may 2008

This article contains spoilers for the series finale of Game of Thrones.

It went, roughly, like this: The queen who had presented herself as a reformer and savior revealed herself to be, in the final countdown, the opposite. Airborne and seated on her dragon, Daenerys looked down at the populace of King’s Landing, at all those people caught in the crosshairs of others’ political struggles. She heard the bells, their clangs making clear that the city had surrendered. She gave a snarl of rage, and then, acting either on a cruel whim or on a cruel martial assessment—Daenerys’s thought process in that moment was one of many mysteries this season that Game of Thrones’ writers kept gallingly vague—she opened fire. The queen wielded her weapon, and the people below her burned.

Along the highways of states where support for abortion is at its lowest, it’s not uncommon to see road signs that say choose adoption and similar messages. The signs capture a preferred anti-abortion retort to outcries over abortion restrictions, like the kind Georgia and Alabama just passed: Women with unwanted pregnancies should find adoptive families.

Adoption is a choice that certain women who don’t wish to keep their babies enter into happily. Some women find abortion to be anathema and rule it out among their options for an unwanted pregnancy. And for women considering abortion who ultimately settle on adoption, the process often benefits everyone involved.

Of course, adoption is not a reasonable option for all pregnant women. Some girls and women would imperil their health if they carried a baby to term. Many pro-abortion-rights people believe it is immoral to compel a woman to carry a pregnancy she does not want, especially if that pregnancy is a result of rape or incest. And some studies show that abortion is medically safer than childbirth.

Every week for the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, three Atlantic staffers have been discussing new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners were made available to critics in advance this year, we’ll be posting our thoughts on the series finale in installments.

In 1996, a group of European researchers found that a certain gene, called SLC6A4, might influence a person’s risk of depression.

It was a blockbuster discovery at the time. The team found that a less active version of the gene was more common among 454 people who had mood disorders than in 570 who did not. In theory, anyone who had this particular gene variant could be at higher risk for depression, and that finding, they said, might help in diagnosing such disorders, assessing suicidal behavior, or even predicting a person’s response to antidepressants.

Back then, tools for sequencing DNA weren’t as cheap or powerful as they are today. When researchers wanted to work out which genes might affect a disease or trait, they made educated guesses, and picked likely “candidate genes.” For depression, SLC6A4 seemed like a great candidate: It’s responsible for getting a chemical called serotonin into brain cells, and serotonin had already been linked to mood and depression. Over two decades, this one gene inspired at least 450 research papers.

Cancer cells grow in distinctive patterns that defy normal limitations.

That growth activity requires energy, and so cancer cells metabolize nutrients in different ways from the healthy cells around them. In an attempt to kill the tumor without killing the normally functioning cells, chemotherapy drugs target these pathways inside of cancer cells. This is notoriously difficult, expensive, and prone to toxic side effects that account for much of the suffering associated with the disease.

Now doctors are starting to think more about specific nutrients that feed tumor cells. That is, how what we eat affects how cancers grow—and whether there are ways to potentially “starve” cancer cells without leaving a person undernourished, or even hungry.

“I have been talking about China for many years. And you know what? Nobody listened,” Donald Trump told a crowd outside Pittsburgh in 2016. “But they are listening now.” If China’s leaders didn’t notice a campaign speech then, the president has their attention now.

In office, President Trump and his administration have taken a series of escalating measures against China in hopes they would coerce Beijing to change its trade practices. But, two years and numerous rounds of meetings later, the trade talks aren’t moving.

And now the Trump administration has dropped an economic bomb on China by taking steps to cut off the tech giant Huawei from its American suppliers. The escalation points to an ominous reading of the trade war: It’s only the starting point for what administration hard-liners see as a generational battle with America’s most powerful adversary since the Soviet Union.

When Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage was doused Monday with a milkshake while campaigning for the European Parliament elections in the English city of Newcastle, it was unclear who he was more angry with—the protester who threw the drink at him, or the security team that didn’t see it coming.

“It’s a complete failure,” Farage told his security detail as the banana-and-salted-caramel concoction dripped from his lapel. “You could have spotted that a mile away.”

After all, this wasn’t a random attack. “Milkshaking,” as it has come to be known, has emerged as the latest form of protest in Britain, where a number of mostly right-wing political candidates have been drenched by shake-wielding demonstrators on the campaign trail. It began earlier this month when a viral video showed a 23-year-old man dunking a strawberry milkshake on Tommy Robinson, the anti-Muslim activist running as an independent candidate to represent the Northwest region of England in the European Parliament elections. It was the second time in two days that Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, was hit with a milkshake.

The fight began with little subtlety. White, wealthy parents in the southeastern corner of East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, an area known as St. George, wanted their own school district. They argued that the schools in East Baton Rouge were routinely named as among the lowest performing in the state, and were unlikely to improve any time soon. So, in 2012, some of those parents went to the state legislature with a proposal: Create what would be called the Southeast Community School District.

The legislature shot it down. The parents needed a two-thirds majority for the creation of a school district, and they couldn’t marshal the votes. A similar push in 2013 was rebuffed as well.

The organizers were discouraged, but undeterred. They needed a new strategy—and they didn’t have to look far. In 2005, a nearby community, Central, was unable to gather support for a school district from the legislature, so it incorporated as a new city. That helped it gain legislative approval to create its own school district, Central Community Schools, which opened its doors in 2007. The St. George supporters launched a petition drive and, in August 2013, registered a new website: StGeorgeLouisiana.com. They would try to create their own city.

The bet was on, and it was over the fate of humanity. On one side was the Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich insisted that it was too late to prevent a doomsday apocalypse resulting from overpopulation. Resource shortages would cause hundreds of millions of starvation deaths within a decade. It was cold, hard math: The human population was growing exponentially; the food supply was not. Ehrlich was an accomplished butterfly specialist. He knew that nature did not regulate animal populations delicately. Populations exploded, blowing past the available resources, and then crashed.

In his book, Ehrlich played out hypothetical scenarios that represented “the kinds of disasters that will occur.” In the worst-case scenario, famine rages across the planet. Russia, China, and the United States are dragged into nuclear war, and the resulting environmental degradation soon extinguishes the human race. In the “cheerful” scenario, population controls begin. Famine spreads, and countries teeter, but the major death wave ends in the mid-1980s. Only half a billion or so people die of starvation. “I challenge you to create one more optimistic,” Ehrlich wrote, adding that he would not count scenarios involving benevolent aliens bearing care packages.

It would have been easy to miss the stories late last week, what with a trade war in progress, a hot war with Iran threatened, and the president accusing his critics of treason.

But on Thursday, a report from the Government Accountability Office concluded that Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, broke the law in lavishly refurnishing his office. The same day, the inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency said that former Administrator Scott Pruitt wasted nearly $124,000 of taxpayer money on excessive travel, including first-class airline tickets.

For the first year and a half of his administration, the petty corruption of Donald Trump’s aides was a leading story. During the spring and summer of 2018, there seemed to be nearly daily revelations about abuses at one department or another, from tony travel to soundproof booths. Then the issue sank from the headlines, for a variety of reasons. There were bigger stories, especially as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe began producing more indictments. Pruitt was finally forced to resign, which seemed to tie a bow on the corruption thread. Besides, a certain numbness sets in after so many cases of wasted money.