january/february 2012

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.

Since its launch four years ago, the website Task & Purpose has built an ardent following among veterans, military personnel and defense intellectuals with smart, unvarnished coverage of military issues and veterans’ affairs. This week, the site analyzed President Trump’s proposed Space Force, described security careers for veterans, and lead with a follow-up to one of its own scoops on the wounding of a Marine: “The Pentagon Is Trying To Spin The Truth Of How A Marine Got Shot in Syria.”

Given this brand of journalism and its 2.5 million monthly readers, the news a week ago that its top editor had resigned over alleged interference by the site’s CEO was jarring and troubling. Adam Weinstein, the acting managing editor, announced in a tweet that he had resigned after the CEO and founder, Zach Iscol, asked to change a headline on a ProPublica investigation of Trump’s influence over the VA that referenced “three non-vet Mar-a-Lago members” running the agency. In the tweet, Weinstein said the attempted headline change was “the latest in a series of such demands over our editorial content.”

On HBO’s Insecure, the Issa Rae–helmed comedy about black women navigating life and love in Los Angeles, the show’s main characters tease each other lovingly and unceasingly. The two friends, Issa Dee (Rae) and Molly Carter (Yvonne Orji), trade barbs in a cheeky, exaggerated tone. It’s a welcome dynamic, a reminder that the show is first and foremost dedicated to the story of the women’s friendship (even if disillusioned male fans insist that Lawrence, Issa’s ex, is integral to her narrative). The interactions speak to Issa and Molly’s closeness—who but your  giii-iiii-iiiirlfriends could get away with calling you a bitch so often?

Taken as standalone scenes, these barbs don’t grate much; it’s not unusual for marginalized people to reclaim words that originated as slurs, and to then offer these words to one another as terms of endearment. It’s not rare to lend tenderness to words that could otherwise convey malice, to strip them of their venom by sheer force of will and pitch. In one such scene during Sunday night’s Season 3 premiere, Molly and Issa sit down for a meal at L.A.’s famed Pann’s Restaurant. Having just returned from a much needed getaway after quitting a job where she wasn’t paid as much as her white male colleagues, Molly explains her new life strategy to Issa:

Donald Trump’s rhetoric may be coarsening most everything in America, but might the already-rowdy realm of commercial rap at least be safe? Don’t bet on it. Midway through Nicki Minaj’s “LLC,” one line washed me with a nausea of familiarity: “All these low-IQ hoes baffle me.” Low-IQ as a modifier: Isn’t that Trump’s thing? The president makes a habit of invoking IQ as an insult, drawing on an aptitude test that’s otherwise been falling out of fashion due to, among other things, a historical association with racism.

Minaj may or may not be channeling Trump with that line, which certainly isn’t the toughest dis heard on her 19-track fourth album, Queen. And her rivals’ intellects have long been in her crosshairs, as heard on 2011’s delicious Lil’ Kim takedown “Stupid Hoe.” But lately, as she’s returned to a rap landscape that’s shifted in the four years since her previous album, Minaj has been particularly fixated on claims about the brain. Premiering Queen on Apple’s streaming radio station, she said it used to be that, “It felt like you had to be smart to rap. And now, it’s a little bit different.” Interviewed by Roxane Gay in 2017, she said, “Do you sound intelligent? Does your flow switch up? Are you in command of the beat? I listen for things like that.”

In a very short time, we human beings have seeded our corner of the universe with all kinds of signs of our existence. We have flung hundreds of satellites into the sky, cloaking the Earth in technology. We sent spacecraft to swing by planets and moons, to orbit them, to roam their surfaces. A few years ago, we reached the invisible line between the end of our solar system and the beginning of everything else, and then pierced it, hurtling into the darkness beyond.

This last achievement, humanity’s escape from the solar system, was certainly astonishing, a testament to human ingenuity and engineering. But it was much easier than what we’re trying to do next.

The Parker Solar Probe, a NASA mission, will blast off from the Florida coast in the early-morning hours of Saturday. Next month, the spacecraft will reach Venus, its sidekick on a long journey. Parker will swing past the planet seven times, slowing down with each pass. Eventually the probe will end its rendezvous with Venus and move into a closer orbit around the sun, coming within 3.9 million miles of the sun’s surface to graze its edge. It will be more than seven times closer than any probe has flown before.

A famed professor. A student claiming they were sexually harassed. A months-long internal investigation.

Many of the particulars of the case against Avital Ronell, a professor of German and Comparative Literature at New York University who an internal investigation found responsible for sexually harassing Nimrod Reitman, a former graduate student of hers, are familiar. Reitman accuses Ronell of kissing and touching him repeatedly, as well as sending inappropriate email messages, among other things. After its investigation, the university found that Ronell’s conduct was “sufficiently pervasive to alter the terms and conditions of Mr. Reitman’s learning environment,” according to The New York Times, and suspended her for the upcoming academic year.

Updated on August 15 at 4:30 p.m. ET

This November, voters in Washington state may do what no group of people—in or outside the United States—has done before.

They will vote on whether to adopt a carbon fee, an aggressive policy to combat climate change that charges polluters for the right to emit carbon dioxide and other potent greenhouse gases.

Their decision will reverberate far beyond the Olympic Peninsula. If the measure passes, Washington will make history, becoming not only the first state in the union to adopt a type of policy called a carbon tax—but also the first government, anywhere, to do so by ballot referendum.

If it fails, it will bring into question whether progressives can implement substantive, state-level climate policy in the face of President Trump’s environmental rollbacks, even in deep-blue redoubts like Washington.

The Young family of Crazy Rich Asians is, for lack of a better word, quite wealthy. They’re well-off. One might say they have oodles of money. There’s no ignoring the obvious here—the Youngs are absurdly rich, to the point where merely being close to them is exciting enough to serve as the premise of a major summer movie. Though Crazy Rich Asians is rightly being lauded for its groundbreaking nature (as the first studio film with an Asian cast set in the present day since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club), it’s also a charming throwback to the kind of story Hollywood doesn’t tell much anymore: the high-society comedy, rife with family drama, acidic one-liners, and indomitable female characters.

Based on Kevin Kwan’s best-selling 2013 novel, Crazy Rich Asians is a classic ballad of life among the 1 percent, and how it can be as thrilling as it is ultimately unfulfilling. The extravagance on display is nonsensical, but that’s part of the fun; the movie is filmed with colorful dynamism by Jon M. Chu, the man behind buzzy, disposable delights like Step Up 3D and Jem and the Holograms. The setting (Singapore) and the ensemble cast (which doesn’t feature a white actor after the first scene) are breaths of fresh air, but so is the fact that Hollywood can still churn out a winsome family rom-com when it wants to.

BERLIN—What happens when you do a prime-time interview with a far-right leader—but don’t ask them anything about refugees?

German television viewers found out Sunday night when the broadcaster ZDF ran a major interview with Alexander Gauland, a co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which capitalized on anti-refugee sentiment to earn its first-ever seats in the German Parliament last fall. Ahead of the interview, ZDF’s Twitter feed teased the interview as dealing with “climate change, retirement, digitalization—and without refugees.”

The resulting 19-minute interview, in which Gauland struggles to answer basic questions about his party’s positions on such issues, has been lauded by opponents of the AfD as masterful. Supporters of the AfD and Gauland himself panned it as biased. The ZDF journalist Thomas Walde, who conducted the interview, repeatedly pushed Gauland to clarify or explain statements made by his fellow party members—and asked more than once about proposed policy “alternatives” from a party that counts the word alternative as part of its name.

In 2012, on a whim, Vincent Lynch decided to search the genome of the African elephant to see if it had extra anti-cancer genes. Cancers happen when cells build up mutations in their DNA that allow them to grow and divide uncontrollably. Bigger animals, whose bodies comprise more cells, should therefore have a higher risk of cancer. This is true within species: On average, taller humans are more likely to develop tumors than shorter ones, and bigger dogs have a higher cancer risk than smaller ones.

But this trend breaks down when you look across species. Elephants are no more susceptible to tumors than Chihuahuas, and whales are no more likely to develop cancers than humans—if anything, their risk is lower. That’s especially strange because big animals also tend to have longer life spans, giving more opportunities for each of their already abundant cells to become cancerous. They ought to be walking (or swimming) masses of tumors—but clearly they aren’t. For the vast majority of mammals that have been studied, the odds of dying from cancer range from 1 to 10 percent, whether you’re talking about a 50-gram grass mouse or a 5,000-kilogram African elephant.