january/february 2008

The first data on Paxlovid, out last November, hinted that the COVID antiviral would cut the risk of hospitalization and death by 89 percent. Pundits called the drug “a monster breakthrough,” “miraculous,” and “the biggest advance in the pandemic since the vaccines.” “Today’s news is a real game-changer,” said Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, which makes the drug. The pills are “a game changer,” President Joe Biden repeated a few months later.

Now, finally, the game is being changed. The government has ordered 20 million courses of Paxlovid, committing half of the $10 billion in additional COVID funding that is being negotiated in the Senate; and Pfizer says that the number of patients taking the drug increased by a factor of 10 between mid-February and late April.

The grieving people of Uvalde, Texas, a town in the Hill Country about 80 miles west of San Antonio, now confront the irreplaceability of life in one of its most ghastly and unnatural incarnations: the murder of at least 19 children and two adults, with several more injured. In their mourning they will join dozens of other communities scattered throughout the country where school shootings this year alone have injured or killed people, and in their special torture—these children were elementary schoolers; they still had the faintly round faces of babies—they will join the families of the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in another episode of stochastic annihilation only 10 years ago.

The first time it happened, she said, she thought it was a joke. On the stand in her defamation trial a few weeks ago, the actor Amber Heard shared her account of the first time her now-ex-husband, Johnny Depp, allegedly hit her. She’d asked him about one of his tattoos: the one on his bicep (the one he’d famously had edited) that to her looked like a muddle of black ink. The tattoo spelled out wino, she said he told her. Thinking he was kidding—Depp had publicly struggled with substance abuse, and Heard claimed he’d been drinking that night—she laughed. And then, she alleged: “He slapped me across the face.” Her response, she testified, was to laugh some more. “I didn’t know what else to do. I thought, This must be a joke. This must be a joke. Because I didn’t know what was going on.”

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

The dirty secret of social scientists is that a lot of research is actually “me-search.” Many of us tend to study aspects of life that affect us personally, looking for solutions to our own issues. In that spirit, I celebrated my 58th birthday last week not with a toupee or red sports car, but rather by investigating how to have the best possible midlife crisis.

The midlife-crisis phenomenon has taken on almost mythic proportions in the American psyche over the past century. The term was first coined by the Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, who noticed a pattern in the lives of “great men” in history: Many of them lost productivity—and even died—in their mid-to-late-30s, which was midlife in past centuries. The idea entered the popular consciousness in the 1970s when the author Gail Sheehy wrote her mega–best seller Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. Sheehy argued that around the age of 40, both men and women tend to descend into a crisis about getting old, running out of time to meet their goals, and questioning life choices. She based her work on in-depth case interviews with 115 individuals, the most famous of whom was the auto entrepreneur John DeLorean. He went on to become infamous in 1982, when, at the age of 57, he was arrested for attempting to sell about 60 pounds of cocaine to undercover federal agents.

After each of the repeated mass shootings that now provide a tragic backbeat to American life, the same doomed dance of legislation quickly begins. As the outraged demands for action are inevitably derailed in Congress, disappointed gun-control advocates, and perplexed ordinary citizens, point their fingers at the influence of the National Rifle Association or the intransigent opposition of congressional Republicans. Those are both legitimate factors, but the stalemate over gun-control legislation since Bill Clinton’s first presidential term ultimately rests on a much deeper problem: the growing crisis of majority rule in American politics.

Polls are clear that while Americans don’t believe gun control would solve all of the problems associated with gun violence, a commanding majority supports the central priorities of gun-control advocates, including universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban. Yet despite this overwhelming consensus, it’s highly unlikely that the massacre of at least 19 schoolchildren and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, yesterday, or President Joe Biden’s emotional plea for action last night, will result in legislative action.