april 2016

Why have national Democrats and not national Republicans fallen under the tyranny of the 70-somethings? It seems so contrary to common expectation. Democrats are, as they often remind us, the party of progress and the future. The question seems to rival those enduring, unanswerable mysteries such as “What happens when you die?” and “Why did Mick Taylor quit the Rolling Stones?”

People in their mid-to-late 70s are thick on the ground nowadays, while in an earlier era, of course, you’d have been more likely to find them under it. This is especially true in the urban centers of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, according to a recent survey of census data by the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. In particular, the Washington, D.C., area is a leader in “senior labor force participation,” by which the researchers mean the region is loaded with people who have passed the age of retirement yet somehow neglected to retire.

Late on the eve of my mother’s wedding day, in August of 1965, in Springfield, Illinois, a hoot owl on a tree outside her bedroom window called out “Who? Who?” The call echoed in the darkness of her high-ceiled room. It was a loaded question.

Earlier that day, my grandmother (Granny, we kids called her) had taken my mother (whom we call Mama) aside for a private talk. “Now Beth,” she said. “You know that Daddy and I had trouble having you.” In spite of Granny’s midwestern Methodist reserve and impermeable feminine decorum, Mama did know a little about this. When, as an unusually intense and imaginative little girl, she had begged Granny for brothers and sisters, Granny had finally explained that siblings were impossible. She and Grandpa had tried to conceive Mama for five years and sought the assistance of doctors at a Chicago hospital; it was a miracle she had been born at all. Mama would have to content herself with her cousins in Moweaqua—the children of Granny’s little sister. Effusive and highly sociable, Mama bonded with her cousins as if they were her own sisters and brother, and made near-siblings of the kids on her block, herding them to perform dog circuses and theatricals on their quiet street.

By the tail end of the Obama administration, the culture war seemed lost. The religious right sued for détente, having been swept up in one of the most rapid cultural shifts in generations. Gone were the decades of being able to count on attacking its traditional targets for political advantage. In 2013, Chuck Cooper, the attorney defending California’s ban on same-sex marriage, begged the justices to allow same-sex-marriage opponents to lose at the ballot box rather than in court. Conservatives such as George Will and Rod Dreher griped that LGBTQ activists were “sore winners,” intent on imposing their beliefs on prostrate Christians, who, after all, had already been defeated.

The rapidity of that cultural shift, though, should not obscure the contours of the society that the religious right still aspires to preserve: a world where women have no control over whether to carry a pregnancy to term, same-sex marriage is illegal, and gays and lesbians can be arrested and incarcerated for having sex in their own homes and be barred from raising children. The religious right showed no mercy and no charity toward these groups when it had the power to impose its will, but when it lost that power, it turned to invoking the importance of religious tolerance and pluralism in a democratic society.

DES MOINES—Isaac Rosenberg is stumped. What is it about Kirsten Gillibrand that makes people love to hate her, the rush of coverage eager to point out how her presidential campaign has underperformed?

Maybe, Rosenberg says, “it’s because America isn’t used to such an opinionated and strong woman.”

Rosenberg doesn’t get it. They hit it off. Rosenberg likes her style—in politics, and in fashion. They’d just done their makeup together upstairs. “I like a full, pink lip; she likes a red lip,” Rosenberg tells me.

We were standing in Blazing Saddle, a gay bar in the East Village neighborhood here. Rosenberg had on a white top exposing a bare midriff, and a flowing white skirt that people in the crowd had to be careful not to step on. Rosenberg is better known as the drag queen Vana, and is one of the senator’s biggest fans in Iowa.

I was standing two feet away when my 74-year-old father slugged an emergency-room doctor who was trying to get a blood-pressure cuff around his arm. I wasn’t totally surprised: An accomplished scientist who was sharp as a tack right to the end, my father had nothing but disdain for the entire U.S. health-care system, which he believed piled on tests and treatments intended to benefit its bottom line rather than his health. He typically limited himself to berating or rolling his eyes at the unlucky clinicians tasked with ministering to him, but more than once I could tell he was itching to escalate.

My father was what the medical literature traditionally labeled a “hateful patient,” a term since softened to “difficult patient.” Such patients are a small minority, but they consume a grossly disproportionate share of clinician attention. Nevertheless, most doctors and nurses learn to put up with them. The doctor my dad struck later apologized to me for not having shown more sensitivity in his cuff placement.

“Jews will not replace us.” When 300 neo-Nazis marched with flaming torches through the central quad of the University of Virginia on a late Friday evening in August 2017, their message was clear. The college’s response, in contrast, was a study in confusion. As a public institution, wrote then-President Teresa Sullivan, the University “must abide by state and federal law” regarding the First Amendment rights of free speech and freedom of assembly. Short of barring the “torch-bearing protesters” as an imminent threat to safety, university officials’ hands were tied. National Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee concurred, denouncing the shocking display of hatred but urging the public to let the “protesters” voice their “protected speech.”

When Federico Batini, an Italian academic, wanted to research classroom bullying, he distributed a questionnaire to 54 schools in central Italy. The survey was carried out in partnership with local education authorities and sought to explore the extent to which young people faced racial, homophobic, or gender-based discrimination from their peers.

But instead of learning more about students’ experiences, Batini found his name smeared in the national media and his research abruptly discontinued. A senator from the far-right League party condemned Batini’s questionnaire as “gender indoctrination.” A national conservative daily, La Verità, berated the survey as “crazy gender ideology.” Then the Italian education minister, Marco Bussetti, a member of the League, blocked the questionnaire altogether.

Long ago, I was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could cure much of what ails America.

This belief system, which I have come to think of as “educationism,” is grounded in a familiar story about cause and effect: Once upon a time, America created a public-education system that was the envy of the modern world. No nation produced more or better-educated high-school and college graduates, and thus the great American middle class was built. But then, sometime around the 1970s, America lost its way. We allowed our schools to crumble, and our test scores and graduation rates to fall. School systems that once churned out well-paid factory workers failed to keep pace with the rising educational demands of the new knowledge economy. As America’s public-school systems foundered, so did the earning power of the American middle class. And as inequality increased, so did political polarization, cynicism, and anger, threatening to undermine American democracy itself.

American homes are a lot bigger than they used to be. In 1973, when the Census Bureau started tracking home sizes, the median size of a newly built house was just over 1,500 square feet; that figure reached nearly 2,500 square feet in 2015.

This rise, combined with a drop in the average number of people per household, has translated to a whole lot more room for homeowners and their families: By one estimate, each newly built house had an average of 507 square feet per resident in 1973, and nearly twice that—971 square feet—four decades later.

But according to a recent paper, Americans aren’t getting any happier with their ever bigger homes. “Despite a major upscaling of single-family houses since 1980,” writes Clément Bellet, a postdoctoral fellow at the European business school INSEAD, “house satisfaction has remained steady in American suburbs.”

“You’re not in Jazzercise, ladies,” a trim, tattooed, fitness instructor chided me and the roomful of women who were attempting to work up a sweat one morning a few months ago. I’d never done Jazzercise, but I knew what she meant. The caustic cue conjured grainy VHS tapes—the kind that circulate on social media for their Totally ’80s aesthetic—featuring a gyrating blonde who’s all limbs, leotard, and embarrassing exclamations like “find that boogie body.” My instructor was calling us uncool.

Tempting as it may be to dismiss Jazzercise to the dustbin of fitness history, the dance-cardio program—which turns 50 this month—is more than a punchline. The format founded in a dance-studio basement by Judi Sheppard Missett, the frontwoman in the videos, established the style and substance of “boutique fitness,” the fastest-growing segment of today’s $26 billion industry. Jazzercise set the standard not only for contemporary choreographed offerings, but also for the franchise model exemplified by the likes of Curves, PureBarre, and Barry’s Bootcamp.