue the Court will hear is whether, during a murder trial in 2010, a Mississippi prosecutor named Doug Evans deliberately used “peremptory challenges” to remove potential jurors because of race. If the U.S. Supreme Court agrees, then Flowers’s conviction for multiple murders in 1996 will be set aside.

At the very first Harvard College commencement ceremony, nearly 400 years ago, markers of exclusivity were front and center. The graduating class consisted of just nine students: no women, no people of color; only, in the words of a Boston historian, “young men of good hope.” The order in which they received their degrees was determined “not according to age, or scholarship, or the alpheber [sic], but according to the rank their families held in society.”

The freshman class admitted to Harvard University last spring was much less homogenous. According to a survey conducted by the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson, more than half of the accepted students were nonwhite; more than half were women; more than half would receive financial aid once enrolled. But vestiges of the same exclusivity remained. Legacy applicants, predominantly white and wealthy, were admitted at five times the rate of non-legacies. And white students with annual family earnings exceeding $250,000, legacy or not, constituted more than 15 percent of the admitted class—despite coming from an income bracket representing less than 5 percent of Americans of any race.

On Friday, the Philadelphia-based clothing retailer Anthropologie did something that would have been nearly unthinkable for an aspirational brand even a few years ago: It added a plus-size clothing line. The collection, which is now available online and in 10 of Anthropologie’s biggest stores, arrived complete with a New York City launch party, the support of plus-size social-media personalities, and plenty of sun-drenched photos. In other words, the launch was just like any major launch for an American fashion company. And that’s exactly why it’s so different.

I’m excited about Anthropologie’s new line in a way that is, frankly, not journalistic. I’ve worn plus-size clothing my entire adult life, which means the overwhelming majority of fashion brands at any price level don’t make clothes that fit me. I’m in good company: Almost 70 percent of American women wear a size 14 or above. The past decade of fashion has given those women little evidence that things would materially improve, with most plus-size options still occupying fashion’s cheapest, most poorly made tier, and few higher-quality options available beyond the simplest basics. But the new Anthropologie line has items that are interesting and fun. The garments are vibrant, like the striped, sailor-necked dresses and mustard-colored skirts with detailed embroidery.

Whether they’re running for president or just hoping to hold onto their seats, Democratic lawmakers face growing pressure to endorse one of Bernie Sanders’s signature causes. “Doc, they keep coming—pressing me to sign onto Medicare for all,” a somewhat hesitant and confused congressman told me recently. “Should I?”

“It all depends what you mean by ‘Medicare for all,’” I said. He was hoping for a better answer than I had. About 70 percent of Americans say they support the idea—under which Medicare, the federal program that now provides health coverage for about 60 million seniors and disabled individuals, would expand to cover millions more people.

Yet Medicare for all is a messy concept. At least four different approaches to health reform could truthfully carry the Medicare for all label. Sanders’s plan is the best known, but it’s also the most politically impractical. It ignores the brutal history of repeated defeats for all Democratic health reform proposals that try to abolish private health insurers.

Vern Loomis, a retired structural draftsman in West Bloomfield, Michigan, had a standard office lunch: a peanut-butter sandwich, with various fruit, vegetable, and dessert accompaniments. He ate this, he estimates, nearly every workday for about 25 years.

His meal underwent slight modifications over time—jelly was added to the sandwich in the final five or so years—but its foundation remained the same. The meal was easy to prepare, cheap, and tasty. “And if you happen to be eating at your desk … it was something that was not too drippy,” he told me, so long as one applied the jelly a bit conservatively.

Last year, Loomis retired from his job but not his lunch, which he still eats three or four days a week (now with sliced bananas instead of jelly). “I never stopped liking it,” he says. “I still do.”

The great thing about tobacco pipes, according to Julie Schablitsky, is that they are hard to not find. They were ubiquitous in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries—to the point, she says, that “wherever you have people during this historic period, you’ll find these clay tobacco pipes in the ground.” And wherever these people left broken tobacco pipes, they were also unwittingly leaving their DNA.

Traditionally, archaeological study of DNA has focused on human remains like bone and teeth. But geneticists are now able to extract DNA hidden inside ordinary objects, including tobacco pipes, which can contain centuries-old saliva. Schablitsky, an archaeologist with the Maryland State Highway Administration, and her collaborators recently analyzed the DNA from one such 19th-century pipe—uncovered in the slave quarters of a Maryland plantation called Belvoir.