Brexit Referendum: The Front Pages

How Gabriel García Márquez Created a World in a Sentence

Joe Fassler

The novelist Mary Morris explains how the opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude shaped her path as a writer.

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Colum McCann, George Saunders, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more.

When I was her student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the novelist Marilynne Robinson told our class it was almost unthinkable for women of her generation to become writers. Society afforded women with an extremely limited range of opportunity: You could be a teacher, nurse, or homemaker, she said, and that was about it. Other paths—especially professionalized, artistic ones—were possible, but extremely hard-won.

That was the challenge facing Mary Morris, author of Gateway to the Moon, after she dropped out of grad school in the 1970s. For years, she’d worked in secret, living a kind of creative double life—writing constantly, but never sure she was really a writer. No one ever told her how the verb might earn the noun.

The Reinvention of America

James Fallows

Americans don’t realize how fast the country is moving toward becoming a better version of itself.

I have seen the future, and it is in the United States.

After a several-year immersion in parts of the country that make the news mainly after a natural disaster or a shooting, or for follow-up stories on how the Donald Trump voters of 2016 now feel about Trump, I have a journalistic impulse similar to the one that dominated my years of living in China. That is the desire to tell people how much more is going on, in places they had barely thought about or even heard of, than they might have imagined.

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

In the case of China, that impulse matched the mood of the times. In the years before and after the world financial crisis of 2008, everyone knew that China was on the way up; reporters like me were just filling in the details. In the case of the modern United States, I am well aware that this message runs so counter to prevailing emotions and ideas as to seem preposterous. Everyone knows how genuinely troubled the United States is at the level of national politics and governance. It is natural to assume that these disorders must reflect a deeper rot across the country. And indeed, you can’t travel extensively through today’s America, as my wife, Deb, and I have been doing in recent years, without being exposed to signs of rot, from opioid addiction to calcifying class barriers.

Why We Sleep Together

Jon Methven

A long time ago, beds were expensive—but there's more to it than that.

With a guest in town occupying the second bedroom of our Manhattan apartment, my three-year-old son, a notorious sideways sleeper, bunked with my pregnant wife and me. Too many snores and little feet in the back of my neck, I relocated to the sofa, where I was blessed with the best night’s sleep I’ve had in months.

As a self-diagnosed insomniac, a good night’s rest for me lasts anywhere from three to five hours. I generally break up the slumber with walks around the apartment, followed by lying awake and unearthing inconsequential paranoia that, come morning, will not live up to the hype. When I hear people claim they get eight hours of sleep each night, they might as well be talking about the Loch Ness Monster, or alien life. All three are things I suppose it’s possible someone may have encountered, but I cannot personally confirm their existence.

The Hardest Job in the World

John Dickerson

What if the problem isn’t the president—it’s the presidency?

I. A Broken Office

Donald Trump often appears to be a president in rebellion against his office. A president, we have come to expect, hastens to the scene of a natural disaster to comfort the afflicted. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, President Trump arrived tardily and behaved unseriously, tossing rolls of paper towels at storm-battered residents as if he were trying to drain three-point shots.

We have come to expect that when the national fabric rends, the president will administer needle and thread, or at least reach for the sewing box of unity. After white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, shouting “Jews will not replace us,” President Trump’s instinct was to emphasize that there were good people among the neo-Nazis.

People in sweatshirts and jackets grab at an American flag. — Stephen Lam / Reuters

People Voted for Trump Because They Were Anxious, Not Poor

Olga Khazan

A new study finds that Trump voters weren’t losing income or jobs. Instead, they were concerned about their place in the world.

For the past 18 months, many political scientists have been seized by one question: Less-educated whites were President Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters. But why, exactly?

Was their vote some sort of cri de coeur about a changing economy that had left them behind? Or was the motivating sentiment something more complex and, frankly, something harder for policy makers to address?

After analyzing in-depth survey data from 2012 and 2016, the University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana C. Mutz argues that it’s the latter. In a new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she added her conclusion to the growing body of evidence that the 2016 election was not about economic hardship.

Trump Throws Ronny Jackson Under the Bus

David A. Graham

The president appears ready to blithely sacrifice his nominee for veterans affairs secretary as part of a long-running war against the Senate confirmation process.

Hours after news of allegations of misconduct emerged against Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, the White House physician and President Trump’s pick to be the next secretary of veterans affairs, the president had a bizarre commentary to offer.

“I told Admiral Jackson just a little while ago, what do you need this for? This is a vicious group of people. … What do you need it for?” Trump said Tuesday, during a joint news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron. “I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. What does he need it for? I don’t think personally he should do it. It would be totally his decision.”

I don’t think personally he should do it.

Could there be a stranger thing to say about the man who you nominated to take the job—whom you delivered over to an “ugly” and “disgusting” confirmation process?

Macron standing with arms at sides next to Trump, who has a hand over his heart — Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Trump and Macron See the World Very Differently

Uri Friedman

That has big implications for everyone else.

Emmanuel Macron had something surprising to say about the United States last week, given that the president of the United States would soon be hosting his French counterpart for an elaborate state visit. Hard-edged “national selfishness”—of the kind that plunged the world into war nearly eight decades ago, long before the 40-year-old leader was born—is resurgent and endangering Europe’s “model” of liberal, pluralist democracy and international cooperation, Macron said in a speech before the European Parliament. And the threat to Europe is coming not just from without (“authoritarian powers”) and within (“illiberal” politics in certain European countries), but from its centuries-old ally across the Atlantic.

A van with crumpled front — Saul Porto / Reuters

ISIS Tactics Have Spread to Other Violent Actors

Graeme Wood

The Toronto van attack shows the wider adoption of techniques associated with the Islamic State.

Yesterday’s headline writers took the afternoon off, it seems, and engaged the newsroom’s cliché machine: A van “plowed” into crowds on Toronto’s Yonge Street, killing at least 10 and wounding several. That many readers no longer blanch at this agricultural metaphor—indeed they expect it—is a mark of how far the technique of mass vehicular homicide has spread. The alleged driver does not appear to have anything to do with the Islamic State, with whom the technique is now most associated. But of course we all waited (or rather, some of us did) to discover whether his name was Muslim, and we were ready to deploy our opinions to the crime scene, depending on the result.

In fact the alleged driver turns out to be a Canadian of likely Armenian descent, and sympathetic not to ISIS but, according to a Facebook post the company confirmed to be from the suspect’s since-deleted account, to “incels,” short for “involuntarily celibate.” Incels, mostly male, want to have sex but find no willing partners. They often resent the sexually active for spurning them. In 2014, in Santa Barbara, a 22-year-old killed six people, two of them Tri Delta sorority women, as “retribution” (his word, in a manifesto) for his celibate misery. The Toronto police added that yesterday’s van suspect might be “mentally ill,” and by implication defective not in morals but in mind. The evidence we see now points to pure violent sexual frustration. That is most definitely a moral impairment.

A table at a diner with a hamburger, french fries, milkshakes, and ketchup — Photo 24 / Getty

American Nostalgia on a Bun

Suzy Swartz

The burger, shake, and fries—“enduring icons of American cuisine”— are used to symbolize abundance, accessibility, and dominance while ignoring the dark side of those values.

The series Riverdale owes its ratings success to a number of factors, not least of which is its appeal to a relentless and sometimes revisionist nostalgia. The characters are lifted from the classic Archie comics, for one, which are synonymous with the wholesome, mid-century aesthetic they retained from the late ’50s through the 21st century. But the show’s nostalgia for a supposedly simpler time is most evident in the food the characters eat.

Betty, Veronica, and the rest of the gang often gather at their local diner, Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe, where they favor the greasy, calorie-laden stuff of American folklore: burgers, fries, and milkshakes. So integral is the food to the iconography of the show that the cast shared a milkshake on a Jimmy Fallon segment in reference to their characters’ heroic consumption of thick malts. In a Netflix promotional video, the show’s breakout star, Cole Sprouse, stared into a camera doing nothing but sloppily eating a hamburger.

Partial skeleton remains from an ancient burial site — Regis Duvignau / Reuters

Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans?

Adam Frank

A look at the available evidence

It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me.

Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (a.k.a. GISS) a world-class climate-science facility. One day last year, I came to GISS with a far-out proposal. In my work as an astrophysicist, I’d begun researching global warming from an “astrobiological perspective.” That meant asking whether any industrial civilization that rises on any planet will, through their own activity, trigger their own version of a climate shift. I was visiting GISS that day hoping to gain some climate science insights and, perhaps, collaborators. That’s how I ended up in Gavin’s office.

Just as I was revving up my pitch, Gavin stopped me in my tracks.