november 2011

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

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.

Claire is a 14-year-old girl with short auburn hair and a broad smile. She lives outside Philadelphia with her mother and father, both professional scientists. Claire can come across as an introvert, but she quickly opens up, and what seemed like shyness reveals itself to be quiet self-assuredness. Like many kids her age, she is a bit overscheduled. During the course of the evening I spent with Claire and her mother, Heather—these aren’t their real names—theater, guitar, and track tryouts all came up. We also discussed the fact that, until recently, she wasn’t certain she was a girl.

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Sixth grade had been difficult for her. She’d struggled to make friends and experienced both anxiety and depression. “I didn’t have any self-confidence at all,” she told me. “I thought there was something wrong with me.” Claire, who was 12 at the time, also felt uncomfortable in her body in a way she couldn’t quite describe. She acknowledged that part of it had to do with puberty, but she felt it was more than the usual preteen woes. “At first, I started eating less,” she said, “but that didn’t really help.”