december 2011

An astonishing number of students start college in America without finishing it: Roughly 40 percent of college enrollees don’t go on to get a degree within six years of starting to work toward one.

The good news is that in recent decades things have gotten a bit less bad. By one calculation, at four-year state schools that didn’t make the top 50 public universities in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings, the graduation rate within six years rose from about 40 percent for students starting in the early 1990s to about 50 percent for students starting in the late 2000s. (The phenomenon was not limited to non-elite schools.)

When Jeff Denning, an economist at Brigham Young University, started looking closely at the data on college-completion rates, he was a bit perplexed by what, exactly, was driving this uptick. He and some of his BYU colleagues noticed that a range of indicators from those two decades pointed in the direction of lower, not higher, graduation rates: More historically underrepresented groups of students (who tend to have lower graduation rates) were enrolling, students appeared to be studying less and spending more time working outside of school, and student-to-faculty ratios weren’t decreasing. “We started thinking, What could possibly explain this increase?” Denning told me. “Because we were stuck with not being able to explain anything.”

Back in May, Representative Justin Amash of Michigan held a town hall to defend his position as the lone Republican calling for impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. Amash explained to voters that he’d arrived at this position after reading Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by the president. But for at least one voter, that explanation was more like revelation: As far as she was aware, Trump had been totally exonerated.

“I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before,” Cathy Garnaat, a Republican who supported Amash and Trump, told NBC that night. “I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report, and President Trump has been exonerated.”

Late morning on Tuesday, July 23, the denouement in Boris Johnson’s lifelong quest for political power will be revealed, when the committee that has organized the Conservative Party’s leadership election will announce the winner of the race to replace Theresa May. The following day, the winner—Johnson is the heavy favorite—will be driven to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the Queen, and be formally appointed prime minister.

It will be the culmination of seven weeks of national campaigning in which Johnson has slowly and cautiously closed in on the prize. Yet in reality it has been a 40-year pursuit, relentlessly driving forward, each step a mere prelude to the next on his seemingly unstoppable rise.

Raj Chetty got his biggest break before his life began. His mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Anbu showed the greatest academic potential of her five siblings, but her future was constrained by custom. Although Anbu’s father encouraged her scholarly inclinations, there were no colleges in the area, and sending his daughter away for an education would have been unseemly.

But as Anbu approached the end of high school, a minor miracle redirected her life. A local tycoon, himself the father of a bright daughter, decided to open a women’s college, housed in his elegant residence. Anbu was admitted to the inaugural class of 30 young women, learning English in the spacious courtyard under a thatched roof and traveling in the early mornings by bus to a nearby college to run chemistry experiments or dissect frogs’ hearts before the men arrived.

The Apollo 11 mission was, in most respects, a feat of extraordinary precision.

Traveling at a maximum velocity of about seven miles a second, the Saturn V rocket would have launched the crew far off course in the event of even a slight navigational error. From nearly 240,000 miles away, Houston’s Mission Control could track the spacecraft’s position to within 30 feet. The command module’s guidance computer kept time to the millisecond.

And yet for all that precision, no one can say with absolute certainty when, exactly, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon.

Most of the details of the moment are canonical: Armstrong took his one small step on July 20, 1969—50 years ago this past Saturday. The step took place just after 10:56 eastern time that night. And Armstrong bookended the step with the lines “Okay, I’m going to step off the [lunar module] now” and “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” (Or was it “one small step for a man,” as Armstrong insisted?) At some point during the roughly eight-second interval between those two lines, he became the first human being to walk on the moon. But when exactly he did so is less than clear.

The Vermont lake was the perfect setting for a mother-daughter day. The mother packed water and towels. The daughter, an excitable young girl, shoved cheese sticks into a cooler. When the two arrived at the beach, they swung the cooler between them as they walked to the water.

But the mother’s smile was strained, because the day of family fun would be closely watched. Joining the pair was Sharon Lamb, a psychologist who evaluates parents and makes recommendations to family courts regarding whether their rights to their children should be terminated. The daughter had been in foster care for two years, and her mother was in danger of losing custody permanently. Lamb was there to help determine whether the mother could be considered fit to parent.

In order to fall asleep at night, I must run a gantlet of bedtime rituals. I must be marinating in overnight-skin-care products from head to toe. One (but only one) of my legs must be hooked around the side of my covers, poised to alert me to the presence of monsters. I must be lying on my stomach, with one arm folded under my head between me and my pillow. Not only must the air in the room be frigid, but it must be blowing directly on me.

Most people will probably cop to at least one idiosyncratic sleep habit. The presence of a fan is a common one. Some people are so attached to a particular pillow that they’ll haul it through the airport. Others are dead set on having their toes dangle off the mattress. Some adults still cuddle a stuffed animal. I started taking this inventory of bedtime peculiarities after someone asked whether I could explain why her face always had to be touching her childhood blanket at night.

Seventy-five.

That’s how long I want to live: 75 years.

This preference drives my daughters crazy. It drives my brothers crazy. My loving friends think I am crazy. They think that I can’t mean what I say; that I haven’t thought clearly about this, because there is so much in the world to see and do. To convince me of my errors, they enumerate the myriad people I know who are over 75 and doing quite well. They are certain that as I get closer to 75, I will push the desired age back to 80, then 85, maybe even 90.

I am sure of my position. Doubtless, death is a loss. It deprives us of experiences and milestones, of time spent with our spouse and children. In short, it deprives us of all the things we value.

Robert Spada walked into the decrepit warehouse in Detroit and surveyed the chaos: Thousands of cardboard boxes and large plastic bags were piled haphazardly throughout the cavernous space. The air inside was hot and musty. Spada, an assistant prosecutor, saw that some of the windows were open, others broken, exposing the room to the summer heat. Above the boxes, birds glided in slow, swooping circles.

It was August 17, 2009, and this brick fortress of a building housed evidence that had been collected by the Detroit Police Department. Spada’s visit had been prompted by a question: Why were police sometimes unable to locate crucial evidence? The answer lay in the disarray before him.

Updated on July 23 at 8:35 a.m. ET

Easy to miss amidst the continuing fusillade of racist remarks from the White House was a remarkable Washington Post story this weekend:

President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for sweeping budget cuts if he wins a second term in the White House, five people briefed on the discussions said, a move that would dramatically reverse the big-spending approach he adopted during his first 30 months in office. Trump’s advisers say he will be better positioned to crack down on spending and shrink or eliminate certain agencies after next year, particularly if Republicans regain control of the House of Representatives.

If Trump is really contemplating large cuts in a second term, it’d be very strange. But the idea of a serious fiscal-conservative turn after 2020, no matter how unlikely, does raise a larger question: What exactly would be the point of a second Trump term?