july/august 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.

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.”

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.

Two years ago, I walked downstairs and saw one of my teenage sons watching a strange YouTube video on the television.

“What is that?” I asked.

He turned to me earnestly and explained, “It’s a psychology professor at the University of Toronto talking about Canadian law.”

“Huh?” I said, but he had already turned back to the screen. I figured he had finally gotten to the end of the internet, and this was the very last thing on it.

That night, my son tried to explain the thing to me, but it was a buzzing in my ear, and I wanted to talk about something more interesting. It didn’t matter; it turned out a number of his friends—all of them like him: progressive Democrats, with the full range of social positions you would expect of adolescents growing up in liberal households in blue-bubble Los Angeles—had watched the video as well, and they talked about it to one another.  

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.

Early in the recent BBC/PBS miniseries Little Women, the first significant adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel in 24 years, Laurie (played by Jonah Hauer-King) tells Jo (Maya Hawke)—the first March sister he falls in love with—how much he enjoys watching her family from his nearby window. “It always looks so idyllic, when I look down and see you through the parlor window in the evenings,” he says. “It’s like the window is a frame and you’re all part of a perfect picture.”

“You must cherish your illusions if they make you happy,” Jo replies.

The scene nods to an awkward truth: Little Women is the window tableau and we, its readers, are Laurie, peering in and savoring its sham perfection, or at any rate its virtuous uplift. During the 150 years since the novel’s publication, fans have worshipped Alcott’s story of the four March sisters and their indomitable mother, Marmee, who navigate genteel poverty with valiant acceptance and who strive—always—to be better. Detractors (notably fewer in number) have generally fastened on some version of that saga of gritty goodness too, irritated rather than awed.

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.

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 Donald Trump’s proposed Space Force, described security careers for veterans, and led 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, had asked to change a headline on a ProPublica investigation into Trump’s influence over the Department of Veterans Affairs 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:

The press, says the 45th president of the United States, is “very dangerous & sick.” It causes “great division & distrust.” It is the “enemy of the people.”

Every president—starting with George Washington, who griped about his treatment at the hands of “infamous scribblers”—has felt maligned or misunderstood by the media. The rhetoric now emanating from the White House—remarkable in its ferocity, irresponsibility, and remorselessness—represents something darker. It is an attack not just on individual media outlets, but on the role journalism serves in a free society; not just on specific stories, but on the need for Americans to know the facts; not just on journalists, but on the right of all people to speak their minds.