june 2017

Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.

The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.

Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.

In the public-health world, the rise of Omicron prompted a great, big “I told you so.” Since the new variant was detected in South Africa, advocacy groups, the WHO, and global-health experts have said the new variant was a predictable consequence of vaccine inequity. Rich countries are hoarding vaccine doses, they said, leaving much of the developing world under-vaccinated. But in reality, countries with low vaccination rates are suffering from more than just inequity.

South Africa, the country where the variant was first reported, did receive vaccines far too late, partly because wealthy countries did not donate enough doses and pharmaceutical companies refused to share their technology. At one point, South Africa had to export doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that it had manufactured in-country in order to comply with a contract it had signed with the company. The COVID-19 vaccines must be kept cold, and because not everywhere in South Africa has reliable roads and refrigeration, the country has struggled to store and transport vaccine doses to far-flung areas.

This article contains spoilers through the eighth episode of Succession Season 3.

What’s clear by now is that the Roys need to stay away from water. Every late-in-the-season tragedy and act of bloodshed, whether real or intangible, has been tied to the element that classically represents femininity, emotion, and intuition. These are not, of course, qualities that you’d associate with the Roys, and yet balance will have its way in the end.

Tonight’s episode, “Chiantishire,” named for the unfortunate moniker upper-class Brits give the region of Tuscany, ended with Kendall Roy (played by Jeremy Strong) lying facedown in an infinity pool in the Italian countryside. It was a climactic and devastating end to an episode chock-full of emotional violence, but also one that seems fated to be an installment on the upcoming podcast being made about the “curse of the Roys.” The news of that show, delivered casually by Kendall’s PR flack Comfrey (Dasha Nekrasova), added yet more anguish to Kendall’s buffet of psychological slights. First, his mother, Lady Caroline (Harriet Walter), made fun of his buzz cut. Then she asked him to back out of certain events at her wedding so his more powerful father could attend. Finally, Logan (Brian Cox) taunted Kendall over an uneaten dinner, refusing to agree to buy him out of Waystar Royco, and reminding him that his addictions had led to a young man’s death at the wedding of his sister, Shiv (Sarah Snook). “Whenever you fucked up, I cleaned up your shit,” Logan said. “And I’m a bad person? Fuck off, kiddo.”

At the bleakest moment in the pandemic, when you felt your most stressed, most scared, least centered, you probably heard some variation of the phrase This is really hard. Maybe you read it; maybe your manager said it to you; maybe you said it to yourself. But that’s the truth: Our nearly two years of living through a pandemic have been hard. And like everything else in the United States, that difficulty has not been evenly distributed. It has been hardest for those on the front lines, those afraid of how customers will react to their requests to put on a mask, those out of work or in constant fear of the way COVID variants are whipping through their community. It has been hard, in different ways, for those attempting to work and supervise school from home, for those in complete isolation, for those terrified of being around other people. It is fucking hard, in so many intersecting and unfair ways.

“It’s been completely Americanized!” my host declares proudly. “The bidet is gone!” In my time as a travel editor, this scenario has become common when touring improvements to hotels and resorts around the world. My heart sinks when I hear it. To me, this doesn’t feel like progress, but prejudice.

Americans seem especially baffled by these basins. Even seasoned American travelers are unsure of their purpose: One globe-trotter asked me, “Why do the bathrooms in this hotel have both toilets and urinals?” And even if they understand the bidet’s function, many Americans fail to see its appeal. Attempts to popularize the bidet in the United States have failed before, but recent efforts continue—and perhaps they might even succeed in bringing this old-world device to new backsides.