june 2010

When the Harvey Weinstein story broke, I thought of something my mother told me when I was a little girl. She said: To be a free woman, you have to be a financially independent woman. She wasn’t wrong. I studied economics in college and went to New York to become an investment banker. To be blunt, I wanted the freedom money can buy.

I had a sudden change of heart while working at Goldman Sachs as a summer analyst. I decided that if the world required me to sell the hours of my life in exchange for access to what had long ago been free—food, water, shelter—I wanted to at least be doing something that stirred my soul. This is, granted, a privileged position. But as a young woman that was the conclusion I came to.

It was the hippies who drove Nancy Hale over the edge. She had spent three days listening respectfully to the real people of Middle America, and finally she couldn’t take it any longer.

She turned off the tape recorder and took several deep breaths, leaning back in the passenger seat of the rented GMC Yukon. The sun had just come out from behind a mass of clouds, casting a gleam on the rain-soaked parking lot in rural Wisconsin.

Hale, who is 65 and lives in San Francisco, is a career activist who got her start protesting nuclear plants and nuclear testing in the 1970s. In 2005, she was one of the founders of Third Way, a center-left think tank, and it was in that capacity that she and four colleagues had journeyed from both coasts to the town of Viroqua, Wisconsin, as part of a post-election listening tour. They had come on a well-meaning mission: to better understand their fellow Americans, whose political behavior in the last election had left them confused and distressed.

“Brit Marling is a super talented actress and writer. Mr. Weinstein has a different recollection of the events.’’

That was Harvey Weinstein’s spokesperson, Sallie Hofmeister, offering a statement to The Atlantic in response to Marling’s essay that shares her experience—an invitation to shower, an offer of a massage, in a form now eerily familiar—of a 2014 encounter with Weinstein.

The statement is nearly identical in wording to the one Weinstein’s team offered in response to the op-ed Lupita Nyong’o published in The New York Times late last week—one describing predatory behavior playing out over a series of discrete interactions she’d had with Weinstein early in her career. Here was a Weinstein spokesperson, replying to Nyong’o’s essay through a statement given to E! News:

Happiness is an active process, not something you get by sitting back and waiting. It’s something to be grabbed by the horns or more vulnerable areas and then conquered. At least, this is the gist of the message from Tony Robbins and gurus of his ilk.

Many also say happiness is not something we can buy, or steal, or work too hard to acquire. If you work too hard at it, you end up obsessing over your own state of mind—Am I happy? ... Really though? And like love, if you have to ask, the answer is no.

So what’s the right way to think about effort and happiness? Should I be trying for “happiness” per se—or something more magnanimous, like purpose or meaning?

Or money? Is happiness actually all about money? That would be a real twist.

“You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country,” White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said Thursday. Among those were Gold Star families: “I just thought—the selfless devotion that brings a man or woman to die on the battlefield, I just thought that that might be sacred.”

But Kelly acknowledged that might no longer be true: “Gold Star families, I think that left in the convention over the summer.”

Then on Monday morning, Kelly’s boss decided to prolong a feud with the widow of a fallen American soldier:

I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 23, 2017

Emma Perrier spent the summer of 2015 mending a broken heart, after a recent breakup. By September, the restaurant manager had grown tired of watching The Notebook alone in her apartment in Twickenham, a leafy suburb southwest of London, and decided it was time to get back out there. Despite the horror stories she’d heard about online dating, Emma, 33, downloaded a matchmaking app called Zoosk. The second “o” in the Zoosk logo looks like a diamond engagement ring, which suggested that its 38 million members were seeking more than the one-night stands offered by apps like Tinder.

She snapped the three selfies the app required to “verify her identity.” Emma, who is from a volcanic city near the French Alps, not far from the source of Perrier mineral water, is petite, and brunette. She found it difficult to meet men, especially as she avoided pubs and nightclubs, and worked such long hours at a coffee shop in the city’s financial district that she met only stockbrokers, who were mostly looking for cappuccinos, not love.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

It was a week of powerful speeches. The least memorable, oddly, was delivered by the most naturally gifted speaker, former President Barack Obama, at a campaign rally in Virginia. “Our democracy is at stake,” he said, before harking back to the trope of his 2008 campaign: “Yes, we can.” Compelling in the setting, but not special.

Far more powerful was former President George W. Bush’s indictment of Donald Trump that didn’t mention the 45th president by name. It was a cry for freedom as a theme in American policy, a denunciation of “casual cruelty” in American discourse, of “nationalism distorted into nativism,” of isolationism, of attempts to turn American identity away from American ideals and into something darker, driven by “geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood.” In itself it would have been noteworthy.

Alabama is usually such a happy place for Republicans. The state is not merely blood red; its conservatives thrill to the culture-war revanchism that the GOP has been peddling for decades. (I know plenty of Alabamans—family, mostly—who have felt sneered at and let down since George Wallace failed to become president.)

But then came this year’s special Senate primary, and things turned ass-over-teacup for the party. After all the money and effort spent on boosting Luther Strange (the guy appointed to Jeff Sessions’s seat when he decamped for the Cabinet), the prize ultimately went to the flagrantly batty Roy Moore. This despite Donald Trump’s taking his carnival barker act down South to sing Big Luther’s praises in person.     

What is a country? Is it a place like the United States that is recognized by all other countries and is a member of the United Nations? Is it, like Kosovo, a place that is recognized by most of the world’s powers but isn’t a UN member? Where does Taiwan, which has its own government and its own military despite being claimed by China, fit? And where does all this leave places like Catalonia and Iraqi Kurdistan, many of whose citizens have voted to secede over the objections of the countries they’re currently part of?

“Really, when we’re talking about a country, we’re talking about a political territory with a population, a government, and legally recognized boundaries that indicate or grant sovereignty,” Rebecca Richards, a lecturer in international relations at Keele University in the U.K., said in an email. “They are the legally determined shapes on a map.”