november 2012

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Yesterday, at 4 p.m. eastern time, the Southern Baptist Convention released a comprehensive, independent report of its executive committee’s response to decades of sex-abuse allegations. The SBC is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, by far. It is the nation’s most powerful and influential evangelical denomination, by far. Its 14 million members help define the culture and ethos of American evangelicalism.

Last June delegates, called “messengers,” to the SBC’s annual convention responded to proliferating reports of inadequate or corrupt responses to sex-abuse allegations by voting overwhelmingly to commission an external review of their own leaders. The executive committee hired a firm called Guidepost to conduct the investigation.

Some propositions are so obvious that no one takes the time to defend them. A few such propositions are that human life is good, that people can and often do provide more benefits to the world than they take away, and that we should design society to support people in leading lives that are good for themselves and others.

These ideas came under attack, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, by environmentalists in the 20th century who were worried about overpopulation. Although major organizations have abandoned population management as an explicit policy goal, the underlying fear that too many people are running up on the limits of too few resources and Well shouldn’t someone do something about that? has never fully been rooted out of American political thought. It is alive and well among NIMBYs. Of all the objections people raise to new housing and infrastructure, perhaps the most risible is that their community is already too crowded. Some even suggest that municipalities should limit housing supply explicitly to combat population growth.

The expression off-ramp has a pleasing physicality, evoking a thing that can be constructed out of concrete and steel. But at the moment, anyone talking about an off-ramp in Ukraine—and many people are doing so, in governments, on radio stations, in a million private arguments—is using the term metaphorically, referring to a deal that could persuade Vladimir Putin to halt his invasion. Some believe that such an off-ramp could easily be built if only diplomats were willing to make the effort, or if only the White House weren’t so bellicose. It’s a nice idea. Unfortunately, the assumptions that underlie that belief are wrong.

The first assumption is that Russia’s president wants to end the war, that he needs an off-ramp, and that he is actually searching for a way to save face and to avoid, in French President Emmanuel Macron’s words, further “humiliation.” It is true that Putin’s army has performed badly, that Russian troops unexpectedly retreated from northern Ukraine, and that they have, at least temporarily, given up the idea of destroying the Ukrainian state. They suffered far greater casualties than anyone expected, lost impressive quantities of equipment, and demonstrated more logistical incompetence than most experts thought possible. But they have now regrouped in eastern and southern Ukraine, where their goals remain audacious: They seek to wear down Ukrainian troops, wear out Ukraine’s international partners, and exhaust the Ukrainian economy, which may already have contracted by as much as half.

For the past year and a half, since the COVID-19 vaccines first became available—even as last summer’s reprieve gave way to Delta’s surge, then Omicron’s; even as the coronavirus continued to rack up mutations that lifted its speed and its stealth; even as millions of vaccinated Americans caught the pathogen and passed it on—there’s been one huge slice of solace to cling to: The shots we have are still doing an excellent job of staving off severe disease and death.

Billions of people around the world have now been dosed at least once, twice, or thrice; the shots have saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives, in the United States alone—and they probably could have saved hundreds of thousands more, had more people rolled up their sleeves. “We’re so much better off than where we were in 2020, when nobody had any immunity,” says Donna Farber, an immunologist at Columbia University. It feels, in some ways, like gazing down the side of a mountain we’ve been trekking up for a good 30 months: A nice, stubborn buffer of elevation now lies between us and the bottom, the sea-level status of no protection at all. The body’s defenses against severe disease are immunological bedrock—once cemented, they’re quite difficult to erode. Even as the fast-mutating virus pushes down from above, our footing has, for more than a year now, felt solid, and the ground beneath us unlikely to give.

If you’ve ever wondered whether a life without work would be blissful, well, Lorie Kloda can confirm that it pretty much is.

Kloda really likes her job as a university librarian in Montreal, but she still really liked not doing it for a year. During a paid sabbatical that ended this spring, she deleted the work-communication apps from her phone and regularly forgot what day of the week it was; she read, went to museums, picked up tennis. She stopped getting the Sunday scaries.

It took a few months for Kloda to feel completely untethered from work. But in the U.S., a paid, voluntary break from a job that lasts longer than two weeks is generally considered unusual. Vacation days are nice—and Americans should get more of them—but truly helping people to be more than just their job would mean thinking on a bigger timescale. It would mean giving people a regular opportunity to subtract work from their life and see what remains—in other words, granting sabbaticals to everyone who wants them.