may 2009

Hot or not? The question of whom we’re attracted to and why has long confounded humankind’s greatest philosophers, scientists, and reality-show contestants.

Scads of studies suggest that those of us looking for Mr. or Ms. Right may actually be looking for Mr. Facial Symmetry or Ms. Ideal Waist-to-Hip Ratio (about 0.7 for women). [1, 2] But other research suggests that whether a trait is attractive depends on the type of connection you’re looking for. For example, women in one study found men with facial scars more appealing than other men for short-term relationships, but not for long-term ones. [3] In another study, men with beards had an edge among women seeking long-term relationships—a finding that might give clean-shaven guys with scars an idea about how to turn a one-night stand into something lasting. [4] (If all of this sounds heteronormative, it is: Almost all research on attraction involves straight people.)

In the fall of 1997, after I graduated from college, I began experiencing what I called “electric shocks”—tiny stabbing sensations that flickered over my legs and arms every morning. They were so extreme that as I walked to work from my East Village basement apartment, I often had to stop on Ninth Street and rub my legs against a parking meter, or else my muscles would begin twitching and spasming. My doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong—dry skin, he proposed—and eventually the shocks went away. A year later, they returned for a few months, only to go away again just when I couldn’t bear it anymore.

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Over the years, the shocks and other strange symptoms—vertigo, fatigue, joint pain, memory problems, tremors—came and went. In 2002, I began waking up every night drenched in sweat, with hives covering my legs. A doctor I consulted thought, based on a test result, that I might have lupus, but I had few other markers of the autoimmune disease. In 2008, when I was 32, doctors identified arthritis in my hips and neck, for which I had surgery and physical therapy. I was also bizarrely exhausted. Nothing was really wrong, the doctors I visited told me; my tests looked fine.

Yesterday the hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell held a joint media session at the Roc Nation offices in New York to seal a once-implausible partnership that isn’t being received as positively as both parties probably hoped.

I assume neither Goodell nor Jay-Z expected to be on the defensive once the NFL announced that it would give Roc Nation, the music mogul’s entertainment company, significant power in choosing the performers for the league’s signature events—including the coveted Super Bowl halftime show. Jay-Z and Roc Nation will also help augment the NFL’s social-justice initiatives by developing content and spaces where players can speak about the issues that concern them.

On Monday, the New York Times columnist James B. Stewart published a remarkable article: a summary of an interview he had conducted last August with Jeffrey Epstein. The two were ostensibly talking together about matters of business—about rumors that Epstein had been doing advisory work for the electric-car company Tesla. But Epstein, in Stewart’s telling, kept guiding the conversation toward the secret that was at that point no secret at all: the fact that Epstein was a convicted sex offender. “If he was reticent about Tesla,” Stewart wrote, “he was more at ease discussing his interest in young women”:

He said that criminalizing sex with teenage girls was a cultural aberration and that at times in history it was perfectly acceptable. He pointed out that homosexuality had long been considered a crime and was still punishable by death in some parts of the world.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is a man in a rush to build a legacy. In 2013, only four months into his presidency, Xi launched the One Belt One Road initiative, billed as the largest international development scheme in history. The “New Silk Road Economic Belt” promises to connect Europe and Asia overland through a large network of highways, railways, pipelines, trade corridors, and digital infrastructure. The “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” will build up a string of industrial port cities tracing the coastline of the South China Sea, Indian Ocean, and Suez Canal all the way to the Mediterranean.

The scope of the plan is mind-boggling, but the details are hazy. Neither the belt nor the road are actual routes connecting hub cities, as the Chinese government’s official maps depict them. Any country can join the initiative, but membership carries no concrete commitments. Some observers call One Belt One Road—OBOR—a “Chinese Marshall Plan.” Others have argued it will mark the “dawn of Eurasia” and profoundly reshape global politics. The Trump administration calls OBOR “debt-trap diplomacy”—a predatory scheme to get poor countries hooked on Chinese loans.

Late on a fall afternoon, a skeleton crew staffed the cafeteria at New Canaan High School, in Connecticut. Custodial workers cleaned up the day’s remains while one of the cooks prepped for the evening’s athletic banquet.

A woman entered quietly through the back door, the one designated for deliveries and employees. She wore a jacket over a loose gown. She clutched something to her chest that appeared to be a bag connected to an IV.

“What are you doing here?” one of the workers asked.

The woman said nothing. She shuffled to her small office. The door clicked shut. The workers exchanged looks.

Humans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. Or so we’re told. Whereas some epochs in Earth history stretch more than 40 million years, this new chapter started maybe 400 years ago, when carbon dioxide dipped by a few parts per million in the atmosphere. Or perhaps, as a panel of scientists voted earlier this year, the epoch started as recently as 75 years ago, when atomic weapons began to dust the planet with an evanescence of strange radioisotopes.

These are unusual claims about geology, a field that typically deals with mile-thick packages of rock stacked up over tens of millions of years, wherein entire mountain ranges are born and weather away to nothing within a single unit of time, in which extremely precise rock dates—single-frame snapshots from deep time—can come with 50,000-year error bars, a span almost 10 times as long as all of recorded human history. If having an epoch shorter than an error bar seems strange, well, so is the Anthropocene.

The immigration raid last week at seven poultry plants in rural Mississippi was a perfect symbol of the Trump administration’s racism, lies, hypocrisy, and contempt for the poor. It was also a case study in how an industry with a long history of defying the law has managed to shift the blame and punishment onto workers.

Planned for more than a year, the raid involved at least 600 agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, helicopters, and a staging area at a local National Guard base. The agents carried handguns, wore black body armor, and led 680 immigrant workers—almost all Latino, many of them women—to waiting buses with their hands zip-tied behind their backs. One worker, an American citizen, was shot with a Taser for resisting arrest. Children gathered outside the poultry plants crying as their parents were taken away and sent to private prisons; other kids sat in classrooms and at day-care centers, unaware that their families were being torn apart. It was the first week of school.

I. Wiped Out

“You ever chop before?” Willena Scott-White was testing me. I sat with her in the cab of a Chevy Silverado pickup truck, swatting at the squadrons of giant, fluttering mosquitoes that had invaded the interior the last time she opened a window. I was spending the day with her family as they worked their fields just outside Ruleville, in Mississippi’s Leflore County. With her weathered brown hands, Scott-White gave me a pork sandwich wrapped in a grease-stained paper towel. I slapped my leg. Mosquitoes can bite through denim, it turns out.

Cotton sowed with planters must be chopped—thinned and weeded manually with hoes—to produce orderly rows of fluffy bolls. The work is backbreaking, and the people who do it maintain that no other job on Earth is quite as demanding.

This article contains spoilers regarding recent episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Loudest Voice.

During its three seasons on Hulu, The Handmaid’s Tale has depicted all kinds of grim visuals: ritualized hangings, feet flayed with steel cables, women whose mouths have been bolted shut. And yet the image I couldn’t get out of my mind this week after watching the Season 3 finale was that of a generic to-go coffee cup. Early in the episode, Mark Tuello (Sam Jaeger), a representative of the U.S. Government-in-Exile, came to meet with Serena Waterford (Yvonne Strahovski), a recent defector from Gilead who’d turned in her husband in exchange for immunity. As Tuello walked up to greet her, Serena was sitting on a bench outside her detention center, placidly reading. She wore a long, dusky pink overcoat, tailored slacks, and ballet pumps. With her smooth blond curls, she looked like the very model of Apostate Girl Autumn. Tuello handed her a cup of coffee, just one human in a free, caffeine-permitting country to another, and the ordinariness of it—the banality, maybe—felt somehow obscene.