january/february 2005

After giving birth to a baby, a young woman told her nurses at Boston Medical Center that she was having pain in her hip. That happens sometimes after births, says Ali Guermazi, one of the doctors involved. As he recounts the case from a few years ago, he looked at X-rays and saw a small amount of extra fluid in the joint. Otherwise things looked normal. “We injected her hip with steroids, hoping to help with the pain,” Guermazi says. They seemed to help, and the women went home with her baby.

Guermazi didn’t think more of it until the woman returned to the hospital six months later, unable to walk. “The head of her femur was gone,” says Guermazi, who is now the chief of radiology at VA Boston Healthcare System. The bone appeared to have simply vanished. The new mother needed a total hip replacement. “We didn’t know what happened, and still can’t know for certain,” Guermazi says. “But I feared it was related to the injection.”

Several weeks ago, I met up with a friend in New York who suggested we grab a bite at a Scottish bar in the West Village. He had booked the table through something called Seated, a restaurant app that pays users who make reservations on the platform. We ordered two cocktails each, along with some food. And in exchange for the hard labor of drinking whiskey, the app awarded us $30 in credits redeemable at a variety of retailers.

I am never offended by freebies. But this arrangement seemed almost obscenely generous. To throw cash at people every time they walk into a restaurant does not sound like a business. It sounds like a plot to lose money as fast as possible—or to provide New Yorkers, who are constantly dining out, with a kind of minimum basic income.

Just under a century ago, the Soviet Union embarked on one of the strangest attempts to reshape the common calendar that has ever been undertaken. As Joseph Stalin raced to turn an agricultural backwater into an industrialized nation, his government downsized the week from seven to five days. Saturday and Sunday were abolished.

In place of the weekend, a new system of respite was introduced in 1929. The government divided workers into five groups, and assigned each to a different day off. On any given day, four-fifths of the proletariat would show up to their factories and work while the other fifth rested. Each laborer received a colored slip of paper—yellow, orange, red, purple, or green—that signified his or her group. The staggered schedule was known as nepreryvka, or the “continuous workweek,” since production never stopped.

Where in the pantheon of American commercial titans does Jeffrey Bezos belong? Andrew Carnegie’s hearths forged the steel that became the skeleton of the railroad and the city. John D. Rockefeller refined 90 percent of American oil, which supplied the pre-electric nation with light. Bill Gates created a program that was considered a prerequisite for turning on a computer.

At 55, Bezos has never dominated a major market as thoroughly as any of these forebears, and while he is presently the richest man on the planet, he has less wealth than Gates did at his zenith. Yet Rockefeller largely contented himself with oil wells, pump stations, and railcars; Gates’s fortune depended on an operating system. The scope of the empire the founder and CEO of Amazon has built is wider. Indeed, it is without precedent in the long history of American capitalism.

LONDON—Just before lunchtime on October 17, 2019, Britain and the European Union announced a deal on a smooth British exit from the EU. This is the second such deal in less than a year. The previous deal was rejected by Parliament and capsized the career of former Prime Minister Theresa May. Will this new deal come to a happier conclusion? And what is happiness in this context anyway?

The new agreement is reportedly 500 pages long, recapitulating most of the elements of the rejected 2018 agreement. There is, again reportedly, one big difference between May’s deal and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s: Ireland. (The word reportedly is doing a lot of work here, because I write only a few minutes after the agreement was announced and before the release of the full text.)

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, founded in 1965, is an annual international showcase of the best in nature photography. This year, the contest attracted more than 48,000 entries from 100 countries. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London. The owners and sponsors have once again been kind enough to share the following 15 winning images from this year’s competition. The museum’s website has images from previous years and more information about the current contest and exhibition. Captions are provided by the photographers and WPY organizers, and are lightly edited for style.

When Fox News’ Trish Regan first reported President Donald Trump’s October 9 letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, some journalists and pundits wondered whether it was a joke or a hoax. But the White House confirmed: It was genuine.

“History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen. Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” Trump wrote, signing off incongruously, “I will call you later.”

As it turns out, the Turkish government didn’t stop to puzzle over whether the missive was authentic or a joke: It quickly concluded that it was both.

Read: There is no Plan B for ISIS prisoners

The letter “was not taken seriously at the time, especially given its lack of diplomatic finesse,” Gülnur Aybet, a senior adviser to Erdoğan, told NPR’s Morning Edition today. The BBC quoted a Turkish source saying that “President Erdoğan received the letter, thoroughly rejected it, and put it in the bin.”

The Trump administration has a lot to grapple with at the moment—Turkey’s disastrous incursion into Syria, a strong likelihood of impeachment, a tough reelection campaign—but there’s always time for the president to profiteer from his job.

White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney announced today that the United States will host the 2020 Group of Seven summit at Trump National Doral, the president’s golf course near Miami. In other words, Trump is choosing to host an important international conference at a resort he owns, which has been struggling badly. In a presidency marked by the shameless intermingling of the personal and the political, it may be the most brazen act of self-enrichment yet.

There are two dominant cultural ideas about the role women play in helping other women advance at work, and they are seemingly at odds: the Righteous Woman and the Queen Bee.

The Righteous Woman is an ideal, a belief that women have a distinct moral obligation to have one another’s backs. This kind of sentiment is best typified by Madeleine Albright’s now famous quote, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” The basic idea is that since all women experience sexism, they should be more attuned to the gendered barriers that other women face. In turn, this heightened awareness should lead women to foster alliances and actively support one another. If women don’t help each other, this is an even worse form of betrayal than those committed by men. And hence, the special place in hell reserved for those women.

The United States is, yet again, facing an unnecessary crisis of its own making. On October 6, Donald Trump decided, during a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to withdraw U.S. military forces from northern Syria. And not for the first time. Erdoğan persuaded Trump to withdraw U.S. forces during a phone call back in mid-December 2018. In response, then–Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned in protest. Under bipartisan pressure, Trump agreed to keep a reduced number of troops in the region.

But this time was different. Instead of reversing course in the face of bipartisan criticism, Trump doubled down. The same day that he publicly announced his decision, Trump tweeted that an American troop presence was unnecessary to protect the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) or prevent Islamic State fighters from escaping confinement, because “if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).”