may 2009

Enrico Fermi was an architect of the atomic bomb, a father of radioactivity research, and a Nobel Prize–winning scientist who contributed to breakthroughs in quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. But in the popular imagination, his name is most commonly associated with one simple, three-word question, originally meant as a throwaway joke to amuse a group of scientists discussing UFOs at the Los Alamos lab in 1950: Where is everybody?

Fermi wasn’t the first person to ask a variant of this question about alien intelligence. But he owns it. The query is known around the world as the Fermi paradox. It’s typically summarized like this: If the universe is unfathomably large, the probability of intelligent alien life seems almost certain. But since the universe is also 14 billion years old, it would seem to afford plenty of time for these beings to make themselves known to humanity. So, well, where is everybody?

The drive to the little white dome on the northern slope of Mauna Loa is a bumpy one. Mauna Loa, the “Long Mountain,” is a colossal volcano that covers half of the island of Hawaii. The rocky terrain, rusty brown and deep red, crunches beneath car tires and jostles passengers. Up there, more than 8,000 feet above sea level and many miles away from the sounds of civilization, it doesn’t feel like Earth. It feels like another planet. Like Mars.

For the last five years, small groups of people have made this drive and moved into the dome, known as a habitat. Their job is to pretend that they really are on Mars, and then spend months living like it. The goal, for the researchers who send them there, is to figure out how human beings would do on a mission to the real thing.

It started, as controversies so often will, with fast fashion. On Thursday, as Melania Trump made a hastily planned trip to McAllen, Texas, to visit migrant children being kept in a holding facility at the Mexican/American border, she donned an olive-green anorak, gathered at the waist, that was printed on the back with the following words, seemingly painted in white: “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?”

It was a striking choice for a first lady embarking on a trip whose whole purpose, ostensibly, was caring—so striking, in fact, that the conspiracies about the first lady’s sartorial strategy pretty much theoried themselves. On the one hand, as East Wing staffers insisted, gamely trying to get #ItsJustaJacket to become a thing: Maybe the first lady’s foray into fast fashion was just that—a jacket, donned without much thought, by a woman who maybe got cold in her SUV as she made her way to Joint Base Andrews. Maybe people were reading too much, literally, into a piece of clothing. Ceci, c’est juste une veste.

Conservatives have been able to abide these decidedly anti-family policies through an embrace of white nationalism, which deems brown skinned men, women and children of degraded humanity—and therefore absent any inherent value and unworthy of protection .

A straw is a simple thing. It’s a tube, a conveyance mechanism for liquid. The defining characteristic of the straw is the emptiness inside it. This is the stuff of tragedy, and America.

Over the last several months, plastic straws have come under fire from environmental activists who rightly point out that disposable plastics have created a swirling, centuries-long ecological disaster that is brutally difficult to clean up. Bags were first against the wall, but municipalities from Oakland, California, (yup) to Surfside, Florida, (huh!) have started to restrict the use of plastic straws. Of course, now there is a movement afoot among conservatives to keep those plastics flowing for freedom. Meanwhile, disability advocates have pointed out that plastic straws, in particular, are important for people with physical limitations. “To me, it’s just lame liberal activism that in the end is nothing,” one activist told The Toronto Star. “We’re really kind of vilifying people who need straws.” Other environmentalists aren’t sure that banning straws is gonna do much, and point out that banning straws is not an entirely rigorous approach to global systems change, considering that a widely cited estimate for the magnitude of the problem was, umm, created by a smart 9-year-old.

In 1993, Charles Krauthammer delivered the commencement address at McGill University. Some 20 years earlier, he told the graduates, he had been sitting in the same seats. “What I shall offer you today,” he said, “is a reconnaissance report from a two-decade life expedition into the world beyond McGill College Avenue.” Sardonically likening himself to Marco Polo, Krauthammer said he had returned to his alma mater “without silk, with few stories, indeed, with but three pieces of sage advice.”

The lessons? Don’t lose your head, Krauthammer explained. Look outward and avoid the insularity and parochialism of narcissism. And save the best.

Krauthammer, who died of cancer this week, was born in 1950 to Jews who had fled the Holocaust. He exercised the same power over Gen-X and Millennial conservatives that William F. Buckley held for an earlier generation. But Krauthammer’s conservatism was as unique as his biography—and revealing of the intellectual and political currents of the latter half of the American century. Krauthammer, like Walter Lippmann, was not only an influential columnist and essayist. He was emblematic of his times.

Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes—car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost seems easier to list the things they don’t mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.

Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids’ development, but it’s probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents.

Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend more time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly low-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children’s lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. To be clear, I’m not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn’t have survived infancy if I’d had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.

I had my first kiss with a boy long before I transitioned. At 17, I knew I was a girl, but also that adults in my life weren’t ready for that. I figured if I couldn’t be a girl, then I might as well fake being a boy who likes boys.

It was the winter of 2004. I remember this because that was when my little heart discovered the Bright Eyes’ song, “Lover I Don’t Have to Love.” On this perfectly executed, piano-driven, emotional-roller-coaster of a track, Conor Oberst sings, I want a lover I don’t have to love. I want a boy who’s so drunk he doesn’t talk.

On the desktop computer in the kitchen of my home in rural Maine, I opened up AIM and typed out an away message with that lyric and then, without waking up my parents, I crawled back upstairs to my bedroom to sleep.

The Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents brought a flood of comparisons to the Holocaust. Some described the facilities used to hold the children as “concentration camps.” ICE officials have been called Nazis. President Trump and those around him have been described as Hitler and kapos.  Former CIA Director Michael Hayden posted a picture of the entrance to Birkenau with the message, “Other governments have separated mothers and children.”

I understand Hayden’s outrage. I share it. But something can be horrific without being a genocide or a Holocaust. Defenders of the Trump policy self-righteously pounced on the comparison, denouncing it as hyperbolic. Although there is nothing good that can be said about Trump’s family-separation policy, it is not a genocide. Equating the two is not only historically wrong, it is also strategically wrong. Glib comparisons to the Nazis provide the administration and its supporters with a chance to defend their position, something they do not deserve.

For Markus Heilig, the years of dead ends were starting to grate.

A seasoned psychiatrist, Heilig joined the National Institutes of Health in 2004 with grand ambitions of finding new ways to treat addiction and alcoholism. “It was the age of the neuroscience revolution, and all this new tech gave us many ways of manipulating animal brains,” he recalls. By studying addictive behavior in laboratory rats and mice, he would pinpoint crucial genes, molecules, and brain regions that could be targeted to curtail the equivalent behaviors in people.

It wasn’t to be. The insights from rodent studies repeatedly proved to be irrelevant. Many researchers and pharmaceutical companies became disillusioned. “We cured alcoholism in every rat we ever tried,” says Heilig, who is now at Linköping University in Sweden. “And at the end of every paper, we wrote: This will lead to an exciting treatment. But everything we took from these animal models to the clinic failed. We needed to go back to the drawing board.”