january/february 2009

Ken Jennings rose to fame after an unprecedented run on Jeopardy 15 years ago: Over the course of 74 episodes, he won a total of roughly $2.5 million.

Recently, a contestant named James Holzhauer has been working toward Jennings’s record at an astonishing pace. After the Friday-evening broadcast of the quiz program, Holzhauer had won about $850,000 over just 12 episodes. If he keeps up that rate, he’ll reach $2.5 million in less than half the time it took Jennings to do so.

Before Holzhauer went on the show, the most money earned in a single episode of Jeopardy was $77,000. During his 12-episode streak, he’s beaten that total not once, but five times, and has set a new record of $131,127. Holzhauer’s success has been attributed not just to his deep trivia knowledge, but also to his aggressive style of play—he homes in on high-value tiles that might contain Daily Doubles, and then often bets enormous sums when he finds them—and his unmatched buzzer-pressing reflexes.

As Instagram has grown to more than 1 billion monthly users, it has ushered in a very particular look: bright walls, artfully arranged lattes and avocado toast, and Millennial-pink everything, all with that carefully staged, color-corrected, glossy-looking aesthetic. Photos that play into these trends perform so well on Instagram that the look became synonymous with the platform itself, then seeped into the broader world. Even if you don’t use the app, you’ve undoubtedly encountered an “Instagram wall,” a pop-up experience like the Museum of Ice Cream, or a brightly patterned restaurant bathroom just made to be photographed.

No one has capitalized on this look’s popularity more than influencers. Some have even started to make thousands of dollars on photo presets that warp anyone’s pictures to fit this mold. But every trend has a shelf life, and as quickly as Instagram ushered in pink walls and pastel macaroons, it’s now turning on them. “Avocado toast and posts on the beach. It’s so generic and played out at this point. You can photoshop any girl into that background and it will be the same post,” said Claire, a 15-year-old who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym because of her age. “It’s not cool anymore to be manufactured.”

President Donald Trump has often seemed to conflate himself with the government, and his own interests with the nation’s.

At times, the results are merely ridiculous. At others, they are actively dangerous. At the moment, Trump is declining to protect the United States from foreign interference in its elections, because it’s politically inconvenient and personally irritating to him.

Despite repeated evidence of Russian attempts to interfere in American elections—most recently detailed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, released last week—the White House continues to refuse to take action, because the president can’t separate the nation’s security from questions about the legitimacy of his victory in the 2016 election. Wednesday’s New York Times offers disturbing new details:

The Greenland Ice Sheet is the world’s second-largest reservoir of fresh water sitting on the world’s largest island. It is almost mind-bogglingly huge.

If Greenland were suddenly transported to the central United States, it would be a very bad day for about 65 million people, who would be crushed instantly. But for the sake of science journalism, imagine that Greenland’s southernmost tip displaced Brownsville, Texas—the state’s southernmost city—so that its icy glaciers kissed mainland Mexico and the Gulf thereof. Even then, Greenland would stretch all the way north, clear across the United States, its northern tenth crossing the Canadian border into Ontario and Manitoba. Kansas City, Oklahoma City, and Iowa City would all be goners. So too would San Antonio, Memphis, and Minneapolis. Its easternmost peaks would slam St. Louis and play in Peoria; its northwestern glaciers would rout Rapid City, South Dakota, and meander into Montana. At its center point, near Des Moines, roughly two miles of ice would rise from the surface.

Updated at 3:21 p.m. ET on April 24, 2019

On an episode of Jeopardy that aired Tuesday evening, James Holzhauer became the fastest-ever contestant on the show to earn $1 million in prize money. During his now 14-game win streak, he has seemed unstoppable, usually pulling away from his competitors early in the game and piling up money at an unprecedented rate: He’s winning more than twice as much per game as the Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings did during a record-setting 2004 run on the show. And Holzhauer’s highest daily prize yet, $131,127, exceeds the previous record holder’s one-day sum by more than $50,000.

What makes Holzhauer so dominant? When I asked him, he was able to sum up his gameplan pretty easily: “I sketched out what I believed to be my optimal strategy for Jeopardy: Play fast, build a stack, bet big, and hope for the best,” Holzhauer wrote to me in an email. “In my mind, playing a seemingly risky game actually minimizes my chances of losing.”

Let’s start at the end of this story. This weekend, I read Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report twice, and realized that enough was enough—I needed to do something. I’ve worked on every Republican presidential transition team for the past 10 years and recently served as counsel to the Republican-led House Financial Services Committee. My permanent job is as a law professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, which is not political, but where my colleagues have held many prime spots in Republican administrations.

If you think calling for the impeachment of a sitting Republican president would constitute career suicide for someone like me, you may end up being right. But I did exactly that this weekend, tweeting that it’s time to begin impeachment proceedings.

In the early 2000s Terry Mitchell’s dentist retired. For a while, Mitchell, an electrician in his 50s, stopped seeking dental care altogether. But when one of his wisdom teeth began to ache, he started looking for someone new. An acquaintance recommended John Roger Lund, whose practice was a convenient 10-minute walk from Mitchell’s home, in San Jose, California. Lund’s practice was situated in a one-story building with clay roof tiles that housed several dental offices. The interior was a little dated, but not dingy. The waiting room was small and the decor minimal: some plants and photos, no fish. Lund was a good-looking middle-aged guy with arched eyebrows, round glasses, and graying hair that framed a youthful face. He was charming, chatty, and upbeat. At the time, Mitchell and Lund both owned Chevrolet Chevelles, and they bonded over their mutual love of classic cars.

Even the announcement was delayed as long as possible.

It has seemed likely since before Democrats won the House of Representatives in November, promising to demand President Donald Trump’s tax returns, that the White House would refuse to hand the documents over without a fight. But after weeks of dickering and assurances that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was considering the legality of the request, the White House finally said, with just hours to go, that it would not produce the documents by the Tuesday deadline set by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal.

Also on Tuesday, a former White House official in charge of security clearances did not appear to testify to the House Oversight Committee, after the administration instructed him not to comply with a subpoena. Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings said he’d move to hold the former official, Carl Kline, in contempt of Congress. The Washington Post also reported that Trump would fight a subpoena calling former White House Counsel Don McGahn to testify. And on Monday, the White House filed a lawsuit against Cummings and his own accounting firm to try to block the firm, Mazars USA, from handing over information about Trump’s finances.

I recently had the honor of meeting an award-winning literary sort, a man wry and restrained and overall quite utterly mature, who casually referred to having gone through a phase in his 20s when he’d been “pilly”—that is, when he’d taken a lot of recreational drugs. The word had a wonderfully childish sound to it, the tacked-on y creating a new adjective in the style of happy, angry, and silly. My writer-acquaintance, I recognized, was not alone in bending language this way. On the sleeper-hit sitcom Schitt’s Creek, for instance, one of the protagonists, David, speaks of a game night getting “yelly,” while his sister describes a love interest as “homelessy.” Meanwhile, back in real life, one of my podcast listeners informed me of a Washington, D.C., gentrifier who declared that a neighborhood was no longer as “shooty-stabby” as it once had been.

The post–Anthony Kennedy Supreme Court majority has introduced itself to the nation by strapping itself to the decaying corpse of the American death penalty.

It is a curious choice. Capital punishment is a relic of a harsher time, now stumbling toward extinction, unpopular with both right and left. For these conservative justices—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh—to embrace it is like an American politician journeying to the Soviet Union in 1991 and saying, “I have seen the future and it works!”

In February, the Court rejected a plea from an Alabama inmate to have his spiritual adviser in the death chamber with him as he died. The inmate was Muslim, and Alabama law allows only the prison’s full-time chaplain, a Christian, to fill that role. Remarkably, the Court had no need to become involved. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit had already granted the inmate, Domineque Ray, a stay of execution until a court could hear his religious-freedom claim. The Eleventh Circuit encompasses Alabama, Florida, and Georgia—the heart of the death belt. Its judges hear in one year more death cases than Roberts, Thomas, or Kavanaugh heard in their whole careers on the circuit bench. (The Tenth Circuit, where Neil Gorsuch was previously seated, includes Oklahoma, which conducted 33 executions during his tenure; only one other state in the circuit, Utah, conducted an execution during that time.)