You’re at a party and you see someone cute across the room. They glance at you, maybe even smile for a second, then carry on with their conversation. You feel the room shrink, your heart rate quicken, your face go red: You’re crushing on this stranger, hard. But then the sensible part of your brain tells you to forget it: That person’s way, way out of your league.

Wait a second, you counter: Do dating “leagues” even exist?

At this point, Elizabeth Bruch, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, crashes in to your thought process (and this news article). Yep, she says. Leagues do seem to exist. But you’re not alone in trying to escape yours: “Three-quarters, or more, of people are dating aspirationally,” she says. And according to a new study, users of online-dating sites spend most of their time trying to contact people “out of their league.”

I am staring at a photograph of myself that shows me 20 years older than I am now. I have not stepped into the twilight zone. Rather, I am trying to rid myself of some measure of my present bias, which is the tendency people have, when considering a trade-off between two future moments, to more heavily weight the one closer to the present. A great many academic studies have shown this bias—also known as hyperbolic discounting—to be robust and persistent.

Most of them have focused on money. When asked whether they would prefer to have, say, $150 today or $180 in one month, people tend to choose the $150. Giving up a 20 percent return on investment is a bad move—which is easy to recognize when the question is thrust away from the present.

Gerta Keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t die,” she told me cheerfully as soon as I’d said hello. “I’ll bring you back.”

Death was not something I’d considered as a possible consequence of traveling with Keller, a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton University. She looked harmless enough: thin, with a blunt bob, wearing gray nylon pants and hiking boots, and carrying an insulated ShopRite supermarket bag by way of a purse.

I quickly learned that Keller felt such reassurances were necessary because, appropriately for someone who studies mass extinctions, she has a tendency to attract disaster.

On Thursday night, The New York Times published an interview with Elon Musk that offers a view into the billionaire entrepreneur’s life in the last year. Musk choked up “multiple times,” the Times reported in the story, and “alternated between laughter and tears.” He explained that he was overworked at Tesla, his electric-car company—which has spent the past several months scrambling to meet ambitious production goals—and that the situation has taken a toll on his physical health, family time, and social life.

“I thought the worst of it was over—I thought it was,” Musk said. “The worst is over from a Tesla operational standpoint. But from a personal pain standpoint, the worst is yet to come.”

Forty-one million IQ points. That’s what Dr. David Bellinger determined Americans have collectively forfeited as a result of exposure to lead, mercury, and organophosphate pesticides. In a 2012 paper published by the National Institutes of Health, Bellinger, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, compared intelligence quotients among children whose mothers had been exposed to these neurotoxins while pregnant to those who had not. Bellinger calculates a total loss of 16.9 million IQ points due to exposure to organophosphates, the most common pesticides used in agriculture.

Last month, more research brought concerns about chemical exposure and brain health to a heightened pitch. Philippe Grandjean, Bellinger’s Harvard colleague, and Philip Landrigan, dean for global health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, announced to some controversy in the pages of a prestigious medical journal that a “silent pandemic” of toxins has been damaging the brains of unborn children. The experts named 12 chemicals—substances found in both the environment and everyday items like furniture and clothing—that they believed to be causing not just lower IQs but ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. Pesticides were among the toxins they identified.

Floyd Abrams well remembers the era when Richard Nixon battled the free and independent press. As a young First Amendment lawyer, Abrams was co-counsel for the defense, representing The New York Times in 1971 when Nixon unsuccessfully sought to block publication of the Pentagon Papers. Nixon wiretapped journalists, put some of them on his enemies list, and dispatched his vice president, Spiro Agnew, to threaten broadcast licenses and deride media members as “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

And how benign those actions now seem in retrospect. Abrams, still practicing constitutional law at age 82, says the current president easily trumps Nixon as the most dire threat the press has ever faced. Nixon never borrowed from Stalin to assail “enemies of the people.” Nixon never wrote the way Donald Trump tweets, that journalists “can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!” Nixon at his rallies didn’t goad his followers into hurling abuse at nearby journalists on the scene—and threatening worse.

LONDON—For more than a year, the British government has insisted that the only thing worse than leaving the European Union with no deal would be to leave it with a bad one. Implicit in this proclamation was that Britons would have nothing to fear if negotiations between the U.K. and the EU went sour; that while every effort would be made to get the best deal for Britain, Britons would never have to bow to European demands U.K. voters thought unreasonable.

But nearly two years on, the forecast for a “no deal” Brexit—in which the U.K. would leave the EU without an agreement on the terms of its withdrawal or their future trading relationship—has started to look grim. Recent concerns over potential food shortages prompted the newly appointed Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab to offer what for a wealthy nation was the remarkable assurance that the government will “make sure that there is adequate food supplies.” Health Secretary Matt Hancock, facing similar anxieties over the possibility of medicine shortages, confirmed that the National Health Service would prepare to stockpile essential materials, including vaccines and blood products.

Even by the formidable standards of eminent Victorian families, the Bensons were an intimidating lot. Edward Benson, the family’s patriarch, had vaulted up the clerical hierarchy, awing superiors with his ferocious work habits and cowing subordinates with his reforming zeal. Queen Victoria appointed him the archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church, in 1883. Edward’s wife, Minnie, was to all appearances a perfect match. Tender where he was severe, she was a warmhearted hostess renowned for her conversation. Most important, she was Edward’s equal in religious devotion. As a friend daringly pronounced, Minnie was “as good as God and as clever as the Devil.”

All five of Edward and Minnie Benson’s adult offspring distinguished themselves in public life. Arthur Benson served as the master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University, wrote the lyrics to Edward Elgar’s hymn “Land of Hope and Glory,” and was entrusted with the delicate task of co-editing Queen Victoria’s letters for publication. His brother Fred was a best-selling writer, well known today for the series of satirical Lucia novels (televised for the second time in 2014, on the BBC), which poked good-natured fun at the pomposities of English provincial life. Their sister Margaret became a pioneering Egyptologist, the first woman to lead an archaeological dig in the country and to publish her findings. Even the family’s apostate, the youngest brother, Hugh, a convert to Roman Catholicism, was considered a magnetic preacher and, like his brothers, was an irrepressible author of briskly selling books. All told, the family published more than 200 volumes.

Every year more money is being spent studying the now-infamous plant protein gluten. The studying raises more questions. That leads to more money being spent. And then more questions.

If there was more than one lecture in medical school where gluten came up, I don’t remember it. The one I remember was in 2007, in the context of celiac disease. After the lecturer mentioned “gluten,” a classmate raised a hand and asked him to repeat himself. People who eat what?

Of course gluten, which comes from wheat, rye, and barley, was all around us then, as it is now. It’s a sort of mortar in the walls of the modern food system, in so much of what we eat or otherwise ingest and apply to ourselves. But we were barely, if at all, aware of it.

This week, beset by bad news about Omarosa Manigault-Newman, President Donald Trump decided to launch a war of choice. The White House announced Wednesday that he had revoked security clearance for John Brennan, who was the CIA director under Barack Obama and has since become a leading Trump critic. Trump also threatened to take clearance away from a slew of other critics.

But wars, once started, don’t always unfold the way you intend. In Trump’s case, a host of prominent retired military and intelligence leaders have entered the fray opposing him. First, retired Navy Admiral William McRaven wrote an open letter to the president in The Washington Post on Thursday criticizing the revocation of Brennan’s clearance and asking to join him: “I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency.”